"Dead End" (Angel 2.18): All About Lindsey

Both Jenn and I realize that the actual point of this episode is to chronicle the increasingly debilitating effects of Cordy's visions on her body and mind. But both Jenn and I actually like the episode for its focus on that rascally Wolfram & Hart associate, Lindsey McDonald. His arc, at least for this season is completed in a compelling fashion during this episode. So let's take a look at the Angel Guide to Getting an Evil Hand and Freeing a Good Heart

DO look good while you're melting down.  I've always had a soft spot for Lindsey--his doomed love for Darla, his frustration at being a good man in a bad world--in a lot of ways, he's Angel's double, and this episode makes that more clear than ever as they must work together to undo some particularly nasty medical malfeasance. But I must say, the first thing I noticed in the opening Lindsey montage wasn't his plastic hand, but the stylin' bracelet he wears.

Sort of looks like something a tween would buy from Claire's, but whatever.

DO be suspicious of the Wolfram & Hart Insurance Plan. Everything seems to be normal with Lindsey's hand transplant

And by "normal," I mean "not at all."

 until this little quirk that Jenn aptly identifies as a Shining homage.

Lindsey is about to do a lot less work and a lot more play.

DON'T ignore the The Host. Lorne again proves his desire to remain relatively neutral and make his nightclub a safe place for demons and humans all along the D&D Alignment scale by giving the newly handed Lindsey a spot on stage. Rather than karaoking, LMcD showcases his strumming skillz.

and probably shills for the latest Christian Kane album.

Yup. That's a thing.

Lorne insists that Angel and Lindsey should bury the hatchet and work together, which they adorably do, despite Angel's obvious jealousy over Lindsey's superior singing

Angel's "I'm not impressed" face.

and Lindsey's distaste for Angel's vampiric interrogation style

"You're so gross." (Actual quote.)

What they uncover is a pretty unspeakable body farm that Lindsey liberates in a manic freak-out.

Ugh. Poor guy that's just a torso.

DO enjoy one of my favorite scenes from the series. Lindsey's "I've got an evil hand" monologue/resignation from Wolfram & Hart is equal parts hilarious, disturbing, and satisfying. He shoots a security guard in the foot,

"That's gonna hurt in the morning!" (Actual quote.)

ruffles "Charlie's" hair repeatedly,

Charlie looks like Angel did listening to Lindsey sing.

and cops a feel off Lilah

"Evil!" (Actual quote.)

before warning the partners not to pursue him because of his "evil hand" issues, and riding off into the sunset in his cool truck, which Angel has, um, altered, as a good-bye gift.

Gotta love Angel when he's being immature.

Jenn suspects that Lindsey's parting advice to Angel, to not play W&H's game, but rather to make them play his, is a nod towards season 5 and the role he plays in the end of the series. Both of us wouldn't put it past Joss.

"Intervention" (Buffy 5.18): Stuff Gets Weird

I have to say, though I never think of season 5 as being amongst my favorites, this rewatch reminds me of how skillfully the writers helming the follow-up episodes to "The Body" sensitively handle the psychological fall-out from Joyce's death. As seems completely normal, Buffy expresses some real reservations and concerns about what being the Slayer is doing to her emotionally. And she's not the only one who's having some interpersonal issues.

Not by a long shot.

So let's peruse the Buffy Guide to Self-Exploration.

DO it. Self-explore, that is. Giles, awesome as usual, takes Buffy's concerns seriously,

Seriously enough to do the hokey-pokey with a magic gourd. (The same magic gourd from "Primeval"?)

and thereby initiates a Slayer-quest that involves felines,

If it's anything like my cat, he's leading her straight to the food dish.

washed-out landscapes,

Did David O. Russell direct this?

and a cameo appearance from the first Slayer.

We all, again, try to ignore the racist depiction.

Slayer I tells Buffy that she doesn't have to worry about an inability to love, because she is love, and in fact "Love is her gift." That will be important later.

DON'T blame your self for your break-up with Captain Cardboard! Please! Stop it! Jenn takes down this persistent meme in Buffy's psychology so expertly, I'm handing this point off to her:

"There are two very good reasons as to why she could be available to Angel in a that she couldn't be for Riley. One: she had been hurt and hurt bad. Consequently, it is very natural for her to not be willing to risk such pain again. It's called emotional self-preservation. And more importantly, she wasn't there for Riley because he wasn't there for her. His inability to accept and truly respect her powers was a much more significant roadblock to their relationship. Deep down she must have sensed that she could never really trust him. I mean, how can you trust someone who doesn't have your back because he's too damn intimidated? It takes a strong man to be able to love a strong woman, and Riley wasn't ever strong in the ways that mattered. For Angel, on the other hand, it was never an issue. Not because he is a vampire and thus has his own strength, but because it wasn't ever a power play between them." Well said, my friend.

This stupid Riley picture is all me, though.

