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EPISODE 3.05 FREDLESS
Written by: Mere Smith Directed by: Marita Grabiak
Finding a Place at Angel InvestigationsI am of course a serial complainant when it comes to the way that Charles Gunn was introduced into and found his place in Angel Investigations. One moment he was the leader of his own gang hired on a case by case basis for local knowledge and extra muscle; the next he was a part of the team and his own gang were nowhere to be seen. There was no transition and no attempt to consider what the change meant for Gunn as a character. Well, it seems that the ANGEL writers are determined to avoid similar complaints with Fred. As a rescuee from Pylea and as someone who is still having difficulty coming to terms with this world, it was only natural that she should remain where it was safe and she knew she was among friends. But as she recovered her mental equilibrium the obvious question would be why does she remain with Angel Investigations. Would it not be more natural for her to try to recapture her old life, as the best antidote to the trauma she suffered in Pylea? As a qualified physicist would she not feel more at home in academia? And in any event there is her family. Would they not be wondering about her? Would they not want to re-establish contact with her? Would she not want to see them again? The longer these last questions go unanswered, the more problematic Fred’s presence in the Hyperion becomes. So, I for one am very glad to see them tackled now.
A Knight in Shining ArmorIn season 3 so far we have already been
made aware of Fred’s attachment to her cave, err…room, and her unwillingness
to leave it. We have also seen her
crush on Angel. Given the fact that
for five years her only refuge in Pylea was her cave and that it was Angel who
rescued her, these reactions are not difficult to understand.
But the clever thing about this episode was the way that the writers
fitted them together like pieces in a jigsaw to give us a coherent picture of
how Fred reacted to her situation. Let’s look at Fred’s attitude towards
her home first. When she and Angel
are walking through the sewers, she feels quite comfortable: Fred: “This has been the best night. First there's
you takin' me out for ice cream,
and then there's the ice cream, and
then that monster jumps out of the
freezer and you're all brave and "Fred, watch out!", and then we get
to chase it down into the sewers,
which are just so bleak and oppressive
and homey. I could build a condo down here.” Angel:
“I'm glad you're having fun.” "Bleak" and "oppressive"
is a very odd description of what constitutes a home-like environment.
The reason for her description of the sewers as “homey” was obviously
because they reminded her of her cave. But
what was the significance of her cave? Angel
later noted: “She
seemed pretty comfortable in the sewers - they're dark, cavelike.
She felt safe there.” And this indeed is our immediate
reaction too. In Pylea Fred’s
cave was her refuge from the monsters that pursued her.
So, she would naturally want to recreate the look and feel of those caves
in the Hyperion. That is why she
covered the bare walls of her room with the same mathematical calculations as
she had back in her cave. That is
why she wanted to go even further and live underground.
But isn’t there something odd about this?
The caves in Pylea may have been her refuge but by the same token they
were also a symbol of the danger she was in.
If she wanted to escape from the monsters wouldn’t she want to forget
all about the way that she had to hide? And
after all isn’t there is a difference between saying that Fred was safe in the
caves and saying that they were her home. Indeed
she makes it very clear that they were not her home and never felt like it: “Once
upon a time there was a girl who lived all
alone in a horrible cave so far from home that
it made her chest hurt. And every day in that
horrible cave, the girl tried to figure out a way
to escape.” So, why did she want above everything
else to recreate that environment on Earth?
The answer came when she spoke to her parents for the first time since
being transported to Pylea. Fred: “I was…I was five years, and so lost and at night I would… I was all by myself and you weren't there.” Roger:
“Fred, I don't understand…”. Fred: “I
got lost, I got lost, they did terrible things to me but it was just a
storybook, it was just a story with monsters, not real, not in the world, but if
you're here and you see me then... then it's real,
and it did happen, if you see what they made of me... I didn't mean to
get so lost.” When confronted by a reality worse
than she could bear, Fred did something very typical of a human – she
retreated from it. She built up a
fantasy world around her. In her
cave with its mathematical equations she could free herself from the horrific
reality all around her and plan and dream of escape.
