Throw Me A... um... season?

[thebratqueen]

stakebait and I got to chatting last night about Angel, the Angel/Cordy ship and the many ways that ME fell down on the job as far as selling this ship to us went.

Somehow that led into a brainstorming session on how the two of us would have fixed this season given the contraints of plot that had to happen. It's not quite "Throw Me A Line" - morelike "Throw me a scene/altered story arc" but it's still a way to, in our opinion, fix some of the problems of season 3 without making changes to the real worries like budgets and schedule constraints.



Okay, so let's take it as our given that TPTB come to us and say we have to have the following elements:

1) Angel/Cordy angst
2) Wes in a love triangle that bites him on the ass
3) Gunn/Fred
4) The other big elements of the season (ie Darla being pregnant, Wes taking Connor, Cordy being a demon, etc)

Now here's the thing - for me and Mer fundamentally the things that fell down on the job were 1-3. As they were on the show we couldn't buy into them. There was no chemistry between any of the chosen pairs and the pairs themselves didn't make much sense as they were presented, which is why, IMO, 1-3 were essentially established with an entire season of "Tell, don't show". ("Angel you love Cordy, Angel you love Cordy, Angel you love Cordy, Angel we're going to make up words to seriously hammer home this idea that you love Cordy"). They had to tell and not show because they had nothing to show.

Sidenote - I find it especially ironic that we are getting this "tell, don't show" from a television show which is supposed to be a visual medium. Anyway...

Let's start with Angel/Cordy.

Now there are a lot of problems with this pairing, not the least of which is that David B and Charisma have negative chemistry together. But putting that aside for a minute, let's look at this from a writer's perspective.

What's our interest here? Where's our conflict? How was this presented to us onscreen? Basically as "Angel, the vampire, is a less than ideal boyfriend for Cordy and he's not supposed to get close to her because of the happiness clause thing" (and I think I'm being generous to suggest that ME included the clause at all in the plotting of this arc).

Well - so? Who cares? Oh look - Cordy's got another demon/less-than-ideal-boyfriend lusting after her. Big whoop. Been there, done that, we like to call it basically every romance-related arc that Cordy's ever been in (with the possible exception of Wes but even there the fact that the relationship failed still puts him in the less than ideal category).

And look - Angel's lusting after a beautiful girl that he's not allowed to be near because he's a vampire. We like to call that seasons 1-3 of Buffy. Been there, done that does not even begin to describe this concept.

Negative chemistry could have been forgiven/fuzzy-tigered over in the face of a good storyline. This is not that storyline. It doesn't even make sense. Frankly, from a writer perspective, I don't even know why they picked Angel to pair Cordy with in the first place. What do these two as a team offer us that separately they do not? AngelandBuffy gave different things to the narrative than Angel and Buffy did separately. AngelandCordy as a pair don't do that. Not that we've seen so far. AngelandCordy is pretty much... Angel... and... Cordy. And again what conflict they tried to give us is just a rehash of what's come before. So what little we do get isn't that much to write home about.

But again let's assume that the WB came to town and demanded the Angel/Cordy ship. ME doesn't have a choice (and for all I know this is how it happened). Fine, then how do we write it?

Well you already know my first point - redo Angel's feelings for Cordy. Relate it back to Buffy's death and Angel looking at her in a new light. But IMO even that's not ideal. Let's try another version:

Do it from Cordy's perspective.

There's your conflict. There's a storyline we've never seen before. Cordelia "Queen C" Chase, the girl who could have any guy she wanted suddenly realizing she's got feelings for a guy she can't have.

Now notice how many of the canonical storylines suddenly fall into place without any effort at all or even that many changes in the dialogue.

Picture this as our lead-in: Angel's away for 3 months. This is the longest Cordy's ever been without the big A and she misses him. In "Heartthrob" show her leaping into Angel's arms the way that Wesley did. Get just enough closeness there for some subtext but otherwise leave it alone. Pick it up again in "That Vision Thing" where Angel puts his all into saving her - this could have lead to Cordy's epiphany moment that maybe she's having feelings for Angel (or at least the start of realizing it - I'm thinking here we could have just gotten a significant look in the end scene where she's making him breakfast).

