Angel 5.16 Shells

[thebratqueen]

After much debate I've decided that now that weeks have passed I don't think I'll be doing the full-on comments that I tend to do for the eps as soon as I watch them. Reason being, frankly, y'all have already had the chance to discuss it to death. I'm pretty sure at this point there's not much left for me to point out. There's things to talk about, sure, but I think a lot of them can get folded in to more general comments, such as ones about Wes/Fred as a whole, or how the arc plays out over the rest of the season, and so forth. Things like "Damn Alexis is a good actor who is clearly not paid enough" is, I would hope, something you don't need me pointing out to you.

So, brief comments then.

Though the Alexis thing is a given I must give props to Amy, which I'm sure is also a thing that many others have said but I want to repeat it anyway. Girl couldn't act to save her life in s3 but she did a great job here. Granted I noticed the few times she slipped and the fact that she was paired with a great director, so I'm going to be curious to see how well she manages to continue doing Illyria as Illyria and how much of this is going to be fuzzy tigered under the same canon fallback of "Oh yeah, Spike's accent isn't actually real" (ie "Fred's impulses are still in there, so let's not call continuity error when Illyria has a Texas twang and starts using Amy's Fred's mannerisms"). But for this ep she done good, and her slipups were few and subtle.

The award of MVP, though, has to go to my boy Steve, who again I must say clearly loves me and wants to father my children. Because for me the key of this ep was the tone, and if the tone failed then the ep would have failed, no matter how good the acting was. Case in point? That slap in the face that we call A Hole in the World.

See here's the thing, I'm fine for Joss's little weaknesses. I know he likes to throw in random and completely unforeshadowed elements into the story for the sake of the story and let's just nevermind that they make absolutely no sense. Tim Minear does the same thing too and I don't mind it with him either. So it's not the random things per se that piss me off. Joss can introduce his Illyrias and his "Knox was a demon worshipper this whole time, no really he was"s all he likes because this is the same writing technique that gave us things like Acathla, which I think we can all agree worked out pretty well in the emotional and narrative scale. We forgive the fairly nonsensical step one of the story when step two packs a mighty whallop. I'll buy a thousand Darlas getting pregnant if it means I get "Home" in the bargain, in other words.

But the crux of all that is the step two has to be phenominal, and handled well, and make absolute sense for all the characters. It's okay that out of nowhere Angelus is suddenly interested in a big rock if it means that later on we get to watch Angel and Buffy go through the horror of Angel being sent to Hell. It's a vague sort of canonical AU, in a way. As long as the characters are true there's a lot that can be done and a lot that can be forgiven.

On the Kinsey scale of totally bruce plot ideas that Joss himself came up with I think Acaltha would be in the realm of "Good", Buffy's death in The Gift would be in the middle ground of "Ehhhokay" where the story itself made fuck-all sense but for all that you can't deny the emotions pulled at your heartstrings, and the death of Fred falls waaaaaay on the other side with "Seriously, what show were you writing that week, exactly?"

I don't deny that AHitW had some good acting in it. Lord knows Alexis can bring it pretty much no matter what. And yeah, there were things about that ep which had goodness to them. But in the week that followed I kept working it over in my teeth and finding myself unable to escape the conclusion that all things considered what we had was the equivilant of a string quartet playing a beautiful piece of music while some jackass with about fifty untuned electric guitars stood right in front of us and randomly plucked chords while the amplifiers were turned up to 11. I can't get to the beauty with all the shit somebody put in the way.

Joss? You shat all over your show. You shat all over what could have been a classic ep by filming the whole thing in time and a half for no reason I can discern (and don't argue with me that Joss was trying to convey a sense of urgency. you can do that without feeling as though the story itself is being told like it's being recited by a four year old whodoesn'tunderstandthatsometimesyouneedtotakeabreathevenwhenyougettothefastparts) and by hiking everybody's emotions up to the exact same state. Much as I don't like Wes/Fred, I would have still loved to been there for you for the beauty of Wes's manpain if only you gave me Wesley. But you didn't. You gave me five guys who just so happened to be named Wes, Gunn, Angel, Lorne, and Spike, and had them all screaming at the top of their emotional lungs with the exact same message. Argh! What the Hell? How is that good storytelling? How does that even work using the earth logic?

