somniloquence

Could Luke and Lorelai be any cuter? I think not.

( Grooving on Gilmore Girls again )

First thoughts on Hawaii: I normally give a new show a couple of episodes before I decide whether or not I will keep watching. Pilots are often done at different times from a series once it's picked up, and frequently have different casts, crews, etc., so everyone is trying to find their footing and get a handle on the series' potential. Sometimes, of course, a show is so bad that you know right away it's not worth even two tries. And sometimes you can see what's there even though the network has fucked it up: witness Firefly.

I can't say Hawaii has untapped potential that's being worked out, but it's definitely not good from the get-go. I predict it will succeed, though. ;-) Partly because I think many people are so hungry for a basic old-fashioned stupid cop show that isn't just about forensics (god, my loathing for CSI and its clones knows no bounds, and this year I have to struggle with my hatred because my favorite actor, Gary Sinise, is going to be on CSI: New York... arg) or yet another Law & Order: CPU or something like that (they start with a computer crime, and we follow the case all the way through to trial!). And also partly because the stupid but fun and glitzy Las Vegas did well for NBC last year, and Hawaii reminds me of that in many ways. Check brain at door, watch for hotties. (Though it's obvious that NBC yet again has no clue who is in the audience; they heavily promote bikini-clad babes without even evidencing an ironic understanding that it will be women and gay men tuning in for the hunks.)

And lots of hotties are there to be watched. While Michael Biehn is ostensibly the lead (yay!), it's clear that they're positioning Sharif Atkins, as his partner Declan (sp?), as the smoothie girl-magnet for the show; and also Ivan Sergei as the anti-smoothie but supposedly intriguing hottie. Though that one is a hard sell for me especially, as I find him eminently unattractive and his character is repugnant, and not in a fun way. I like repugnant but interesting or funny, but characters like this have nothing redeeming in their offensiveness (which is why I could not warm to Nip/Tuck like I usually do to FX shows such as Rescue Me or The Shield, most of whose characters are repellant and offensive but really fun), and I think they wildly miscalculated that his looks would be enough to make women swoon and tune in every week. This guy, at least in the pilot, is just a fuckwit, and he makes the fuckwitted-but-charming-in-a-bad-boy-way guys of Rescue Me look all the more complex by comparison. I really hope they fix him -- if you don't already think he's smokin', you'd have no reason to want to watch him. By conrast, funny-lookin' cutie-patootie Eric Balfour, late of Six Feet Under, 24, and Veritas (!), comes off much better as he struggles with being tainted by Sergei's character as his partner.

There are a lot of other great players in the cast, but so far they don't have much to do. I especially want to see Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa get something to do besides be the same old same old police lieut (also, such an elegant man wearing only baggy shirts... what is with the baggy aloha shirts?). The story was very formulaic, but I did like the local color aspects (though their attempts at that hand-held camera immediacy kind of annoyed me frequently) and the attempt to get into native culture, and found myself going to a Lilo & Stitch place when the Hawaiian martial-arts guy talked about his "ohana." I was mentally going, "means family, and family means no one gets left behind." A part of me wonders why they premiered it so much earlier than other new shows; I wondered if it was because it's a rare drama that's not part of the above-mentioned franchises, and they wanted to get hold of the non-RNC-watching, bored to death audience as fast as they could.

And sadly, I know I will keep watching, if for no other reason than to see Michael Biehn in a grey t-shirt and flak vest (which, I would like to gripe about, we had to wait the whole hour for and see him in dorky baggy shirts instead), doing the thing he was born to do, carry and shoot guns. Yummy. He's finally added some poundage in his aging-gracefully years so now you can't see through him if he turns sideways, but he's still got the incredible bod and those arm muscles... I'm sorry, was I talking? It's certainly much better than MB's last show, Adventure Inc., which may be one of the most painful things ever seen. But it's a far cry from the show before it, Magnificent 7. I still weep copiously about the loss of that one.

This has taken me so long to do that at this point, it's probaby worthless, but I won't rest until I do it!

