Hello everyone.

Sing along to the theme of the Season. It's not about Angel's inability, it's about his own lack of self-worth. This all boils down to some poor past decisions, the paranoia of working at Wolfram and Hart, and Spike playing an alternative route to the prize. These two episodes don't quite keep up the monumental run that has been building since 5.6 (but then, with no fewer than seven episodes in a row being marvellous, it's churlish to complain), but they do hit on a few interesting points about the journey of the Season. The first one does it little too sincerely, and the second one- well, the second one is one of those episodes that suffers for me when I have to think about reviewing it. It's darned wonderful, and great fun, and it's hard to write about, but that doesn't mean it's failed. It means it's been an enjoyable hour rather than a mind-stretching heart-breaking one.

One of Season Five's great strengths so far has been its balance. It's managed to balance Angel, Wesley, Spike, Fred, Gunn, Lorne and Harmony perfectly, (and in that order, relievingly), it's popped from gentle but not pointless comedy in 'Harm's Way' to wrenching emotion in 'You're Welcome' to cryptic riddle-time glee in 'Soul Purpose'. Angst in 'Damage' and 'Tale', and families in 'Lineage' and 'Destiny'. It's actually had the most diverse yet coherent range of episodes of any Season of Angel I remember, after Season Four's delicious but joined up, and thus consistent yet similar, melodrama. Depending on the final eight episodes, it has the ability to be the finest Season of Angel to date, and even if the end is not what it should (a resolution of the Angel-Connor storyline, Gunn's playing with reality and Spike's motivations used as parallels), it will still be up there with Season Two. I went into Wolfram and Hart desperately wary of workplace dramas, and I've been convinced. I mean, they gave me a pen...

5.13- 'Why We Fight'

One of those episodes that I imagine had the writers (possibly the males more than the females?) rubbing their hand together in glee and remembering being young. Who doesn't love a Second World War yarn? Well, I have certain issues with it. As a stock genre used often due to the intensity of human drama, the immediacy of death and the necessity of comradeship in unlikely people, the Second World War has been plumbed as a background on so many different occasions that episodes like these immediately encourage comparisons. Is it like U571? It is better than Das Boot, or The Hunt for Red October?

What Angel does manage to do interestingly is to explore the mythology of its universe when it collides with real life events. We get the old-style Initiative acquiring vampires as super-men of war- the people who can do what no-on else can. Their marshalling of said monsters seems to have been particularly haphazard- reflecting the conclusion come to at the end of Buffy's fourth Season about the magic of the super-natural, not to be controlled by a gun on a glass desk.

We're given a possible entry into the Second World War, when Spike mentions Angel's 'patriotic phase'. This is a clever mislead by the writers, a piece of Spiek sarcasm that cuts both ways. We wonder whether Spiek is snarling at his bravery, when in fact he's ironically lauding him while Angel is actually just as brutal and disconnected as he'd be shown to be in the Hyperion a decade later. Angel ensoulled but pre-Whistler continues to be a fascinating character to me- thinking of 'Orpheus' and his latent desire to do good eroded by a glut of self-pity and confusion. Now we're in the same space again, and the comparison works nicely- now Angel again desires Good, but cannot connect with it. And where before it was partly his 'leopard with stripes' status, him being the two-way outcast, neither vampiric nor human, now, to an extent, it is the precise opposite- the fact that Spike is in the position as him, and may, he fears, be handling the situation better.

The submarine setting of the episode works well for the kind of claustrophobic brooding that Angel feels through the first half of the twentieth century. It's dark, subdued and inescapable. Where his months under the Seas after 'Tomorrow' enabled him, due to moments of grace in his life, to understand his calling more clearly (climaxing in the beautiful 'We live as if the world were what it could be' speech), here without Connor, Cordelia and Family, his submersion is just another form of death. Notice that at the end of the episode, both Lawson and Spike are forced back to the surface by Angel, accepting a baptism of new life, reborn through him to fight on, even if evilly. Angel offers himself no such baptism, instead staying below in his marine basement, brooding about the weight ofhis soul, an ample ballast.

