Well, now; I haven't done one of these in almost a month, so this may not turn out well!

Let me say before I start out on another batch of Angel-ness that I watched my 200th episode of the Buffyverse yesterday- it was 7.7- 'Conversations With Dead People'. Just like the 100th episode I watched ('The Gift'), this was wonderfully funny, tightly structured, with a feeling of foreboding. Always good to see a good episode for the big figures. I somehow doubt we'll get to 300, (that would involve Angel going to seven seasons), but I suppose I can keep my fingers crossed.

I'm currently at that time in both seasons, (Season Four Angel, Season Seven Buffy), where the Big Arc starts to unveil itself and become an issue in the foreground. Looking back over the years, the sixth episode of the season is often an interesting, funny, diversionary sidebar, before the usually very important seventh episode, (think 'Band Candy', 'Family', 'All the Way' vs 'Revelation', 'The Initiative', 'Fool For Love', 'Once More, With Feeling'). In the Buffyverse, I was a little underwhelmed by him- it felt like an episode from Season One. It had a couple of moments, and I wouldn't go as far as Rob [!], but it wasn't the greatest. 'Conversations with Dead People' was just startling, with Jonathan's speech perhaps the clincher.

Back in Angel, a similar path was followed, with 'Spin the Bottle' being a bit quirky before we turn to the business of the season in 'Apocalypse, Nowish'.

4.6- 'Spin The Bottle'

Well, let me get my reservations out of the way right at the beginning. This isn't one of my favourite Joss Whedon episodes. Apart from 'Anne', I can't immediately cal to mind a Joss script which was less engaging for me than this one. It had some fascinating direction and quirky perspectives, and from anyone else I might let it go without comment, but form Joss I might have expected a little bit more. I thought its ultimate problem was its lack of real bite in the plot. The dialogue is bound to sparkle, and the structure was interesting, and Joss does characterisation better than anyone, but the whole thing was too static. I felt stuck in the Hyperion like I feel stuck in 'A Doll's House', which can't be a good thing. Ibsen was trying to be claustrophobic, you see.

To the good stuff:
Lorne reprises his role as the narrator. It's interesting to see just how much he really is a storyteller in this episode. At times, he reminded me of Melville's Ishmael. For anyone who hasnt read Melville's vast portrait of America, 'Moby Dick' is a 600 page encyclopedia of whaling. Trust me, it's great. Anyhow, we start out from the perspective of a man aboard a ship, but by half way through, some of the scenes we're seeing could barely possibly have been seen by Ishmael, without major diversionary tactics. It's like Ishmael has become the consciousness of the author. We still hear some of his first person opinions on things throughout, but some of the scenes that play out are rather far out of his one consciousness. Here we have the same from Lorne. How is he to know about the scene of Connor saving the prostitute, or what happened while he was unconscious. We are not to believe that Whedon is being lazy here; it's all deliberate. Lorne has become the consciousness of the group, the point at which the five people whose memories have been wiped back to childhood, and the one person whose childhood has been wiped by Fate, come together into a collective consciousness. In this episode, he is just skating on the very edges of staying as one character. No longer is he simply Greenwalt, he's become something even more important.

Indeed, Lorne's role holds one of the keys to understanding this episode's cruxes. We're thinking, (Joss often draws us to this theme), about forging our families, and how they can be made strong, but are still somehow organic- shifting; breaking apart and falling back together. This family is often disparate- and with the adulthood of the characters stripped away, we are left with their early environments, highlighting the gaps between where they came from and where they now, literally and metaphorically, are standing. The Irish upstart son; the unhappy English Head Boy; the streetfighting LA crew leader; the bitchy self-obsessed May Queen; the Southern pot-head; the green monster. This might be what people see when they first tune in to the show; the outward appearance- the veneer under which the characters have so much in common. Yet with time, the adoring, never-seen audience start to understand and become interested by the little twists of development, the quirks and parallels. This is why we see Lorne 'performing' the episode. He is currently Whedon. He's the character, who, because he knows he's a character, and it's his story, can suddenly rise from being unconscious while the others fight like mooks. That we never see the audience is crucially important. There's a powerful loneliness about that final scene of the episode. The audience are gone- Lorne must take on faith that he has satisfied his auduence, with only the difficult to gauge clapping to go on. And then, when it's all over, he walks out of his stage room, totally alone, into the light of the 'real' world, to ponder what comes next. For me, Whedon again paints himself, the performer, the artist, as a lonely person.