( Review of Angel season 3 DVDs )

I’ve been trapped in this outplacement seminar thing the past few days, and yesterday was especially difficult because all I wanted to think about was this episode of Angel. I didn’t believe that this season would give me new favorite episodes that I could put up there with I Will Remember You, In the Dark, and Dead End, but now I’ve got Damage, Smile Time, and A Hole in the World to add, all within the space of a few weeks.

( Review of Angel episode A Hole in the World )

I can’t believe they want to take this story away from me. I just can’t.

I didn’t write anything about last week’s Angel episode, You’re Welcome, because I didn’t enjoy it very much (though there were some parts I loved) and I didn’t want to kill everyone’s buzz. This week, everyone seems unhappy with Why We Fight, and again I’m in a minority because I liked it for the most part, though there were things I was definitely unhappy with.

( Review of Angel episode Why We Fight )

My grumpiness continues, as I sit and wait for about 30 separate huge, complex, and detailed files that I have to send to print and proof today, till long into the night and tomorrow night. I hate this hurry up and wait crap, where I'm paralyzed and chained to my desk and completely at the mercy of the production folks.

At least, though, I am not having siezures or going for emergency CT scans or waking up to a dead partner beside me, as has happened to people I know over just this past weekend. I can't believe the terrible things friends have gone through. I did break my little finger, but since I break bones on a seemingly regular basis (though, oddly, I don't really bruise much and the fingers/arms/toes don't really swell), it's not that big of a deal, and hard to tell except for the excrutiating pain when I type (and if my typing is even worse than normal, please forgive me). When I broke my arm a couple years ago, the doctor said he'd never have known it until the x-ray, because there was no bruising at all, and no discernable swelling. Which is weird, because I bruise if you look at me hard, but I think it has to do with how little circulation I have in my farthest appendages. Like, if I'd broken the arm nearer the elbow than to my scrawny wrists, I'd have had big-ass bruises and would swell to pumpkin size. But I'll take a broken or cracked bone, or even a really bad sprain (which, I think, hurt worse than broken bones), over siezures any day!

So, while I wait to wait, I gakked this from tzikeh because it's mindless and amused me. She listed out shows she has been fannish about over time, and I wondered if I could ever even do that. I know I'll forget some, but what the heck, it's worth a try.

( my life is so pathetic ) And if you ever wondered just how sad and scary I really am, now you know!

I’d planned to do a review of the Buffy season 5 DVDs before, but then time kind of got away from me, and I wasn’t sure it was worth it. But after all the fic writin’ of the past few weeks, I ran out of things to say! So I figured I’d at least put it down on electronic paper just to get it off my mind, plus, I’m stuck home on a snow day, so what else to do?

( Review of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season five DVD set - long )

After Alias last night I flipped the channel to watch Angel on the local syndication run, and they were showing one of my favorite eps from third season, “Billy.” I remember when this was first aired, I seemed to be the only person on this one list I was on who enjoyed it. They all disliked it intensely, calling it overly stated, broad, dumbed down, you name it. And I could understand that, I mean, it’s so overtly allegorical, and less about the supernatural than about the worst of the natural instincts in people. But I think that’s precisely why I love this episode so much.

I was about ready to give up on Angel in S3. I wasn’t sold on Fred as an addition to the cast, Gunn bored me silly, I’d never liked Cordy all that much, but didn’t dislike her, but she really became blurry and annoying in 3 for me, and by the time Darla arrived with the baby story, I was just about ready to leave. I have always disliked Darla, I often find Julie Benz insanely annoying, and the way they turned Angel into the cooing comic relief dad just about killed my interest. It was really “Billy,” in the early eps, and then after the development of the story with Holtz and that aftermath, that grabbed my interest back in a big way. What I liked best about “Billy” was that it was horror based on the things inside us as human beings that we want to keep from getting out — I’ve always found what people do to other people to be far more terrifying than spooks and monsters. In fact, I’ve never been scared by traditional horror stuff; it’s the way humans torture, terrorize, and manipulate other humans that I find scary. Which is another reason the Jossverse vampires are more effectively creepy to me, because they often embody the worst examples of human behavior on a far more evil scale.