Scatter some thoughtful looks throughout the next few eps, maybe toss in something more when Cordy goes to help out with the Billy situation, add in some sexual tension during the workout scenes and then, as we had in canon, do the real reveal of the feelings in "Offspring". And notice too how much more plausibly we can do what canon did: Fred can still be the one who does the speech, but now she's giving the speech to Cordy and instead of "Kye-rumption" it's Fred, as a girl who had a crush on Angel herself, saying words to the effect of "Yeah, he's pretty hard to resist, isn't he?" to Cordy. Splutter splutter splutter, Cordy denies everything, Wes comes in and wonders who brought the flowers into the basement and Cordy gives a sharp denial of any meaning and changes the subject.

Conceivably we could also have seen something from Angel here too. The groundwork for Angel's feelings for Cordy was laid last season during the post-Epiphany episodes (and even a little in Epiphany itself). Now I'm not saying I like that what was meant to be a brother/sisterly vibe was forced into a sexual one, but again given the assumption that we have to do this - well the groundwork is already there. All we need to do now is establish that it's still there. So we could have Angel giving Cordy some looks of his own, and maybe even a cute scene of the two of them doing the "are you saying you love me?" painful dialogue from hell, except now it's not so much painful dialogue from hell as a vaguely "aww" moment of both of them being clueless about the others' feelings and trying to fuzzy tiger their way out of it.

Now compare and contrast this: Angel, at the end of "Waiting in the Wings", thinking he's about to maybe get close to Cordy when suddenly Groo shows up and Cordy leaps into his arms. vs Cordy, in "Offspring", getting ready to maybe talk to Angel about her feelings when Darla shows up pregnant.

Tell me that even just in concept the latter doesn't have more impact. Especially because unlike Groo who had to be retrofitted to Hell and back to hammer home the "he's like Angel but better" idea that came out of nowhere, Angel becoming a father does knock Cordy's chances out of the water.

Why? Because Cordy as a character only has one shot of a point in a relationship with Angel from a personal and narrative interest perspective: she could be the person who makes Angel come out of his shell and join the world. Well guess what - Connor does that too and just the fact of his being does that far more than Cordy could for all the effort she'd have to put into getting Angel to crack a smile.

And again contrast that with what we had in canon: Angel becoming a father meant that the guy who wasn't suitable to be her boyfriend just got more unsuitable to be her boyfriend. Narratively from this perspective Connor is just a "ditto". However from Cordy's perspective we have a change. Her difficulty before was overcoming the "we're just friends and what about Buffy?" thing. Now she's got Angel having an insta-family with the woman he cared about for some level of caring for 150 years and a kid and anything she could have offered Angel is now redundant.

This would also explain some of Cordy's out of character actions in that ep - her sudden giving a shit about Angel lying to her and more especially her taking care of Darla. Yeah maybe she hates Darla, but helping Angel's little family is the closest she can get - she'll take what she can have. Also notice how much more powerful the totally random things like her kissing Angel in "Birthday" and lines like "I got demon DNA for that man!" become. Instead of totally motivationless "Where the HELL did THAT come from??" moments, we now have evidence of Cordy trying to do and get what she can.

Now let's put A/C on hold for a second to address point 2 - Wes in a love triangle that bites him on the ass.

Wes/Cordy/Angel anyone?

Wes/Fred was an idea that made sense on paper but not on the screen. Again the characters had no chemistry. Also it was too obviously done for the sake of doing it. We're supposed to buy that a guy like Wes would get the hots for Fred while she was still so traumatized and crazy that she stayed locked in her room? Um, no. Not unless you're trying to deliberately make Wes creepy before "Billy" even airs. As a single pairing I could have possibly bought into the idea of just Wes and Fred, but in a season with A/C and G/F you can't do it. It's breaking our suspension of disbelief. And considering that Wes doesn't get the girl in the end anyway, what does it matter which girl you pick?

