...Send me a postcard, Drop me a line
Stating points of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
'Yours sincerely- Wasting away'...
Hello everyone.
Both episodes, which could be summarised as the sound and the Fury, are concerned with re-connection, communication in and re-evaluation of the past, all of which lends credence to the reading of Season Five being a slow realisation by Angel that further interaction with Connor is inevitable, (the two lifts come up, and Masq and me are revealed side by side. Sometimes life works like that.) In 'Damage', Spike is made to confront his past, and in doing so, a mite more resolution is added to the Wood/Spike storyline, as Nikki finally, gruesomely gets the veangeance Wood could never bestow. It's also about the consequences of the end of Buffy, both from a purely plot point point of view, and in a more metanarrative sense, about how the effect of Angel's forebear still needs to resound, to keep a consistent Universe.
And internal consistency is a darned hard thing to do. 'Damage' is the 243rd episode I've seen in Whedonland, (which incidentally is 3^5, surely as big a milestone as 100 episodes), and there are little problems, but the fact that it's still revving with understandable continuity, and unharmed emotional punches is as much of a credit to the show as anything else. The emotional punch in the latter episode left me, (admittedly no more than a light-welterweight) absolutely floored, and this is the episode that finally convinced me that David Fury can write. Here, he competently gives eleven characters stuff to do (some of it is a little less crucial than, say, the absolute genius of 'Becoming'), and manages to get a funny, powerful episode with a genuinely painful but not cop-out ending. The bearded one hits the nail on the head just in time for redemption before the end of the Season. Fingers crossed for Angel and Spike.
5.11- 'Damage'
This episode plays all sorts of games with perspective, which is very enjoyable. The first one is that, for the first time in what I'll vaguely suggest is 'quite a while', we have a complete teaser with no-one we recognise at all, and certainly none of our regular characters. It recalls Faith on two levels: her entry into Los Angeles in 'Five by Five', and, more visually, the nightdress that Dana wears. She appears very similar to Faith at the beginning of 'This Year's Girl', as she awakes from her coma, a Slayer out of control. Given these thoguhts, of the Slayer line and of how it goes wrong, the plot then develops much along the line that one expects it to. Except that in the end, we are left with an onverwhelmingly positive message about the new Watcher's Council. Dana is one aspect of the Slayer spell, but notice how the plot carefully shows that it is not the Slayer Spell that has made her who she is, tortured, depressed and dangerous. This is the result of the abuse of the man with the metal, keeping women who are born free in chains of repression. Her strength, while dangerous, also allows her to take the first fragile steps towards recovery, in many ways paralleling Bethany in 'Untouched'. But the wider parallel (not a particular surprise in an episode co-written by the man obsessed with continuity, Drew Goddard), is that this is a beautiful subversion of the episode 'Consequences', in the third season of Buffy.
whit, a few 'co-incidences'
But, eventually, we get those lovely subersive hints about the new Story, about how life has moved on. Angel, the story runs in 'Consequences', is just getting somewhere with Faith, when Wesley interrupts and the Council attempt to take Faith. Here Spike, with excess baggage really not helping him, gets nowhere in rehabilitating Dana, other than to his own detriment. In the end, when Andrew backed by Slayers takes Andrew away, the viewer is left with the impression that she is in the safest hands, with Giles, Buffy and Andrew as equipped to deal with Dana, largely due to their experience with Faith, as anyone else. Giles has graduated, to be a new Quentin Travers, and one worthy of respect. Buffy, teh head of the whole global organisation, if not as administrator then at least as figurehead, is in Rome, the centre of the Empire. What is she, Saint Buffy? No, the Pope presiding over cardinals, and a Caesar presiding over centurions. And you can't help feeling, a damn good one. 'Consequences' is dark and horrible, one of the best nihilistic Noxon offerings of Buffy's run. 'Damage' subverts the shadows and allows that pure, soulful burst of sunlight that encapsulated 'Chosen' to be shed upon the bleak subject of Dana. But what about the instigator of that Ray, the Sundance Kid himself?
Spike is fascinating in this episode, largely because he plays a whole host of subtly different roles at the same time, and all of them equally sum up sides of his character. First of all, we get him as dramatic foil and competitor to Angel, as we see the lifts to the psychiatric ward opening, and the two neatly paralleled. During the conversation that follows with the doctor, Spike shows the slight differences in how he would handle the situation, though mostly stylistic rather than intrinsic. At the end, when he decides to find Dana, he shows off his impulsive streak, his tendency, in a later to be gruesome metpahor, to be hands-on. Angel shows a little more guile in double-checking the story with the nurse, and therefore gets to the truth first- that Dana is a Slayer, mad and overrun by Vision Dreams which meld with reality. In 'Consequences', Buffy is drowning, being pulled down by Allan Finch until his body is washed up in the docks. Here the weight of Slayer lore is slwoly asphyxiating Dana, and we have the tiny cell to represent it.
