I'm listening. With beer.
Apr. 15th, 2004 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI have a feeling that I’m not really smart enough to do even a halfway decent job of reviewing last night’s Angel episode. Considering the fact that they’re obviously setting everything up for the finale, it’s probably more layered than I can completely see through. And the truth is, I’m just filled with misery because every episode is a clock, ticking away the minutes till there’s nothing of this universe left for me.
It seems like there’s always a lot of complaining about anvils lately, but to be honest, I’ve always thought that was a big part of both series by Joss, so it’s a complaint I’ve never really understood or embraced. Doing a complex story in 42 minutes is pretty tough without making things obvious and accessible to casual viewers. Few people who watch TV are as analytical (and anal) as we fans, and so I think that anvil dropping and clearly metaphorical events and characters are perfectly reasonable things to have. As fans, we expect the higher-level intelligent TV-makers to make the shows for us alone, with nothing obvious or telegraphed; in practical reality, though, that’s not really going to happen. So, I don’t know... it might make me stupid, but I’m definitely a happier person watching this show than many people appear to be.
It seemed as if these writers didn’t have a good handle on Spike before, but this time, they finally got it -- he had a great mix of his sarcasm and pain in the assness, caring and understanding, in this ep. One thing I liked was the return of Spike the fanboy. A classic complaint about fanfic was that of having characters in stories be media fans, which would be highly unlikely in the “reality” of the show’s universe. More often than not, when you saw such fannish discussion in fanfic, it was a way to work in a fan writer’s interests by having their main BSOs be obsessed with the same things the writers were. The Jossverse was one of the first places where this “media characters aren’t media fans” rule was transcended -- characters had a pop culture knowledge and used it the way fans did, and Spike was kind of the apex of that. Whether he’s discussing evil vineyards on TV or complaining about being chained in a bathtub because he might miss his soap and “Timmy’s down the bloody well!”, he’s so clearly a fanboy, on a par with most of us. And his disgust at people who don’t share his fannish knowledge is palpable; for me, the highlight of Underneath was his reaction to Gunn and Angel not knowing about Knight Rider. He often reminds me of The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy -- he’s either disdainful of people who don’t know what he knows, or feels he has to explain to people the significance of the cultural reference because they’re obviously not up to speed. This makes me weirdly happy. And really, Spike with a briefcase... I ask you. And it works well with all the great little jokes that get dropped in the episodes -- there were riffs on the X-Files in this, more Buckaroo Banzai references, and more movie homaging than you could shake a stick at.
My first reaction to Lorne’s little self-pity party was annoyance, but on second viewing, I began to see something I hadn’t really considered before -- that everyone on this show is involved in their own little self-pity party, whether it’s Angel and his ongoing, century-long pityfest, or Eve, who seems to think she deserves something she clearly doesn’t, or most of all Wes and Illyria, who’ve taken their own self-pity to wonderfully gothic realms. Whether it’s his dream of his real Fred, or his desire to grind Illyria down so she’ll leave, Wes is just filled to the brim with a deliciously psychotic brand of self-pity that’s going to make the next few eps interesting. I figured there must have been a clear decision to keep Wes away from the others right now, especially so that Gunn could make the sacrifice -- would it have happened if Wes had been there? He’s a loose cannon now, and Angel knows that it’s imperative Wes regroup, but there’s also the problem of keeping a team together that has turned on each other to that level.
So Lindsey’s reappearance throws the self-pity partying into another realm -- not only does he have information, he’s also involved in his own little pityfest. And I can’t help wondering how much their self-absorption blinds them to the larger threats -- is what Lindsey’s saying really true? It’s hard to tell with him -- he’s been forthcoming with information before, but what does it serve him to tell Angel (other than that he’s obviously in love with Angel)? I’m still not totally sure I understand what happened in the cellar other than that this was his punishment, to die every day because he believed he should, and apparently this is also Gunn’s belief about himself. And yet, despite their feeling sorry for themselves, I’m not convinced Gunn really does deserve what’s happening to him. But then, I didn’t think what happened to Fred was deserved or a good story development, so... I might not be a good judge of this. I left that feeling like: this can’t be it. Gunn has to escape this holding cell, he has to figure in whatever’s coming. The knowledge he has is too important. Though he’s blinded by his own self-pity and his shame about his role in what happened to Fred, I’m not sure this is the answer (he made a bad decision, not an evil one, and it disturbs me that he’s suffering more than Knox, who made a deeply evil decision but whose life was ended quickly and relatively painlessly). Hopefully, there’s a different answer to come.