How do the specifics of the episode re-inforce the central Angelic theme? Why, thusly:

-In the olden days, the gang played a lot of Jenga. The plot points built up in ever more dizzying ways, until someone had to pull one slab out which would make the whole tower fall down and let the past make no sense. Connor is the pulled out block, never to be replaced on top of the pile...

-Lawson is not a simple substitute in this episode for Connor, although that's one of the twists. Here he is commanding a 'Firefly' like assortment of officers (there's a certain fatalism in this vessel's voyage that suggests a macabre metanarration on the end of the space show), with a young Tom Cruise face that longs to be moulded into all sorts of comparisons. Of course, he's Angel, the man who, since life was sucked out of him (Lawson's by Angel himself, Angel's by Darla, and then Buffy, Darla, Wesley, Holtz, Connor, himself etc), can find no deeper reason to live. Back in the war, the polsihed, elaborate protocol of order and command would have been perfect for Lawson as vampire, would have shaped his life a little. The irony is that the human Lawson was never attracted to such order, only drawn into the conflict for the greater good, after seeing the atrocities carried out by the Germans).

-[Incidentally, the rather coy, vague suggestion that he's seen 'pictures' of what the Germans are doing seems a little playful by ME. It deosn't make sense that he could have seen anything other than pictures of general warfare, as a non-conscript. But whatever.]

-I enjoyed both Nostroyev and the Prince of Lies. There's a real humour in calling a character by a name which seems so overblown. It reflects on how difficult it is for Angel to become an embodiment of Champion or Hero. This wizened Camden Toy seems bathetic to his name, , and is eventually rather easily dusted.

-Spike's off the cuff 'Heil Hitler' to Angel is worth a moment's more consideration than Spike himself probably gave it. Angel here a souled vampire, working against his conscience to commit the wrongs he does. In some ways, this makes them all the more painful, and reminds us of the true atrocity of Hitler's actions, working as he was as a human being.

-Angel sires Lawson entirely for the purposes of his self-centred plan, and then dusts him to let him out of the nihilism that his life has become. The end of Lawson's life is Connor's, and the fate that Spike barely avoided halfway through 'Just Rewards'. Lawson was hoping to find Angel able to explain away his hurt, but Angel has a father has never been able to do that- to Spike or to Connor (more than partially). Angel's relationship with Lawson is a failure from start to end, with only a scant consolation in allowing him to finally do the right thing after death. It must be hoped that it does not prefigure a similarly hefty tragedy of Angel's with Spike- whose arc seems promising for further redemption, or for Connor.

The writers used a 'wouldn't this be cool' premise, and turned it into a half thought through meditation on mission, right, and the emptiness of being undead. Not half bad, yet still the weakest episode in months. That's the standard Mutant Enemy set themselves.

5.14- 'Smile Time'

You can tell this is a Joss Whedon invented story, even though he didn't teleplay it, because it has his trademark subversion in it just before the second act break. The apparently simple puppet episode which turns out to be a little more complicated gets its second airing. Back in The Puppet Show, we thought Sid was Nightmare on Elm Street evil, but he turned out to be just a demon-hunter, like Buffy. This time through, we assume the puppets have moral neutrality, but in fact it's the puppets working their own alibi thorugh a much more life-like simulacram of life Samsor Framkin. And the obligatory aka David Fury raises some really fun metanarrative questions that I can't refuse to play with.

The most surface and obvious one to the plot is that Angel is a puppet, just like the puppets who control the show. It turns out the end that the un-likeable Jim Henson moptops are actually the ones with the power. This is the lesson that Angel most learn; he might see himself as a puppet this Season, but he can actually short-circuit the people who are apparently working from within. As Masq noted, Angel is not a puppet with strings, as we might expect for the parallel. He has total freedom to move, he's just a little smaller and cuddlier. In reality, it is only really his perception that makes him a puppet.

The more out on a limb meta-narratives. Joss' own (possible) game with David Fury: he thinks he's got the power to fiddle with Joss' characters and make them say what Joss was not intending, but eventually Joss sweeps in, picks up the characters he invented, and tells a story that shows that Fury's renegade opinions are just fodder for his own playful plotting.

