Angel 5x06 Review: ¡Hermanos Coraje!

“The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco”
Written by Jeffrey Bell
Directed by Jeffrey Bell
 
The Story
A guard unlocks a gate and goes patrolling down an alley with a flashlight when he hears an ominous noise. He gets in touch with someone on a walkie talkie, but he just finds a dude he knows. However, then that dude gets tossed through the air with a Wilhelm scream before the guard also gets attacked by something we can’t see.
 
Hello luchador mail guy. We’re at W&H, accompanying him along his route. Eventually, he encounters Lorne, who stops him to ask his opinion on what to send this lady for her birthday. Fred comes along and advises him to send no card, mention no birthdays, and just send flowers because she’s special.
 
In his office, Angel is signing a bunch of documents for Gunn. In blood! Yay. These contracts are all pretty awesome, taking down evil companies and setting up nice foster systems. Gunn really enjoys this work, but Angel finds it very unfulfilling. Spike is there, and since nothing can done about him being a ghost, he’s still going to keep being annoying. Gunn points out that they’ve done more good at W&H in one month than they did at A.I. in a whole year. Angel still feels disconnected. Spike mocks him for it. He’s the one who’s disconnected. Luchador guy shuffles through with his mail cart. While he’s still in the office, Wesley brings them a report on three men who’ve had their hearts cut out. This gives the luchador pause. Angel goes to add a file to the luchador’s cart, and the luchador throws him through a window before continuing on.
 
Angel gets up, still kind of baffled about the luchador throwing him. Spike thinks it’s hilarious. Gunn gets security on it. Fred shows up, and Spike tells her Angel attacked the old mail guy, which immediately gets her all upset on his behalf. *snort* Gunn gets a call from security, who are taking him off the premises. Lorne joins them and Spike takes his little joke from amusing to obnoxious territory, and Angel quickly gets fed up. He’d like to focus on the bodies Wes found out about. There’s already been another one, and it seems to be connected to Día de los Muertos.
 
Angel, Spike, Gunn, and Wes are all in one of Angel’s non-Plymouth cars, heading out to investigate. Well, Spike’s there because his other option is to aimlessly haunt W&H (he, of course, explains this much more crudely). Wes is annoyed that Spike somehow ended up riding shotgun. Wes is just giving Angel directions when Angel comes to a screeching halt, spinning the car around, and gets out of the car without saying a word. The other three follow him to another body with the heart missing. Spike’s the first one to spot the demon doing this. It looks like a bipedal Aztec jaguar. Angel fights it and Wes empties his shotgun into it. Gunn buries his axe in it. Spike attempts to pick up a two-by-four to whack it with but his hands go through. It manages to get away.
 
At W&H, Fred is analyzing the blood on Gunn’s axe. Spike wanders through there. For once he’s actually avoiding Angel, because apparently he’s so grumpy that being annoying isn’t fun. Fred tells him to give Angel a break because championing is hard, as he should know. He doesn’t really consider himself a champion, but she tells him why she thinks he is.
 
Wes is looking for Inca and Aztec mythology reference materials to figure out what that thing was. For some reason, he describes it as looking like a bird of prey rather than a jaguar. Which is really unfortunate, for two reasons: 1) I won’t get to hear Wes use the British pronunciation of “jaguar” (jag-you-are, rather than jag-wire), and 2) that thing looked nothing like a bird! Angel finds him and he explains what he’s researching. He seems antsy and disgruntled. He goes back to his own office.
 
Spike appears over Wesley’s shoulder. He wants to read up on the Shanshu prophecy. Wes explains a little about it, and Spike is starting to feel that he qualifies under the prophecy’s parameters, so maybe it’s about him, not Angel. (Yeah, except Angel was drawn to the scroll with the prophecy in “To Shanshu in L.A.,” and the Oracles strongly implied that he would be made human after saving humanity and averting the apocalypse.) Spike claims to believe it’s all nonsense. Wes ignores him, but Spike says it’s Angel who thinks it’s nonsense. Wes seems a bit disturbed by that. And then one of his employees turns up some good info.
 
Wes briefs Angel on the Aztec demon they’re up against. It was there exactly fifty years ago too. It killed over a dozen people before being defeated by five brothers. All but one of them were killed. Turns out the surviving brother is still alive. Angel goes to see him. He’s the luchador! And he even wears his mask at home. He grabs Angel and throws him against the wall inside his room (does that constitute an invitation?). The reason the luchador threw him earlier was that he thought Angel was coming to drag him into the Aztec demon investigation. Angel was really only giving him mail. The luchador is a bit embarrassed, but Angel really is dragging him into that now. He throws him across the room, then asks him for help fighting the demon that killed his brothers. He’s not interested. He tells Angel about how he and his brothers used to be famous Mexican wrestlers known as Los Hermanos Numeros. Angel is a bit nonplussed at that name (yeah, seriously). They all had their numbers on their masks. The survivor is 5. I’ll refer to him as Cinco from now on. He has an elaborate memorial altar to his brothers.
 
