Give mama a little EWWW!!!!
Mar. 6th, 2003 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynSpoilers for Angel episode 3/5, Salvage — beware!
The Faith bandwagon passed me by back on Buffy season 3 and 4. I can count on two fingers the times when she didn’t irritate me, and I found the badgirl shtick incredibly tiresome after about, oh, say, five minutes. But I’d been looking at some stuff about this episode and it sounded as if they were going to not only address some of the things I disliked about her, but also create a more fully realized character in Salvage and the subsequent episodes — and boy, did they. I not only liked Faith last night, I wish to hell she could have stuck around for longer than this season ending of Buffy.
Part of it, for me, was that she always felt like a creation — and a Mary Sue creation at that. She was the cool-slang-spouting, hip swiveling, hair flinging, hippest chick around, the one all the guys wanted to boink and the girls wanted to be (so tough, so cool, so much), and it got, like any Mary Sue, really old really fast (to my eyes), plus there was the fifty pounds of lip gloss and the ton of crap on her face. And her whiny ‘tude and jealousy over Buffy, her selfish wickedness, never interested me, because gosh, bad childhood, boo hoo. I didn’t even care by the time she was attempting atonement on Angel. She was in prison, I was glad she was gone, that’s what mattered. But what was interesting here was that they took a lot of the created, over the top aspects of her this time and made it work. They fleshed her out a little, they gave some focus to her embittered bad girl shell, and added a sense of humor instead of the whiny poor me crap, and it all came together into a character I could finally embrace.
It didn’t hurt that her scenes with Wes were absolutely fantastic. I kept thinking they belonged together even before she came on the show, and now I know they do — screw the stick figure and even the decapitated ex, this is the woman for Wes. The way they instantly seemed to know what the other was thinking (Wes’s face when she said “move away from the glass” was so perfect — it was that tandem thought process that’s been missing from the dysfunctional AI team for so long, not to mention his “five by five” after the jump), the shorthand they communicated with, the way she acknowledged his new look and he skipped past her acknowledgement all just worked beautifully. I never thought ED was a bad actress, it was just the character that I despised, but her growth as an actress in the intervening time really came out here with AD — they play off each other like the total pros they are, and sparks were flying along with the stakes and the verbal repartee. I could so see these two riding off into the sunset (or maybe post-apocalyptic night?), rogue demon hunter and slayer, having hot sex and killing evil creatures.
And speaking of Wes... those scenes with his imagining of Lilah talking to him really ripped me apart. Underneath all this bitterness and tragedy, this is a guy who’s still very decent at heart, whose mission in life is to do good, and how he pictured Lilah’s spirit speaking through him about that was just... tragic in the best sense. He really does do all the ugly jobs now, and in some respects, part of that ugly job was to be involved with Lilah all that time, to find out what it was inside him that felt that way, and learn to cope with it. He has become the most fully realized character on the show, to me, and also the most self-aware, which I think showed in his scenes with Faith — he knows who he is now, and Faith, unlike the rest of the AI team, had the insight to see it all. And she liked what she saw, which I think mirrors the audience’s take on him as well.
And speaking of ugly — I so wanted Lorne’s axe to actually just cleave right into smarmy little Connor’s head. That kid is just a wretched addition to this cast, but I loved how they turned it around a bit with Faith. All this time what he really needed was an ass-kicking bitch to put him down like the whimpering little cur that he is, and as soon as she did it, he was all over worshipping Faith. I liked how they played it with his fanboyness about her to Evil!Cordy, who, even as regular Cordy, would never have enjoyed hearing that. And so the pregnancy is revealed to the new daddy (gack), and her relationship to the Beast, although I’m still a bit unclear about Angelus’s role in all this, since he seems rather puny by comparison. Some very cool cinematography in this episode, too, and flashy, expensive SFX. Their camera setups and blocking are really excellent. (And am I crazy, or was that woman who attacked Faith in the prison yard the cop who attacked Buffy in What’s My Line? She looked weirdly familiar.) The Matrix-style fu scenes didn’t feel out of place or over the top here, because the whole storyline has that larger than life feeling.
Some of the Angelus reputation stuff seems kinda retconny to me, but then, much of the series is retconning what we knew of him from Buffy. I suppose I ought to just let it go, but I have this tendency towards order in writing (I’m an editor in real life, it’s a curse of this job that we look for linear sense). And two things really frustrated me: one, if the Beast knew that the stabby thing was the one item in the universe that had the power to kill him, why on earth would he leave it lying around in an old warehouse, especially knowing Angelus’s deviousness and resourcefulness? And two, how the freaking hell could anyone NOT have known Cordy was preggers? Jesus, she looked like she swallowed a beach ball, she’s fainting... I mean, duh.
But that aside, I loved this episode — it may be one of my favorites of the series, up there with some of the first season eps. Parts of it felt like they were seriously Jossed, especially Lilah’s conversation with Wes when she told him he was trying to save her from her. Fury’s never really written that kind of penetrating, wise dialog, nor something with such sensitivity to the character and such heartbreaking wistfulness, so I wondered if that scene had been Jossed up, as well as some of the stuff with Faith and Wes. Maybe not, but I liked the fact that it felt as if Joss’s hand was in it, because for me that’s usually a sign of lip-smacking goodness.
Although, if Cordy macks with anyone else at this point, I may be running to another channel.
