November 4, 02: Angel: Supersymmetry
I wrote this in real-time, on my laptop as I watched the ep, which is why it sounds the way it does.
* Fred's got back. Whoa. The way that skirt was riding up her fanny, I thought we were going to be following perv-cam deep into the heart of Texas. Also, p-dimensional subspace seems to be what gets a girl hot.
* Angel bringing Lorne brekkie in bed! ("Sugar pie.")
* I could have sworn I heard someone say "I got your back" when Angel was chasing down the sound he heard, which turned out to be Connor. But then Connor was alone. Weird. [I found out later this was Lorne.]
* "I know. She's always stealing the covers..." That was one hell of a moment, even knowing that stuff like that was coming this week. Angel's expression...yeowch.
* "Oh look. A bribe. How thoughtful." Wes is becoming the master of the stony-faced dry comment. I mean, he kind of was before this, but lately he's just...arid extra dry. I love how Lilah took the helmet from his hands and he just stood there with his arms by his sides, letting her handle him. There's an element of something there I find deeply sexy, and I can't put my finger on it. It's kind of like he's a gigolo and she's the lady with the bucks and power; but it's also the opposite--he's got this power that doesn't need gesture or movement. He can be absolutely still and give off this *vibe* of coiled...coiliness.
* Connor in a tank-top with shower head--not badddd. And checking out Cordy
cleavage with that little smile. Snerk. He looked really good in that first
C/C scene. Very dykey, actually. * Fred in the hallway scene, doing the brainy gab while Gunn gets
predictably ego-burned, feeling stupid. I'm glad he acknowledged it to
Angel--I thought he might sulk about it.
* Wes! Appearing in the auditorium--that was just lovely. And Angel's look.
How nice was it to see these people in some place other than the hotel?
* Was it just me or did they make it look as if Fred was the first speaker,
when she was supposed to be coming after someone else.
* Jealous Lilah! Danger Will Robinson...
* Okay. Giant interdimensional snakes. That was kind of unexpected.
* "Tragedy struck Gidget?" Heh.
* "...idle threats are so idle." So very true. Angel's becoming the worst
type of talking villain. Sigh. But you know...hmm. I'm beginning to think
we might get some action from him eventually. Can I just vaguely allude to
spoilers which we received? Okay, vague allusion over. Sorry. Moving on.
* Aww, Fred writing on the walls again. I'm very pleased to see them
revisit her craziness, actually. She's had such a facade of normalcy, and
there *should* be stuff lurking under the covers.
* So, she's just described how she read the words from the book in the
library, and I'm thinking: she was making her speech and basically putting
into words the theory of interdimensional travel, right? What if voicing
that theory is like vocalizing a spell? ...And now I'm learning there have
been other disappering students. Ahh...waiting for more on this.
* Angel's parlor trick. Kind of cool.
* "'Cause when my girl's not happy? I'M NOT HAPPY." Ooh, yeah.
* Lori--villain, right? Oh wait, now Fred is finding the book of snakes.
Oops.
* Oh, man. "Chatty rooms." Forums on Angel...this is rather painful. Bet
we'll never touch on the implications of *that* again. I've read a lot of
stories now with references to online resources--networking of magic geeks
and such. You can't really call this a nod to anything specific, but it
does seem to be playing with an idea that came out of fanon. Did anyone
else feel like this?
* How did Gunn know how to find that geek? I was watching, but I missed the
connection entirely.
* "He's gonna pay." -- "No. He's gonna die." Okaayyyy. Little Texas
firecrackin' mama. But honestly? I thought she was going to say: "No. He
already has." And then reveal that she killed him. Oh well. I wanted the
pain scene to play out differently--it was pretty predictable. But then the
bits afterwards had nicely satisfying twists.
* So, was this conference in L.A.? Must have been. Because she's there,
then she's back at the hotel, etc.
* Flail whipping. "Hours if you do it right." Nice.