Flashback to a wrestling match! Cinco and his brothers kind of tag-team their opponents, and they’re very synchronized in their fighting. They were undefeated. After the flashback fight, a dude pulled a shotgun on them. Two of the brothers catapulted a third at him to take him down. The five of them fought gangsters and monsters, protecting the helpless of the city. Angel quite enjoys this story. He can relate. More flashbacks. Cinco is mournfully nostalgic of those days. They got a call about a demon robot (wow, another one?) and sprang into action. Huh. I wonder if Angel would’ve run into the brothers in the ‘50s if he’d stuck around longer.
 
Angel wants to hear the story of the Aztec demon. Cinco doesn’t want to talk about his brothers’ deaths. He tried to carry on helping people after he was alone, but it didn’t work well. Then a young Holland Manners came to recruit him for W&H, to work as muscle. Even though he knew W&H was evil, nothing mattered to him without his brothers. He wishes he’d died with them. Angel tells him the reason his brothers’ spirits never visit him is that he’s given up.
 
Cinco takes Angel to a wrestling ring to show him one of the reasons he stopped caring. In the ring are five midgets in numbered masks, fighting a big dude in a warrior mask. They’ve been turned into jokes, after everything they did to help people. Cinco can’t see that they even really made a difference. Angel disagrees. He explains why helping people is worthwhile for its own sake, and he seems to be convincing himself more than he’s convincing Cinco. Aww. Cinco slips out while he’s still having that nice moment of purpose.
 
Wes and Gunn are still researching. One of the demon’s victims seemed a bit unusual. It skipped over many potential victims to get to her instead. Wes is concerned about Angel. Gunn isn’t, particularly; he’s more focused on the case. It occurs to him that the victims were all heroes. Veterans, philanthropists, public service workers.
 
Angel sees Cinco on a bus. When he turns around, the demon is right there. It stabs him in the chest, then goes to remove his heart, but backs off, pulls the sword out, and leaves. Dang, has Angel lost heart so much that the demon won’t even steal it?
 
Angel disagrees with Wes and Gunn’s theory because the Aztec demon didn’t take his heart. He’s clearly miffed about it. Wes and Gunn think the demon prefers hero hearts, yes, but they do have to be functioning. Angel’s doesn’t beat, so it’s not tasty even if he’s the hero-y-est hero who ever heroed. *snort* Wes knows of the brothers’ defeat of the devil’s robot. Bahahahaha. Gunn figures that if the demon came back again after exactly fifty years, there might be some kind of mystical deal involved. If so, then there’s also a contract. Which he can find.
 
Wes sits down to talk to Angel. He thinks the reason the demon passed over his heart is that his heart isn’t in his work. It’s become meaningless for him. Wes brings up the prophecy, and it takes Angel a moment to realize why Wes would no longer remember that he, too, has a very good reason for no longer setting store by prophecies. Wes insists that it matters very much for Angel to believe in the prophecy. He needs to have hope to keep him going. Fred calls them. She has info for them. Wes is still troubled on Angel’s behalf.
 
In Fred’s lab, she explains that the demon’s blood makes it practically invulnerable. Spike’s guess is that its weakness is its heart. Not because of science, but because that’s what makes the most poetic sense. I hate to admit it, but he’s right. Gunn joins them, having found the record of the demon’s contract thing. He used to be all-powerful because he had a talisman that gave him the power of the Aztec sun god. But he lost it. He made a deal with an Aztec shaman to return from the dead every fifty years so that he could look for it. Finding it would free him of the curse and restore his power. So...it’d be that shiny trinket Cinco has on his brothers’ altar, then. It’s been passed down in his family for generations. Angel remembers it and leaves without a word. Spike accuses him of being a drama queen. No, he’s being Batman.
 
Angel hurries to Cinco’s apartment, but he and the talisman are both gone. That’s because he went to the cemetery with it. He’s at his brothers’ grave, and he’s summoning the demon. Angel joins him there. He guesses that Cinco wants the demon to come so he can put him out of his misery. Cinco says he doesn’t have the talisman, and Angel rustles through the grave decorations to find it. The demon is coming. Angel tries to make Cinco cough up the talisman. Yeah, that’s going to have to be literally—he swallowed it. (I didn’t even remember that detail when I used that phrasing. I feel pretty great about that pun.) Cinco tosses Angel across the cemetery, then calls out the demon.
 
Angel gets up as Cinco and the demon are facing off. It punches him into a headstone. Angel tears off a bit of the fence to use against the demon, and he and the demon fight while Cinco watches. Cinco joins the fight eventually. He gets impaled. He walks over to his brothers’ grave and smears his blood on it as he falls to his knees. Angel keeps fighting, but he’s not doing so great. Then Cinco’s brothers bust out of their grave to join in! They were buried in their masks. Wow. They clap, yell “Andale!” and grab more pieces of the fence for weapons. Angel sort of stands there in bewilderment as this happens, but then one of them calls him “amigo” and urges him to come fight with them. Aww.
 
