Fanfic ideas and more Angel reviews
Fanfic bunnies nibbling at me:
BTVS: Joss help me. After badgering andrastewhite for ages, now I have an idea about Buffy and Andrew and unicorns.
AtS: That Lorne and Wesley talk I promised bimo ages ago. Now I'm rewatching season 4 the glimmer of an idea finally appears on the horizon.
DS9:
- a Quark and Jadzia Dax story, covering all the six years.
- a Michael Eddington tale; he's my favourite Maquis and sadly uncovered by fanfic.
(and while we're at DS9, why am I the only one writing for celestial_templ?
B5:
- a Lochley background story covering her short marriage to Sheridan. Both because I like Lochley, and because I want to prove to myself I can write non-Centauri, non-Narn and non-telepath characters on that show.
Meanwhile your faithful reviewer continues with comments from
"In order to defeat him," says Wesley to Faith in Release, referring to Angelus, "you have to be as vicious as he is." Only a minute or so later she'll tell him he lost the mission.
It's that "do the ends justify the means?" argument which gets never resolved on this show. (BTVS, being a different show, takes a somewhat clearer stance on the matter in saying no, they don't.) In Release, Wesley nails a girl's hand to the wall and deliberately humiliates Faith until she punches him (thus proving her earlier "do you think I'd ever hurt you again?" wrong to his satisfaction), all in the name of the greater good of enabling Faith to capture Angelus. Flash forward to Shiny Happy People and Jasmine-blissed Wesley will call all the horrors the Beast wrought "birth pains", necessary sacrifices for the greater good of humanity being saved by Jasmine. Flash forward to a year later, and Angel will kill an innocent himself, and will order Lorne to commit a murder, in the name of the greater good of humanity.
Of course, the tortured girl does give Wesley and Faith a clue of where the find Angelus. Wesley's taunts might have been elementary to putting Faith into the mind frame that made her execute Wesley's idea of using the Orpheus drug to trap Angelus by letting him bite her, a somewhat suicidal gesture. It's not like all that ruthlessness doesn't have palpable effects. But where do you draw the line? And is the end result really worth it? (Arguably, since Fred at that point had already called Willow in Sunnydale, and Willow can and did ensoul Angelus without physical proximity, capturing him wasn't even necessary. But Wesley and Faith didn't know that.)
Not that Wesley is all brutality. He's quite tender with Faith in the opening sequence, trying to dress her wounds, a scene which will be echoes with Illyria in season 5. In both cases, he's acting as a Watcher in the Giles, not just the Quentin Travers sense. And while we're at this early scene, Faith taking a shower is a small but great scene, because it takes something which could have easily been cheap exploitation (ED in a shower) and uses it to show Faith's extreme vulnerability. The shower scene isn't about Faith being sexy. It's about Faith being hurt, and lashing out helplessly.
Unfortunately, the last Faith episode of season 4, Orpheus is my least favourite of the season. And probably my least favourite featuring Faith. Not that this has anything to do with Faith. Orpheus has some good ideas - and brings the return from the underworld theme of the last episodes full circle - as well as funny invidual moments (Connor imitate a game face, 70s Angel with the horrible hair and the horrible Manilow, and the Willow/Fred flirting is cute). But. But. But. Upon rewatching, I was still ticked off by the same things which annoyed me the first time around.
1) While calling Willow for help makes sense given that she is, as Wesley says, the only living person to have successfully ensouled Angel, the way she is written at that particular point clashes completely with her simultaneous season 7 BTVS characterisation. Fred's phone call happened in First Date, BTVS, at which point Willow as still very hesitant and guilt-ridden about using major spells. Granted, the episode didn't have the time to get deeply into Willow's issues - the regulars were what was important, after all. But a line or two about her problem and a little bit more low key characterisation instead of happy-go-lucky Wills of yesteryear would have done that.
2) Someone obviously thought having a scene with real life sweethearts AD and AH comparing trips to the dark side was cute. By itself, it might be, but in the overall context of both AtS and BTVS, it jars.
