EPISODE 3.08

QUICKENING

Written by:  Jeffrey Bell

Directed by: Skip Schoolnik

Towards a New Life

There is one thing I have always appreciated about ANGEL episodes and perhaps have never quite talked about enough.  That is the creative way the writers use titles, often with quite subtle layers to them.  “Quickening” is a prime example of this.  In the modern idiom we can say that this episode represents  a quickening of the pace in the arc, as we find out more about the mysterious Tro-clon and see evidence of the confluence of events it refers to.  “Quickening” also means coming alive.  As such it also represents the coming to term of the mother and the birth of her child.  And of course this is what we see towards the closing stages of this episode.  But there is perhaps a deeper sense in which this episode represents a coming to life and it is in the impact of these events on Angel that we see its true importance.

Darla’s son (for that is what we now discover it is) is an object of great significance for many.  And when I use the word “object” I choose the word  carefully.  None of the individuals or groups in question have any interest or concern for the child himself.  It's what he represents.  For Wesley, Gunn and Cordelia the child is still associated  with some “evil apocalyptic thing” they must prevent.   It is the potential danger for humanity that they are mainly concerned about.  As Gunn so graphically puts it:

“we need to know what kind of bun is in the oven.

In this respect Angel Investigations seem to be somewhat behind the game.  As Wesley later observes:

            “other people seem to know a lot more about this kid's importance than we do.”

It isn’t clear what other people do know but there is certainly no shortage of groups and organizations with their own hopes and fears invested in the child.  Certainly there are those in Wolfram and Hart who have just as much reason for concern as Wesley and the others, but for different reasons.    They are not really concerned about the foretold Tro-clon.  Indeed Lilah only reports the Nyazian scrolls to Linwood in vague terms

“Intelligence is just coming in. No one seems to know *how* Darla could be pregnant. There is a rumor about a prophecy involving a vampire birth, but the Scroll it's recorded on seems to be missing."

But they were the ones who brought back Darla.   She became pregnant and no-one in the firm knew about this until it was almost too late. As Linwood says:

“Heads are gonna roll if the Senior Partners hear about this."

For him interest in the child is purely a matter of survival:

"Man works hard… builds something…waters it… grows rich and powerful.  Leaves his wife for a younger beauty.  These are the reasons we take certain  blood oaths.  And to have it all vanish because..."

And because he is solely concerned about the consequences of his ignorance to his own career (not to mention prospects of survival) he is simply intend on finding out as much as he can about the child.  Hence he brings in a Dr Mengele clone:

Lilah: "Dr. Fetvanovich is the world's foremost specialist in paranormal obstetrics. We are very fortunate he's consented to help."

Doctor: "It is I who feel fortunate. A vampire birth is, ah…unprecedented. I look forward to dissecting both the mother and the child."

That is all the child means to him – an opportunity for study and experimentation.  The symbiotic relationship between Wolfram and Hart and Dr. Fetvanovich in dealing with the baby is neat.  Both sides get what they want.  The baby gets dead.

But Linwood isn’t the only one at Wolfram and Hart with an interest in Angel's son.  In all good corporations responsibility for the sort of failure he must now explain to the Senior Partners rolls downhill.  The first scapegoats are the psychics, at least one of whom met an unfortunate end.  But then they are not really high enough up the corporate ladder to make the sort of sacrificial victims the senior partners would be interested in.  Nor, I suspect, is Gavin.  Lilah is though:

Linwood: "If the Partners are looking to place blame, I'm gonna have to step forward."

For Lilah too the baby was no more than a threat hanging over her career (and her life).  She too had very personal reasons for trying to do something to correct this situation.  And when it comes to Lilah’s own personal interests, well what is a child’s life?

Apart from Wolfram and Hart there was at least one other group interested in Darla’s child, possibly two.  The principal one for which we have clear evidence in this episode was the vampire cult who surprised Angel and the others at the hospital.  They want to protect the miracle child and to worship him:

"As it has been prophesied, by our great potentate Ul-thar, we vow our lives to protect this special child."