* "Vengeance. Sounds good." Nice anvil. (Or is there another term for those
segues?) "He's a serial killer." -- "All right, then."
* Wes's brain...big enough to include string theory and quantidimensional
physics. Hard to buy this, really, but whatever.
* Cordy and Connor and kissin'. Woof. Aww, but Cordy's going to give him
The Talk. Poor kid. Interesting that she raises the point, obliquely, that
he was recently an eight-month old baby--not that it's even clear she knows
this. But it reminds the audience of the weirdness that a C/C pairing would
be.
* Wes's face in the car drive. Nice and rough and broody, and then that
profile. I hope he doesn't have a close shave anytime soon, because that
stubble is growing on me. Still--do you think millenial stubble will look
goofy ten years from now, the way Miami Vice stubble looks self-conscious
to us today?
* Angel, don't let the guy pick up the book and read! Jeez.
* Carrot Top needs to die. Carrot Top needs pain. Flail whipping, make it
last for hours. Yes, yes, yes...where was I.
* So, Fred's got the bow trained on him, and they're talking, and I sense
that Gunn is about to arrive and save her from the cost of vengeance. "If
you kill him, I'm gonna lose you." Hmmm. Ohhhh, wow. Didn't expect that.
Color me surprised--they didn't pull their punch, even though it wasn't
Fred who threw him in. Yay, Mutant Enemy.
* "Come onnnnn, I'm holding your head!"
* Cordy's with Connor. Cordy's with Angel. Cordy's a bit flighty, isn't
she?--but then, that's who she was before, isn't it?
* Well. That was an abrupt ending.
December 10, 01: Angel Baby ("Dad")
Arggggh. I'm sorry, but this is such a godawful arc. We're only in third season and already we've got a bawling brat to fill out an ensemble cast that already has stretch marks. This baby has just been born, and already I'm throwing my vote behind Lilah in favor of vivisection. This is a baby who popped into existence through a giant plot hole, by landing on wet asphalt when Vamp Mom dusted herself. Two words: umbilical cord. Now it's wailing its obnoxious little head off as all babies must--god forbid this be preternaturally quiet vampire spawn--and giving me a headache, despite the benefits of volume control.
Everything is just derailing in a seriously stupid way. Holtz, a "single-minded vengeance machine"? Yeah right. This is the same Holtz who stayed his hand because a vamp-spawned baby happened to existentialize itself in an alley, who--rather than ruthlessly killing his enemy--shows every intention of plodding through the paces of an extended arc, in classic Doctor Evil style:
DR. EVIL: Fine. Whatever. Mutated, ill-tempered sea bass it is. Come, let's return to dinner. Close the tank.
SCOTT EVIL: Aren't you going to watch them? They'll get away!
DR. EVIL: No, we'll leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, and we'll just assume it all went according to plan.
SCOTT EVIL: I have a gun in my room. Give me five seconds, I'll come back and blow their brains out.
DR. EVIL: No, Scott. You just don't get it, do you?
So here's Holtz, saying, "I can kill you--but I won't. Rather, I'll take a slow revenge on you, not because I have any good reason but because that gives us at least six to eight more eps. I'll kill all my demon helpers so I can do it myself, because a handicap evens the odds. I'll recruit Whiskey, the Vampire Slayer instead, because that pointlessly complicates my non-existent plan." (Anna pauses to spit.)
This is just the nutty cake under a heap of stale icing that includes the tired banter between Gavin "Gordon Gecko" Park and Lilah "Lame-Ass" Morgan, and the posturing by Wolfram & Hart's Mayoral Wannabe. (Whatever the fuck his name is. I surely don't care.) How many times must you drive home, like a blunt stake through the heart, the ironic and banal contrast of evil and family values? Learn another chord, guys! (Anna mixes and strews her metaphors with feral disregard.)
Okay, and guys? Those goofy dad faces Angel was making? Scary. Scarier than his game face. And I don't care if that was supposed to be the point. It was HORRIFYING. I cringed. I muted. I averted my eyes. Someone please tell Boreanz he's not that fucking charming.