“one
day, just like in a fairy tale, a handsome man rode up on a horse and saved her,
and took her back to his castle. Now you'd think that was the end, wouldn'tcha?
Dumb old fairy tales and their happily ever afters.
But see, the minute they got back to the castle,
the handsome man went away again. And
even though she didn't mean to, didn't want to ... high up in that castle... the
girl just built herself another cave, hoping he would save her again.” For Fred, Angel and Angel Investigations
were just as much part of her fantasy world as the “Klingons” of Pylea. Whereas the latter threatened her, Angel saved her and
protected her. Her dependence on
him was stressed from the moment we first saw her literally counting the minutes
he was away. She was so happy when
he invited her out for ice cream and, as we saw, she was continually impressed
by his bravery and strength. But it
was more than that. Perhaps despite
Cordelia’s best efforts in
“Carpe Noctem” she also maintain the illusion that Angel saw her as more
than a damsel in distress – that the happily ever after was still possible for
her. It was Buffy who had taken
Angel away from her the first time when they had returned from Pylea.
It was also Buffy who had separated them at the beginning of this
episode. That was why she was so
interested in whether her Angel was going to get back together with the girl
with the goofy name. But of course, if Angel were real and if
he had really saved her from somewhere as terrible as Pylea then everything she
had experienced there was also real. She
would have to face up to that fact. And
equally, if Angel were real instead of some mythic champion always ready to dash
to her rescue, then Fred must have realized that she had no chance of being more
to him than
“plain ol' boring ol' Fred” or the “nutty-ol'-goonie-bird-up-in
her-room-doin'-nothin'-but-moochin'-off-Angel Fred.” As she admitted herself, she would
have no idea how someone like Angel could put up with her All of this was why Fred desperately
wanted to prevent reality from destroying her illusions.
With Angel and the others she had a chance of doing this.
With her parents she had none at all.
It wasn’t just the fact that they were her parents, symbols of her real
life. It was the sort of people
they were too – down to earth, solid people who saw the world head on and had
few pretensions and few illusions either. There
are so many small details that bear this out like the fact that they let
Fred’s room after she had been absent for four years.
When we first see them, Roger takes the fact that Wesley and the others
were carrying out an inventory of mediaeval weapons in his stride.
And they both cut through evasion and obfuscation, as witness the
following exchange: Roger:
“So what exactly does Fred do for you people? It strikes me a little odd - a
physicist workin' for a detective agency.” Cordelia:
“Well, Fred's ... gone through some changes.” Roger:
“And whose fault is that?” For Fred, meeting her parents means that
it would no longer be possible to maintain her fairytale world. She
would have to deal with reality. And it is in the context of her fear of
the monsters of Pylea that the meaning of the Host’s warning
to her becomes clearer: Host:
“Yeah. You are in a bad place, aren't you, doll? You thought you could outrun
them, that maybe you were free -
but those old monsters hunted you down. I
know why you're running away, Fred. And
you know what your problem is? Fred:
“I'm not strong enough to stay and face my fear?” Host:
“No. You haven't run far enough.” Those monsters were still hunting her, even now, or at least the memory of them and what they had done to her was. But going back home with her parents wasn't the way to banish them. Instead such a course of action would simply serve to banish the illusory environment in which she lives. And, as it was her illusions that were protecting her from the horrors of those memories, the destruction of that one last line of defense was the thing she feared most. That was why she wanted to run away from her parents, not because they were some sort of moisters themselves. In any event, once Fred and her parents
were reunited, Fred’s course of action seemed to be dictated for her.
Let her put things in her own words: “I wanna
go home.
I'm…
I'm just not cut out for this. I mean, if Angel hadn't gotten me outta the way,
you'd all be laughin', in the
morgue right now. Okay, maybe not laughin' but the point is, I think I should go
back home, where it's quiet, and
safe, and monsters don't eat your family.” Without the illusions protecting her from
reality, Fred felt very vulnerable indeed.
Angel had saved her life yet again.
Only now she couldn’t even believe that this was because she was in
some way special to him. As she
said rather matter-of-factly, it was what he did.
That’s all. She probably
felt that she was a burden on him, unable to contribute anything to Angel
Investigations and always at the mercy of her fears of the monsters in Pylea.