Might I mention some of the specifics of the episode, you ask? Oh, go on then.

But let me stay with Lorne's words for a moment. Remember at the very beginning we here him pronounce the phrase- 'It starts with a kid'. This is very muti-purpose. First off, it means that he's chosen to start his story with Connor- only to decide not to shortly afterwards. Second, this is the theme of the episode- the youth that we leave behind, the ideas that shape us in our teens, and how we develop from them. Thirdly, it is a rumbling that Lorne knows about the Beast, those red eyes under Cordelia's eyelids.

The link between storytelling and reality is routinely questioned in the episode. We have Lorne turning from talking to his audience to talking to Cordelia about his 'surefire' spell. Notice here that the narrator is fallible- it is his mistake that makes the turn of events happen. It is as if explaining the writers' necessity for complications to simple harmony- something must happen for a story to begin. We occasionally blink between different persepctives, or get them given to us. We almost get an 'Angel for Dummies' moment in the scene between Gunn, Fred and Wesley, where the events of 'Supersymmetry' come to an awkward head, and Lorne recounts each of their different perspectives. Again, he is the fluidity of movement between the characters, the ability of Whedon's wonderful direction to suddenly whizz towards each character and consider them in turn.

How does each character's amnesia help to expand their character in the present, and what do they learn? Let's forget Lorne as the golden syrup in the flapjacks for a moment, and consider the other five in turn.

Fred- Fred here is basically a rather charming High School student who also has a yearning for any marijuana she can find. It is interesting to see her drawn more towards Wesley than Gunn in this episode, although it is not as simple as to say that this means that Wesley is truly her correct match. This is a Fred of a much lighter era- before the trauma of her dimensional nightmare, before the hardening of her ways, and before her understanding about moral ambiguity. The tendency of the two towards each other seems to pre-figure a full-blown setting up of the triangel however, which leaves the show seeming rather liek a bow-tie, with the two triangle point-to-point; Angel-Cordelia-Connor, and Wesley-Fred-Gunn.

Gunn seems still to have those identity issues which began to haunt him at the start of the season. After Angel's raturn at the end of 'Deep Down' robbed him of the alpha male role, and we see his later insistences that he is 'not a sidekick', he wants a clearly defined role within the group. He quickly decides that Wesley is the brains and Angel the leader, which leads him to the dissatisifed understanding that he must be the muscle. Inside himself, Gunn knows thta he has reasoning, coolness under pressure, a generally good judgement, and emotional ties to the group that make him much more than just this. Yet it is this struggle for definition that appears to be haunting him, just as his one note of constancy, his relationship with Fred, is starting to falter.

-Wesley goes back to his campy pratfalls, and, as much as I was bored of the static character and his lack of depth at the time, playing this Wesley, with his faux martial arts skills, against the dense, complex, dark, beautifully portrayed Alexis Denisof character of Season Four is delightful. We are reminded of his introduction to the Scooby Gang way back in 'Bad Girls', and their incredulous faces then. Also form back in Season Three, there is a reference to 'Helpless', when Wesley supposes there is an analogue of the test Buffy goes through with Kralik taking place. Clever and subtle continuity from Whedon, without the feeling of newer viewers that they are being left out of something.