And I’m still a bit unclear about what Wes is doing with Illyria, but at the same time, a part of me is enjoying it. That he calls her names, and describes feelings as human crap, and has developed this dissociated, cynical way of talking that makes post-throat slitting Wes look like Pollyanna, leaves me with a peculiarly gleeful feeling. In some ways, Wes has been working to this point forever -- his knowledge and demonology background and all of that not only make him the only person qualified to deal with Illyria, but also to possibly be the one who harnesses all the different qualifications that this strange team possesses. I don’t know if Lindsey will be sticking around or not, but if he has certain abilities and knowledge, Wes may be the only person who’ll be able to put everything together. Angel still has to be team leader and strong guy on point, but there’s a strange vibe about the direction Wes is going in, and I’m curious to see just what he does with all of it.
Of course, the whole thing was made even more wonderful by Adam Baldwin (he *was* well-dressed!) in that lovely suit, and I enjoyed his strangely fey, prissy line delivery as well as the nice contrast between the Terminator introduction and the friendly legal guy wrap-up. When Harmony, Lorne, and Eve were screaming as they saw him punch through the guard, it was a fun little reminder of the group scream in Tabula Rasa. The camerawork was interesting -- everything with Wes and Illyria, even when they were outside, had such heavy shadows cloaking them that it seemed they truly were being strangled by the walls around them. The world of light suddenly seems more dangerous than the darkness, with the bright suburban homes and the blonde child and wife who turn out to be deadly manifestations of the senior partners’ team, so it’s back to the shadows the group goes.
So everything now revolves around Angel again -- after many eps where things didn’t, really -- and everyone’s centered on getting something out of him. He has his Angel’s Avengers, but they’re all currently wrapped up in their own pain and issues, except Spike, who’s got his pain and issues, but who’s more curious at what he’s supposed to be there for than anything. At the end, we see a glimmer of change (except for poor Gunn) in this, as the fog lifts for Angel that it really is all about him and how he fits into a larger picture, not how the picture fits him. And even a slight warming of the frost inside Wes, so that he will rejoin (?) the group. The setup is made even clearer by the redone credits at the beginning -- Amy Acker’s clips are almost all of Illyria now, and Mercedes McNab has been added to the credits. The players are on the board, we see the opposition starting to show themselves a little more, and the match is starting. The important thing will be how they can interact as a team, rather than as individuals lost in their own pain and misunderstandings of their roles in this fight.
It seems like there’s always a lot of complaining about anvils lately, but to be honest, I’ve always thought that was a big part of both series by Joss, so it’s a complaint I’ve never really understood or embraced. Doing a complex story in 42 minutes is pretty tough without making things obvious and accessible to casual viewers. Few people who watch TV are as analytical (and anal) as we fans, and so I think that anvil dropping and clearly metaphorical events and characters are perfectly reasonable things to have. As fans, we expect the higher-level intelligent TV-makers to make the shows for us alone, with nothing obvious or telegraphed; in practical reality, though, that’s not really going to happen. So, I don’t know... it might make me stupid, but I’m definitely a happier person watching this show than many people appear to be.
It seemed as if these writers didn’t have a good handle on Spike before, but this time, they finally got it -- he had a great mix of his sarcasm and pain in the assness, caring and understanding, in this ep. One thing I liked was the return of Spike the fanboy. A classic complaint about fanfic was that of having characters in stories be media fans, which would be highly unlikely in the “reality” of the show’s universe. More often than not, when you saw such fannish discussion in fanfic, it was a way to work in a fan writer’s interests by having their main BSOs be obsessed with the same things the writers were. The Jossverse was one of the first places where this “media characters aren’t media fans” rule was transcended -- characters had a pop culture knowledge and used it the way fans did, and Spike was kind of the apex of that. Whether he’s discussing evil vineyards on TV or complaining about being chained in a bathtub because he might miss his soap and “Timmy’s down the bloody well!”, he’s so clearly a fanboy, on a par with most of us. And his disgust at people who don’t share his fannish knowledge is palpable; for me, the highlight of Underneath was his reaction to Gunn and Angel not knowing about Knight Rider. He often reminds me of The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy -- he’s either disdainful of people who don’t know what he knows, or feels he has to explain to people the significance of the cultural reference because they’re obviously not up to speed. This makes me weirdly happy. And really, Spike with a briefcase... I ask you. And it works well with all the great little jokes that get dropped in the episodes -- there were riffs on the X-Files in this, more Buckaroo Banzai references, and more movie homaging than you could shake a stick at.