That is why she wanted to go somewhere else. But what changed was the fact that it was
Fred who saved the day in general and Angel in particular.
She was the one who figured out the truth behind the bug attacks, that
one of their number had laid eggs in the Durslar demon’s head and when Angel
brought it back to the hotel they had ended up tracking him to reclaim the eggs.
And more importantly than that, when Angel was at a disadvantage and
asking: “Who's
helpin' me here?” it was Fred who destroyed the Durslar head with her little axe throwing device, thus releasing the newly hatched eggs to the adult bugs. The realization that this event brought about within Fred was expressed in the following terms to her parents: “Look, I
could go home with you and pretend
the last five years didn't happen. I might even be able to pretend to have a
normal life, but truth of it is, well, I'm not normal anymore.” This was an acceptance that the monsters
in Pylea were real and that they had marked her – permanently.
She had got to know enough about demons to figure out what had happened
with the bug eggs. More importantly
she had used her mechanical skills in a way that she would never even have
imagined as a “normal” physicist – to make a device which Wesley described
as a spring loaded decapitation device. She
now accepted that she did indeed have to face reality but the fact that she was
now different was also reality and
so too was Angel Investigations. Remaining
there was no longer a way of preserving her illusions but of confirming that
reality. Hence we have the final
scene. Fred’s room is transformed
from the cave-like den she had made with all the writing on the wall into
something brighter and more cheerful. This
indicates she doesn’t any longer need to live in bleak and oppressive
surroundings to maintain her illusions of a fairytale kingdom.
And just as significantly she paints over the stick figures of a hero on
his horse rescuing his damsel in distress.
For her Angel would continued to be a champion but not the knight in
shining armor coming to rescue her she once needed to believe he was.
Analyzing Fred For me, “Fredless” and its treatment
of the latest recruit for Angel Investigations works but only to an extent. First, it avoids any niggling questions about why Fred is
still hanging around when she has a perfectly good alternative career ahead of
her. Let’s face it, as a nutty
old goon bird she would feel right at home in academia.
Given the problems we have seen with Gunn that must be a major plus.
Secondly, the way the writers opened up her character for the audience
was completely unexpected. As we have seen, Angel adopted a very conventional view about
why she felt attracted to her cave. It
was one I certainly shared and I suspect most other viewers as well.
But as it turns out we were wide of the mark.
This shows that the writers thought very hard about Fred and the
implications of her journey to and back from Pylea.
They could after all themselves have gone for the obvious here.
But the fact that they adopted such an unexpected approach to her
problems means that they forced the audience to abandon its own conventional views about
her and instead think about they were seeing.
In particular we have to ask ourselves does this new take on Fred work? Here I have to say I can certainly follow
the writers analysis but I am not
completely convinced by it. As I
have already said, it is entirely understandable that someone faced with the
horrors of Pylea might choose to retreat from reality into a pretend world. But it seems almost counter-intuitive that Fred would
maintain her pretend world even after she had escaped.
LA 2001 is so very different from Pylea. It has tacos and soap. Would
a person who had convinced themselves that Pylea was all a nasty fairy tale not
want to grasp hold of the real world on Earth as a way of convincing themselves
that the different world of Pylea was not real?
More importantly if a person did have such loving and supportive parents
as Roger and Trish would she really want to avoid them?
This last point is especially problematic for me and in many ways it is
an obstacle to accepting the thesis of the episode that I can’t really get
round. The other problem with the characterization of Fred is that there is no great depth to it. At one point when the members of Angel Investigations are wondering where Fred has gone Gunn asks just what they know about her. And the answer is not a lot. She likes tacos; she wants to live in a cave and she has a crush on Angel. Indeed that is all we know about her and at the end of this episode neither we nor they are any the wiser. Having said all that, it was I think important that Fred come out of this episode without looking whining or self-pitying and I think the writers achieved this end admirably. Indeed at the end of “Fredless” I like her much more than I did at the start. A garrulous, eccentric genius is more likely to irritate me than get me on her side. And I am notoriously resistant to self-conscious tugging of the sympathy strings such as setting Fred up for a fall by showing how big a crush she has on Angel and then letting FakeAngel play cruel tricks on her. The writers do not need to do that. Fred has been through a horrific ordeal. Her expectations for life afterwards must have been correspondingly high, and that would in part account for her fantasies about Angel. The disappointment of having to deal with the loss of those fantasies is obvious; but so too is the moral courage. That is moving in itself. For me Fred’s “Dumb old fairy tales and their happily ever afters” speech to Angel quoted above was more real and more affecting than seeing her in floods of tears in “Carpe Noctem.” Plot
I have noted before that one of the tricks
that ANGEL as a series regularly pulls off is to make us think we are watching
one type of story only to surprise us with a twist that shows us we were in fact
watching something very different. This
is another example of that approach and I think a very effective one.