There's so much more to snark at. That great shot of Angel turning away and revealing the plastic baby he's cradling; and then later, when he tucks it under his arm like a salami with the blanket over its face--yeah, yeah. Red baby herring. We get it. But it looked ridiculous. Baby Dolmas, swaddled and smothering. And are we to believe they all just left the baby in the janitor's closet all that time? Riiiight.
There were a few good moments, a few good lines (and a few that were trying too hard), and Whiskey, the Vampire Slayer--she has some amusement potential. But overall, I'm theeeesss close to giving up on the show altogether. I've got better things to do with my time. I could have been playing FreeCell.
November
20, 01: Buffy ("Smashed")
Just. What to say. What to say. I will not play at being incoherent, because
there is no need. I am incoherent. In fact, the fact that I'm writing
in complete sentences is possible only because trained stenographers are
transcribing my dazed and inchoate gestures to create these words. See
me gape, rock back and forth on the floor, crawl to wall, knock head against
it, whimper, gesture at TV, pluck at shirt, tear off clothes, tear out
hair, weep. Give me a moment.
We are all Joss's bitch, this is
clear. I started off this ep thinking: a ray-gun that freezes its victims?
How very lame, how very... Batman. Is it Whedonian homage, or is
it just shark-baiting? And, oh Joss, forgive me, because halfway through
the ep Buffy and Xander and Anya make with the hey, and say, whoa, isn't
this all pretty lame? And that's the point. Of courssssse. The Wonder
Boys are geeks. And they are plucking their evil plots straight
from the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide. It's no coincidence. My faith
is restored.
So then there's, uh, witchy plot
stuff going on, and yeah, whatever, because they're chopping it up with
Buffy and Spike, and... Buffy... and Spike... fighting and fighting and
more fighting, snarly karate break-the-walls oh-god-how-I-hate-you fighting,
and then they're. Okay, pause, rewind. I did not just see that. I did NOT
just see that on UPN, before nine p.m., in broad TV light. Did not, did
not, did--and yes, okay, we've seen Spike straddled by the bouncing Buffy-Bot,
but that was a demented aberration, and though horrifyingly fascinated,
I really tried to forget it, and yet here is Joss giving it to us again,
except he's doing it right this time--only the most obvious scene
of up-against-the-wall, slayer-riding-vamp, no-holds-barred explicit fucking
you could ever hope to see on nationwide affiliate television, available
to minors and Christian fundamentalists and stray startled housecats, initiated
by a descending zipper so loud I thought it was the sound of my heart ripping
itself free from my chest cavity by the force of sheer joy, and consummated
in chaos, with the walls literally tumbling down around them.
Can I just point out--just to actually
have the pleasure of writing this sentence--that several million people
now know the exact moment when his dick slid inside her? Right up
to the hilt, baby. No soft core elisions, no fades, no spouting fountains.
This was fucking. This was Linda Fiorentino and Peter Berg screwing in
an alley in The Last Seduction. Shot above the waist, sure, but
with very little left to the imagination about what was going on below
the fold. Screw subtlety. I'm happy. I'm pratically stoned on happy. I'm
laid low by it. Wish me a slow recovery.
February 26, 02: Buffy: "As You Were"
Can someone help me, please please, wipe this ep from my brain?
Sponge? Someone?
I suppose they had to do something different with Riley's revisit, a
twist. Because what fans may have been expecting and hoping--oh, I'm
just projecting here--was that Buffy would come to Spike's defense
against Riley's shock and jealousy and perhaps abuse, realize she
really did care for Spike to a certain degree. So, instead--give Riley
a wife to show he's actually over Buffy. Because otherwise what was
the point of Mary Sue Butch!Ninja!Chick? Closure for Buffy and Riley
then. Yay closure. I thought they had it already, but whatever. But,
given this, could Riley have shown some amazement at the fact Buffy
was sleeping with Spike? I mean, he knows her thing for vamps, but
still, this is pretty different. Yet not a twitch. How lame was that?