Angel can't help calling Spike a 'pathological idiot', but form the point of view of the sap Andrew, Spike is Gandalf, come back to him at the turning of the tide. Spike as a wise mentor, mighty in counsel, is perhaps a little daft, but there is at least a kernel of truth in Spike's development from the Grey vampire, tending only to do good due to his chip and his love for a Slayer, and now the White, a self-professed Hero. But as soon as we get anywhere near Spike as the Hero of 'Soul Purpose' or the bridge of Khazad-Dum, the text twists on us. It's Whedonland, not Middle Earth.
Spike is made to remember by Dana the deaths of both of the Slayers, and by association his oither atrocities in the long years of the twentieth century. Goddard references the line in 'Fool For Love': 'I'm sorry love, I don't speak Chinese', and we're reminded just how callous and thoughtless he was as a vampire. When he comes to find Dana with Andrew, and Andrew gets knocked out, he leaves him and tracks his Slayer, showing his usual persistence in a task and warrior mentality in leaving Andrew. But when he finds her again, all sorts of symbolism comes to town. We have the needle with which Spike injects Dana. Literally, it is her confused remembrances switching Spike for her earlier torturer. But also, how much of that needle reflects what Spike helped do to Dana in 'Chosen'? Do we see Spike as inflicting strength and responsibility on people who have not taken the oath that they 'are ready to be strong'?
And then we get Nikki's reclamation of the leather duster through Dana, and the cutting off of Spike's hands. He's tried to be impulsive, but he's ended up once again leashed, like the wheelchair, the lovelornness, the chip, the trigger, and the ghostliness before this action. Spike the dynamic physical vampire in perpetual conflict with fate's compulsion with making him question his instincts, in pushing him against his cerebral, poetic side. In this case, his corporeal hands come back, but how much has the Spike Hero of 'Soul Purpose been dented?
Brief bites:
-Gunn playing nine holes of golf is a deliberately corporate and lovely detail in his hook, line and sinker approach to the company.
-The answer to the crossword clue [In a mellifluous manner (7)] is, I think almost certainly, 'treacly'. We get a hint in the teaser that Dana will be hanging about with the molasses, and that all fits together with Andrew's rather sugary expositon in Angel's office.
-There's a reverse shot of 'In the Dark' in the third act. Watch the scene with Andrew talking to Spike in an alleyway, and Dana stalking them up on the rooftop. Now the woman is higher, and has the power. Now Spike is the one being chatted up by Andrew, and now Andrew is the verbose (if less cyncial), Spike. Neat work.
-Twelve vamPyre slayers for the twelve disciples of Buffy. Or twelve apostles, then leavein Dana, or Faith?, as Judas. Faith I think.
Angel and Spike's 'Nature of Evil' speech at the end is one of the highlights of the fifth Season so far. Angel has enough sympathy, and Spike is shaken sufficiently for them both to actually listen to each other. And, telling us once and for all that this episode is full of beautiful subversions, the final line of the episode is 'Once Upon a Time'. Brilliant writing.
5.12- 'You're Welcome'
What to say about how hard 'You're Welcome' hit me, even at eleven o'clock in the morning on a Wednesday, feeling a little sleep-deprived. In fact the reason why I'd been up until three the previous evening was, along with obligatory student alcohol, that I was finishing A S Byatt's Booker-winning 'Possession', a lovely novel, and one you should read if you get a chance to bite into something truly unfashionable and highly literate. Thanks to luna for the recommendation. At the end of said book, there's a truly heart-rending moment, where two characters who, according to evidence preserved for the following sesquicentury never met, do, thereby establishing a link that has all manner of gentle tragedy. And the book ends, not on this consolation, but on the loss of the record of the meeting, on how people and their feelings are ephemeral and float into the air. Much of what I felt with moistening eyes through 'Possession', ripped through me as I cried buckets over 'You're Welcome'.
It was a dreadfully simple line that did it, all quiet and unimportant. Cordelia, her old, self-assured sassiness, says that she assumed Angel would be lost without her. Angel, with 251 years of anguish contorted into only one face, almost whispers 'I am lost without you'. This isn't gentle, touching banter, it's absolutely corkscrew to the heart [copyright Dylan] sincerity, from a man who always locked himself back in his basement in the dark. The remaining scene, including Cordelia's not-quite-profession that she fell in love with him, just left me a wreck. By the time we got to Lindsey and Eve in bed, I was ready for a somnolent afternoon myself.
So, all well and good, but if you're going to have a reaction like that in a review which is supposed to have elements of objectivity, at least explain it. This is why. It's because Season Four had its own, brilliant, ulterior motive for existing, but that wasn't to do with finishing Cordelia's storyline of Season Three. At the end of 'Peace Out' I was of the conviction that Fury had provided a minor resolution, in explaining how Cordelia represented a character with no free will, perpetually buffeted by Fortune. She was what Angel could have become if he had submitted to Jasmine. But this was only the resolution to the story of Cordelia between 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and 'Home'. We still had no real resolution to 'Heartthrob' through to 'Tomorrow', 22 episodes of build-up quenched and supposedly forgotten.