It was so effective because it used our own expectations against us.
The idea of bad parents – and especially bad fathers – who subvert
the natural bond of affections that should exist between parents and children is
so prevalent in the world of both Buffy and Angel that every time we see an
example of the species we almost expect the same to be true.
So, when Roger and Trish arrived at the Hyperion looking for their
daughter, we started to look for suspicious things about them.
And the writers certainly provided them.
First, when Fred sees her parents after so long a gap of time she just
takes off in panic. This is itself
suspicious. As everybody agrees the
very idea of her going out into the world unaccompanied is strange. Then there was the letter she may or may not have sent.
It is certainly true that Fred sneaking out to post a letter would be
strange so they could have been lying about that.
But even if they weren’t, why, as Angel says, would she tell her
parents not to contact her. Then
there is the behavior of Roger and Trish themselves, always muttering together.
One of the few snatches we overheard also sounded suspicious: “We
might have to call him in sooner than we thought.” And when Angel and the others did start to
search for Fred, her parents seemed awfully keen to split up so they could look
for her on their own. But of
course the clincher was when the Host started talking about monsters being after
Fred and the need for her to run further. On
hearing this I suspect most people jumped to conclusions about whom the
monsters were. Of course everything
that seemed to cast suspicion on Fred's parents had either a benign explanation or was simply a case of the gang (and indeed
the audience)
reading too much into things. After
her parents did eventually catch up with Fred we came to understand why she
didn’t want to see them and even the muttered comments eventually came to make
sense. Roger and Trish were just
wondering whether they have to call the police in to investigate the weird
people who seemed to have kidnapped their daughter. “They
found her once, they'll do it again. At least this time we can be there to
protect her.” So, why didn’t he just tell him that the
parents were no danger to Fred. Then
wasn’t saying things were going to get messy overstating things? How were they going to get messy? To me that term implies a situation full of awkward
complexities with the potential for a disastrous outcome.
But when Fred was finally confronted by her fears, she was able to cope
with them without too much difficulty. The one explanation that occurs to me for
the Host’s behavior here lies in his own circumstances and not those of Fred.
The attack on Caritas obviously took place some time ago and yet the
place is still wrecked. There hasn’t even been a rudimentary attempt to clear it
up. He is in a dilapidated state
himself. Gone is the immaculate
silk kimono. Instead he is wearing
a cheap bathrobe. The normally
gregarious demon is actually hostile to Gunn and doesn’t want to see anyone at
all and he especially doesn’t want to be reading other people’s auras: “Bar's
closed, good seein' ya, it's been fun, buh-bye.” And when pressed by Angel he is clearly preoccupied with his own concerns: “Well I
am not some mystical vending
machine, here to spit out answers
every time you waltz in with a problem. I have a heart. Granted, it's located in
my left buttcheek, but it's still a
heart, and that heart is broken. I
mean, why is it nobody ever cares about my destiny? Everyone who walks through
that door is all about "me, me, me".