3) That third person thing again. I keep telling myself "they rectified that again in season 5", but the whole Angel vs Angelus concept just feels like bad fanfic to me. As for Faith getting such a shock that her sponsor fell of the wagon by drinking from a dead man - please. And anyway, if the point of that scene is to show Faith ensouled Angel doing highly questionable things, why aren't we revisiting season 2 and the locking up of very much alive, very much human lawyers in a cellar with Darla and Dru?
On to better things. Players is an excellent Gunn episode that treads not old ground again, as Gunn episodes were prone to do (That Old Gang of Mine essentially rehashes ground from Belonging as far as Gunn is concerned). He even gets to spout some entertaining meta ("trapped in a turgid supernatural soap opera"), and his adventure with double-crossing Gwen feels like a breath of fresh air while he gets to prove he can do very well in the brain department indeed. Gwen's motivation, to find a means for being able to touch people again, made perfect sense as well.
Of course, Gunn and Gwen aren't the only players the title refers to. Connor, voicing doubts about Cordelia's actions the first time, continues to be played by her. Still, it's visible what will be more and more clear about Connor in the next ep and for the rest of the season. He has the choice between believing two different things. If Cordelia lies to him, then his first love as well as the only person who ever chose to be with him for no other reason than her feelings for him isn't really. Then nothing between them is real. If Cordelia tells the truth, otoh, then everything will have a happy ending and there is a sense and purpose out there. Connor isn't really a believer, he is someone who desperately wants to believe. (A trait which holds true for post-mind wipe Connor as well, and thus is didn't surprise me he chose to regard the implanted memories as the real ones, and the others as the dream.)
Cordelia, however, gets played herself, by Angel, whose stint as Angelus served to let him finally arrive at the right conclusions. (Well, nearly the right ones since he at first assumes he's dealing with a Cordy doppelganger.) What he says about the cheesiness of the Beastmaster should have alerted her since it does look like deliberate taunting. But in the tradition of nearly all villains, Pod!Cordy grew overconfident.
Which brings us to the stand-off that begins Inside Out, Inside Out itself and a lot of questions. For starters: is Skip telling the truth or not? And: Pod!Cordy and Jasmine show significant behavioural differences. If Cordelia was overtaken completely by Jasmine by the time of Jasmine's birth, why is this so?
As to the later question: my personal interpretation is this. Beastmaster Cordy behaves much like a traditional supervillain. There is the "give momma sugar" scene with the Beast, the entire "you dare defy me?" stuff with Angelus (which, as Angel observes, is cheesy), and the way she kills Lilah ("why do you think I let him out, you stupid bitch?"). And let's not forget the pop culture references ("you want a go, Glinda?" when Willow starts her locator spell). All of which sounds very unlike Jasmine as we later get to know her. Which is why I suspect that while Jasmine was inside Cordy, she herself got influenced by Cordy's brain patterns and ideas of how a supervillain would behave.
As to Skip's claim that everyone's actions were influenced by Jasmine so she should get born; I don't think so, not to that complete extent. (Leaving the retcon meta question away completely here - I'm talking from within the show.) Angel and Darla having a child, certainly, and yes, Lorne sending Angel to the trials so he could procure a life, but not Darla's life. And of course Cordelia's ascension. But Fred going to Pylea, Gunn staking his sister, Doyle dying so Cordy got the visions in the first place? There he's just messing with Our Heroes.
Of course, the real meat of Inside Out lies not in the exposition scenes with Skip but in the Connor and Cordelia, and then Connor and Darla scenes. One of the many heartbreaking things here is that Connor doesn't jump at Cordy's explanation of the situation he rescued her from, i.e. that Angel wanted to kill her and the child. A year ago, he would never have doubted that for a moment. Now, he first suggests it must still be Angelus. Then he tries to accept it but is still stunned that everything Angel told him about being a champion and trying to do good should have been a lie. (Thus proving Angel actually had gotten to him in Deep Down.) Or that the others should be. "But I thought that they - that Gunn, Fred, Wesley, even Lorne - that they were good people." Whereupon Cordy holds her "what is good, what is evil" speech.