And of course, men are scarier. Even though we’re taught that the female of any species is the one you have to watch out for, I don’t think most human women ever feel that way when it comes to facing down human men. There’s that mindset we’re raised with that all men are potential rapists (whether that’s true or not isn’t the point, it’s a message we hear over and over), and we know our culture of violence, degradation, and cruelty towards women. We realize that the enlightened, caring male could always be a false front, and know that we can never really understand what possibly lurks in the depths of a seemingly civilized exterior. “Billy” brings this home to us with terrifying clarity, especially in the scenes with Gavin and Lilah, and Wes and Fred. And Cordelia, of all people, becomes the one real voice of strength and action, the one person who understands just where this evil comes from and its true potential for destruction, and the one who takes the most decisive action until the end, when Lilah shifts back.

And I suppose if you’re not inclined towards allegorical tales of the psyche gone wild, this wouldn’t seem like a great ep, but I’m more disposed toward those, actually. I found the whole concept of the most hidden parts of these men coming out in sick ways to be incredibly creepy, particularly Gavin, who’d seemed less than effectual before, and Wes, the one person we thought of as the most tender, reasonable, and the most civilized. His emotional agony at the end isn’t that far from what an audience would feel — we’ve seen this part of him that he didn’t know existed, that he couldn’t control, something he didn’t want to believe could exist inside him, come out with deadly force, and it preys enough on him that it becomes one of many emotional breaks that lead him toward Lilah at the end of the season. I also like that brief moment of fear when Billy touches Angel, because Cordelia knows just how terrifying that part of Angel can be; the thought that it could manifest itself with even more violence is a nice scary touch.

What really struck home with me, though, was the scene with Cordy and Lilah. I love that it starts out with this argument of how tough Lilah is — or not, segues into a fashion discussion, and then Cordy giving Lilah the what’s what. Because it not only shows how much Cordy’s grown in emotional maturity due to the toll the visions take on her, but also just what Lilah actually fears. Cordy understands that Lilah is largely fearless and empowered, but that this beating and letting Billy get away has hurt her at a far deeper level than her bruises and cuts hint at. She knows that Lilah may be in service to her firm and her clients and thus has cut off any sense of morality or human feelings, but that she is not enslaved to them, and that Gavin’s beating and the destruction Billy causes have made Lilah nothing more than a slave to someone else’s will and evil nature. It’s this concept of being beneath, forced, that finally motivates Lilah to take action — she will not live in fear, or be subject to any man’s hatred, or bow down to someone else’s will because they have more physical power. And it’s after that that Lilah’s machinations take a different turn in terms of her involvement with W&H’s agenda, and of course, with Wesley.

And frankly, despite all the cries of “it’s a Shining ripoff” with Wes chasing Fred down hallways with an axe, I found that whole sequence extremely disturbing. Until then, we’ve seen a slightly ... greyer version of Wes. Not dark, precisely, but growing more embittered, cynical, and into the deeper tones that he’ll develop once he figures out that prophecy. To watch his veneer of civilization and gentleness and intelligence slide away and slither and twist into such malicious cruelty is, for me, much scarier than any monster, or something such as Hellbound’s finger chopping guy. The way he called to Fred, taunting and threatening her, just gave me chills the first time I saw it, and again last night. Because you know that if it can happen to Wes, if it can make him become that man who’s trying to punish Fred for having and being the very things he wants, then no man is safe from Billy’s evil, and no woman is, either.

And when he cries at the end, when he sits so forlornly in front of that window, and he cannot forgive himself even when Fred does, to me, that’s a much more effective horror aftermath than just throwing a bad guy to the wolves, so to speak, or dusting them. He has to live with that, Lilah now has to live with the conflict of how far she debased herself for W&H, and it’s going to scar them deeply. And despite Fred’s forgiveness, it could very well be one of many things that drove her to Gunn instead of Wes, even subconsciously. He’ll be left to wonder if what he did contributed, but will never know completely, sending him on the way to the darker paths he chose later in the season. What happens to Wes chills me to the bone, because he becomes that man we hear about as we grow up, that man who seems nice at first but hates women, who may just be a rapist or wife-beater or serial killer and torturer. And Wes is not the man we ever expect it from. Angel is immune to Billy’s poison, the one with the greatest evil inside him, yet it’s the outwardly civilized and quiet characters we know, Wes and Gavin, who show the true faces of the men we’re raised to believe exist deep down inside every human male. To me, that’s the scariest thing they could do.