-This leaves Angel. We hear that he has a chip on his shoulder about the English, and his struggling with all the more modern teenagers is most funny. The most powerful moments for him though are the obvious and much less obvious references to Connor. The obvious one is in their little speech before Connor attempts to kill him, once again with the Oedipal perspective, with Cordelia, the Mother, egging him on and promising him a reward. Angel's explanations of having lost his childhood, of his freakishness, of his lack of want ot even be born, directly connects with Connor, who for the first time identifies witht the problems of his Father, and doesn't just use them as restirctions of his own liberty. Connor, the confused disorientated child, not only doesn't understand why his Father is acting this way, but identifies strongly with the Liam he has now met. Whether, considering what comes shortly afterwards, this momentary connection is to be sustained is quesitonable, but at least there has been some mutual perspective on something- the prodigal son attempting to escape the resticting father; unhappy about what his father is (vampire/Catholic), seeking only escpae, often through women.

The second is a beautiful and I suspect deliberate little moment where Angel runs out of the Hyperion to be confronted with cars. This is just like 'A New World' with Connor, although Connor did a little better than Liam does. Yet it is this visual parallel that spoke the most to me- each character puzzled by the modern world, and just where they fit into it.

A miscellany of Any Other Business:

-'Those were some exciting products. You should think about going out to buy some of those'. Very funny; first time I can remember a character in TV referencing an advert break.

-What kind of Angel do we see when he realises that he has a vampire's natural instinct to kill? Would he have followed through on Cordelia or Fred? There's a puzzle going on about souls here- about existence and essence, determinism and free will, yet Whedon more or less skirts round the edge of it in getting Connor to the rescue.

-Just as Lorne toys with perspective, so does Whedon, as we hear once again the 'Were we in love?' question, this time the other way round. I loved that quesiton when it broke- it summed up all that te departing Cordelia left unanswered for Angel- how was he to know? When Angel asks the new Cordelia back, we hear what I suppose we must take as her genuine answer. But it will now be complicated by time and intervening experiences.

Not my favourite Whedon, but there's not a Whedon script out there which doesn't merit a close analysis, and I appear to have rambled on about this one for quite long enough. So let's have a Rain of Fire...

4.7- 'Apocalypse, Nowish'

An episode that I again could have been more impressed with; it's a pretty much straight ahead arc-heavy plotting episode, with little room for breath. Things go at an incredible rate, and the viewer continues to be bombarded by information and new happenings throughout. Of course, this is absolutely deliberate. Both de Knight and the director set out to bring the feeling of foreboding and confusion from the screen to our minds- there are so many hapennings, so many harbingers and such terror that we are left hurtling along in a visceral marathon of emotion, right to the action climax of the battle with the Beast, and the character climax of Cordelia with Connor. I have to say that as a general rule, my favourite of these arc-heavy episodes are one's that delineate a theme and roll it around, eventually alighting on a general conclusion, (the genius of Minear), or episodes where the sheer quikiness of many of the events keep you perpetually in as feeling of amused distraction (the genius of Greenwalt). This I enjoyed a little less than 'Heartthrob' or 'Reunion' or one of their masterpieces, but it certainly had its moments. -Of course, Angel is about the Old Testament. Vengeance, Fury , Redemption, Gods with short tempers, the Devil Incarnate, Blood Feuds, a giant and sometimes campy stage for the most wonderfully subversive melodrama. Hence all the harbingers- some of which seemed to strongly resembel the Ten Plagues, some the reports from that carzy John man in Revelation, worked nicely, really yanking up the tension to the nth degree. It's not enough to just have this grandiose disturbance though; in the Whedonverse the stuff going on in the foreground is usually just the metaphor for the little things with characters going on in the background. One of the strengths of this episode is that while the action of the Beast and the disturbance in the neighbourhood is overplayed, the various relationships coming to their sticking points are underplayed, so that it is only by comparison to the apocalypse and by inspection of their meaning that we see just how integral they are to the characters' trajectories. Let me specificise [say that ten times fast]

