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rmTonight we are seeing The Fairy Queen, and I am so excited.
Last night we watched:
Angel 1.8, which hit me where I live with the Children of Earth stuff. I thought there was something not dissimilar to the tone of the goodbye between Buffy and Angel to the big Day 4 death scene, and it really got me. I also am, necessarily, both as a memoirist and a Torchwood fan interested in the connection between memory and life. And, while the episode had a lot of cheesy crap in it (the Oracle visitation set was awful), I loved the actual makeup design and performances from the Oracles. I also felt that this was the first time I really felt chemistry between Buffy and Angel and the first time I really enjoyed watching David Borreanaz, it's like his performances are deeply, deeply stifled under Angel's misery, which he has no idea how to execute for us.
Buffy 4.9, MADE OF HILARIOUS AWESOME. Anyway, so is Spike going to stay defanged for the whole of the series? That really lowers the stakes (ha, ha) in a lot of issues and strikes me as narratively weak. On the other hand, I love Willow getting a business card from a demon.
Angel 1.9, about which I have too much to say on too many fronts. It's a very effective episode, somewhat in spite of itself. I found the half-demon group very effectively portrayed, and when we first seem them hiding in their squalor, I didn't even realize we were at the obligatory Nazi-motif episode of every science fiction or fantasy show.
Here's what did work: The design of the Scourge. Specifically the design of the Scourge guy we see talking the most, who, unlike the others doesn't look like a mass of rotting flesh, but like he is wearing neat mask of laced skin; I thought, instantly, of lampshades. The pacing. The moment where the runaway half-demon kid tells Doyle he's got his directions turned around and for a split second you think collaborator. Angel, working as one. The fleeing to South America. The container ship. The evocation of Nazi occultism. These Holocaust allegory references were much more complex and detailed than I'm used to seeing in this type of episode, and I was moved and impressed and intellectually stimulated and taken aback.
But here's what didn't work: The fucking uniforms. They were too evocative of the Nazi's. They became a distraction and prevented the Scourge from being their own terror. Same with the very WWII-era jeeps and bikes. I found it profoundly distracting.
Here's what was just odd, and I'm not sure how I feel about it: The whole "chosen one" thing. I didn't actually find it at all grating in the moment of the episode, but to tack Christian savior mythology onto an episode that's a Holocaust allegory is intellectually awkward for me.
And then, of course there's the rest of what happens in the episode. Doyle sacrifices himself, and at the end, we see Cordelia and Angel watching that video tape from the opening of the show. "Is that it? Am I done?" And then silence. It was extraordinarily powerful. I never even liked the character that much, and I felt gutted, and it seemed like a wrong thing, a sinful thing to make a sound into that silence. It also, again, punched a CoE-related button for me, related to how the last of the Torchwood novelizations (the short story book) ended, and I felt like I needed to get up and walk around and shake it off me, these terrible things, but it was bedtime, so you know....
Right when I started watching Angel one of you all said "and poor Glenn Quinn," so I looked it up. And then I knew Doyle was going to die, and then I knew Quinn was an addict and in every scene for the entire bit he was in the series, I found myself trying not to grieve this actor who's work I had never heard of before and didn't care about all that much, but I couldn't not in every moment of his oddly translucent eyes, and his pasty skin and that clamminess that sort of came off the screen. It was horrible. And distracting. And the poor bastard was dead, and not like Doyle, and I couldn't really stand it.
Once again though, Whedon proves my point about we get angry at the deaths in his shows, but do not need to mourn for the characters as if they were real. The other characters mourn for us, on screen, and so we need not be conscripted into these roles.
Also, I want a t-shirt that says Oppressed Demon People.
Last night we watched:
Here's what did work: The design of the Scourge. Specifically the design of the Scourge guy we see talking the most, who, unlike the others doesn't look like a mass of rotting flesh, but like he is wearing neat mask of laced skin; I thought, instantly, of lampshades. The pacing. The moment where the runaway half-demon kid tells Doyle he's got his directions turned around and for a split second you think collaborator. Angel, working as one. The fleeing to South America. The container ship. The evocation of Nazi occultism. These Holocaust allegory references were much more complex and detailed than I'm used to seeing in this type of episode, and I was moved and impressed and intellectually stimulated and taken aback.
But here's what didn't work: The fucking uniforms. They were too evocative of the Nazi's. They became a distraction and prevented the Scourge from being their own terror. Same with the very WWII-era jeeps and bikes. I found it profoundly distracting.
Here's what was just odd, and I'm not sure how I feel about it: The whole "chosen one" thing. I didn't actually find it at all grating in the moment of the episode, but to tack Christian savior mythology onto an episode that's a Holocaust allegory is intellectually awkward for me.
And then, of course there's the rest of what happens in the episode. Doyle sacrifices himself, and at the end, we see Cordelia and Angel watching that video tape from the opening of the show. "Is that it? Am I done?" And then silence. It was extraordinarily powerful. I never even liked the character that much, and I felt gutted, and it seemed like a wrong thing, a sinful thing to make a sound into that silence. It also, again, punched a CoE-related button for me, related to how the last of the Torchwood novelizations (the short story book) ended, and I felt like I needed to get up and walk around and shake it off me, these terrible things, but it was bedtime, so you know....
Right when I started watching Angel one of you all said "and poor Glenn Quinn," so I looked it up. And then I knew Doyle was going to die, and then I knew Quinn was an addict and in every scene for the entire bit he was in the series, I found myself trying not to grieve this actor who's work I had never heard of before and didn't care about all that much, but I couldn't not in every moment of his oddly translucent eyes, and his pasty skin and that clamminess that sort of came off the screen. It was horrible. And distracting. And the poor bastard was dead, and not like Doyle, and I couldn't really stand it.
Once again though, Whedon proves my point about we get angry at the deaths in his shows, but do not need to mourn for the characters as if they were real. The other characters mourn for us, on screen, and so we need not be conscripted into these roles.
Also, I want a t-shirt that says Oppressed Demon People.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-27 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-27 06:55 pm (UTC)There are parallels with Scourge and the Initiative, but I won't say any more!