( Alias, The Nemesis -- Dixon rocks, but not much else )

At a get-together this weekend, one person asked us to name off our current biggest fandoms/pairings or what we’re reading. I of course was one of the most boring — my same old, same old of Spike and Buffy, and Chris and Vin, though I don’t really read much of either just because I’m usually writing. But I mentioned that I’m curious about the dynamic of this coming season of Angel because I’m interested to see how Wes and Spike relate to each other. (I don’t know of episode spoilers, so please don’t get medieval on my ass — it’s total speculation based on my knowledge of only a couple things: that Spike is going to be in the show, and that Wes is there. If you haven’t seen Chosen yet and you haven’t watched Angel, then proceed with caution, but I have no real spoilers.)

I’ve never really been interested in Spike slash, with anyone. There’ve been a couple Spuffy stories where suddenly we were introduced to some Spike/Angel slash, and that corner of my little brain went “whee!” as I was reading it, but I’ve generally not sought out actual S/A stories, and the whole Spike/Xander phenom mystifies me. The only slash pairing I ever really thought much about and had interest in was Spike/Giles, but didn’t think much about it and didn’t seek out much fanfic, though I’ve read a few things when occasion warranted. Spike, for me, just always belonged with Dru or Buffy. That was the guy I responded to most.

Even though I’m writing the work-in-not-much-progress-at-all as Spike having a very slashy past with Angel and a tiny flirtation with Wes, it’s still a Spike and Buffy story at heart, eventually. I think the layers of slashy history in fanfic are cool, but it’s not a primary interest for me. I see that a lot of Spike/Wes (I can’t go to the conflation place with Spes or Wike...gah!) is being written now, but I haven’t really checked it out because... because it’s not fanfic I’m interested in. What I want is canonical Spike and Wes relationship stuff.

Ha ha! you all laugh at me. Goodness, she really has gone off the deep end. But I have my reasons! Hear me out!

See, I’ve always thought it was cool that Joss made Willow gay and put her in canonically gay relationships. But it was also very, very safe. I discussed this a long time ago with a friend who’s a lesbian and has been out since mid-teen years, that on TV, lesbians are relatively safe, but homosexuals are not. Men find lesbianism titillating and provocative (after all, the girl/girl sex scene is a staple of het porn) but male homosexuality threatening, and it’s men who are mostly in charge of things in Hollywood. Even as outraged as many narrow-minded fans were about Willow morphing into a gay character, and as much heat as Joss took, it was still safer than turning Giles or Xander or hell, even Spike, gay. Despite all the gay me up jokes and stuff over the years for Xander, it would simply never happen, as that might make him a far less identifiable character for that everyguy quality. TV shows (outside of Will and Grace) seem to feel much safer with women being gay than men, and there aren’t quite as many societal issues to deal with (which is one reason I’m so very enamored of Queer Eye, because it’s like watching someone take a hammer to that wall and knock a few chinks in it; I’m also glad of QaF’s success). So it made a lot of sense that Willow would be the gay one, but I would love to see Mutant Enemy have the balls to develop a canonically gay male relationship on this show.

If they couldn’t do it on Buffy, Angel is the place. The characters' lives have been far more fluid on this show in many respects, and it’s often been willing to push that crush-on-Angel thing to jokey limits with other male characters. I always thought they made no subtext at all about the UST with Lindsey and Angel, it was almost flagrant at times — enough that even Lorne had to joke about it. So this doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility that two very broken male characters could come together in a relationship, but I’m not certain Joss and crew have the cojones to do it. It’s also doubtful the WB would allow it; their past treatment of gay characters hasn’t been all that supportive. But with the changing face of gays on TV, it’s instilled in me a silly hope that Mutant Enemy could again break some ground and shift a couple characters’ relationship patterns.