So pick the actress Alexis actually has chemistry with - Charisma.

From there it's essentially the same timing. Instead of telling us that Wes is developing feelings for Fred, show us Wes thinking maybe he and Cordy have a shot again. Yes this causes some redundancy with the A/C plotlines but it's no more redundant than the way they actually handled the W/F/G plotline and again here at least we've got onscreen chemistry to sell us on the story. You also have far more believable angst if you happened to write in any scenes of Cordy using Wes as something of an agony aunt without telling him who she's got the feelings for - reason being we already know these two are friends and that he's lusted after her in the past. Contrast that with the scene in "Carpe Noctem" where Fred prattled on about how wonderful it was to go to the movies with Angel where Wes mostly looked bored.

We also get a far more believable plot turn in Wes's romantic downfall. Instead of Fred and Gunn smooching out of nowhere, picture this: Cordy becomes a demon. Wes thinks maybe he's got a chance with her b/c he can step in as Master of All Demonic Knowledge and help her through this tough time, except instead of turning to him in what he perceives as her time of need, she turns to Angel. Or even Groo for that matter, if we work in Charisma's personal time.

Now the only thing I don't like about this concept is that it does take the one thing I think worked well this season - the Angel and Wesley parallels - and draw it near if not totally over the line between "subtle" and "rain of anvils from the sky". But A) I think it could still be doable, esp since by definition we're toning down if not entirely getting rid of the five billion scenes of people stating "Angel has feelings for Cordy but can't act on them" B) Doing a parallel via a love triangle is a fine old tradition and one that makes sense given Wes's hero-worship/envy of Angel and C) Again at least this kind of triangle has some believable chemistry.

This also adds extra angst to the Connor storyline, and again could help explain some of the weak plot points. Think of how more powerful it becomes when Wes, after having his heart broken by finding out about A/C, still does his best for Connor anyway. Suddenly it also makes more sense about why he doesn't confide in any of the team - he's clamming up about a lot of things and this is just one more of them. I could easily see a Wes who goes into full "Don't mind me" mode and just doesn't talk about anything if he can help it.

(Note: not that I had a problem with Wes not telling Angel in canon, just that I know some who do so here's a possible alternative for them).

We also get the interest of Wes who gets hurt like this, still puts his all out there for Angel, then gets his throat cut and the gang turning his backs on him and so on. This also would go far to explain why Cordy automatically sided with Angel and didn't even care about Wes. If she's got romantic feelings for Angel that we knew coming in to this storyline it would have played much better than the "this is how we're introducing the potential of Cordy's feelings"

The Fred/Gunn thing also could come into play here as well. They still have no chemistry but off on their own this is less of a sinking ship (no pun intended) than when you add the non-chemistry of Wes/Fred on top of it. Play them more or less as you did in canon but change the tension in Gunn and Wesley's friendship from the forced and unbelievable "Wes is trying to tear us apart!" (Um - no, Wes is trying to get y'all to do your jobs. I'm not saying he liked how much you were hanging out, but he never once onscreen asked you to do anything but your jobs) to the more plausible "Gunn's got a new girl that he's really into and is therefore spending less time caring about his friendship with Wes." Which could have then dovetailed easily into what we did have, which was again Wes asking Gunn and Fred to keep their minds on the job. So same arguments, same emotions, more plausible explanations.

Then, finally, we also get another explanation for Wes going dark (again not that I personally had a problem with Wes going dark at the end but I know of some who do) which is that after he's betrayed by his friends turning their backs on him and had his heart broken by everybody, the woman he loved included, picking Angel over him, Wes reacts by rebelling and trying to out-Angel Angel. He hooks up with Lilah, who is canonically the evil Cordy, and there ya go.

Now tell me all of that doesn't make more sense. And again see? We were able to work that in with some very minor changes. ME are you listening?