Angel picks up his fence post thing and slowly approaches the fight. The brothers all get knocked aside before he takes his shot. Then three of them do that signature vault move of theirs, which lands the demon on the ground. They pin all four of its limbs to the ground, leaving Angel to do the honors of stabbing it through the heart. It crumbles to rock, then to dust. Angel goes back over to Cinco. He’s not quite prepared to believe that his brothers came back because he’s worthy. He tells Angel the talisman is in his coffee thermos. He didn’t actually swallow it. His brothers line up in front of them as Cinco dies. Angel picks up the talisman. The brothers carry Cinco over to the grave, then they all disappear.
 
The Latino music continues to play as Angel returns to W&H. He gives Wes the talisman for safekeeping. Wes is still concerned about him, but he’s feeling better than he has in a while. He told the team about the fight, but it seems he may have played up Cinco’s role a tad and downplayed his own.
 
He walks alone over to Wesley’s office, picks up the book with the prophecy archive, and sits down to read the Shanshu prophecy. (The text is too small for us in the audience to make out, though. Boo.)
 
I haven’t been a huge fan of this episode in the past, but I’ve changed my mind. “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco” is fantastic. I think I generally like episodes where there’s a one-shot type character going through something that’s very familiar to the main character, so the main character ends up solving his own problem by helping the one-shot character solve his. It’s not an original storytelling tactic at all, but it’s a very effective one. I used to find Cinco and his brothers ridiculous, but now I think they’re great. The luchador culture stuff was fun, and presented in that way where the characters are dead serious about it but it’s all deliberately over-the-top so it’s really funny. The Aztec demon was interesting, too, and there’s some good foreshadowing for Spike’s pretentions to the Shanshu prophecy. I also really like Wesley’s part in this, and the hints at how much the memory spell changed for him. Is he going to be curious about what Angel was talking about, or is he going to just move on and forget about it?
 
The Characters
Angel definitely won’t be able to take W&H down from the inside if he doesn’t even believe in what he’s fighting for anymore. I like the way he isn’t just becoming apathetic; he’s afraid of his apathy. The demon passing over his heart seems to confirm that fear. What if he’s lost his heroism? What if he’s reverted from “all that matters is what we do” to “nothing matters?” But he helps Cinco, and Cinco’s brothers consider him worthy in an instant, and he kills the demon and saves the day. It feels good. He’s still got it. And just because some prophecies were deliberate fabrications, it doesn’t mean others aren’t true. There is still hope. Even if there are always more people to help, the people he’s helped so far are still better off, so he is making a difference.
 
Spike actually contributed something useful—the idea that you have to go for the heart on this demon. I really like that his interest in poetry could be valuable in this way (especially because I have very little patience for poetry in general, but particularly for Spike’s overly sentimental drivel). What’s less fun is how Fred’s encouragement goes straight to his head and makes him start feeling entitled to the Shanshu prophecy. What is it with Spike and thinking he deserves to get everything he wants? Drusilla, the Gem of Amara, his chip out, Buffy, his soul, Buffy again, the amulet, a corporeal body even though that’s not possible, and now the Shanshu even though he’s still a ghost. He ignores the evil he’s done in the past whenever he can and just assumes he can have the things he wants.
 
Gunn went through the kind of funk Angel’s in now last season. He feels like he’s truly found his place, so he’s no longer in that funk at all, and he and Angel can’t really relate like they used to because of how completely in his element Gunn is at W&H.
 
Fred’s fondness for Cinco is adorable. Did she interact with him much, or did she just think this silent old grouch in his luchador mask was precious? Because I totally would if I were her. One thing that’s slightly irritating is that she’s become the all-purpose super-scientist of the team. She was studying to get her PhD in physics. Did she spend all her spare time reading about every other scientific discipline that exists? Because if not, then how does she know how to recognize blood enzymes through a microscope? It’s kind of a nitpick, though. She is a genius. And it makes more sense for her to know this than for those kids in “Some Assembly Required” to be skilled enough to assemble pieces from different corpses into a viable patchwork body, I suppose. Even though I don’t like Spike, I do like the guileless way in which Fred offers him her support. The only two people who have ever believed in Mr. Self-Loathing are his mom and Buffy, so it’s nice for someone with neither a familial nor a romantic connection to him to also be giving him positive feedback. Even though he does unfortunate things with it.
 
Wait, so Lorne, whose mystical power is empathy, doesn’t know not to point out the increasing age of a depressed, middle-aged mom? He clearly hasn’t quite caught up on his sleep yet. Pretty hilarious, though, that he found out about Angel’s altercation with Cinco through his PR channels.
 
Wesley is officially back to being Angel’s closest confidant! (Cordelia was only that in S3; it was definitely Wes starting towards the end of S1 and continuing until the fake prophecy about Angel killing Connor.) I love this so much. It’s a shame Gunn isn’t particularly close with either of them anymore, but Angel and Wes are probably my favorite bromance (not counting Angel and Faith) on the show anyway.
 
Favorite Quotes
“Remind me again how you ended up in the front seat.”
“Called shotgun, mate.”
“Oh.” [sheepishly pulls a literal shotgun into view] “I thought we were doing a weapons check.”
 
“El Diablo Robotico.”