There’s always been a hint of ambiguity in Spike, which is why he’s so popular to slash with different characters. He’s clearly very focused on women, but he has that kind of dangerous anything-goes subtext about him that appeals to a slasher’s heart. And while all of Wes’s relationships have been with women, they’ve often played up his devotion to Angel and that tension with Gunn. And there’s the whole English public school thing. Both characters are severely damaged at this point, very lonely and alone, very much adrift in their own lives. I can see Wes being a presence in Spike’s life in whatever method they use to bring him back from...whatever happened to him. With his interest in unusual things, his knowledge, it would make sense that he’d be interested in Spike, and of course there’s the whole English connection. But mostly, there are mutualities that seem ripe with possibilities: the incredibly significant changes they’ve gone through over the years, their profound isolation from others, their desire to not be isolated, their broken hearts, and so on.

Even though the catalysts for their changes are not the same, both characters’ changes were deeply shaped by their relationships with women. For Spike, his catalyst for transformation was love for Buffy; with Wes, it was outside circumstances that were then affected powerfully by both Lilah and Fred, especially losing Fred to Gunn. In the end, Buffy shaped Spike’s future and his destiny by being part of his life (taking him out of the basement first to Xander’s and then to her own house, rescuing him when others didn’t want to, standing up to Giles and Wood for him, etc.) in a completely different way than she was as his love object. And Lilah’s relationship with Wes in particular pushed his loneliness and isolation in different directions than it might have taken, giving him the emotional strength to deal with something like an apocalypse he might not have had otherwise. As much as I want Spike with Buffy (and, well, I’d be happy with Wes being with either Faith or Lilah, but that ain’t gonna happen!), that story isn’t part of the canonical universe anymore. While hard for me to accept, there’s not much to do besides hide in fanfic. What I would like to see, though, is that Spike's love for Buffy not be negated by some wonderful new gal in his life, or throwing his past and his intense emotions away so they can move him on quickly. In some respects, it feels like altering the character’s sexuality could do that — be respectful of who he was then, and yet change him for the future in a dynamic and challenging way.

A TV show isn’t going to turn its titular character gay, not in this country, not in this time. So any gay relationships for Angel will have to be created by fanfic writers from subtext. But secondary characters are more malleable, and it seems more possible that they could change these characters’ orientations. Not that I believe it is possible. It would take a lot of courage to do something like that even on as testosterone-heavy a show as Angelwill be this year, with only Fred to really balance things on the estrogen end as a primary character. Few people would have the courage to buck a trend like that; fewer still the clout to deal with a network attempting to quash such an exploration. Gay males on network TV are supposed to be as asexual and unthreatening as possible because their very existence is supposedly so threatening. But there’s no way for Spike to not be sexual, really, it’s the nature of the character, and for a lot of us in the audience, Wes has become pretty damn hot lately, and his scenes with Lilah were frequently smoking. Why not, instead of having them mope around without some action, or stick them in standard low-gear relationships, get them together and show them a new kind of action? That could be not only really cool, but send a positive message about how strong and tough gay men could be and break a lot of barriers at the same time.

I know, I know. The only place I’m gonna find this is in fanfic. I’m sure there’s some good stories out there already, and more to come... but dammit, I want to see it on screen. Is it too much to ask in our Queer Eye glasnost period for a little hot English boy on boy action? I think not.

Of interest to probably only about two people on my friends list, but hey, reviews and essays.

At almost the same time that Buffy the Vampire Slayer bowed on television, another chick action show had just started on USA cable network. Also based on a movie of the same name, La Femme Nikita started life an hour after Buffy did on Monday nights, and I remember a friend of mine saying “Suddenly, Monday nights rock.” Though radically different in concept, they were essentially about two women who’d been forced, through no choice in the matter, to descend into, and live in, hell. I remember that at about the time Buffy was breaking my heart by crying, “I’m only sixteen. I don’t want to die,” Nikita was being duped by her mentor and trainer, Michael, into falling even harder for him than she already had, only to have her heart ripped out when she found out he’d deliberately seduced and lied to her to circumvent her escape plan. Buffy had humor and romance and parody, while LFN did not, but they both also had about two tons of angst per episode, and I couldn’t have been happier.