We see Connor standing in front of the window in those early scenes, which is an ongoing visual motif throughout the fourth season (standing or sitting, that is). He does it the first time in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and it, too, conveys both the sense of separation from the world he's watching and the desperate need to be a part of it.
The human sacrifice he procures for Cordy is both an echo of the very first girl Angel rescues in the pilot of the show - young, blond, pastel and white cloths (which is of course the very horror film cliché Buffy set out to subvert) and a visual echo of the person who appears embodying his feelings of doubt and guilt - Darla. The show leaves it ambiguous whether this is the genuine article or not while the beautiful Darla theme composed by Robert Kral for Darla the episode plays in the background.
"You can't be my mother."
"I have her memories, her feelings. Isn't that what makes a person?"
Good question. Let's ask Illyria as well. As well as looking forward, it also looks back to the episode Darla. "Who am I?" Darla asked Lindsey then. "Am I Darla?" She could not remember the name of the human she had been before she became Darla, and vampire Darla's memories were increasingly troublesome to the human she had become. She wanted to be Darla again, until she changed her mind, and then was forced into it. But even the second vampire version of Darla could no longer be like the first, troubled by new human memories, and later by the soul of her unborn child. "Who am I?" was a consistent question for Darla and Connor.
For Connor, she is Darla for a while, but here we see the damage Angelus has caused. "Why did you leave me? Did you hate me that much?" Now it's understandable why Holtz never told Connor anything about how and why his mother died, but Fred, who was present, could have done. Or Angel himself. It might have fortified him against Angelus' vicious taunt about her. As it is, though, Angelus' version was the first he heard. And the fact that Connor finds it easier to believe that both his mother and his father hate him than that they love him speaks of the extent of his self-loathing.
For a while, though, he wavers, and Darla, who might be a) a messenger by TPTB looking like her, b) his own doubts, as I said, given visual form, much like Wesley spoke to Lilah in Salvage, or c) really Darla, whatever was left of her, gets through to him to the extent that he starts untying the girl. And then Cordy intervenes. Choosing the woman he knows over the woman he doesn't, the illusion of a higher purpose justifying even murder over the idea of having been used all the time, Connor cries out "you're not my mother!" and drags the girl to the slaughter. In the moment before Cordy kills her, he sees Darla's face on her one last time. I don't know about you, but that tops even Lilah's death for me as most shocking killing of the season.
"It has to be your choice," Darla said to Connor. Free choice, the big theme of the season. Over in the Hyperion, Gunn states that predetermination cannot be upheld, that they all have that free choice, no matter the manipulation. Which might as well serve as a comment on Connor. He was manipulated, yes, but he did have a choice, as Macbeth did, and as heroes of tragedies are wont to do, he makes the wrong one. And all the perfumes of Arabia cannot wash the blood from that little hand.
Angel's arrival, too late to stop the birth of Jasmine, serves not just as the tag scene but the introduction into the next and final act of the play. As Steven DeKnight observes on the commentary, Jasmine's light form echoes Indian deities, and like those, she has many shapes. She becomes Gina Torres, and Connor and Angel, doing the natural thing when one sees Gina Torres naked, kneel.
Okay, more serious now. Jasmine looking like GT makes no sense if you look at Charisma and Vincent Kartheiser, but I certainly don't feel like complaining - I can't imagine anyone else playing that very difficult role. More on Jasmine the next time, but let me say here that upon rewatching, I noticed Angel falls on his knees first in adoration, and only then does Connor. Which ties with the later revelation that Connor is in fact immune to the Jasmine effect (as Cordelia would have been if she had awoken from her coma), that he wants to feel the bliss everyone else feels but doesn't really. He does love her, though, and her miraculous first appearance as well as Angel's reaction to it (which is just as Cordy had predicted it would be if their baby was actually born) seems to confirm everything he did was justified after all, if it brought her.
