1.4 I Fall to Pieces

It's funny. I should have known from 'I was Made to Love You' that the reference in the first title was literal, but it didn't occur to me. It's an interesting kind of monster. Again, the monster is human. In the grown-up life of LA, problems feel like real life, rather than feeling like the big, scary monsters of adolescence. Come to think of it, I suppose this is one reason why Buffy Season Six turned off a lot of viewers. It's partly about how growing up makes you stop thinking your life is a melodrama, (Buffy/Angel Seasons 1-3), and start realising that the horrors are often mundane, and of no interest to anyone else. The show itself was having growing pains. [Realise I have entirely ignored the Pylea arc that I caught some of in Angel- oh well.]

The monster in this episode lets Greenwalt play with all the parts of the body and their apparent metaphorical connotations, something which I think is a little bit underused. The hands suggest a thoughtless possessiveness, the eyes an inappropriate voyeurism to something he shouldn't see, and the viscera, (or whatever that scary gory thing is), the mindless violence of fighting. In fact, in each case I guess the point is that the disconnected body part is disconnected from the brain and the heart. It's a cold, mechanical life that the doctor leads.

1.5 Rm w/a Vu

I really liked Rm w/a Vu. It's a typical Espenson episode, which you can take as 'merely' funny, but is actually multi-layered and interesting. I'm starting to really like Cordelia as a character, something I thought unlikely to ever happen. On Buffy, it's like we only saw the left-hand side of her face or something, and now we see something different. It's a perspective thing. While she is just bitchy comic relief, she works through a funny but crucially unempathetic character. Here, she is often the person on centre stage, and the consequences make her a much more layered character, revealing her insecurity about the vacuousness of her (former) life, as well as revealing how her put-downs are really only a defence mechanism for her insecurity.

The control freak mother of Rm w/a Vu' was fairly chilling, and was one of the lines from the song playing on the gramophone 'You always hurt the one you love', as in 'Dead Things'? If so, what's Spike quoting? Still not entirely entranced by the main trio of Angel, Doyle and Cordelia, but I'm liking it as much as most other shows. It's still falling somewhat short of Buffy for me though.