LFN was made for the digital world — the cinematography was incredible, the colors richly saturated, the fashions totally boundary-pushing, the gadgets and spy toys bleeding edge. The music soundtrack was incredible, with little-known techno and ambient providing an even cooler feel to the show. But Warner Home Video has yanked the chains of the fans now for a couple years in terms of putting this most high-tech of shows on disc; they even had the nerve at one point to tell us that unless we bought the Columbia House tapes, we’d never get DVDs. Finally, last week, the first season set came out, and as much as I loathe the bastards for their treatment of this show, I have to give them props for the discs. The prints are fabulous, the sound is outstanding, the menus function just right (unlike Buffy’s, which I hate, because you have to keep going through menu after menu to get anywhere and listen to the same snatch of music over and over if you don’t menu jump fast enough), even their proprietary paperboard packaging isn’t as annoying as it usually is (WHV will never give that up, since they own the system and the plant). Though they spell Birkoff’s name three different ways, even the booklet isn’t half bad. I found only one technical error, where the (still just gut-wrenching use of) Love Thieves by Depeche Mode glitches out as the train comes through the tunnel in the final scene of the season, in Mercy.

I’ve been just boggled by some of the episodes. My first season tapes are all incredibly sharp and pristine (the show, after its second season, began filming in a more subdued style and went for less color saturation in the scene design, which I always thought was a mistake), but these just leap off the screen on a high-def TV. Even though they weren’t shot in hi-def and my DVD player isn’t progressive scan so I often get that digital dragging effect, there’s virtually no artifacting, no edge effects, and absolutely no bleed on colors, especially the blue they use so heavily. At times I just froze the screen to look at the incredible visual backgrounds they abandoned after S1, where they had high-tech maps and grids and information processing systems on full-wall screens throughout the Section One interior. Rocco Mateo’s set design was vastly superior to almost any other TV show at the time, and these discs highlight his work in a magnificent way. Being able to see all the details of a screen on the Section computers, too, is really cool — I can finally read Nikita’s dossier that comes up on the credits each ep.

The clothes were always cutting edge, but what’s interesting is being able to see the detail of Michael’s black jackets, for instance, or Madeline’s Armani suits, or Nikita’s incredible wardrobe. And there are other details I’ve never seen before, including one in the episode War, right after Nikita was tortured with rats (did I mention I love this show? When they tortured people, they did not screw around. Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, who went on to do 24, never pussy-footed around: if they threatened someone with cutting their finger off, and the person didn’t comply, they promptly cut the finger off) and Michael shows up and is thrown in the cage. Nikita can’t look at him, and she is crying. I never knew she was crying there as she huddled in the corner, as I have never been able to see the tears on her cheeks, even with my outstanding off-air copies.

But there’s more to the show than stunning visuals and cool clothes and music. What I responded to initially, somewhat negatively, was that they’d taken a story I loved — of this horrible, worthless, murdering girl who gained humanity by being made into an assassin — and changed it significantly. I had liked both the movie versions of LFN and Buffy, and was dubious about both of them being translated to weekly stories, and LFN especially seemed to have chosen a weird direction: Nikita was no longer subhuman, she was a street kid framed for murder, and put into this place that week after week intended to strip her of her humanity. Between that and Peta Wilson’s big, Amazonian blond gorgeousness, I thought it was going to be bad. But they were right in what they did, I realized quickly — it would be hard to want to watch this subhuman monster week after week, and there’d be little struggle for personal redemption in that. Once you’ve gained your humanity, where do you go in an organization that imprisons you and makes you its slave? And that was the core of the show — her constant struggle against becoming like the inhuman monsters who were her superiors as they fought terrorists with terrorist tactics. She’d never killed, but no one believed her, and they wanted to use her up and throw her away as long as it served their ends. Nikita’s struggle was the audience’s struggle, to find some kind of happiness or redemption or just make it through another day, and Peta was very touching in how she created that character. It is interesting, though, that they’ve completely dispensed with the voiceover intro that used to start each episode (“One night I was taken from my cell to a place called Section One, the most covert anti-terrorist organization on the planet... if I don’t play by their rules, I die”); I’d never noticed till now that the repeats on Oxygen running currently don’t use it either. I would have thought they might throw it on at least one ep, just for good measure, though I haven’t yet watched all the extras on the set (not many, sadly).