BTVS: Joss help me. After badgering andrastewhite for ages, now I have an idea about Buffy and Andrew and unicorns.
AtS: That Lorne and Wesley talk I promised bimo ages ago. Now I'm rewatching season 4 the glimmer of an idea finally appears on the horizon.
DS9:
- a Quark and Jadzia Dax story, covering all the six years.
- a Michael Eddington tale; he's my favourite Maquis and sadly uncovered by fanfic.
(and while we're at DS9, why am I the only one writing for celestial_templ?
B5:
- a Lochley background story covering her short marriage to Sheridan. Both because I like Lochley, and because I want to prove to myself I can write non-Centauri, non-Narn and non-telepath characters on that show.
Meanwhile your faithful reviewer continues with comments from
"In order to defeat him," says Wesley to Faith in Release, referring to Angelus, "you have to be as vicious as he is." Only a minute or so later she'll tell him he lost the mission.
It's that "do the ends justify the means?" argument which gets never resolved on this show. (BTVS, being a different show, takes a somewhat clearer stance on the matter in saying no, they don't.) In Release, Wesley nails a girl's hand to the wall and deliberately humiliates Faith until she punches him (thus proving her earlier "do you think I'd ever hurt you again?" wrong to his satisfaction), all in the name of the greater good of enabling Faith to capture Angelus. Flash forward to Shiny Happy People and Jasmine-blissed Wesley will call all the horrors the Beast wrought "birth pains", necessary sacrifices for the greater good of humanity being saved by Jasmine. Flash forward to a year later, and Angel will kill an innocent himself, and will order Lorne to commit a murder, in the name of the greater good of humanity.
Of course, the tortured girl does give Wesley and Faith a clue of where the find Angelus. Wesley's taunts might have been elementary to putting Faith into the mind frame that made her execute Wesley's idea of using the Orpheus drug to trap Angelus by letting him bite her, a somewhat suicidal gesture. It's not like all that ruthlessness doesn't have palpable effects. But where do you draw the line? And is the end result really worth it? (Arguably, since Fred at that point had already called Willow in Sunnydale, and Willow can and did ensoul Angelus without physical proximity, capturing him wasn't even necessary. But Wesley and Faith didn't know that.)
Not that Wesley is all brutality. He's quite tender with Faith in the opening sequence, trying to dress her wounds, a scene which will be echoes with Illyria in season 5. In both cases, he's acting as a Watcher in the Giles, not just the Quentin Travers sense. And while we're at this early scene, Faith taking a shower is a small but great scene, because it takes something which could have easily been cheap exploitation (ED in a shower) and uses it to show Faith's extreme vulnerability. The shower scene isn't about Faith being sexy. It's about Faith being hurt, and lashing out helplessly.
Unfortunately, the last Faith episode of season 4, Orpheus is my least favourite of the season. And probably my least favourite featuring Faith. Not that this has anything to do with Faith. Orpheus has some good ideas - and brings the return from the underworld theme of the last episodes full circle - as well as funny invidual moments (Connor imitate a game face, 70s Angel with the horrible hair and the horrible Manilow, and the Willow/Fred flirting is cute). But. But. But. Upon rewatching, I was still ticked off by the same things which annoyed me the first time around.
1) While calling Willow for help makes sense given that she is, as Wesley says, the only living person to have successfully ensouled Angel, the way she is written at that particular point clashes completely with her simultaneous season 7 BTVS characterisation. Fred's phone call happened in First Date, BTVS, at which point Willow as still very hesitant and guilt-ridden about using major spells. Granted, the episode didn't have the time to get deeply into Willow's issues - the regulars were what was important, after all. But a line or two about her problem and a little bit more low key characterisation instead of happy-go-lucky Wills of yesteryear would have done that.
2) Someone obviously thought having a scene with real life sweethearts AD and AH comparing trips to the dark side was cute. By itself, it might be, but in the overall context of both AtS and BTVS, it jars.