Look, I was leading the brigade for "Jesus God fire Charisma's ass and do it a season and a half ago once you invent the time machine" but Cordy's death still made me cry. Reason being because it was Cordy's death, and it rang true for her and the other characters. God help me but it worked (and how often do I say that about a Fury episode?). Fred did not work, though. Hell, Fred was barely even there. Same with everyone else. I can't get into her death and how it's affecting the others when I don't have the others there to show me. Instead I have these people who are apparently emotional clones of one another. Also they have no sense of levels. It just don't work.

Also? While I'm at it? "Caveman wins"? You're kidding me with that, right?

Oh, and the mirror shot was pretentious and pointless. And this from the girl who defends your insanely long scenes done in one take to any who dare question them. Your tools have to support the story, not the other way 'round.

Ahem.

Not that I've been saving that up during my time away or anything.

Anyhoo...

Point being AHitW was a great meal burnt to a crisp. Yeah, we can poke at pieces of it and maybe get a nibble of how marvelous the recipe was, but the end result was overdone to the point of ruin.

Shells, OTOH, not so much.

Steve did a great job with both writing and acting of putting this back into the characters. As the touchstone for this I point you right back to my boy Wesley. Even though I am the last person to wave the flag of Wes/Fred shippiness, I'll still stand by what Wes did in this ep because it at least made sense for him. I could recognise him and didn't have a quarrel with any of his actions in the slightest. Wes was Wes. Angel Angel. Everybody else was everybody else - including Harmony. It worked.

This was especially important considering that they were introducing a new character. Yes, clearly Wes is going to be the one Illyria is interacting with the most, but even so it was crucial for his interactions with the others to ring true as well. Spike could be Spike with Lindsey all he liked, didn't mean squat for the show as a whole because we needed Spike to be Spike with Angel (and everybody else). A Wes who is amazing around Illyria and suddenly jarring and out of character with the rest of the gang would not have been as good. It would have come off as a blatent "We have no idea what to do with Amy and Alexis, so we're going to shove them into scenes together just like we did with Xander and Anya for about three years, and hope nobody notices that they never talk to the rest of the cast". Wes is still part of the team, and we get that touchstone by seeing him with Angel (Angel because he's the lead of the show and also because he was the one doing the reactions to Wes's psychotic behavior).

The Wes/Illyria thing fascinates me. One because I admit that I'm already inclined to like Illyria since she shares my personal favorite philosophy (ie "Sure, that's how it should be, but this is what it is. Let's deal with that, mmkay?") but also because I'm bemused to ponder that Joss, when coming up with this, probably didn't realize that yet again he's only shooting his own favorite ship in the foot. You can't expect me to feel bad about Wes not being with Fred when clearly Illyria is more his type to begin with. (Though my slasher heart can't help but point out that setting Wes up to have attachments to a demon who needs help connecting to humanity is something some of us have been pointing out as the ideal role for him for years, and can't we just admit that if Angel was on Showtime we would have admitted onscreen that Wes's Angel-crush was canon? But I digress.)

I also harbor the theory that this whole thing was a storyline that Joss originally intended for River over on Firefly. Don't ask me to offer proof for this because I have none. It's just that since Fred was so obviously the beta-River, Simon so obviously influenced by Wes, the Illyria plotline came out of nowhere, the execution of it required jacking up Wes's Fred-love to the point of obsessive devotion even when doing so didn't make sense to people who were already on board the Wes/Fred ship, and such a fuss was made over both "notice how fragile and insane River is" along with "but we've no idea what was done to her before Simon could rescue her" I gotta say I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that an original plotline for River was that the experiments done on her were going to result in changing who she was on a fundamental level, but her brother Simon still stuck by her and tried to help her because that's what devoted brothers do. You gotta admit Simon standing by River in a situation like that makes a Hell of a lot more sense than Wes doing it for an erstwhile Fred. Especially in terms of a motivation you want to root for. "Brother stands by memory of his sister" has a lot more noble ring to it than "Guy stands by 3d picture of the girl he was supposedly in love with, even though we never really saw proof that he even knew who that girl was during the three years it affected him on the show".

But that's just my pet theory.

On a final note, I gotta say this ep more than any other really shows why it'd be a shame if Angel really was cancelled. Watching the gang together both in terms of personal interaction and how they approached solving a crisis shows that they've all finally gelled, even our poor boy Spike. This is the crew that could've led us into yet another season. I can only hope they get that chance.

And, as always, hi, Lorne, bye, Lorne.

And I'm done.