This is the boy simply as an object of veneration.  Yes he was important and yes he had to be protected.  But for the cult his importance lay only in what he represented to them, not who he actually was or what he might need. 

so, here we have the central point and counterpoint in the episode. None of  the contending groups care about the child as an individual  - only in what he might do or cause or what he represents.  Even Darla his mother can only think of the pain he is causing her.  She refers to him as her little parasite and freely discusses the efforts she has made to destroy his life.   But there is one exception in all of this – Angel.  He is as conscious as Wesley or anyone else of the potential for his child to be an engine for or a cause of destruction.  But he means more to him than that:

Gunn: "So you're saying, if I shot this into your stomach, it wouldn't do anything?"

Wes: "Angel's right. Clearly something wants this thing to come to term. - We'll wait for it to be born then we'll chop its head off."

Fred: "Well, what if it doesn't have a head?"

Instead of concentrating on what the child might do or might cause, Angel’s first thought is for the child itself.  Plainly at the front of his mind is the importance of the child and the need to protect him.  And because of that, unlike Wesley or any of the others, if he ever did become convinced that the child was a threat anything he might have to do to harm the child would be a devastating blow to him for that very reason.  And we can see the mixture of pride and joy that the prospect of a son brings to him.  When the ultra sound shows Angel just who the child is, he is mesmerized by the first sight of his son and his normally keen senses are so distracted by the prospect of becoming a father that he doesn’t notice the appearance of the members of the vampire cult:

Angel: "Gonna have a son. I'm gonna have a son."

And when the vampire cult hails the boy as the miracle child Angel rather absurdly turns to Darla and says:

"You hear that? Our kid. Special."

What works so well about this is that it is the contrast between Angel on the one hand and everyone else on the other that points up so clearly the existence of the paternal feelings in Angel.  He genuinely loves the child.  But the mere existence of those feelings is one thing.  The really important question is what they might mean for him.  How would being a father affect the vampire with a soul?  I suspect we may need to wait for forthcoming episodes to learn the answer to this question but some evidence is provided by another very clever piece of counterpoint, this time involving Holtz.

The Walking Dead

We see nothing of Holtz as a family man but it is easy enough to build up a picture of what he was like.  After all the mere fact that Angelus and Darla chose to send him a message by slaughtering his wife and children shows that they were the most important things in his life.  And this is confirmed by Angelus calling Sarah the apple of her father’s eye.  But in this episode we do see the significance of a family for Holtz in the way he behaved after he lost his.  As he and Sahjhan are walking through LA, the demon tries to explain that in spite of the superficial differences between 18^th century England and 21^st century California, human beings are still the same:

Sahjhan: "The buildings are taller, machines more powerful …and you can get really great Thai food at two in the morning.  But the thing to understand is that people are the same today as they were in your day. They drink too much. They fight. They work hard. They fall in love."

Sahjhan had just described the ordinary rhythms of human existence – both in the 18^th and the 21^st centuries.  And it leads Holtz to this simple statement:

              "They still have families"

The face that this was the first thing that came to Holtz's mind in thinking about this new and unfamiliar world shows that, for him, a family was the most important part of human existence.  And when he lost his family he lost his connection with the rhythms of that existence, with life and ultimately perhaps to his own humanity.

The key scene in this context is when Sahjhan offers Holtz his Faustian pact.  At the beginning of the scene Holtz is alone with just his memories for company and drink for comfort.  When the demon first enters he has no-idea who it is.   But his reaction is plain enough:

"Another step and it'll be your last. If you've come for anything other than a fight, you're in the wrong place."

Sahjhan is a demon and Holtz has spent his entire life fighting them.  But now there is only one thing he is interested in and that is revenge on Angelus and Darla.  Nothing else means anything.   That is why he agree to Sahjan’s proposal – a proposal that will take him away from his home, the home he shared with his family.  It will take him from the only life he has known, from the community with which he was familiar and in which he was trusted and into he knew not what.

And when after a sleep of over two centuries he emerges into a new century he is shown the great sweep of human history since the 1770’s.  Sahjhan even tries to prompt some interest in it:

“Have you followed this part of the history? American Revolution, manifest destiny, westward expansion, the Beach Boys?"