My first reaction to Lorne’s little self-pity party was annoyance, but on second viewing, I began to see something I hadn’t really considered before -- that everyone on this show is involved in their own little self-pity party, whether it’s Angel and his ongoing, century-long pityfest, or Eve, who seems to think she deserves something she clearly doesn’t, or most of all Wes and Illyria, who’ve taken their own self-pity to wonderfully gothic realms. Whether it’s his dream of his real Fred, or his desire to grind Illyria down so she’ll leave, Wes is just filled to the brim with a deliciously psychotic brand of self-pity that’s going to make the next few eps interesting. I figured there must have been a clear decision to keep Wes away from the others right now, especially so that Gunn could make the sacrifice -- would it have happened if Wes had been there? He’s a loose cannon now, and Angel knows that it’s imperative Wes regroup, but there’s also the problem of keeping a team together that has turned on each other to that level.
So Lindsey’s reappearance throws the self-pity partying into another realm -- not only does he have information, he’s also involved in his own little pityfest. And I can’t help wondering how much their self-absorption blinds them to the larger threats -- is what Lindsey’s saying really true? It’s hard to tell with him -- he’s been forthcoming with information before, but what does it serve him to tell Angel (other than that he’s obviously in love with Angel)? I’m still not totally sure I understand what happened in the cellar other than that this was his punishment, to die every day because he believed he should, and apparently this is also Gunn’s belief about himself. And yet, despite their feeling sorry for themselves, I’m not convinced Gunn really does deserve what’s happening to him. But then, I didn’t think what happened to Fred was deserved or a good story development, so... I might not be a good judge of this. I left that feeling like: this can’t be it. Gunn has to escape this holding cell, he has to figure in whatever’s coming. The knowledge he has is too important. Though he’s blinded by his own self-pity and his shame about his role in what happened to Fred, I’m not sure this is the answer (he made a bad decision, not an evil one, and it disturbs me that he’s suffering more than Knox, who made a deeply evil decision but whose life was ended quickly and relatively painlessly). Hopefully, there’s a different answer to come.
And I’m still a bit unclear about what Wes is doing with Illyria, but at the same time, a part of me is enjoying it. That he calls her names, and describes feelings as human crap, and has developed this dissociated, cynical way of talking that makes post-throat slitting Wes look like Pollyanna, leaves me with a peculiarly gleeful feeling. In some ways, Wes has been working to this point forever -- his knowledge and demonology background and all of that not only make him the only person qualified to deal with Illyria, but also to possibly be the one who harnesses all the different qualifications that this strange team possesses. I don’t know if Lindsey will be sticking around or not, but if he has certain abilities and knowledge, Wes may be the only person who’ll be able to put everything together. Angel still has to be team leader and strong guy on point, but there’s a strange vibe about the direction Wes is going in, and I’m curious to see just what he does with all of it.
Of course, the whole thing was made even more wonderful by Adam Baldwin (he *was* well-dressed!) in that lovely suit, and I enjoyed his strangely fey, prissy line delivery as well as the nice contrast between the Terminator introduction and the friendly legal guy wrap-up. When Harmony, Lorne, and Eve were screaming as they saw him punch through the guard, it was a fun little reminder of the group scream in Tabula Rasa. The camerawork was interesting -- everything with Wes and Illyria, even when they were outside, had such heavy shadows cloaking them that it seemed they truly were being strangled by the walls around them. The world of light suddenly seems more dangerous than the darkness, with the bright suburban homes and the blonde child and wife who turn out to be deadly manifestations of the senior partners’ team, so it’s back to the shadows the group goes.
So everything now revolves around Angel again -- after many eps where things didn’t, really -- and everyone’s centered on getting something out of him. He has his Angel’s Avengers, but they’re all currently wrapped up in their own pain and issues, except Spike, who’s got his pain and issues, but who’s more curious at what he’s supposed to be there for than anything. At the end, we see a glimmer of change (except for poor Gunn) in this, as the fog lifts for Angel that it really is all about him and how he fits into a larger picture, not how the picture fits him. And even a slight warming of the frost inside Wes, so that he will rejoin (?) the group. The setup is made even clearer by the redone credits at the beginning -- Amy Acker’s clips are almost all of Illyria now, and Mercedes McNab has been added to the credits. The players are on the board, we see the opposition starting to show themselves a little more, and the match is starting. The important thing will be how they can interact as a team, rather than as individuals lost in their own pain and misunderstandings of their roles in this fight.
