gwyn | Fragments of shells (Reply)

I’ve had a lot of trouble with the idea of writing a review of Shells, for various reasons, but the most difficult is simply that I’m too upset by it to actually think sensible thoughts.

I like trauma. I like angst and misery and darkness and favorite characters turning into psychopathic, emotionally damaged people. I like never knowing if characters will continue or not, and complex stories that make you puzzle over their purpose. But the truth is, I don’t think Fred deserved this. I don’t think Angel and Wes deserved it, either, nor the rest of the consequences that ensued from Fred’s death. I don’t want Amy Acker around with cool blue hair and animal motions and sexy S&M leather gear -- I want her as Fred. Despite how much I love bittersweet almost happy endings where damaged characters assess their losses and their futures, this ending left me cold. Because Fred’s gone. Really most sincerely gone.

As wonderful as much of the episode was, I can’t seem to get past this hurdle. I know all the usual platitudes -- Joss giveth and he taketh away, you can’t have expectations with his shows, it’s the gayest show ever so why not get rid of the women, blah blah. None of those really work for me to get rid of this negative feeling. A lot of it comes from the fact that I had just really begun to love Fred, especially in her interactions with Knox (and that’s a whole other thing that I can’t really go into, because having one character I love kill another character I love usually gets me all happy, only this time it had the reverse effect), and her difficulties in maintaining her role as the heart of the group in a heartless situation. Some of it comes from the fact that this is two women in a row -- the only real women on the show who could be considered integral to the story -- have disappeared, and been replaced with something else in order to be killed off. I’m not sure what this says, even though I’ve always known it was not a kind show for women.

Some of it also comes from how the story has developed with the off-screen characters -- I could buy Andrew’s statement that they didn’t trust Angel and his group anymore because they were working for Wolfram & Hart. But I’m not sure I can buy Giles making a decision to let someone die horribly because she works for Angel -- there’s a difference between mistrust and wanting to take care of one of your own, and allowing those people you mistrust to die horribly and be replaced with a deadly demon. I don’t see it happening in those characters, and it bothers me that it became a plot device. And some of it is plain inconsistency in how they played the Gunn storyline, because last week he didn’t seem to know the real result of his actions until Knox spilled the beans; now he’s being stabbed and rejected from his family because he apparently knew all along and knew every detail.

The second half of serious stories always seem to suffer when the first one’s done by Joss and the latter ones by someone else. So it could simply be that this is where I felt the breakdown, even though I think highly of Steve DeKnight. But most of it didn’t feel as intense, as cohesive, as sensible as the first part, and often felt static and far too explanatory for my usual tastes. And I can’t quite get past that issue of Fred’s death. The pounding anvil of her soul being gone... it really bothers me, especially because the show has never clearly established the truth of what a soul really is, so the harping on this particular point makes me wonder.

Not that there weren’t fabulous moments in the show, most especially Wes’s true break with reality, with his emotional nature, at long last. He’s finally, irrevocably gone round the bend this time, and the fact that he seems fully aware of it -- and even okay with it -- makes him a wonderfully scary character to me. I don’t necessarily buy him stabbing Gunn that way, but I still love psycho killer Wes all the more. Even Angel seems baffled by what to really do with, and for, him And I loved the stuff with Angel and Spike in the beginning -- Spike’s “it’s a play on perspective” coming out full force by the end, with Illyria trying to connect to Wesley -- and in the end, especially Spike finally realizing that what he wants is what matters, not what he thinks others want in him, or what he wants from them. He’s always been selfish before, but never self-oriented in the way that would give him some idea of how to make a go of his existence. It’s wonderful, also, to see Angel relying on him, and knowing that he can count on Spike after all this time of insisting he couldn’t.

And I loved Knox’s hilarious responses to Illyria, especially his “sorry, my bad” and “I’m with the king!” lines. The idea of a million-year-old demon who’s confronted with a world long since changed, making it irrelevant, and the destruction of its kingdom, is pretty darn cool. I just wish it hadn’t come at the expense of poor Fred. In watching the season 3 DVDs this week (I’m trying to get through them all and the features so I can do a real review, but it’s taking time), it seems like too much of this happens to Fred, which makes the ending of her heading off into a beautiful sunny day and her great new life all the more heartbreaking. I loved the idea of everyone being left shells of their former selves, of it not just being Fred’s body that is the shell here. The fragmentation thing again -- where pieces of Fred are left inside Illyria’s mind, and pieces of Gunn and Wes and Angel are left inside themselves, unanchored and helpless. And it’s probably wrong of me, but I loved Spike wiping his hands of blood and talking about torturing that horrible smug doctor, just a little too much.

But still I come back to the fact that within a span of a few weeks, we’ve lost the only two significant women on the show; throughout the history of the show, women continue to fare very badly, and for some reason that eats at the back of my brain. Clearly Illyria is going to play a pivotal part in whatever Spike was talking about at the end of the episode, and this was their way of introducing her to the equation. But I’m dissatisfied with the explanation that her soul is gone, when this relationship of soul/ether/replacement of soul has never been fully explained. I want, and hope, that the rest of Fred can come back to inhabit that shell, and not simply as echoes inside Illyria’s consciousness. I know people loved this episode, but I can’t quite embrace it as I have other operatically tragic episodes. I’m left with the feeling of extreme loss and sadness over Fred’s passing. She deserved better, as did others before her.