Imagine what it would be like to be asleep for two hundred years and to wake up to see that the world has changed utterly – in both great matters and small.  The United States in 1773 were fractious British colonies, electricity and television were unknown, clothing and speech were different, not to mention social customs.  For most people in Holtz’s position the differences he saw all around him when compared to his own time would be overwhelming.  But Holtz lack of interest in any of these matters is complete.  He asks one question about his homeland.  Otherwise his obsession now as in the 18^th century is vengeance:

"I understand enough. One thing baffles me. These visions, wars, the weapons of destruction - how is it no one has killed Angelus or Darla?"

Besides this central preoccupation nothing else matters.  The symbolism here is clear.  Just as he was ripped from his own time in order to pursue those he hated, so that hatred had separated him from his ordinary life.  And in his isolation from the rest of humanity he was emotionally and spiritually as dead as any vampire.  He has no longer any sense of right and wrong – just a sense of what will serve his need for revenge and what will not.  The man who had tried to save his friends and neighbors from the depredations of demons now made a bargain with one of them, even agreeing to be transported into the future through black magic and sorcery.  We can only imagine what Holtz as a family man would have made of this prospect.  Equally a man who risked his own life in pursuit of vampires now welcomed an alliance with Grappler demons:

“Not the sharpest pencils in the box, but merciless in battle.”

They did after all fit the bill for “ruthless bastards”.  And when ordinary human beings (of whom he knew nothing) got in his way at the Hyperion, he cold-bloodedly saw them slaughtered.

It is a truism that we don’t appreciate what we have until we lose it.  And that is what we see here.  In the way that Holtz behaves when he loses his family we see what that family meant to him.  And by that I don’t just mean we see how much he loved them.  Rather I mean we see how they shaped and conditioned who he was.  In his reaction to the loss of his family we see that Holtz had no other reason for living.  Nothing else meant anything to him.  His family was his connection to ordinary life and everything that meant.  It was only because he shared it with them that it meant anything at all.

Angel too, although in a different way, is disconnected from life.  The way that his vampire nature constituted a major barrier to the ordinary things in life that we take for granted was after all a major theme of “Offspring”.    But now Angel is faced with the prospect of having a son – a human child.  His life too would therefore be shaped and conditioned by this family.  And the counterpoint between him and Holtz shows just how he may be affected.  Just as Holtz’s now dead family were his connection with ordinary life so too may Angel’s new family be his.  And in this sense we may perhaps be seeing at least the potential for Angel to come to life – to undergo quickening of his own.

There was always a danger that a storyline centered around the birth of Angel’s child would be overwhelmed by sentimentality – that the child and considerations of its safety would be the center of attention  and everything else subordinated to it.  But ultimately such a tale would have been one-dimensional. Instead the child and its safety have simply been the fulcrum around which the real issues posed for the viewers have turned.   And these issues have implications that are far from limited.  Indeed they could decisively affect Angel’s whole direction.   He now faces a fork in the road.  In one direction lies fatherhood.  There too lies perhaps a degree of personal happiness he had only rarely known.  But perhaps more importantly there also lie questions such as: what does this mean for his mission?  In one sense, as I have said, we can see Angel becoming far more connected to human life through his new family.  But what does family really mean for a person like Angel and is the sort of a connection with life that it brings compatible with his mission.  Could a family be a sort of redemption for him?   Alternatively, could he continue to risk his life on a daily basis knowing he has a son to live for?  And even if he were prepared to risk his life, any enemy he fought would have a ready made vulnerability to attack – as Angelus so decisively proved to Holtz.  In the other direction is the prospect of having to destroy his own child for the sake of the world.  What would that mean for his perception of his mission; how would he see a fate that left him with such an intolerable choice?  Remember that what Buffy was forced to do in “Becoming” was for her (temporarily at least) a breaking point.  And hanging over this all is the question: to what extent is the road Angel now follows a matter of choice?  Could there be a more powerful set of issues facing him?  And he has as yet no way of knowing what to do for the best.  The Nyazian scrolls are a very unsure guide at the best of times.  How in fact in any given circumstances does he know what is the right thing to do.   Imagine for example in “Becoming”, that Buffy didn’t know whether Angel’s blood or something else had opened Acathla’s vortex.  How could she then decide what to do?  It is here, in the dilemmas that face Angel and in what those dilemmas mean for him personally, that the true strength of this arc seems to me to lie rather than in the need to avert another apocalypse.  And this episode helps to set those dilemmas up.

