late night not-so-fanish note
Confession: the Fred dies/is taken over by Illyria OMG! drama! tragedy! plot-line totally fails to impress or touch me. The whole thing feels a little forced and over-done, although that may be due to the fact that for the most part my feelings for Fred are more along the lines of finally! and good fucking riddance. There's such a thing as a too perfect character.
My main issues are 1) Give Wesley some peace, for god's sake. For a change. Last season he had to decapitate Lilah only to have her return from hell, and now this? To have Fred finally decide she does love him, only to have her die in his arms in the next episode? There's a point where the angst is cranked up to a level where IMO it ceases to have real meaning. For me his conversation with dead Lilah in Salvage had a much greater emotional impact in its quiet, understated way than Fred's endlessly drawn out dying scene.
2) Wesley and Fred (or AD and AA?) don't have any real chemistry. Wesley and Lilah may not have had the grand epic true love going for them, but they had chemistry, they connected, and when you looked at them you knew that they belonged together in a sense, however twisted that sense might be. Wesley may love Fred, but more than that I think he loves some pure ideal she represents for him, something he longs for desperately; and Fred herself has a particular selective perception where Wesley is concerned... I rather doubt they'd have worked out, because Wesley's gone to places Fred simply doesn't understand: there were enough moments where you could see just how far apart they really were. Her reaction to Wesley's relationship with Lilah, worse, that maybe he did actually care for her; her insistence that Wesley knew it wasn't actually his father when he shot him. There are plenty of things she doesn't want to see and/or tries to forget. But then, women seem to also make this kind of mistake about Angel all the time...
Too much gratuitous angst, on the whole.
Also, if they'd let Wesley keep his memories, there'd probably been a little less shooting and stabbing people, because then he'd remember what it's like there to lie in that hospital bed after a former friend tried to kill you and all your other friends hate you, because you fucked up once and triggered a sequence of events you couldn't have foreseen.
It's a rather interesting twist, reversing the roles like that and emphasising in yet another way the parallels between Angel and Wesley's character arcs, but it's a little too schematic for my taste.
This said, they broke my heart all over again with the end of Shells, Wesley and Illyria. Not the big drama death scene, but this, where he's willing to put up with this millions of years old demon (herself? itself? confused and lost in this world she/it doesn't know) who took over the body and burned away the soul of the woman he loved, in order to hold on to any scraps of memory, any timy little thing of Fred possibly left, a physical resemblance, if nothing else.
- But you will. If I abide, you will help me.
- Yes.
- Because I look like her?
- Yes.
- We cling to what is gone. Is there anything in this life but grief?
- There's love. There's hope...for some. There's hope that you'll find something worthy... that your life will lead you to some joy... that after everything... you can still be surprised.
- Is that enough? Is that enough to live on?