ANGEL
S5x05 –
Life of the Party
Review by Terry J. Aman
It's Lorne!
And he's so cheerful, and happy, and a big bursty ball of energy like he always
is, fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun!
Well, not so much.
And now with seven years' bad luck to boot.
The opening sequence (again, a long single shot following Lorne) begins with a
muted strain of Thelma Houston's "Don't Leave Me This Way," which
segues into Lorne trying to sell a space adventure vision of "The Grapes
of Wrath" -- it's got space battles, laser beams, explosions, a tale of
interstellar poverty (Tom Joad, the dirt poor farmer, on a journey through the
stars? That sounds vaguely familiar. One wonders if that was Joss' pitch speech
for "Serenity.") Lorne is asked to dig up a leading man and he tells
them he'll get back to him. Henry Fonda played the lead in the 1940 original,
but it's a great discussion as to how limitless Lorne's power has become by his
reputation -- what kinds of things has he promised in the past, and -- more to
the point -- what kinds of things has he delivered?
Having a driven, helpful guy whose empathy has become a persuasive force on
your side must be a pleasant thing. After all, Lorne hasn't slept in a month,
so his powers of persuasion must have been building over this time. And with
all the demanding demands demanding actors and actresses and agents and
directors and producers have been making in all of Lorne's power lunches and
Lorne trying to deliver -- and magically doing so most of the time, I'm
guessing -- asking him to bring Henry Fonda back from the dead probably doesn't
seem like too much to ask at this point.
Again, I bring up the notion that these people, these department heads, need
some staff. Lorne's interaction with his assistant, Van, is fun, but if Lorne
is as busy as he claims to be, he really ought to be delegating some of this
activity.
It bears out what Fred was saying in "Unleashed," however -- everyone
is working way too hard. Later in this episode, we see Fred and Wes both
concerned over a mystical grenade that didn't work, and both of them -- along
with Knox -- were heavily involved in the creation of it. I enjoyed the tension
of division rivalry, but it felt like, um, don't all of you have better things
to be doing?
Well, it makes sense that they'd want to be very hands-on since they were
sending it out to help Angel, in this case fight a Thraxis demon. Leaving a
task like that to underlings -- underlings who may want nothing better than to
see Angel aloft in the breeze. But they themselves worked very hard on it and
it didn't work, so it's kind of the same difference.
I liked that knowing feeling Wesley got when he knows something.
Back to Lorne's truck through the lobby and his exchange with Harmony. It's fun
that they had a nice little vibe going -- "The hair, the eyes -- no wonder
the fourth floor's got a crush on you." Angel's broody party-poopery was
well established, which led us to a nice exchange with Eve. Who, so far as we
can tell, got to hang out briefly with naked Angel. "Gentlemen's
time" indeed. With this scene and the one in his office, David had to
spend a lot of time with Sarah Thompson in advanced stages of deshabille.
It was never as scandalous as many scenes in "Nip/Tuck," but it's
pretty racy even for a Joss production.
Finally alone, Lorne enters his office. He has a beautiful office --
spacious, actually tasteful, with space-emphasizing and visually engaging
statuary and muted earth tones, against which the vibrant Lorne collection
shows forth like a blazing star. He takes a moment to collect himself, because
it's obvious that the pressure of what he does is really getting to him and ...
this is the first time I've noticed this. Lorne's reflection sings to him in
the broken and he looks deeply troubled.
More than Lindsey's performance in "Dead End," I wonder if this
is where he sees his final moments in "Not Fade Away."
One wonders if he can read himself ...
His reflective pep-talk over, his flicker of grave concern past, we sweep forth
to the resumptive accompaniment of "Don't Leave Me This Way" and
Lorne singing it into his cellphone as he strides forth and back into the fray.
He's got a party to plan.
It's one of the best uses of music in the series. Joss has a great ear for
sound and story and the plaintive pleading message of that song -- "I
can't exist, I'll surely miss, your tender kiss, don't leave me this way
..." -- was beautiful.
Lorne is self-destructing.
Roll credits.
Lorne gets everyone together and the main point of the episode is the party.
Party, party, party. He's all upset because everyone's kinda bummed out about
it, and despite all his hard work and preparations, he can't get Team Angel to
focus on having fun or even relaxing a little.
But his powers of persuasion are kicking in, and he gets everyone in a party
mood eventually -- even tho, during the party itself, for quite a long time the
only person who's out there on the dance floor dancing is Harmony. But this is
the best thing about Mercedes McNab -- how she looks -- so watching her dance
is pleasant.
First, tho, he has to get the guest list.
The episode introduces a member of The Circle: Archduke Sebassis. We're not
given his full significance -- it's not really even hinted at -- but Joss being
who he is and adhering to his commitments -- no story arcs, simple,
self-contained standalone episodes -- recognizes the potential for telling
different parts of stories and making them even more amazing by weaving them
together down the road. They overshot themselves with Jasmine, and this
introduction, bit by bit, to the members of the Circle, actually seems like a
better approach.
Sebassis is charismatic, charming, scary, a little too S&M with his
nameless manservant, perhaps (who in this episode becomes the "Pee-Pee
Demon"), and doesn't seem to be the party sort. We know he's delightful,
of course, and his aristocratic nature is wonderful. "Your contempt is
fragrant" is a phrase I'd love to use sometime in my life.