The Plot

“Quickening” is, therefore, another episode full of set up for later developments.  Here it is possible to isolate three features of the episode in which we can see the arc unfolding:

These developments represent a clear advance on the situation we saw at the end of “Offspring”.  This gives the arc a feeling of momentum – of it going somewhere. And that is I think important.  Arcs work because not revealing and solving everything in the course of an hour allows a sense of tension to build.  Inevitably if you condense a storyline too much it cannot have the same feeling of importance as something that is allowed to develop for months.  But giving yourself time also means you have to fill it and if arc developments come to a standstill – as they did for example in the middle of the Key arc on BtVS – then instead of increasing anticipation you will simply bore and annoy the viewer.

And, not content with this mixture of developments, the writers throw in a few others for good measure.  Clearly the most significant is Wolfram and Hart.  The scenes here show to good effect many of the strengths of this corporate villain.  Not the least of these strengths is its hydra-like nature with yet another senior human figure within the firm appearing to pull the strings.  Another strength lies in the resources at its command – across the full spectrum of its operations:  electronic bugging, mind readers and psychics, medical expertise and para-military muscle.  They have something to meet every need.  And finally they have patience and planning.  They can sit, await developments and when an opportunity presents itself they can put together a plan of action and execute it.  But what I also like about Wolfram and Hart is that we also see the weaknesses of the corporation.  And the biggest weakness is the “let not thy right hand know what thy left is doing” syndrome.  It appears that Lilah was not after all responsible for the cleaning of the Hyperion – Gavin was.  This was in fact only a cover for planting surveillance equipment.  But intelligence is useless unless there are people available to make sense of it and whereas Lilah would have been able to grasp the significance of Darla’s pregnancy at once, Gavin couldn’t.  And the reason they didn’t work together is because they were rivals who cared more about proving they were better than each other than working together for the good of the firm, as we discovered when Lilah thought Cyril was trying to blackmail her:

Lilah: " You little weasel! If you think you can blackmail your way onto me on *my* desk..."

Cyril: “No! That's not it! You got it all wrong. I respect you way too much to be attracted     to you. It's - it's just - down in the mailroom, I see a lot. You know? Different factions in the  firm. There comes a time when a guy has to choose a side."

Lilah: "And is that disk your way of telling me you're choosing *my* side? (Cyril smiles and gives her a nod) And who are we allied against, you and I? Who is this common foe?"

Cyril: "I'd rather not..."

Lilah: "If you don't tell me right now, I'm gonna have your skin peeled off and stapled back on inside out."

Cyril: "Mr. Park."

Lilah: "Gavin."

Equally the way that executives can be more concerned to protect themselves than to achieve results can often lead to a waste of valuable resources.  That is the only way to describe the abortive assassination to which Lilah resorted when Linwood threatened her.  But this, the fact that they were so clearly blindsided by Darla’s pregnancy (they obviously had no idea about the Tro-clon) and the ultimate failure of the SWAT operation suggests that they lawyers are not all-powerful.  There are forces at work that are outside their control.  Indeed in many ways the fact that they are just as much in the dark about events as Angel Investigations adds to the sense of mystery and anticipation about what is to happen.

In comparison the vampire cult made little impression. Indeed I found myself a little confused by their appearance.  Cyril contacted Master Tarfal, Underlord of Pain.  I assume that this is a different cult leader from Ul-thar.  If it isn’t then why is a human involved in a vampire cult.  If it is then how did Ul-thar's cult know the child had arrived and where it was?  If this knowledge was simply down to Ul-thar’s psychic abilities then they are very precise indeed, especially since none of Wolfram and Hart’s psychics had the first clue about what was to happen.   But leaving this to one side, the cult itself is little more than a cliché.  Given the fact that the child was born to two vampires we can readily understand that it would be considered important.   But exactly how did the cult  perceive it – as a god, as a symbol, as a sign of something to come or as something else?  And how does this fit in with the nature of the cult itself?  Are these vampires simply disciples of a powerful demon like Balthazar in the BtVS episode “Bad Girls” or are they some sort of Messianic group like the Order of Aurelius?  There is nothing here to give the cult a distinct identity or that makes their motivation in this meaningful.