3) That third person thing again. I keep telling myself "they rectified that again in season 5", but the whole Angel vs Angelus concept just feels like bad fanfic to me. As for Faith getting such a shock that her sponsor fell of the wagon by drinking from a dead man - please. And anyway, if the point of that scene is to show Faith ensouled Angel doing highly questionable things, why aren't we revisiting season 2 and the locking up of very much alive, very much human lawyers in a cellar with Darla and Dru?
On to better things. Players is an excellent Gunn episode that treads not old ground again, as Gunn episodes were prone to do (That Old Gang of Mine essentially rehashes ground from Belonging as far as Gunn is concerned). He even gets to spout some entertaining meta ("trapped in a turgid supernatural soap opera"), and his adventure with double-crossing Gwen feels like a breath of fresh air while he gets to prove he can do very well in the brain department indeed. Gwen's motivation, to find a means for being able to touch people again, made perfect sense as well.
Of course, Gunn and Gwen aren't the only players the title refers to. Connor, voicing doubts about Cordelia's actions the first time, continues to be played by her. Still, it's visible what will be more and more clear about Connor in the next ep and for the rest of the season. He has the choice between believing two different things. If Cordelia lies to him, then his first love as well as the only person who ever chose to be with him for no other reason than her feelings for him isn't really. Then nothing between them is real. If Cordelia tells the truth, otoh, then everything will have a happy ending and there is a sense and purpose out there. Connor isn't really a believer, he is someone who desperately wants to believe. (A trait which holds true for post-mind wipe Connor as well, and thus is didn't surprise me he chose to regard the implanted memories as the real ones, and the others as the dream.)
Cordelia, however, gets played herself, by Angel, whose stint as Angelus served to let him finally arrive at the right conclusions. (Well, nearly the right ones since he at first assumes he's dealing with a Cordy doppelganger.) What he says about the cheesiness of the Beastmaster should have alerted her since it does look like deliberate taunting. But in the tradition of nearly all villains, Pod!Cordy grew overconfident.
Which brings us to the stand-off that begins Inside Out, Inside Out itself and a lot of questions. For starters: is Skip telling the truth or not? And: Pod!Cordy and Jasmine show significant behavioural differences. If Cordelia was overtaken completely by Jasmine by the time of Jasmine's birth, why is this so?
As to the later question: my personal interpretation is this. Beastmaster Cordy behaves much like a traditional supervillain. There is the "give momma sugar" scene with the Beast, the entire "you dare defy me?" stuff with Angelus (which, as Angel observes, is cheesy), and the way she kills Lilah ("why do you think I let him out, you stupid bitch?"). And let's not forget the pop culture references ("you want a go, Glinda?" when Willow starts her locator spell). All of which sounds very unlike Jasmine as we later get to know her. Which is why I suspect that while Jasmine was inside Cordy, she herself got influenced by Cordy's brain patterns and ideas of how a supervillain would behave.
As to Skip's claim that everyone's actions were influenced by Jasmine so she should get born; I don't think so, not to that complete extent. (Leaving the retcon meta question away completely here - I'm talking from within the show.) Angel and Darla having a child, certainly, and yes, Lorne sending Angel to the trials so he could procure a life, but not Darla's life. And of course Cordelia's ascension. But Fred going to Pylea, Gunn staking his sister, Doyle dying so Cordy got the visions in the first place? There he's just messing with Our Heroes.
Of course, the real meat of Inside Out lies not in the exposition scenes with Skip but in the Connor and Cordelia, and then Connor and Darla scenes. One of the many heartbreaking things here is that Connor doesn't jump at Cordy's explanation of the situation he rescued her from, i.e. that Angel wanted to kill her and the child. A year ago, he would never have doubted that for a moment. Now, he first suggests it must still be Angelus. Then he tries to accept it but is still stunned that everything Angel told him about being a champion and trying to do good should have been a lie. (Thus proving Angel actually had gotten to him in Deep Down.) Or that the others should be. "But I thought that they - that Gunn, Fred, Wesley, even Lorne - that they were good people." Whereupon Cordy holds her "what is good, what is evil" speech.