What a fucking waste of a set-up. The classic fan-fiction moment,
where the ex walks in and finds Spike and Buffy sprawled together in
post-coital bliss, etc, and it lacked any punch, despite the punching.
Though frankly there shouldn't have been any bliss in the first
place--what the hell was Buffy doing going off to sleep with Spike
(going to sleep) in the middle of a mission? Jesus God that was
fucked.
Spike as the Doctor. For crying out loud. That's just...stupid. No
build-up whatsoever to show that he's been doing mercenary type stuff
at that level before now. They could have worked tiny bits in
throughout the season if they were going in that direction--so why
didn't they? This stinks of improv and it pisses me off. It was too
abrupt, as if they were trying to recollect some part of his
personality to mind: Oh, wait, yeah, Spike is a...a what? A guy who
in his spare time sells highly dangerous demon eggs on the black
market to foreign superpowers? Sheeyeah, right. Eggs lying around the
crypt where Buffy might have walked in, full of critters about to
hatch, and Spike being painted as dumb and incompetent for not
freezing them--goddamn them. He isn't that incompetent most of the
time--when he undermines his own plans, it's usually for psychological
or emotional reasons. Except, I suppose, we must allow that they've
been bent on making him look increasingly like an idiot instead of the
smart and dangerous slayer-killer he began as. The whole Spike and
Riley face-off made my skin crawl. The "perfect Riley" droid made my
skin crawl.
No angst wrung out of the utter destruction of his crypt--another
waste. Could they have given us one moment where he holds something of
sentimental value now destroyed?
Other suckiness was the Anya/Xander car scene with horrible FX, and
outdoor sex on Buffy's front lawn, and her utter lameness at
trying to feed a squashed, cold burger to a growing teenager instead
of offering to make some soup, and the cheesy helicopter lift at the
end, and, oh yeah, hold on, the ENTIRE STUPID A-PLOT. Lame!
Lame! I call lame! Riley tells Buffy nothing? Not a word to say, "Oh,
and don't kill it." That whole omission creaks of rotten wood, as does
his explanation for why he's there--I swear he made it sound at first
as if when you literally kill one of the demons, more spawn in huge
numbers, like that ancient mythical dog sprouting new heads, and then
it turns out to be nothing like that and the demons are in fact easily
killed and not at any risk for taking over the world, and where the
hell was the rest of his team if this was such a huge-ass mission of
importance?
And I'm sorry, because I've always been hugely forgiving of Riley aka
Marc Blucas aka season four, but this little return made me realize:
the boy is dead wood. He cannot fucking act to save his life. He made
this entire ep all the more ridiculous by his grated and overblown
line readings. He really was a Ken doll, a plastic droid. Spike is
more of a human being than he is.
That this ep ended with what was clearly meant to be a definitive
break-up just makes it all the more depressing. The break-up,
though...was half-way decent. That's all I can admit to right now. I
liked that she wasn't really angry about his duplicity and scheming.
And: "William." And his lovely, angsty, expressive face. That I have to take what small pleasures I can find from their break-up...that's so fucking sad.
Oh, what else pissed me off. How about Spike wanting sex every five
minutes when just a few eps back he was kicking Buffy out of his crypt
because she was using him. They don't know what the hell they want
him to be. I mean, what's the fucking deal, let's see:
I could buy all of these things wrapped up in one package if they just
showed me how that was supposed to work instead of cutting him up ep
by ep to suit their convenience.
Fuck it. I'm going to rewrite the entire second half of this season
someday.
But you know what? Seriously. I don't think this break-up is permanent. And I don't say that because I cling to Spuffy love. I think this is going to be a break away into a new direction, but that they'll get back together in some new and different form. So far, Buffy has not yet broken up with someone significant who then remained a presence in her life (i.e., on the show). I think that it would be awkward, in dramatic terms. And the presence of Cecily and the potential for curses and that oh so deliberate cue of "William"...it just makes me wonder.