This vampire cult, Holtz, Wolfram and Hart, the child's birth; these individual elements cannot exist in isolation.  They must be brought together.  The interaction between them is what makes a plot.  And here I do not think that the structure quite works.  The only real threat that Angel and his team have to deal with in this episode is the vampire cult.  One aspect of this confrontation that I did like was the degree of ambiguity on the part of the vampires when they first appeared at the hospital.  After all they were there to protect the child and that must raised questions about their likely relationship wiyh Angel Investigations team who, after all, had the same purpose.  WE cpuld, therefore have had a pretty interesting dynamic here, with an unbeasy alliance open to the near certainly of betrayal with all the game playing that suggests.  Unfortunately the cult leader didn’t allow the ambiguity to last long:

 "Now let us kill the humans so we may use their blood to nourish the mother and her miracle child."

By making things so black and white – even for Darla – the writers were placing a premium on the ability of the cult to be threatening.  But in truth, after the initial surprise of their arrival,  the vampires never appeared that dangerous and the escape from the hospital was fairly routine. 

No, the two forces that we perceived as the real threat were of course those belonging to Wolfram and Hart on the one hand and Holtz on the other.  Apart from anything else the lion’s share of attention is given to them and they are the only groups whose preparations we see and whose motivations are made real.  Indeed it was structurally quite neat,  that we saw their preparation paralleling one another throughout this episode only for Holtz to turn up unexpectedly at the last minute at the Hotel to precipitate a clash neither of them wanted.  But there are just too many differences between the two operations for this to work properly.

One of the reasons why Angel’s decision to “get out of Dodge” appeared sensible was because we knew the lawyers’ SWAT team would be on its way to the hotel, if they were not already there.  From an early stage when we became aware of the surveillance of the Hyperion and Linwood’s need to give the senior partners a result to make up for the failure to foresee Darla’s pregnancy, a confrontation between Wolfram and Hart and Angel looked inevitable.  But there was no such compelling reason for Holtz to rush and indeed no indication (other than his sense of impatience) that he would do so.   In fact at one point Sahjhan seemed to caution patience:

There are rules and timetables and forces at work far greater than either of us. Boy, you vengeful types aren't real good at playing with others, are you?"

The confrontation between his forces and the Wolfram and Hart team, therefore, seemed contrived - inteded to do no more than emphasize the menace of Holtz.  But that immediately diminishes the threat posed by Wolfram and Hart and even suggests that they are not intended to be major players in their own right.  But if that is the case then we are left to ask, what then was all the time devoted to their motivations and preparation for?  Wasn't that wasted?  Angel and the others weren't even aware of their interest or involvement.

Having said that, the result of the battle did leave us with  a rather interesting and tense mini-cliffhanger, as Angel confronts Holtz as Darla goes in labor outside.

Overview (A)

As I have said before the importance of an arc like this one lies not so much in the need to avert some great catastrophe but in the likely cost in personal terms of doing so.  And what “Quickening” does very well is to give us a clear insight into that likely cost.  We now have a very clear idea what fatherhood might mean to Angel.  But more ominously we also see very clearly the risks of that emotional involvement.  The writers have on the one hand stressed the power of family ties.  But on the other they have foreshadowed threats to Angel’s own potential ties to the child both from Holtz and from the child’s possible involvement in the Tro-clon.  The stakes could hardly be higher and that is what in many ways makes this episode.  In this context it seems to me that the episode does represent a very real advance in the development of the arc.  We do not see a clear picture emerge.  That would be far too early.  But the pieces are beginning to fall into place.  At the same time the initial skirmishes between Angel, Holtz and Wolfram and Hart were entertaining enough.  My only reservation about this episode lies on the fact that the involvement of the lawyers promised more than it delivered and that so much of it was leading up to a confrontation that would only take place in the next episode.