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Angel: “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco”

I never really got into the show Angel while it was still on the air because it always seemed like a dumping ground for all the ideas that were not quite good enough for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show from which it spun off. Nor did it help that Angel was never one of my favorite characters on BtVS. He was more a character I tolerated for the sake of the other characters.

I finally broke down and watched the DVD for the fifth season a while back and found myself quite pleased with the result. Not every episode in the fifth season was a classic and not every plot twist a welcome one (for example, I believe what they did with the Fred character later in the season was a mistake but I can see why they did it) but as a whole, the season was a lot better than I expected.

One of my favorite episodes is “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco” which introduced a whole group of Mexican wrestlers into a show -- and genre -- that had been notably short of Hispanic characters. The wrestlers in question moonlighted as demon-fighters and had a history of battling both the natural and supernatural evils faced by the local Mexican-American population until all but one wrestler -- the “Numero Cinco”* of the title -- were killed. Fortunately, the wrestlers did not stay dead but came back for one last battle with their old comrade-in-arms Numero Cinco -- who, prior to this episode, had been working for Angel as a mail carrier. (Yes, it probably would have seemed unrealistic to see a former wrestler working as a paralegal or a file clerk. But a mail carrier? I guess we should all be happy that they did not make him a janitor.)

It would have been nice if the wrestlers had stayed around longer because I found the concept of Hispanic characters battling the supernatural quite intriguing. After all, it was not like you ever saw a whole lot of Hispanics on BtVS, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, etc., and apart from Numero Cinco, you rarely saw a Hispanic character on Angel as well. But it was not to be. They only lasted for a single episode -- after which they returned to the dead. And I suspect they were only introduced because the title character Angel was at a loss as to how to stop an ancient Aztec demon who was on the loose. (In short, some PC screenwriter figured it was not cool to portray Angel as the Great White Hope of Los Angeles by having him defeat an nonwhite demon so they brought in a group of token Mexicans to do his dirty work.)

Most of the show's fans criticized the wrestlers for being ethnic Mary Sues and indeed, I would have been nice to have seen more believable qualities displayed during their brief appearance. I do find it troublesome that a show set in Los Angeles (a city with one of the largest populations of Mexican descent on Earth) could not be bothered to find even one Hispanic character to show up on a regular basis prior to Numero Cinco's appearance at the beginning of the fifth season -- even if said character was a bothersome cop or a nosy journalist. Nor am I fond of the fact that when said characters did appear, the show's writers promptly wrote them off as soon as possible. (Okay, long-running character Cordelia Chase lasted about four seasons on this series despite being played by a Hispanic actress. But Cordelia does not really count as a Hispanic character.)

I realize that no one expects social realism from a show named Angel and that adding token ethnic characters to appease audience demographics would not necessarily have improved it. On the other hand, I get so tired of the notion that writers who put Hispanic characters on their shows are somehow doing us Hispanics a favor. That we have no stories to tell that are as interesting as the ones white non-Hispanics tell about themselves. That having a TV series whose characters never interact with Hispanics despite residing in a city with a large Latino population is somehow realistic because Latinos to the average screenwriter seem even more mythical than werewolves and vampires.

Oh, well. I suppose I could have more important issues to kvetch about than the characters on one TV show. And to tell the truth, I am not all that fond of the masked wrestler character in either American or Mexican culture.

But I did relish the chance to see a group of Mexican characters fight their own battles for a change -- and to actually save the day for the title character instead of waiting to be rescued like the Mexicans in Giant. And I'm kinda sorry that they never got the chance to have their own spin-off. At least it would have been interesting to see what the writers would do if they had to contend with a Hispanic character every week. And to see how such a show would compare with Angel.

* “Numero Cinco” is, of course, Spanish for “Number Five.”