I can't be hopeful for any one, particular thing. But--in dramatic terms again--this break-up is simply too lame, too weak to stand as is. It clunks. This has surely got to be the nadir, and I desperately hope they get their shit together and figure out what they're going to do with Spike. Because they would be idiots to paint him as such a useless git when he has so much potential to be otherwise.
But I predict...they're too smart to let what they've done tonight lie there and stink. If it's bad and wrong, I will still lay odds that some of it was deliberate bad and wrong, and that this will be the last, low point before something great.
Fangirl to the end.
Addendum: More thoughts, as the ep boils in my brain. I really don't have any big issue with what took place vis-a-vis Spike, so much as how it happened. Which is, badly. Lame plot, bad acting, inconsistent characterization. Spike bad? FINE. Breaking up with Buffy? FINE. Just do it well, is all I fucking ask. I knew Riley was returning and I was looking forward to it. But this ep was so tedious; someone else has already pointed out the tired pacing. It could have packed so much punch, and instead we got Mary Ninja Sue jabbering and lots of running around, chasing that stupid-ass demon. God, so many missed moments, where they dropped the ball--Buffy's death? Hello? Okay, she got off a cute one-liner, but come on people, if it'd been Angel hearing about this for the first time, we'd surely have gotten a small screw-turn of angst. ("I wasn't there for you.") Surely we could have seen that instead of rappelling? What was the point of the lengthy rappelling? If they wanted to establish faux intimacy there were quicker ways to do it.
So many things--who called the Scooby gang? Riley? When? Car phone? Whatever. Why was his wife catching up with him--why didn't they take the same copter in as they took out? Why? So that she could conveniently rappel in at the most obvious possible moment, that's why. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And just to cement the anvil of magical addiction in place for all eternity we have to hear about jungle shamans to whom this also happened. So much for any possibility that Willow was simply inventing her own addiction to evade other issues. E.g., fear of her own power. For crying out...sigh. Oh, and at the end--why not give us a close-up on Willow to get some smidge of nuance from her, to let us know if she was being Buffy-friendly by calling Ninja a bitch, or if she was really snarky and serious, making all her smiliness a facade?
Waste. Terrible waste.
Maybe someday I can rewatch this in perspective and find it a useful ep in the season's arc, a stepping stone or bridge between the first and second halves. Right now, I can only try to retain my optimism, tread water against the suckage.
March 12, 02: Buffy: "Normal Again"
My thoughts on "Normal Again," wherein I sneakily riff of Mely's post or would be sneaky if I weren't admitting to it here. I'm just going to ramble on various points.
An amazing ep, and very affecting--angst throughout and some tears at the end. I said in comments over at Maren's LJ that this was a really self-referential episode. And then I saw that Thamiris had also posted similar thoughts, even to how Spike echoed the doctor's comments about the Buffycentric nature of her world. Go read this--great insights here on how ME is exploring its own show. With apologies to Mely, I think this gets more at what's going on here in meta-terms than her own interpretation of the show's self-critique ("Yes, it's easier to believe in a sick girl than a heroic one: that's not a striking criticism of the show or the audience's tendency towards escapism"). But not entirely; I don't think ME is really asking us seriously whether we want one show or the other, "to determine which way the show should go." I think it's simply a kind of textual playfulness (in its cruel way), which is so much of what I love about BtVS. It's questioning itself critically, using one of its own storylines to challenge its entire premise, direction, arc.
The ep didn't feel generic to me in terms of Buffy's responses. We don't know what the demon's poison did precisely, but on the safe assumption that Buffy was institutionalized as she described, it may have been surfacing really, old buried angst--the very way in which it jabbed deep into her, mimicking a needle, suggested an agent that could tap core fears, buried several layers down, and stir them into a vivid hallucination.
