Best excuse ever: evil hand issues
I just caught the rerun of "Dead End" on TNT. I love that episode. It's not the best episode ever, but it's got so many good moments: some great glimpses of what makes up Lindsey's life at the beginning of the episode, Lindsey's performance at Caritas (which immediately made me think of asta77), the Angel/Lindsey bickering rivalry, the evil hand speech in the conference room, Lindsey telling Angel how to get to Wolfram & Hart. Especially the evil hand speech. I want an evil hand so that I can blame stuff on it. And I'm not generally one to notice homoerotic subtext unless it's really freaking obvious, but even I picked up on the Angel/Lindsey hoyay in this episode. Whew.
I wish Lindsey's plans in S5 had made more sense. I never really got a solid bead on why he was back and screwing with Angel, because they seemed to have made a sort of peace with each other when he left; I always took his advice to Angel at the end as him tacitly admitting that he was now rooting for Angel to take W&H down, even if he didn't want to be part of the fight. There was that great cliffhanger at the end of, I think, "Destiny" where the camera panned back to reveal Lindsey, and I never felt like the rest of his S5 plotline lived up to that moment. Or even made that much sense. Ah well.
While I'm at it, I feel like I owe "Ted" an apology because I was talking smack about it before. It's not a great episode, but like "Some Assembly Required," it manages to take a pretty cheesy stock horror premise--Frankenstein monster, Stepford robot--and invest it with a lot of emotional resonance, and I really enjoyed rewatching it. It's certainly nowhere near the badness of "Inca Mummy Girl." And, in retrospect, Buffy's reaction to killing Ted, when she thinks he's human, is really similar to her reaction to Katrina's death in "Dead Things." There's a lot less self-loathing in younger Buffy, but she's still got really set beliefs in what her power is meant for and a strong impulse to confess and face punishment for doing harm, whether or not she actually deserves it.
I've caught enough of the Olympics in the past couple of days to be reminded of how much US network coverage of them generally sucks. I really don't like the way they jump around between events like rabbits on crack, and I don't think I even need to get into the inanity of the commentary. Still, I saw some good swimming, and I always enjoy the gymnastics. I don't know what's up with synchronized diving, though. It's diving, with two people instead of one. I guess it seems like there are a lot of sort of semi-duplicative and fringe sports in the Olympics at this point, and while I'm sure it's great to have your sport included, aren't the games teetering on the edge of financial insolvency?
I wish Lindsey's plans in S5 had made more sense. I never really got a solid bead on why he was back and screwing with Angel, because they seemed to have made a sort of peace with each other when he left; I always took his advice to Angel at the end as him tacitly admitting that he was now rooting for Angel to take W&H down, even if he didn't want to be part of the fight. There was that great cliffhanger at the end of, I think, "Destiny" where the camera panned back to reveal Lindsey, and I never felt like the rest of his S5 plotline lived up to that moment. Or even made that much sense. Ah well.
While I'm at it, I feel like I owe "Ted" an apology because I was talking smack about it before. It's not a great episode, but like "Some Assembly Required," it manages to take a pretty cheesy stock horror premise--Frankenstein monster, Stepford robot--and invest it with a lot of emotional resonance, and I really enjoyed rewatching it. It's certainly nowhere near the badness of "Inca Mummy Girl." And, in retrospect, Buffy's reaction to killing Ted, when she thinks he's human, is really similar to her reaction to Katrina's death in "Dead Things." There's a lot less self-loathing in younger Buffy, but she's still got really set beliefs in what her power is meant for and a strong impulse to confess and face punishment for doing harm, whether or not she actually deserves it.
I've caught enough of the Olympics in the past couple of days to be reminded of how much US network coverage of them generally sucks. I really don't like the way they jump around between events like rabbits on crack, and I don't think I even need to get into the inanity of the commentary. Still, I saw some good swimming, and I always enjoy the gymnastics. I don't know what's up with synchronized diving, though. It's diving, with two people instead of one. I guess it seems like there are a lot of sort of semi-duplicative and fringe sports in the Olympics at this point, and while I'm sure it's great to have your sport included, aren't the games teetering on the edge of financial insolvency?