He agrees to attend, and presumably all of the other hold-outs do domino in
behind him.
One moment ...
Before we get to the crazy fun of the party, let me discuss a couple of
conversations. One of the things I love about "Angel" happens, in
fact, to be Angel, and I want to not fly past a couple of these exchanges so
quickly.
First: Angel and Eve in the elevator.
Angel gives a show-so-far on what being in charge of the company he'd done
everything in his power for so long to bring down is doing to his soul. He's
conflicted, given to rationalization, he's done things he's completely unhappy
about -- in getting to the low morale of the company, he's had to do a lot more
violence than we've seen on camera. And he's never certain that any given move
isn't exactly what the Senior Partners want him to do. That kind of
second-guessery wears on a person.
And he did more confiding in that one brief moment than we've seen him do all
season -- and it was with Eve.
His ties to his staff are clearly weakening.
Step ahead to Angel and Lorne in the limo on the way to Sebassiseseses' 
He realizes -- almost surprised by it -- that this party being a success means
a great huge deal to Lorne. And they talk about Lorne's position in Team Angel.
And they talk about it after that flicker
of concern Lorne got when he may or may not have been reading himself in
the mirror.
I'm on your team, he says. I don't have super-human strength, I can't do
physics, I can't do spells. But this is what I can do, he says. It's something
I can do.
Well ... yes and no.
He can, after all, do absolutely anything. He was the first one in the evil
limo, he was entirely won over by the job, and he's right -- he is the Host
with the Most when it came to Caritas (although that space got destroyed more
than once even with the anti-violence spell in place).
He's the schmooze factor, the lubrication in Team Angel’s engine, the buffer
between prickly personalities, the guy who's always there to hear everyone's
troubles. And as we saw at the mirror, there's barely any of him left over to
support himself.
He was strung out and stressed. A good leader would've talked to him about that
much earlier than Angel did, but even Wesley, onetime head of Team Angel, has
been to wrapped up in his own stuff to check in with him and see how he's
doing.
Course, as I said before, all of them are working way too hard, which supports
my W&H-as-meatgrinder theory: Just try to be in charge of everything
we're in charge of and not be evil.
The party was good, the spells were mostly harmless (although Angel shagging
Eve may have been the "EW!"-factor that made her all but universally
hated and earned her the title of "skank on a stick") And naturally
shagging Eve is no road toward perfect happiness, tho Spike's enthusiasm for
him "getting some" was part of why Spike was just pleasant in this
episode.
And as lighthearted as this episode ultimately was -- Wes and Fred are fun
together, even with Fred's unfortunate timing ("Let's be better friends
than we are. We could be confidantes, confiding confidences -- Whaddyou think
of Knoksch?") Oy. That was so much fun I almost forgot about where they
were -- the Psyche Component Storage, where people have apparently had their ennui
removed, which was just fun -- it got very dark with the assassination by
Lorne's Hulkster alter ego of Artode, and the Archduke threatening a rain of
destruction.
This storyline resolved itself a little too easily, but to be honest, while
this pathenogenic golem worked really well in "Superstar," it's quite
impossible to believe it in this case, mostly because no one had ever seen it
before. It's a creature built entirely without stealth, and this is a busy
enough law firm that someone would've seen it before (the mystics do
regular sweeps for noncorporeals, fer Pete's sake, they would've found that).
Course, they would've found Pavayne, too, so whatcha gonna do?
Since it was dressed as Lorne was dressed in that episode, it may have
manifested that very day, but to be honest, wouldn't someone have noticed
that?
Anyway, it shows up, goes "smash," kills Artode and the demon who
came to the party as "hooman bean" -- leading to potentially the
worst line of the season (and maybe the series) delivered, naturally, by
Harmony -- "Someone really dipped his chip" -- a close second behind
Eve's "What would you like passing through these lips?" in
"Conviction" as really terrible lines from otherwise superior
story-tellers (those were some serious clinkers) -- and it is disappeared as Lorne
finally settles down and takes a nap the way he's meant to.
I ... had no idea I had this much to say about "Life of the Party."
But Lorne-centric episodes are few, far between, and just joyous -- and also,
they tend to foreshadow, and they give the writers an opportunity to take a
step back and give us a "show so far" perspective. And naturally,
examinations of the green guy himself are always satisfying, and lend
themselves well to metaphor. In this environment of pushing ourselves so hard
to meet challenges, to make ourselves vital, it's really possible to try to do
too much.
After all, what we don't know about sleep would overflow the Library of
Congress, but this was ultimately a great storyline. Without any escape from
it, Lorne's entire world had become a dreamscape bordering on nightmarish, and
it was a very cool discussion -- when you try to please everyone, you end up
ruining everything. Being omnipresent isn't the same as being vital.
No Gunn Watch, no Powers-That-Sit-There this week. It's enough discreetly not
to have mentioned Gunn's unfortunate role in the episode except in passing.
Instead, the whole "Set realistic goals," and "Take a break once
in a while," and "You're no good to anyone if you burn yourself
out" -- that's a pretty good message for a one-shot.
It's not bad advice to take to heart.