our last glimpse of Cordy for quite
some time
Cordy the Higher Power is unconvinced.
She's been there for three or even four months. No one has stopped by with an orientation
guide or presented her with a schedule. She has no defined duties. She's got
this great perspective, looking out over the world, and she can't do anything
with it.
But more to the point, she doesn't seem all that intuitive.
Skipping ahead to later, where she tells Angel, darkly, that she's been inside
his head and knows everything that he has ever known or done, she is mysterious
and omniscient. As Cordy, floating there, she doesn't seem to have any of that
kind of insight.
This is why I'm pretty sure she's still Cordy.
Just ... Cordy in a bubble.
She's got no mechanisms to interact with the world she's left behind. It takes
all of her concentration, in fact ...
But let's just come back to that in a bit, shall we?
High atop one of those anonymous buildings people always seem to be atop in
this series, Angel watches over Connor fighting in an alleyway.
This could seem a little dull, but for Angel it's better than television. In
fact, a lot of the armchair coaching he's doing could apply as well to Connor
in a hockey tourney. He's such a proud papa up there. And Connor's superpower
hearing doesn't seem to be engaged (Angel is no farther away than Fred and Gunn
were -- even closer, in fact -- and there's no ocean roaring all around him).
He provides a little help, but Connor was doing just fine.
It was a nice scene, a jumping off point, in fact. In that everything in Los
Angeles is in a holding pattern, what better time to road trip out to Las Vegas
and see if the Subcommittee can pick up another prodigal.
Lorne is joyous! Vibrant! Deeply in his element. The consummate showman, and
what a show! No wonder people are stopping in to catch his act -- what a great
voice, and a great gimmick! A lounge lizard down to his toes!
And we get the backstory -- he's trapped. He's miserable. He reads people and
they die. I don't even think he's aware that some of his "clients"
are dying sooner rather than later. He balms his guilt knowing that instead of
people being killed in cold blood, at least they get to stay alive and have
sort of a life as zombies.
Gunn's confrontation with Lorne pulls both of them up short. Lorne knows what's
going on, but when Gunn finds out that he's dispensing either a lack of destiny
or actual death, there's perhaps too little discussion about what's the
difference. Even so, it was a great escape, although effected perhaps too
easily.
And we get a reminder about that old Shanshu -- that Angel has a step or two in
the apocalypso. Not that I can imagine that that's such a hot future for them
to try to market. But it is significant, and all of the baddies seem to link up
somehow to Wolfram & Hart -- i.e. "that weirdo law firm in Los
Angeles."
"Futures trading," heh.
Angel without a destiny is kind of blank. Destiny seems to be a motive force.
If you take that away, people mostly sit around and drool, distracted by shiny
things, or wander into traffic. I loved how they were going to pay Angel his
Cordy-gotten winnings in 1.2 million quarters. He'd have been able to carry
them.
And hey -- she can seem to nudge slightly the inner workings of a one-armed
bandit -- from being able to eradicate a hotelful of gift-with-purchase demons
from the Qor'Toth and stop Connor in his tracks with a glow, this seems like a
weak tradeoff.
Smashing the whatsit seemed like too easy a solve. Even if it needed to be out
in the room in order to work (and I doubt that), they'd have put more security
on it, I'd think. It was like Count Kuzco's ruby pendant in "Waiting in
the Wings" -- for as important as it is, it seems a little front and
center.
But by the time Lorne smashed it, there'd really been too much running around
and dressing up in silly costumes (Fred as a Lornette -- rowr!) for one
episode. It was fun, it never seemed like it was ever going to be really
serious. Angel pointed out that Vegas seemed a whole lot friendlier when the
mob ran it, and it was probably a lot more threatening. The baddie in this case
was a schmuck, about as mystical as a dishcloth, and his toadying affected his
abilities to menace.
And so far as I can tell, no one paid Angel his winnings.
But more valuable -- or so you'd think -- is Lorne's rescue and his return.
They're going to need him ... perhaps ...
Hmm ...
Maybe we're seeing Lorne for the last time in this episode, too.
JASMINE WATCH: She's standing in the hotel lobby at the end. Level of
certainty, about 40 percent.
I don't get the sense that it was anything Cordy did. And it was certainly
nothing anyone else did. But if you want a jumping off point for taking over
the world, why not align your fortune with a few people who've got an
apocalypse coming?
And as much "Cordy" as that vision in white ends up being, she could
just as well have materialized in the W&H lobby.
Just sayin'.