Or ...
"Gee, Your Hair Smells Psychotic."
There's an old trick for getting out of trouble with your girlfriend. Instead
of telling her about the grabfest last night at the stripclub, instead of admitting
anything, tell half a story and then close with ... "Well, you
know."
If you let
them guess at the holes in your story, they'll probably come up with something
far more forgivable than what you actually did.
And Skip standing there saying things like "Why do you suppose that
happened?" Or, "Oo, better get busy, the monkey's thinkin'
again," was a clever way of not saying or admitting to anything at all
while the geniuses of Team Angel come up with more and more bosh.
It made him seem clever without him having to know anything at all.
That, the game at 5 and the buffalo wings were only part of why powerful demon
Skip might be a redneck.
"So ... Cordelia was manipulated into taking the visions?"
"Oh, it goes back a lot longer than that." Then, fold arms and
pretend everything that's said is right, nod and play the room. Add a few snide
comments about their respective mental capacities and that’s all Skip needed to
blow a simple cosmic bait 'n' switch operation into an all-powerful mystical
from time-immemorial PLAN.
He never really said. He rather implied all sorts of things that frankly
no one person could be in charge of and ..
"You know how many lines need to intersect to bring something like this
about?"
I dunno. Angel's in L.A. and not Sunnydale because Joyce needed for her
daughter and Angel to break up, And that's just where he landed up. He got
to Sunnydale in the first place because some seer demon told him to.
Angel is a little bounced about by fate, but ...
Oo! Oo oo oo! When the Powers -- if that's even who these are -- (ooo!)
-- make Joyce make Angel break up with Buffy, is that the beginning of her
aneurysm?
DID THEY HIDE WILLOW'S BLUE SWEATER?!
Cause it's gotta be the Powers, right?
Powers: //nowhere to be seen, nothing there but a sign hangin' up saying
"GONE FISHIN'!"//
Yeah, you'd better hide. Your disappearing act has left us an entire
season with not only no sense, but no one to blame the nonsense on.
Well, if it's not the Powers, who banished Angel to L.A.? (Joyce) Who got Cordy
to go to L.A.? (Cordy's personality -- it completely fits) Who made Lorne leave
Pylea? (Lorne, or more accurately, Fred, who was opening all sorts of portals
but not knowing where. So Ollie Seidel sending Fred to Pylea, so the Powers
probably gave him some sort of complex that made him send the brilliant physics
students to other dimensions.) Who got Gunn involved? (look, no one thing
got Gunn involved with Team Angel) Who got Wes sleeping with Lilah? (ACTUAL
MISTAKE: I thought you'd purged this dimension of all references to The
Beast. If you wanted to leave it unpurged, keep the white hats guessing,
getting Wes and Lilah together was the last move you'd want to make)
AMBITION
Pity poor Stephen DeKnight, writer and director of this pivotal installment.
Right at the beginning, Jasmine's saying that there was a time she'd have been
able to see through a trick like Lorne's eons ago.
Was that an eon ago? Because Lorne just thought of this little scheme
this past week.
The trouble with writing a villian who's too clever for the room is you've
got to be pretty clever yourself.
It's like Joss threw a box of 1,000 puzzle pieces at Steven DeKnight and said
"Build me a runway."
"Sir, these are puzzle pieces. Runways are made of asphalt. And anyway,
when these are all assembled they make a picture of a ... duck."
"RUNWAY! RUNWAY! I have a season to land and it's been circling the tower
for days!"
"These are just ... cardboard ..."
"RUNWAY!!"
* sigh * "Right away sir."
Stephen DeKnight was tasked with writing and directing an episode that is so
monumentally huge it had, ultimately, to fall apart.
But indeed, this was the season with the oblique reference to the center
being unable to hold ("Slouching Toward Bethlehem.")
"QUICK! EXPLAIN EVERYTHING!"
Explain ...
-- If Jasmine had stepped out of the sunburst that killed the Beast
-- If Charisma Carpenter hadn't been pregnant.
-- If "Firefly" had been a hit.
-- If by the end you were even pretending to maintain some sense of
reality (W&H is completely rebuilt and fully staffed indeed).
THE SEASON FEATURED THE LOCALIZED BLOCKAGE OF THE SUN, for frick's sake.
Anything -- including Cordy's sainthood -- is easier to believe.
JASMINE
Let's talk about Jasmine. She talked like Cordy, most of the time. Which made the
Beastmaster aspect of the character just ... dumb. Jasmine's got this jovial,
booming voice and is saying smoochy things to Angelus ...
Why'd Jasmine need Angelus? The banishment of the Beast could've been
discovered wthout that. Why latch on to Cordy? Why not grab any of a million
demons moving back and forth among dimensions all the time?
STOP LOOKING AT THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!