Well, what about my me? My
me's important!” It may be that Fred was not the only one to have lost an illusion. Perhaps he is having difficulty coping with this loss and, unlike Fred, he has no-one to help him. Perhaps what he was saying to Angel was that he and the others had only come to him when they had problems and needed help but they were not there to help him when he needed it. That would make more sense of his role here. Anyway, we were so busy concentrating on Fred and her troubles that we saw something of a mystery unfold before our eyes and largely ignored it. The sight of the bug stalking Angel but not attacking should have alerted us to the fact that there was some sort of twist coming to the plot. It was unlikely to herald the introduction of an entirely separate “B” plot but at the same time there seemed no connection between it and the events surrounding Fred. But the clever part was that there was a lot of information relevant to the mystery right in front of our eyes. There was the unusual behavior of the Durslar beast which we were specifically told about. There was the presence of the crystals near where Angel found that beast and on Fred’s shirt after the bug attack. There was the fact that Angel had brought the Durslar’s head back to hotel (a very unusual move) and finally the bug attack itself. Of course it needed a big intuitive leap to actually piece these clues together to make sense of them. But that is beside the point. The point is that very little if anything was hidden from us so we really should have known that the apparent solution of Fred’s storyline would simply be the prelude to an important twist. Indeed the fact that Fred chose to leave with her parents was the final clue. It was unlikely that she really was going to leave with Roger and Trish and they were now really above suspicion. So, what in the end would lead Fred to turn back? Only some danger back at the hotel. But in spite of all that the writers still
managed to surprise us. After Fred had left, the gang were lying around feeling
a little sorry for themselves. It
seemed nothing was amiss. But that
was simply the writers lulling us into a false sense of security because with
lightning speed the members of Angel Investigations were landed in the deepest
ju-ju flops (to borrow a phrase from the late great Douglas Adams). It was Fred’s realization of the truth that first alerted
the viewer that there was a problem.
But the real twist came with the rapid sequence where first strange
things started happening with the Durslar head while our heroes were unconscious
of their danger and then the sudden appearance of the bugs in numbers.
It wasn’t just the speed but the seriousness of the danger that worked
here. We had already a graphic
illustration of how hard it was to kill one of the bugs; now they had arrived in
force there seemed no escape at all. I
thought that development packed a terrific punch, aided I may add by the first class CGI
effects. No matter how good a set
up like this looks on paper when you are trying to realize a feeling of real
danger on screen, any tension may collapse into a fit of unintended hilarity if
the cgi effects look weak. Perhaps
ANGEL is getting some benefit from its sister show’s recent price hike here. And it was the fact that there was no way
for Angel and the others to fight their way out of the situation which also for
me made the denouement of the episode so enjoyable.
Throughout this episode there had been a great deal of fun about how
truly bad Angel Investigations was at the private detective business.
Gunn for example couldn’t get over the fact that a real private
investigator had tracked Fred down from an unaddressed envelop (in present
circumstances FBI please note). Then they couldn’t at first even work out that Fred might
go to Caritas for some guidance. As
Angel said:
But in the end what saved them all was a piece of deductive reasoning by Fred. Not only is this for me a very positive reaffirmation that not everything can or has to be solved by brute force and violence but it adds weight and substance to Fred’s realization that she does have a role in the team. Before she goes with her parents she describes the role that each member of Angel Investigations has, implying that there is really no role for her. Well perhaps, the way she solved the mystery of the bugs means that she is going to be the only real private investigator in the firm.
Overview (B)This was a solid episode. In terms of characterization it was lightweight enough. We certainly learn nothing new about Fred. But we are at least given a whole new perspective on her trials and tribulations and even if I have some reservations about the writers’ thesis here at the very least we can say two things. First of all Fred had emerged as someone who is for me a more sympathetic figure than ever before. Secondly she has beyond peradventure established a secure place within Angel Investigations. The real strength of the episode though was the plot which I thought was very effective. It contained a very nice balance of humor and drama. It was another example of the series being able to poke a little gentle fun at itself, especially the way it handled the “parenthood” issues and the fact that Angel Investigations did not seem to be very good at investigating things. There was in this context a very effective twist in which our expectations of the Angelverse’s parenthood issues were used against us to surprise us. And finally we had a strong and dramatic ending. And all of this was aided by a very strong performance by Amy Acker. She was able to switch very easily from ditzy to confused and frightened to panicky to regret at losing something important and yet make them all real and believable. And as this episode turned essentially upon the audience believing in and having sympathy for her character, that was key to its success.
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