Oh a false clock tries to tick out my time
To disgrace, distract, and bother me.
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face,
And the dust of rumors covers me.
But if the arrow is straight
And the point is slick,
It can pierce through dust no matter how thick.
So I'll make my stand
And remain as I am
And bid farewell and not give a damn.

-Bob Dylan, 'Restless Farewell'.

Hello everyone.

Right, so this was what I wanted. Out and out genius from Ben Edlund. I have a weird relationship with the chap. I've loved absolutely everything of his except 'Life of the Party', which I still hate like a psychopathic rhinocerous. I rewatched 'Sacrifice' the other day: absolutely wonderful. 'Smile Time', it goes without saying, was highly innovative. And 'Jaynestown' was one of the three best episodes of 'Firefly' ('Lost in Space', 'Out of Gas'). And here, Edlund manages the near-impossible. He does an episode with a crazy timeframe, and yet he absolutely stuffs it full of intelligent philosophical and moral debate. So how does he do this?

5.19- 'Time Bomb'

He does it by not over-filling the somewhat complex inner curves with too much Murder Mystery plodding. In Star Trek's 'Cause and Effect', for example, we have a whole episode while we're working out the 'Groundhog Day' twist. As a result of this, as time-passing as the episode is, it never has time to actually bring thematic or moral depth to the question of time and how we use it. By contrast here, the Illyria time-waltz is restricted to one and a half short acts, and the chunky first two acts have as much interesting dialogue and characterisation as any episode this Season. As a result of this, when the episode goes 'Spotless Mind', it comments on ideas already set up, rather than being done for its own sake. And that's what makes this episode a success.

Themes and relevances

1. Time and Space

I'd even go so far as to say that Gillum and Edlund are softening viewers up for the twist during the first act. We see people all over the place adjusting to different time frames.

Gunn, whose pace of life has been slow utopia followed by pain and carnage, suddenly snaps back into our reality, saved by Illyria. In going back to work, conscience intact, he does something braver than staying in the basement ever was- he confronts his past and moves onwards. But as we see him readjusting, we watch him walk in on Wesley. And Wesley is quie unlike we've seen him recently- at times verging on comic hysteria luiek the chuckle after the line 'Her body's previous owner'. I started wondering what was going on, and if I'd missed something. But as it becomes clear later, Wesley is becoming schizophrenic. In his own office, he manically searches down all references to Illyria. Everywhere else, he barely bats an eyelid, comatose with residual pain. But Wesley's fast/slow frenzy and Gunn's adjusting back to working life are all subjective squiggles on measured and doled out time. A false clock, if you will.

-Also in the first scene, we get a slick little cut across, from Spike and Illyria continuing to fight, to Angel standing next to the wall. All is not quite what it seems. Hollow walls and bending space lead to a time distorted by the bizarre gravity of a God. It's rubber sheet geometry with heavenly bodies.

We are also prone to seeing Illyria moving about at a faster pace than the rest of humanity, but thinking over longer timescales. And so the quite obvious but nicely used parallel to mayflys, the animals, (even that sounds strange), who live for one day only, breeding and then dying. In Illyria's longer view of time, Wesley and Gunn's and even Angel and Spike's lives are but drops in the plankton filled ocean. They are meaningless, somehow. And so we eventually think of Angel as a parallel to Illyria. What means these lives- those of Wesley and Gunn and even Fred, to a vampire who is 250 years old, a year for each Buffyverse programme ever broadcast? Does he only see them as mayflys, born, living and dying in the time it takes for him to complete a good brood. I am reminded of the absolutely fantastic scene (but most things were in that Season), in 'Choices', where the Mayor relates the story of his wife to Angel- how she grew old and died while he remained young. And since the mayor was a human character after all, it really worked. Angel here is forced to look at the carnage of his entire team killed, and think- just what is it to be human, to live for 70 years, and then die. Are we just mayflys, irrelevant ephemera in earth's ageless revolution?

2. Team

Time- Team. All that consonance and the overlapping dipthongs. OK, I just wanted to get the word dipthong in, I admit it. In any case, there's a whole subtheme going on in this episode about how people fit into teams.

• Angel: How much is he the boss of his team, and how much just an individual presence? While he talks to Wesley and tries to help him in this episode, he finishes by allowing him to continue to work with Illyria. He cannot control him as a member of a team, as was shown when Wesley's lack of trust spurred him to break the Window of Orlon.
  