Remember the complicated story Gwen gave to rope Gunn in to save Lisa? That
story ain't got nothin' on this one. But Skip does love him a story with
some scope, so QUICKLY! Let's COBBLE ONE TOGETHER!
Why'd Jasmine need to block out the sun? Or really, for Connor to sleep with
Cordy?
//shrug// I dunno. Cuz.
Well ... um ... don't forget, their baby is special.
Seriously, what's the point?
MORAL AMBIGUITIES
I'm so glad you asked. The one. The only. The $64,000 question flashes ahead
WHAT IS THE POINT?
Jasmine: "What does that even mean? Good? Evil? They're just words."
I can see at the end of like 11 seasons where good has always got to triumph,
that's gotta get boring after awhile. So let's build up the world's greatest
moral ambiguity ...
... out of actual, unquestionable evil.
The murder of a building full of evil lawyers? Wrong, because it's possible
they could get sick of the place and leave and actually fight against it. In
Lindsey's case, he didn't run far enough away, but where there's life, there's
hope for redemption.
The murder of a nightclub full of people. Evil, because again, they're people
and deserve a chance.
Oh, unless you're already arguing that their lives are forfeit because they're
not good enough already. Well, fair enough. You just tend that psychosis
on your own time.
The emotional pain inflicted on people, the bald-faced manipulation of Connor,
the deaths she ordered and tried to bring about.
The destruction of lives and property in the endless night and the subsequent
vamp and demon attacks. Hard to picture anyone with any decency condoning that.
Murdering the Svear and Manny? Means to an end? What end? NOTHING YOU DID MADE
ANY SENSE!
And finally, the blood of that young woman?
Here's where Jasmine, desperate, tips her hand. She says that if the girl isn't
killed, the baby will die. Before, she'd just said if the girl isn't
killed, the baby wouldn't be born for another week or so. And again, all Connor
needed was a single handful of blood. Killing her was way over the top.
Jasmine the creature isn't even morally ambiguous. She's quite simply psychotic
and megalomaniacal. If she was morally ambiguous, why was she OK with all the
death and destruction she left in her wake. Say instead of a couple of victims
to do what she did, she needed a million. A million people everyday, to make
life pleasant for, say, a dozen.
For everyone who has said it's valid that Jasmine take a few lives here and
there in sacrifice to make life pleasant for everyone else, are you starting to
see the problem?
"Her blood for our baby. That's more than fair." Oh yeah? I didn't
hear her vote. I didn't hear her agree, "Oh, that makes perfect sense, of
course kill me now and use all of one handful of my blood to bring about your
mystical hellspawn. BY ALL MEANS!"
No, I think I remember her screaming PLEASE! PLEASE! NO! PLEASE! NO!!!
Well, that's why you need a thrall. People are much more compliant in a
thrall.
OUT OF CONTROL
Cordy at the beginning was derisive, flip, pretending to be so clever. Yet as
they outlined all of the stuff she'd done, after saying how they'd tracked her
down, I never heard why they continued to pretend to trust her while the
confrontation was being planned. Why Connor, given that outlandish and
impossibly unsubtle entrance was able to prevail in the fight. Why however
clever Connor is, how Angel is unable to track pregnant Cordy is beyond
me.
And at the end, he goes right to her.
Never mind the deus, there's a frickin' clown car in this machina
and it's tickin' me off a little.
//brooding// Couldn't even properly enjoy The First as Darla.
It's possible the way Jasmine would work is to turn everyone good, thus
shutting down The First's power source. I prefer her as a ghost or an angel.
But I could see her as The First making a last-ditch effort to preserve itself,
and Darla's certainly dead enough.
Whoever came up with that idea had a whopping clever idea. I like Darla posing
as The First.
With one exception: The First is all about power and destruction, so an
alliance with Jasmine, rather than a thwarting, would just make more sense.
It was a great scene tho, wasn't it? Along with the appearance of Something as
Darla, the really standout things in this episode was Angel's chainfight with
Skip, and Wes finishing the job.
Indeed, sometimes those things do work.
And if you can't tell already, I'm with Gunn on this one. Jasmine is an
opportunist who latched onto Cordy who'd been bamboozled onto a higher plane of
existence and wasn't even given a lousy bag of peanuts.
Our fates, good Horatio, lie not in our stars, but in ourselves, and that's a
much easier course of storytelling to believe.
Unless that's just what Jasmine wants you to believe ...
Oo! I just blew my own mind.
So ... Jasmine, huh?
Any excuse for Gina Torres to be nude on a soundstage, am I right, people?
As for me ... well ...
As for me, I suddenly have this urge to build someone a temple and hold
perfectly still while they eat me.
[marvin the martian] Doesn't that sound delightful, hmmm? [/marvin
the martian]