The one with the obscure and
pretentious title
I've got nothing on the title, beyond
knowing that it's a title of a Joan Didion essay taken from the closing lines
of a Yeats' poem which I've forgotten and incidentally, why is Lorne so much
more up on obscure literary references than I am?
In our opening scenes we see Jasmine, a shrinking violet, newly manifest in our
dimension in the shell of a very confused Cordelia.
This really ticks me off, and is one of the main problems I have with this
season.
Cordy is a conduit for the Powers That Be. She is a figure of heightened
awareness, and regardless of what she consciously remembers -- note the kung fu
with the ninja lawyers in the garden -- she is a wildly self-possessed person.
She hears her voice on the answering machine. She sees pictures of herself with
the people she's talking to. She remembers none of it, but her reaction
throughout is one of deep distrust.
She is eased, by the Subcommittee, back into this dimension. She is not blasted
with the full force of the Whedonverse from the moment she ... reappears
with no explanation and none forthcoming.
They tell her their names, and conduct their business and Angel for reasons that
will only ever be known to himself pours eight tall glasses of blood and moves
them from the lobby to his room, spilling some. Gunn and Fred return from demon
fighting and while the blood on the axe is undeniably purple Cordy somehow
thinks they're talking about actual babies. And Lorne meets with a client (who
later attacks her) and then meets with her himself (in a lovely scream take
which is charmingly droll -- along with Gunn's very funny line "Guess why
we call him 'Lorne.'")
And all the while this Cordy is reacting to everything like a blonde teenager
in a horror film -- shrinking away from the main group, wandering off by
herself, screaming at every passing thing.
'Til Connor arrives and saves her.
Let's back up a moment.
Cordy accuses Subcommittee Angel of lying to her. That's not accurate. They are
giving her the truth in manageable doses. Even after she hears her voice on the
answering machine she is backing away from them.
They do give her the full story and she freaks! She was demonstrably
unable to handle this truth and that surprises me anyway. She grew up in
Sunnydale after all with the cheerleader blindness and friends turning
invisible and, well, that graduation ceremony.
Oh, and now that I'm remembering it, the rebar through the torso that her
"Charmed" costume in "Belonging" didn't betray so much as a
dimple.
But Connor leads with "I tried to kill you. Sorry," and she's moving
in.
Not before Lorne reads her and sees in the words of her ably mismanaged reprise
of Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" (gotta love that
"Puppet Show" reference) an undefined apocalypse -- not a silent one
like in Season 5, but a big tromping thumpy marching brass band of one
"that made my skin crawl away and hide." <-- very good line.
"Do the words 'Slouching Toward Bethlehem' mean anything to you?"
Why no. Let's look them up, shall we?
SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The dark drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
Well, that's some pretty impressive imagery. The Vietnam War discussion Didion
drew seems almost quaint by comparison in a time when Vietnam is a tourist
destination, but at the time the images certainly seemed appropriately
apocalyptic.
Why Lorne has such ready access to them is beyond me, but here is a
delightful bit of misdirection. While Lorne nurses a fear he expressed better
in "Time Bomb" -- "Oh G-d don't go in there" in
reference to Gunn visiting Wesley – Team Angel mounts up on
Wesley-fresh-from-Lilah's say-so and tromps off to save Cordy at Connor's
little hole in the taxidermy.
And W&H with its vast menagerie of demons brings one along to burrow into
Lorne's skull (if that's where his brains are -- what gives them such insight
into Pylean physiology, I wonder? His heart's in his bum after all)
So Lorne has no information. Team Angel is still missing a Cordy -- as are we
all, in that that can no longer possibly be her -- and know little beyond the
fact that some undefined terrible thing is about to happen -- well, duh (it
must be Wednesday).
And Wesley called his dangerous liaison with Lilah a relationship.
Hold onto that dollar Wes -- it's important later.
JASMINE WATCH: I'm still at about 40 to 60 percent certain that that's Jasmine
in there, and I'll put it like this: Her running away from Team Angel and her
instinctive trust of Connor is not only counterintuitive; it fair reeks of
manipulation.
What bizarro hell dimension did I wake up in?
Sadly, that line is still a season and a half away, but for now, we'll leave
the light on for you.