-----------------------------------------
TO: Joss Whedon
FROM: Your friends at the WB
No more arcs.
-----------------------------------------
(Well, maybe
just a big one towards the end.)
We begin with Angel swooping down into an alleyway to save the day. Which he
does. Because there's a rope there. Why is there a rope there? Nevermind, it's
all just happening so fast.
Just initial here concerning your immortal soul.
I've gotta say, in terms of an opening sequence, I truly enjoyed the contrast
with Season 1, where all the Bruce Wayne aspects start spilling out of Angel's
Batman persona.
And I'm truly happy that Eve showed up, only because I was uncomfortable with
Gunn as the liaison to the Senior Partners. In S4x22 - Home, when he spent the
afternoon in the White Room with the big cat and came out and said "We're
taking this," it was a little out of character. For a man who was very
secure in his sense of right and wrong, for the man who is the heart of the
mission, to have communed with emissaries of pure evil and come away saying, in
effect, "That was so cool," it's impossible not to infer a
whiff of corruption.
The addition of Eve -- besides being a slinky new bit of hateable skankitute --
gives Gunn the distance from the Senior Partners we the fans would demand of
someone who, up until now, would on principle be fighting them.
But they needed to do something with him. He couldn't be the head of
Hauser's division -- the division that would be doing most of the "hitting
of stuff," which Gunn claimed was his only contribution to Team Angel (and
with Spike joining the storyline, there's another warrior in the wings -- tho
his allegience is far from complete and his effectiveness as a fighter is somewhat
hampered by his incorporeality). Gunn as the head of Hauser's division wouldn't
do nearly enough plotting to murder children.
Well, they're in a law firm, and none of them have any credentials -- let's get
him mystically lawyered up and send him forth.
Besides -- as we saw in "S4x16 - Players" -- he looks damn' good in a
suit.
GUNN WATCH: I don't believe he's evil -- with one caveat. As dismissive as Gunn
was at the end about asking for permission, I will note that his lies begin
with telling Wesley he's getting fitted for a suit rather than a shiny new law
degree, and in case anyone was wondering about whether this was a decision that
got made without any opportunity to discuss it with anyone else, he had
from that moment to his appointment with Doc Sparrow -- including the
five hours he spent cooling his heels in Sparrow's waiting room.
They didn't make him evil. But they could've. And what's more, they could've
done any damn' thing, up to and including the engram for "Hey, if a
package gets stuck in customs, sign for it." Joss didn't -- I'm guessing
because he mostly needed for Gunn to take that action under his own volition in
order for it to truly distress the character.
But also, it's a question of what do we give up in order to get something else?
Gunn's legal gymnastics could've been performed by Keel and everyone else in
W&H. So it's possible that everyone in W&H is hoping Angel will fail.
But what they've really given him is a powerful weapon. And Gunn married that
weapon to his instincts as a street fighter and used it in a truly astonishing
display of grace and skill.
This law firm didn't get to be the law firm it is by handing out free lunches.
So, the Senior Partners arranged for him to have it. Was part of their
arrangement for it to be temporary? There's no indication that the Senior
Partners wanted Illyria to arise. One wonders if that was more of a side deal between
Sparrow and Knox.
Of course, all of this is speculative. He's got it, he used it, and once Fred
isolates that antidote and Wesley deactivates the mystical vessel, they can
murder the evil Corbin Fries. For now, they'll just murder Hauser and his
squad.
Angel sheds more human blood in this episode than he has in the entire series,
excluding flashbacks as Angelus. There's very little discussion of that. Now, I
don't disagree that Hauser would be a reluctant convert at best, but Angel
broke a couple of necks and spattered blood and brains all over the place (it
wouldve been fun to see him vamp out and feed, but that might have seemed
unseemly). It was maybe necessary, but he's only been in charge for like a
week, and he's already dispatching a unit of humans. Even in self-defense, it
seems a little ... tacky.
Nice to see Harmony again. She's a breath of fresh air. But her presence, and
the presence of everyone else at W&H, seems like a tacit invitation for us
to pretend S4 never happened. In "Habeas Corpses," Lilah tells us the
Beast killed everyone -- even people who were home sick that day. Sure, the
firm was entirely restaffed, but there's some suggestion that Knox has worked
there for longer than a few weeks -- he says the firm has contained more
plauges than it's caused, tho maybe he's just read up on his corporate history.
Also, if the firm actually employs vampires, then what good are vampire
detectors? Bioscanners located here and there throughout the firm would seem to
have been sufficient. Someone who weighs as much as a person but gives off no
body heat would be relatively easy to check at, say, the front door.
I think they just missed writing Cordy -- and not just Cordy, but shallow,
Season 1 Cordy.
And maybe we all miss Cordy. But it was relatively easy for me to get my mind
around her not being there. In his commentary, Joss' silence during the discussion
of Cordy in a coma (and hence, not there) was a very loud silence. Fans wanted
him to say what was up with her not being there, and he very significantly
didn't talk about it.
I have to return to one moment to discuss Gunn saying he's willing to sing for
Lorne. Knox made the same offer, and I'm wondering why it wasn't mandatory in
either of their cases -- Knox because it's easy enough for someone to pretend
to not be evil, and Gunn because he got a whole bunch of new information
stuffed into his brain, and it'd be nice to know what might've been stuck in
with it.
I loved Lorne throughout, but I do have to question the wisdom of sending a
demon to monitor an ongoing trial in open court. He doesn't stop being green
when you put a hat on him.
For now, tho, it's just fun to see these people two weeks from where we left
them, the apocalypse averted, getting used to their shiny new space.
STORY ARCS: S5 distinguished itself from S4 by moving to single-episode
conflicts -- the monster-of-the-week problem-solving. While S4 had some
compelling cliff-hangers, the extended story-arcs were more confusing, imo. The
brackets around S5, of course, is that they're all in the new L.A. branch
offices of W&H, and their whole time there is spent in moral ambiguities --
do horrible things or even worse things are in store. So the one-ers are
not entirely disconnected.
In this case, it worked, I think. Corbin Fries was a terrible candidate for a
Big Bad. As a law firm, they could deal with cases like his all the ime, and they
weren't going to focus on any one case for any length of time. And it helps
that Joss has a wonderful instinct for moral ambiguities. It's a perfectly
acceptable structure, if a little dry in the demands it requires of its fans.
But, this being Joss, he can retcon a season-spanning story arc out of anything
-- part of his genius, really. Go, Joss!
FUN THINGS: Lorne on the cell phone brokering deals, and his reading of the
staff, otter's blood in the pigs' blood, Wesley interpreting feng shui as meaning
"People will believe anything," Fred taking charge of her lab, Angel
telling Wes he turned evil a lot faster than Angel expected with his staffing
decisions, and Spanky. Spanky was a delightful one-shot character. And Spike
materializing in a cloud of smoke, and Harmony peeking around the corner to
confirm, with a hint of ecstasy, "Blondie Bear?" Nice moment of
continuity, although one wonders how ecstatic her character would truly be,
given their history and how things ended between them.
QUESTION: Does Wesley know Spike, specifically? He was the first to identify
him when he appeared. Did their paths cross at some point on "Buffy"?
Or did Wes only know him from the Watchers' Diaries?
And one haunting image, at the end of the episode, was Fred asking if they'd
done the right thing by coming there. I'm thinking that they did. But without a
vision to guide them, it's truly hard to say.
Part of the fun of S5 is the shadows it explored, and that's a big one.
Powers? Powers? Beuller? Anyone?
Powers That Be: * insouciant Willow-esque grin *
Alrighty then.
As Eve said, "Welcome to a crazy time of fun."