It didn’t hurt, either, that her trainer was a super hottie. I fell in love at first sight with Roy Dupuis’s Michael, a duplicitous, wicked, wonderful, and sexy as hell super agent who we in the audience knew adored Nikita, but he wouldn’t admit to that for quite a few years. The discs here show something incredibly interesting — there is a deleted scene from the pilot where Michael begs Madeline, part of the operational leadership, to spare Nikita’s life from being cancelled (executed, Section’s parlance), because she messed up on her first mission. He is nearly in tears, and it’s quite clear right there that he loves her enough to risk his own life, something in his nature that was never explained to us — it was only shown, so that Nikita often misunderstood his motives for protecting her, while the audience knew what was happening. This scene, if it hadn’t been cut, would have changed the entire tenor of the show drastically. It’s fascinating that it was filmed at all, but I’m glad they cut it out, as it made his “does he or doesn’t he” feelings so much more iffy and cool.

Sometimes, too, the incredible cinematography added to the romantic storyline or as a way to punch up the emotions of the characters on screen. I was reminded of that in watching War, in one of my favorite scenes ever on the show. Michael and Nikita are prisoners of Red Cell, a terrorist group, and they’re being held in cages suspended from a ceiling in a vast warehouse type building. When Michael comes back from being interrogated and tortured, he’s thrown in the adjacent cage and curls up in a ball, while Nikita clings to the side of hers and tries to see if he’s all right. He slowly begins to rock his knees back and forth so that his cage will swing towards hers, then he grasps the sides together as they hit, and the two of them twist their fingers through the holes and talk to each other. Michael is bloody and battered, Nikita’s a mess from rat bites, and he tells her that she is the only one of them (in Section) who still has a soul, and that he is empty of feeling now — and what little is left inside him is her. It’s a gorgeous, beautiful, heartbreaking scene, and on the discs, with the background lighting making the two seem almost luminescent and the clarity now of their tear-filled eyes and the wounds, it becomes just ten times more powerful than it was even before.

Other scenes that I’ve always loved seem even more vibrant and alive: when Michael cauterizes his critical bullet wound by igniting gunpowder in Rescue (this show also has some of the most stealable plots, too — I can’t count how much I’ve ripped off from it because it makes such good fanficcy background), shirtless, you can now see every drop of sweat on his body; when Nikita wears outlandish makeup for missions, you can see every single false lash, the texture of her skin, count each individual spangle in her evening dress.

I always loved first season because the Section team worked together far more as a team — in subsequent years, there were no more scenes like in Gambit, where they sit together in the main area and throw out ideas of where and how to locate a faceless enemy, or later once they’ve found him, bring his daughter to the interrogation room to coerce his confession. I missed that in a lot of ways, as the focus of the show shifted away from Nikita trying to work within this system and still maintain her emotional core to more of a Michael and Nikita against Operations and Madeline romantic hugger-mugger. I can almost see that happening on Alias, as well, which has stolen about 99% of its style and feeling and story sense from LFN. I kind of hope they don’t make the same mistake, because the stories in S1 of LFN were probably the strongest they ever did, even if Michael and Nikita never actually consummated their relationship until the first ep of S2. It’s good to keep a focus on strong stories, even while developing the thwarted romance, I believe.

These discs are just a joy to have, but now I’m stuck about vidding. LFN is my perfect vidding fandom, you can do almost anything with it except maybe out and out comedy, but there’s no way I could mix up such fabulous visuals as we have on the discs with tapes, and there’s no clear word on when more discs will come out. I’ve waited to make some vids until I got a computer; now I have the computer but these discs make me feel spoiled for the visuals. I really hope that people who like Alias might buy or rent these discs and see what the show was like, because I really want Warner to make more available. I’ve always thought this show was a perfect companion to the two other concurrent ass-kicking chicks that were on at the time (Buffy and Scully on X-Files), and I hope that in this outstanding presentation, more people might give it a shot.