Manilow's Mandy, Mind Control and other mumblings

That's just reminded me of 'the moan of doves in immemorial elms and the murmuring of innumerable bees', but that's all by the by.

Hello everyone.

A lengthy break since 'Shiny Happy People' for me personally, but the story pretty much takes up where it left off:

Previously on Angel...

Crazy higher power bewitches the earth with the need to be happy unfettered by the desirfe for free will and control of one's own life.

Fred becomes an Orwellian malcontent, as a result of Jasmine's honest blood.

Angel sings Mandy several times.

All of which prepares us for the very accomplished:

4.19- 'The Magic Bullet'

This seemed a rather Greenwaltian effort from Jeffrey Bell, who managed to dredge up amusing little interludes from all over the place in a very scattershot way. There was all sorts of playful directing from him as well, a couple of which I thought worked out very nicely.

We get the teaser, where we are once again made ot draw the comparison between Advert!World and Los Angeles now that Jasmine has arrived. When was the last time you saw an advert that you actually wanted to be in? The vast majority of adverts are so brightly overlit and uncompromisingly perfect that I know I would duck as quickly as possible from being there. I'd rather be in grey old England, but with reality and beauty and free will in there somewhere- not just a bland unquestioning surrender to the better things in life. And so we get our chirpy tune, and the teaser employs a lot of the tactics adverts might- unfeasibly bright colours, unfeasibly happy people, and the feeling that you just need to know what to buy, (a Solero, a bitter[!], a Ford, life insurance) in order that your life could be just like this. And then it is rudely, (or blessedly) interrupted by Fred the renegade, who we see at the end of the teaser back underground in the sewers. I found this a clever little mislead- I was worried that Fred was retreating to her Pylea cave once again. In fact, she does something brave and difficult and slightly desperate, which makes me view her once again as an amazingly powerful and wonderful character. She keeps trying, and she succeeds.

Here's some questions:

'Why would anyone reject love?' Connor

'Where does the darkness go when the world is bathed in light?' TCH getting metaphorical

'How far to demons represent the dark but real half of humans psyche, and is this subjugated by Jasmine in the latter half of Season Four?' from a past Buffy 101 paper at a leading American University.

'Why does it always have to be blood? Couldn't it be a lymph ritual?' Xander

And here's some addresses to the questions, if not exactly answers:

As for Connor, his question is perhaps more important than the answer itself would be. For here in this epsode, we understand even more about Connor's feeling of abandonment- in a beautfiully shaped character arc. Here we see his disbelief that Fred could shun Jasmine. This is borne of his intense feelings of abandonment throughout his natural life. Let's take a small checklist here. Firstly, he feels Angel abandoned him as a child, so that he could be given to his real Father. Then, as we find out in one of this episode's most affecting sections of dialogue, Holtz used to regularly abandon the young Steven to turn him into a hunter. This is dreadfully sad- even the relationship that Connor felt he could trust is based on a feeling of distance- of an inability to communicate properly. Next, Angel leaves Connor to fend for himself at the end of 'A New World'. For Angel at this point, I felt it a brave and correct decision- to let go of the no-longer-baby Connor, and understand he is growing up. Now it seems like he wasn't acting forcefully enough as a Father. Next Holtz deliberately kills himself, abandoning Connor just as he is trying to adjust to his new world, new paradigm even. Then we get Cordelia, who Connor, so desperate for a real connection, refuses to explicitly accept is evil, even though he knows it deep down. And hence, in 'Inside Out', we get to Darla, who crystallises all of Connor's feelings of abandonment, and lets him finally take a step into believing Cordelia's message, only for her to be turned into the empty shell of Shiny Happy Jasmine. Connor doesn't notice this- for the first time absorbed by someone who fully appears to care for him and will always be there for him. Through this idea, he can start to believe in his Father- to the extent where they can sing 'Mandy' as 'Jasmine' together in one of the best funny-yet-serious moments of the Season.

Actually, the 'funny-yet-serious' motif was Greenwalt's, which links back in to the approach of this episode. We also get the 'Four Weddings and A Funeral' like quick cuts of people telling everyone of their love for Jasmine, and the super finger-eating demon. Each serve to demonstrate a deeper theme of the episode, both of which I will return to later.