And the classic, particularly considering how soon before concellation the show was made, and how soon after it aired- David Fury merely summarises ME in general, who think they're making one thing, but through some sub-conscious broadcast trickery (promotions, advertising, the fact that the 'Grrr, Argh' monster now says that he's Alyssa Milano, and please tune in to 'Charmed') the networks eventually get what they want, the real puppeteers.

And use you own power of puppetry to sort these dummies:

-A subtheme in this episode is about perception- what we want to show and what we end up showing: how our logical rationality is a puppet to our emotions. Witness Wesley. He tells Angel about Nina, but can't resist shouting- so jealous is he of Angel's opportunity, as opposed to Fred's apparent disinterest in him. By the end of the episode, Knox having been dismissed as a rival, Wesley is almost telling himself the opposite, that he can't be sure Fred would welcome his advances, to the point where Fred has to do all the initiation herself. Twisty uncatchable emotions.

-Who is a puppet in this episode? Angel. Wesley. Nina, puppet to the bizarre lunar cycle and the strnage quirks of a certain CEO. Also, of course, Gunn, as he's beginning to realise, is being made a puppet of by someone mysterious and connected to the big black Panther. His memories weren't permanent, and they're starting to fade. He needs a re-boost to get him back to where he was. And when he starts relying on knowledge that he didn't at first possess to understand exactly who he is, that's when it gets dangerous. Using the knowledge as a useful tool is one thing, but feeling like you're losing your identity with each bylaw starts making the viewer wonder about the less-healthy motivations of Gunn. Of course, this has been brewing since he was clearly paralleled with Lorne's sleep-deprivation in 'Life of the Party'. Gunn shouldn't have to be a puppet, and being fed some ridiculous distortion abotu how he used to be 'ignorant street muscle' is no use either. Gunn has always been a good, charismatic warrior, and an able leader with great powers of logic. That he should hold so much self-worth in so small a thing as legalese is the real danger sign.

And a few things more expandonable to wrap up the review:

The allusion to 'Flowers for Algernon' was really interesting. In the book, a moron is given drugs that raise his intelligence momentarily to that of a genius, before lowering it back again. The moral and personal consequences are dealt with neatly, along with a lovely parallel of him to a lab-mouse called Algernon. Gunn's predicament is not so over-lapping: it may be the mataphor he sees rather than what is actually going on. Gunn has been imbued with knowledge, not intelligence, and the slipping away shouldn't be compared.

-The Season One Buffy feel doesn't just come from 'The Puppet Show'. There's also a really gothic 'Nightmares' feeling about 'Smile Time' itself. I half expected to see Xander's clown gazing down at me. This early referencing of the show in its infancy plays nicely with the childishness theme.

-There were more than a few 'Squee!' moments in this episode, unrelatable to erudite criticism, but meriting a mention nevertheless. Nina as 'beautiful, engaging, occasionally hirsute'. The puppet who could only speak through his gazoo being called 'Horatio Hornblower' [magnificent]. 'Edutainment'. Angel's nose coming off and his hug of Fred. 'The difference between analogy and metaphor'. Swearing puppets. The money shot on Angel with his sword. Just a marvellous collection of sillinesses.

And a few things more expandonable to wrap up the review:

-The most delicious line about the 'Smile Time' show: they were last in the ratings last year, so they had a revamp and made a deal with the devil, and now they're number one.' Joss' thoughts on his Season Five concessions perhaps, although he has neither let the overhaul hurt the show nor picked up the ratings so violently.

-Fred's killing of Horatio Hornblower (how could she?) is a lovely, utterly stupid reversal of 'Lineage'. Fred ignores the threat of the big purple bird [?] until Wesley is in trouble, and then crazed-ly shoots it dead, just as Wesley did his father's robot. Edlund has a brilliant way of undercutting the serious moments of a season while making a point himself. Remember Lorne's 'It's not about Right, it's not about Wrong, it's about Party', in his previous episode.

-And so we end on Fred and Wesley, finally the less deceived. Learning that they shouldn't be puppets. The repetition of the word dislodges somnething in the dusty library of my brain:

Whistler: So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.

Stoke up the fires for the end of the Season.

TCH