-Gunn and Fred. This relationship is very close to breakdown, and its been portrayed perfecly. The lack of trust from Fred to Gunn was fairly inevitable after his inability to believe what she was capable of. It is not true that Fred was doing the right thing, but the solution whereby he merely shields Fred is as wrong as the one where he keeps telling her that he did the right thing. He knows she doesn't believe it, and deep down he doesn't believe it either. He is desperate to find a connection, and yet everything has been lost by denying Fred her independence in what had hitherto been a mutually co-independent relationship. Meanwhile, Wesley, the character who allowed Fred to carry out her wishes, (also probably the wrong decision, but at least not destructive of her power to choose), just watches, slowly smouldering over her. The chain which is established in 'Supersymmetry' is starting to be pulled in all directions.

-Another direction is that of Lilah and Wesley. It appears that, while Wesley has invested a little in his relationship with Lilah, it may actually be the Bad character who has invested more, thereby suggesting her climb to Good may be more likely than Wesley's slide to evil, which is very much an inversion of the usual Innocence Corrupted cliche in these liaisons. Here, we start to wonder just how much Lilah needs Wesley. We know that she has been caught napping over this latest, rival apocalypse; as have the whole of Wolfram and Hart. So as some of her job security starts to slip away, is she clinging possessively to Wesley in an attempt to re-define herself, or is she merely flirting with the idea, (like she seems to do with everything else!)? In any case, Wesley's instruction to her to keep the glasses on shows where his mind and possibly heart is at the moment, and must further anoy Lilah, who, despite not being the first to call their tryst a 'relationship', seems still to be the first to believe it.

-Then, of course, we have Cordelia, and do I smell something a little fishy going on? The scene with Angel, while painful, did not ring true to me. Perhaps it's misdirection, sloppy writing or me giving too much credit to the Cordelia of early Season Three, but I find it mroe or less impossible to believe that Cordelia, without some major, painful experiences having happenned, would tell Angel that she will always love him before claiming that the reason that she cannot establish a bond is his deeds as Angelus. I understand the argument about the past being known and the difference with the past being felt, but I'm afraid I can't swallow it. Cordelia's only objection in leaving earth with Skip was her unfinished business with Angel, so now she is back home, her sensitivity, even if not her immediate affection, should be focussed on him. There's much more to be revealed in the mystery of a certain Miss Chase.

Which leads to Connor. The identification between the two, both Peter Pan's and Alice's torn from their other worlds, and then brought back with everything changed, has been entirely believable throughout, and thus, despite a slight uneasiness, I both believed and accepted the plot twist at the end. The age difference between the two of them, whiel on screen looking like about 15 years, (Connor can't be more than 14, surely?) is for the purposes of the story only two or three. Connor's ability to charm has been mentioned. Cordelia has mentioned her fear of the apocalypse. Again, her argument about giving Connor something real to hold on to seemed faux, though- the very construction of the argument leads to the perception that sex was a fake construction built to please him in some way. The irony of the completion of the Oedipal subtext in this episode is that it comes after Connor and Angel's closest connection to date. Connor, despite his protectiveness and possessiveness, asks Angel to do the right thing, because it's right, it's good for Cordelia, and because he has grudging trust for his Father, possibly partly catalysed by their meeting while Angel was Liam. Only days later, the trust is thrown away as Angel stands to survey the end of the world as he knows it. Fire rains down over the city's darkened skies, and his greatest friend and one-time suitor becomes the lover for his Prodigal Son. Laius is dead when Oedipus marries his wife. When the tragedy befalls Angel, his stength and consideration to Connor has enabled him to live, and start to try to form a bond with his son. Only for this to happen.

There's a nice link back to the gyre, as Cordelia says 'You make everything feel like its not spiralling apart', to Angel. The widening gyre is reaching Earth-shattering frequencies on both shows, and I am most looking forward to both continuations. My only fear- that nothing can possibly match 'Conversations With Dead People'. I remain hopeful.