To the second and third questions. Fred in this episode is the paranoid one- but her paranoia happens to be right. This fits in very nicely and tidily with the suspicious pot-head of 'Spin the Bottle', which I thought was a clever little reference back. She then goes on to try to find someone in the dark corners of Los Angeles who might be sympathetic nd help her. She tries the bookstore owner, but he has already been taken over by a view of Jasmine on the news. Jasmine is seeping even into the darkest recesses of Los Angeles. Then we get the demon, who it appears might be more conducive to a plan of action. Here's where I wondered whether the demon's often used identity as the Rejected or the Other, or even the Dispossessed, which runs throughout Angel from 'The Ring' and is a rather different usage than in Buffy, where demons are personal fears, was being used again. Perhaps the demon represents the honest side of the human psyche, which exists. The gruesome, the small and dirty, and yet the valid, and the real and the honest. The inner demon inside Fred, which makes her have free will, and also makes her less than perfect. But this was snatched away after it transpired that the demon ate fingers and had his eyes on Fred. Once again, as with the demolition of Skip's character, the complexity of what demon's represent was cut quickly down to size.

So Fred realises that the outcasts have their reasons for being outcasts, and that some of them are already in Jasmine's thrall. And she makes the decision, and a brave one at that, to make Angel see, using a dangerous and wonderful plan rather reminiscent of the 'Go Fred!' moments of early Season Three (Fredless, Billy etc). Fred realises that the people under Jasmine's spell haven't had their free will banished, sent to a shady hollow- and that they, like her, aren't dead losses. They just need to see the truth. They have repressed their free will- their honesty, the knowledge that the world ain't all cheery bubble-gum pop. The darkness, a necessary complement to the light, is there, if only the light beam can be momentarily broken. And so Fred does so to Angel, and the dominoes can start to fall.

As to the fourth question- the lifeblood of Jasmine is what gives away her true purpose, and the connection between Jasmine and Cordelia parallels Buffy and Dawn in 'The Gift'. Neat.

The breaking of the spell reveals the personal aspects of the happening in the first place. Each person was affected in the same simple way by Jasmine, but there were still personal undercurrents washing, just as I mentioned with Connor. So for Wesley, with have the return of the uncomfortable 'Billy' like attitude. The idea of him explaining how Fred was a Siren was really scary, beacause it suggested that some of what Billy brought out is still there residually. The librarian burns his book- he has found a new fantasy world to live in- only this time it is a deformation of the real world. And meanwhile, Jasmine casually dismisses the essence of her plan to the conspiracy theory part of him. The certainty that 'there was no second gun-man on the grassy knoll- it was all Lee Harvey Oswald's own work' would probably have been refuted by him if anyone else had said so. But from Jasmine, her word is enough. And in wondering whether the world may be more complex than the simple, official explanation, the man was doing, for whatever reason, exactly what Jasmine didn't want him to. Because when people start to believe there could have been another gun-man on the grassy knoll, there is no longer trust in the simple, no-questions-asked situation. Whether there was more than one gunman on that day in 1963 is almost irrelevant- Jasmine is the proponent of something which must not be open to conspiracy theories, and so dismisses the biggest one of our time, [or perhaps second to a certain one in 1969].

The cult of celebrity seems to be another facet of what Jasmine as a character comments on. We've already had the 'Diva,deity- fine line' comment form Lorne', and here the 'convention' going on in the Hyperion reminded me of the rabid fans of various people, who let it devour their lives. It also reminded me a little bit of being a Buffy obsessive. Is this a comment by Whedon or Bell on the madness of these people- desperate to get close to their heroes. If so, fair enough. It doesn't affect my outlook, inasmuch as I am perfectly happy discussing with friends real and virtual on subjects to do with Buffy and other thoughts rising for it. Unlike the addiction to Jasmine, our fanishness can be communal, and isn't necessarily personal. Here, it is the utter devotion to one person that is damaging. Of course, Lorne gives us another hint that this is what the writers are thinking in his coy 'Anything for a fan...'

Miscellaneous points:

-The line 'Join hands' had me desperate to hear 'Start a love train'. That song encapsualtes a lot of the thoughtless cheeriness surrounding Jasmine. Of course, there's also a little bit taken from more charismatic forms of Christianity, but it's not a simple broadside- it's criticising the dangerous subthoughts that can come from unhealthy devotion rather than faith itself.

-Jasmine is not omniscient. She doesn't know the difference between a dwarf and a hobbit. But the comparison of her to Cate Blanchett in 'The Fellowship of the Ring' works nicely.