• Hamilton: He reminds Angel of how he plays within the larger team of Wolfram and Hart. Angel isn't interested in kowtowing to the Senior Partners, but he is also aware of keeping the company afloat. He ends up in the episode caught bewtween two stools: Hamilton reminding him of the company's interests, and Gunn having a prolonged tussle with his conscience. And eventually, he rejects both sides of the scales, and goes with something Illyria has taught him. More on that later
  
• Gunn: How does he fit in to this corporate team? By not telling Angel and Spike about the sacrifice he had to make in 'Underneath', he ended as rather a Lone Wolf. Now back, he doesn't understand quite how to fit in to Angel's premiership. His fear that what seems to be careful, solid administration is actually relentless Evil is crystallised in the brilliant parallel with his suburban hell. It was not the basement which was the worst part, it was the seeping terror of the iced-cake perfect family. Here at Wolfram and Hart it's the same. Gunn would be more grimly satisfied if he could see what harm others was inflicting, but here in the airy offices it's a nameless, intangible fear.
  
• Illyria: Eventually, she does act as a part of a team. She regains Gunn at no obvious gain to herself. And she allows herself, more or less, to be reduced in power by Wesley at the end, on the understanding that she will not be killed. Perhaps even someone who 'serves no master but their own ambition', Angel thinks, can be a team player. And he starts transfering that message to his own situation.

3 Betrayal

Wesley now knows that he has betrayed Angel in the past. But also, in breaking the window, he doubled his betrayal, directly disobeying Angel once again. In breaking the window, he also betrayed Illyria, who thinks of him as subject. 'You are my betrayer', she intones, before expanding, 'In my time betrayal was thought of as a neutral word, like 'water' or 'breeze'. There is a definite stigma attached to betrayal now- the betrayal of Judas, of Brutus, of Macbeth. Here Illyria uses it to mean something with a slightly different gradation of meaning. Since in her world, it was all self-serving nightmares, everyone looked to their own achievement. If in doing so, someone else was sleighted, that was a betrayal, neither morally good nor reprehensible. So here Illyria's message to Wesley is that if he does not treat Angel as his master, then betrayal as a negative becomes more of a moot point- and could be considered merely 'vaulting ambition' or Machiavellian power politics.

Meanwhile, Gunn is considering how he's betraying his own conscience, and the Fell Brethren are uncovered in their plan to betray the pregnant lady's son- there was to be a ritual sacrifice at age thirteen, just as he began to be his own person.

4. The cult of celebrity

This is elegantly done in what, notionally, is the A-plot of the episode. We see the lady, so delighted by the prospect of her son being famous, and achieving some kind of celebrated iconic status, merely by birth, that she concludes: 'They have a better life than I could ever give him.' Balderdash and chicanery, of course, for she overlooks the fact that the most important thing about being brought up is love and self-interest. In the obsessed, Reality TV age of the 21stcentury, a passing waft of fame, sweet exotic marijuana smoke from a different block, seems like the ultimate reward and is somehow the goal of every parent for their child. Eventually, as the Fell Brethren's metaphor has it in black and white, they will sacrifice you on an altar, using your eventual failure as inches in tittle-tattle press columns. This is something Angel needs to remember as well. He can prove himself to be a good man, even as a vampire. But his destiny is not written in the stars from Day One, and as long as he believes that Shanshu is his Destiny and his right, he is prone to being mown down by fate's bemused whims.

Just a few quite delicious lines here:

-I still like him better than Eve. A Lorne/writer-audience moment. Lorne is much better used in this episode, which really juggles the regular characters with excellent vim and vigour.

-'Curing cancer?' 'Probably wouldn't be cost-effective' 'Right. The patent-holder's a client'. Genius.

And the final lesson Angel learns, is to serve his own ambition. This is a more bitter epiphany than both, since its immediate consequence is to look as if he's going along with Hamilton over Gunn in the Conscience/Conquest dichotomy. Actually, it's somewhere a little more morally ambiguous than that. In signing the baby over, Angel is doing what serves his own path of least resistance to power, and his own belief in his own Destiny. Though this isn't healthy, it also isnt directly bowing to Hamilton's pressure. In a different situation, he'd bow to Gunn's conscience if it kept his own situation better for him.

Angel has decided that the best way to handle the world is the same way that Illyria attempts to handle it. By announcing himself King, and using other people (who are, after all, his employees), he turns Wolfram and Hart into an almost feudal state. And in doing so, he takes a tiny and dangerous step towards asking himself just exactly what he wants. For that reason, the grisly ending can be seen as a deadly dark grey cause for optimism coming towards the end of the Season.

Thanks for reading. Just three to go...

TCH