Mely's main critique was that the ep didn't explore the right fears. But if you come back from heaven, a place of sanity and peace--a place of wholeness--into a world that reads like some schizo, constructed fantasy that can be constantly rewritten and doesn't always fit perfectly together, then I don't think the parallels are far-fetched at all. I think Buffy has been struggling all season with the demands of her Buffyverse, trying to normalize it (taking a job, dealing with bills, trying to get back into school, running a household) and failing. In terms of the hero monomyth, she's come back from the dead and is trying to reestablish herself in everyday life. But the Buffyverse isn't letting her: it's not normal or everyday. What's normal is still measured by what she once knew: her parents together, no little sister, no vampires.
For the first time in this ep, it occurred to me that Dawn is rather like Spike. They're both self-absorbed, but they also have very sharp insights, particularly relating to things that affect them. Teens cut through a lot of bullshit, have a gift for honing in on what is most true and painful. And Dawn really nailed it here--that Buffy wants on some level a place where life is stable, where her memories can be trusted, a place that doesn't include a little sister magicked into existence. Not that she doesn't love or want her sister on another level, but there's also some ambivalence and it sometimes comes out in her responses; in this ep it just exploded from her. I continue to love Dawn, and really can't embrace other people's impatience with her. Yeah she occasionally demands a smackdown, but she also needs a lot more stability and assurances that she's not getting. It's hard being an ex-key. I thought she was an amazingly sane and sympathetic character in this ep, especially dealing with a homicidal sister. I can't call her a jerk for having an emotional face-off with "sick" Buffy. It was very human, and Buffy still had presence of mind and a facade of rationality. Sickness is relative.
Spike is as always less sympathetic, which I'm okay with. As I said in Maren's LJ: "Not sure whether I agree with Spike that Buffy should tell her friends--not that I don't love that idea. But I'm not sure if he was being "wise" or if he was being self-serving. I mean, he's often both. I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not sure if that is what's best for Buffy. It might make her feel better perhaps to tell other than Tara someone about it, get friendly absolution. But it could also be mature if she dealt with it on her own, and left it unshared--really, in some ways, the whole gang has so little individual privacy."
Was Spike Buffy's "truth-telling fool" here, or was he flat-out wrong about her? Does she love misery instead of darkness? That seems pretty accurate to me, given how she's been behaving this season. And that's a lot of what depression is, aside from the biochemical: clinging to your patterns and your unhappiness. And in a way, I kind of got at that idea at the end of "Lion Shall Lie," obliquely, but--the idea that if Buffy really let herself be with Spike, she wouldn't want dark Spike so much as a contradictory illusion, the glamorous facade of bad over what she would like to imagine is not-evil (if not truly good). Even with Angel, she glossed over his history and his deeds, whole dark facets of him, to be with him. So what I mean to say is--she doesn't really want bad, even in the current season. She wants what's painful, twisted, conflicted. She's an angst puppy.
It's Spike's own illusion, perhaps, that she could be at peace in the darkness with him. Poor boy.
The entire ep challenges us because each universe is presented so very plausibly. I don't see this as an AU ep, though; I think we're being asked to accept one or the other universe as real. The ending is like a parting gift--a fan-fictiony "in" for fans, who can spin it anyway they like. As simply a conceptual goodbye wave to the reality-based universe, or as evidence that it was in fact the real one. (I for one thought we might see Willow, Spike, et al, as real human characters on the ward, or as real-life friends of Buffy's; Spike as an intern, for instance. There'd be a story.) I don't think they'll revisit it. Though, boy, wackiness if they do. {g}
And can I just say: ME = Mutant Enemy. Man, but I spent weeks scratching my head over that one. But it's a useful acronym, to substitute for "Joss" who is not showrunning to the degree he used to. Oh, and hey ("Post post-script!"), Jintian has some thoughts on the ep too, which are not as terrifying as she suggests. {g}