That's why I cried. Because it was about a long-lost friend, and about a long-lost series. The series didn't claim it was possible to revert to its old tenor- one of the greatest strengths of Angel is the dynamic change of its characters, the ability, as Zachsmind explained, to jump the shark repeatedly and provocatively and never lose it. But this was the nod, the moment where we got the old Cordelia back for just long enough, where Angel realises what that past means to him, and another tick in the Connor Lives! box.
This is the best kind of Cordelia- the combative Cordelia who annihilates Eve, (what a fulfilling moment for every viewer), the gently cynical Cordelia who helps Wesley with his research, the slightly brutal Cordelia who commands Angel to torture his lackey for information. The Cordelia to whom Doyle meant so much; his purity, his sincerity, and his sacrifice. This may be Charisma Carpenter's best acting on the programme to date, in her last appearance. When she gets really angry because Lindsey is posing at Doyle, the waves sunk right through me, while Cordelia always used to leave me amused but not quite connected. She explains to Angel that he has raped the memories of his friends (cf Willow in 'Tabula Rasa'). And Wesley's resolution- his profession that he knows heart as well as head that it was not Cordelia who killed Lilah, is a perfect moment, particularly bittersweet when played against Angel's perpetual residual mistrust of Wesley himself.
And so to smaller matters:
-Even in a finely crafted attempt, Fury still gives in to his necessity for pointless crude humour every so often. More positively, we get the repeated existential message of Angel repeated in the line 'I think God's out'.
-Later in the teaser, an effect of the mind-rape is played out, as Angel has to let Wesley and Fred go on their rider 'Even if [parallel dimensions] exist'. He's seen Connor taken to Quortoth after a portal was opened by Sahjihan.
-David Fury appears to be the only writer who still uses Angel's original house style of time passing between scenes with rushing traffics and hierarchical skyscrapers. I miss them, and here they remind us germanely of early Season One.
-Toner is getting obsessive. So, yes, of course it's not absolutely random, (There is no Cheese Man in Angel. Discuss) Toner is the thing that makes the photocopier clearly balck or white. Angel is stuck in a multitude of grey: hence his employee's (and Sebassis' slave) strange obsession with drinking the stuff.
-The clothes scene, where they go to buy stuff for Cordelia is a reference back to the end of 'Disharmony', which I'd appreciate more if I didn't think that part of that episode was wildly misjudged.
-Colin Farrell's ubiquity recently but only recently is a fun little line, calling to mind 'Gatorade has a new colour...'
-Spike lost two hands to Lindsey's one. Spike's hands aren't Evil, and he seems to handle the possible playing by Lindsey extremely well, in a rather less impulsive manner than it at first appears. I liked the description of blood as wine, being 'astringent with a slight oaky flavour'.
Doyle's video is just lovely, and a nice nod to a beautiful episode, and a lovely conceit. I suppose they thought 'We'll show you there are still heroes in this world. Is that it? Am I done?' maybe took the emotion a bit far a bit early. In any case, it re-doubles the impact since of course Glenn Quinn has died, and so the grief is real.
-Fury references his own episode with 'The House Always Wins', but this line seems to have more intelligence in it than the whole of the former episode. Just who is in control at Wolfram and Hart? -When Angel is stabbed through the chest by Lindsey towards the end, I'm fairly sure there's a deliberate visual reference to 'Becoming', thus heightening the Angel/Cordelia, (and indeed Angel/Lindsey), relationships by inference. At a similar moment, there's one particular look Fred at Wesley which seemed kinda significant.
And then the end. I was dreading Cordelia turning out to be a faux!Cordelia, in the same way that Roger Wyndham-Price was. But they spared me this, and instead we had the real spirit of Cordelia, even if not all of her physically. It was like a concession from the Powers that Be, and a very beautiful one. The link between the Powers that Be and the producers can't be overlooked. Although Cordelia's arc is done, there is a lot she can show Angel about his own journey. Hopefully, she really has done so.
The final kiss, is, even as a person not totally invested in Cordelia and Angel's romance, powerful and meaningful. Because what a kiss means is consummation- the consummation and confirmation that Angel hoped to find at the beach in 'Tomorrow'. Now, when they finally get it, it is still a consummation. But now no longer of their togetherness, but of their loss. Cordelia has already explained she cannot be with Angel. The kiss seals not their love, but their separation. From our bleak 'I think God's out' over the butchered nuns in the teaser, we reach an ending where Angel says thank you. And this gratitude is threefold. Gratitude to Cordelia, who as always has pre-empted it with her cheery 'You're Welcome'. Gratitude to the Powers that Be for granting Cordelia the final chance to help. And a metanarrative thank you from Angel and possibly David Boreanaz on his one hundred episodes. Achievement tinged with loss. A lot of that going round since the show's cancellation.
Which leaves us, blubbering like a whale's fundament, to think hard about what it is to lose someone, what it is to lose our series, how we'll miss the good times, and it will be painful to remember. For this, be it a romantic feeling or not, we need Rosetti, the stalwart of a thousand funerals:
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
One hundred episodes, one hundred memories. If ME says to me 'You're Welcome', I reply, belatedly, like Angel:
Thank you.
TCH