The Faith bandwagon passed me by back on Buffy season 3 and 4. I can count on two fingers the times when she didn’t irritate me, and I found the badgirl shtick incredibly tiresome after about, oh, say, five minutes. But I’d been looking at some stuff about this episode and it sounded as if they were going to not only address some of the things I disliked about her, but also create a more fully realized character in Salvage and the subsequent episodes — and boy, did they. I not only liked Faith last night, I wish to hell she could have stuck around for longer than this season ending of Buffy.
Part of it, for me, was that she always felt like a creation — and a Mary Sue creation at that. She was the cool-slang-spouting, hip swiveling, hair flinging, hippest chick around, the one all the guys wanted to boink and the girls wanted to be (so tough, so cool, so much), and it got, like any Mary Sue, really old really fast (to my eyes), plus there was the fifty pounds of lip gloss and the ton of crap on her face. And her whiny ‘tude and jealousy over Buffy, her selfish wickedness, never interested me, because gosh, bad childhood, boo hoo. I didn’t even care by the time she was attempting atonement on Angel. She was in prison, I was glad she was gone, that’s what mattered. But what was interesting here was that they took a lot of the created, over the top aspects of her this time and made it work. They fleshed her out a little, they gave some focus to her embittered bad girl shell, and added a sense of humor instead of the whiny poor me crap, and it all came together into a character I could finally embrace.
It didn’t hurt that her scenes with Wes were absolutely fantastic. I kept thinking they belonged together even before she came on the show, and now I know they do — screw the stick figure and even the decapitated ex, this is the woman for Wes. The way they instantly seemed to know what the other was thinking (Wes’s face when she said “move away from the glass” was so perfect — it was that tandem thought process that’s been missing from the dysfunctional AI team for so long, not to mention his “five by five” after the jump), the shorthand they communicated with, the way she acknowledged his new look and he skipped past her acknowledgement all just worked beautifully. I never thought ED was a bad actress, it was just the character that I despised, but her growth as an actress in the intervening time really came out here with AD — they play off each other like the total pros they are, and sparks were flying along with the stakes and the verbal repartee. I could so see these two riding off into the sunset (or maybe post-apocalyptic night?), rogue demon hunter and slayer, having hot sex and killing evil creatures.
And speaking of Wes... those scenes with his imagining of Lilah talking to him really ripped me apart. Underneath all this bitterness and tragedy, this is a guy who’s still very decent at heart, whose mission in life is to do good, and how he pictured Lilah’s spirit speaking through him about that was just... tragic in the best sense. He really does do all the ugly jobs now, and in some respects, part of that ugly job was to be involved with Lilah all that time, to find out what it was inside him that felt that way, and learn to cope with it. He has become the most fully realized character on the show, to me, and also the most self-aware, which I think showed in his scenes with Faith — he knows who he is now, and Faith, unlike the rest of the AI team, had the insight to see it all. And she liked what she saw, which I think mirrors the audience’s take on him as well.
And speaking of ugly — I so wanted Lorne’s axe to actually just cleave right into smarmy little Connor’s head. That kid is just a wretched addition to this cast, but I loved how they turned it around a bit with Faith. All this time what he really needed was an ass-kicking bitch to put him down like the whimpering little cur that he is, and as soon as she did it, he was all over worshipping Faith. I liked how they played it with his fanboyness about her to Evil!Cordy, who, even as regular Cordy, would never have enjoyed hearing that. And so the pregnancy is revealed to the new daddy (gack), and her relationship to the Beast, although I’m still a bit unclear about Angelus’s role in all this, since he seems rather puny by comparison. Some very cool cinematography in this episode, too, and flashy, expensive SFX. Their camera setups and blocking are really excellent. (And am I crazy, or was that woman who attacked Faith in the prison yard the cop who attacked Buffy in What’s My Line? She looked weirdly familiar.) The Matrix-style fu scenes didn’t feel out of place or over the top here, because the whole storyline has that larger than life feeling.
Some of the Angelus reputation stuff seems kinda retconny to me, but then, much of the series is retconning what we knew of him from Buffy. I suppose I ought to just let it go, but I have this tendency towards order in writing (I’m an editor in real life, it’s a curse of this job that we look for linear sense). And two things really frustrated me: one, if the Beast knew that the stabby thing was the one item in the universe that had the power to kill him, why on earth would he leave it lying around in an old warehouse, especially knowing Angelus’s deviousness and resourcefulness? And two, how the freaking hell could anyone NOT have known Cordy was preggers? Jesus, she looked like she swallowed a beach ball, she’s fainting... I mean, duh.
But that aside, I loved this episode — it may be one of my favorites of the series, up there with some of the first season eps. Parts of it felt like they were seriously Jossed, especially Lilah’s conversation with Wes when she told him he was trying to save her from her. Fury’s never really written that kind of penetrating, wise dialog, nor something with such sensitivity to the character and such heartbreaking wistfulness, so I wondered if that scene had been Jossed up, as well as some of the stuff with Faith and Wes. Maybe not, but I liked the fact that it felt as if Joss’s hand was in it, because for me that’s usually a sign of lip-smacking goodness.
Although, if Cordy macks with anyone else at this point, I may be running to another channel.
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no subject
Date: 2003-03-06 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-06 06:46 pm (UTC)*waxes overly-intense about the Wesley/Faith dynamic*
I saw the spark of sex/romance between them, also, but I think it has more to do with the fact that Faith could spark off a wet spaghetti noodle than from any real potential relationship. Yes, I think Wesley could now hold his own in such a relationship, but I don't think it would be enough for Faith.
Then again, I'm willing to hear arguments. *g*