We see Connor standing in front of the window in those early scenes, which is an ongoing visual motif throughout the fourth season (standing or sitting, that is). He does it the first time in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and it, too, conveys both the sense of separation from the world he's watching and the desperate need to be a part of it.
The human sacrifice he procures for Cordy is both an echo of the very first girl Angel rescues in the pilot of the show - young, blond, pastel and white cloths (which is of course the very horror film cliché Buffy set out to subvert) and a visual echo of the person who appears embodying his feelings of doubt and guilt - Darla. The show leaves it ambiguous whether this is the genuine article or not while the beautiful Darla theme composed by Robert Kral for Darla the episode plays in the background.
"You can't be my mother."
"I have her memories, her feelings. Isn't that what makes a person?"
Good question. Let's ask Illyria as well. As well as looking forward, it also looks back to the episode Darla. "Who am I?" Darla asked Lindsey then. "Am I Darla?" She could not remember the name of the human she had been before she became Darla, and vampire Darla's memories were increasingly troublesome to the human she had become. She wanted to be Darla again, until she changed her mind, and then was forced into it. But even the second vampire version of Darla could no longer be like the first, troubled by new human memories, and later by the soul of her unborn child. "Who am I?" was a consistent question for Darla and Connor.
For Connor, she is Darla for a while, but here we see the damage Angelus has caused. "Why did you leave me? Did you hate me that much?" Now it's understandable why Holtz never told Connor anything about how and why his mother died, but Fred, who was present, could have done. Or Angel himself. It might have fortified him against Angelus' vicious taunt about her. As it is, though, Angelus' version was the first he heard. And the fact that Connor finds it easier to believe that both his mother and his father hate him than that they love him speaks of the extent of his self-loathing.
For a while, though, he wavers, and Darla, who might be a) a messenger by TPTB looking like her, b) his own doubts, as I said, given visual form, much like Wesley spoke to Lilah in Salvage, or c) really Darla, whatever was left of her, gets through to him to the extent that he starts untying the girl. And then Cordy intervenes. Choosing the woman he knows over the woman he doesn't, the illusion of a higher purpose justifying even murder over the idea of having been used all the time, Connor cries out "you're not my mother!" and drags the girl to the slaughter. In the moment before Cordy kills her, he sees Darla's face on her one last time. I don't know about you, but that tops even Lilah's death for me as most shocking killing of the season.
"It has to be your choice," Darla said to Connor. Free choice, the big theme of the season. Over in the Hyperion, Gunn states that predetermination cannot be upheld, that they all have that free choice, no matter the manipulation. Which might as well serve as a comment on Connor. He was manipulated, yes, but he did have a choice, as Macbeth did, and as heroes of tragedies are wont to do, he makes the wrong one. And all the perfumes of Arabia cannot wash the blood from that little hand.
Angel's arrival, too late to stop the birth of Jasmine, serves not just as the tag scene but the introduction into the next and final act of the play. As Steven DeKnight observes on the commentary, Jasmine's light form echoes Indian deities, and like those, she has many shapes. She becomes Gina Torres, and Connor and Angel, doing the natural thing when one sees Gina Torres naked, kneel.
Okay, more serious now. Jasmine looking like GT makes no sense if you look at Charisma and Vincent Kartheiser, but I certainly don't feel like complaining - I can't imagine anyone else playing that very difficult role. More on Jasmine the next time, but let me say here that upon rewatching, I noticed Angel falls on his knees first in adoration, and only then does Connor. Which ties with the later revelation that Connor is in fact immune to the Jasmine effect (as Cordelia would have been if she had awoken from her coma), that he wants to feel the bliss everyone else feels but doesn't really. He does love her, though, and her miraculous first appearance as well as Angel's reaction to it (which is just as Cordy had predicted it would be if their baby was actually born) seems to confirm everything he did was justified after all, if it brought her.