DON'T bury your pain in, well, a robot. Spike, showing his patented refusal to accept suffering, decides that if Buffy won't have him, he'll have a Buffy Bot.

The BB's "sexy" dialogue, as Jenn notes, is hilarious.

As are the different character infoscreens.

What is not as hilarious and a little strange? The rather graphic sex between Spike and the skin-job, including a visual joke that implies a blow job, gave me the wiggins, as the Buffy Bot has probably been programmed to say.

Unconventional sex will rear its, ahem, head in season 6, so again, this will be important later.

DO know where your loyalties lie. Spike, despite his robotophilia, also is the hero rather than the goat in this episode. After being kidnapped by Glory, he refuses to give up Dawn as the Key, despite a rather brutal beating

And an internal exam the likes of which no one deserves.

 But it earns him a kiss from a Real Live Girl!

This will be important, well, you get the picture.

DO know your role. This is mainly just an excuse to point out that Xander fighting the Minions is laughably pathetic. It's the lame battling the incompetent.

Reminiscent of his immortal slap-fight with Harmony.

The foreshadowing is flying thick and fast as we approach the conclusion of season 5!

"Forever" (Buffy 5.17): Mourning Becomes Angel

In Sunnydale, we're still dealing with the fallout from Joyce's death. Which of course makes sense--that sort of trauma isn't shrugged off after forty minutes, but I could see a lesser show not taking the time to as carefully and curiously explore how each character copes with loss. So we're back to the Do's and Don'ts of processing pain.

DON'T be an enormous ass. Buffy's dad apparently has yet to even call his bereaved daughters, or to provide them with reliable contact information, apparently.

Giles NOT talking to Buffy's dad. Also, written and directed by Noxon? Good sign.

That is one of the details about the show that continues to stick in my craw. Though Mr. Summers wasn't perhaps an ideal father in earlier seasons, he was a present one. It seems beyond the pale of even the deadbeatest of dads not to acknowledge this tragedy in anyway. I get that adding another character would probably be more trouble than it's worth, but still.

DON'T be a normal-sized ass, either. We all know Xander has issues expressing pain. It tends to manifest as anger, and that anger is not always directed at an appropriate target. As Jenn puts it, Xander misunderstands and then sounds off. His treatment of Spike, and his genuine attempt to honor Joyce, is unfair.

And he makes Willow make her worried face.

DO remember to celebrate life. Anya and Giles have different ways of indulging this impulse.

Way 1

Way 2 (with "Tales of Brave Ulysses" playing in background).

But it seems an important one that the show endorses. Anya embraces sexual expression, and Giles remembers the day and night he spent re-teenager-ed with Joyce in "Band Candy." Actually, maybe their strategies aren't that different after all.

DO feel the pain. This is a big one, and the episode's major concern. Dawn, brattiness finally justified, understandably seeks a magical solution to her very human hurt. She asks Willow and Tara if there are any spells that could bring her mother back. I think this is a smart moment in the show--for the most part, everyone takes it for granted that the Scoobies live in a world where the supernatural is commonplace. But this moment is an exploration of how that conceit would affect the emotional lives of the characters. Though Tara staunchly refuses, citing the Wiccan directive not to interfere with the natural order of things, Willow helps Dawn. Spike does too.

Not actually helping, part 1.

Not actually helping, part 2. Plus, I felt bad for the monster, who was only trying to protect her eggs.

Both of these characters have and will demonstrate issues with control and processing pain. As Jenn points out, for Willow in particular, the failure to ask "should we" in the name of "can we" is dangerous. The impulse to help Dawn (and Buffy) by bringing Joyce back comes from a good place, but it is a terrible idea. The episode argues for this both in content (What we presume is a zombified Joyce horrifyingly creeping closer to the house as the Summers sisters argue, and Buffy has a much needed emotional breakdown) and structure (the creature Spike consults about the spell, and therefore brings into Dawn's life? Not the last we'll see of him.

Not by a long shot.

DO be present. This is almost a corollary of the above point, but it has a literal embodiment in the episode.

Namely, this body.

Angel can't show up until nightfall, but when he does, he does the only thing that could help Buffy. Sit next to her all night. Everyone experiences and expresses grief differently, and there is often anxiety on the part of all involved (including those closest to the tragedy) to know what to say. Even Buffy doesn't quite know, and instead threw herself into funeral preparations and caretaking. But Angel's appearance, as well as the emotional breakthrough the sisters have, just in time to allow Joyce's body to return to rest, argue less for saying, and more for just being, in the face of terrible pain.

"Epiphany" (Angel 2.16): Lindsey Goes Medieval on Angel's Ass

For Jenn and I both, the title of this episode always recalls James Joyce. Angel experiences nothing that approximates the realization of human futility that befalls the young protagonist of "Araby" or the older protagonist of "The Dead," but some stuff still gets realized by the undead protagonist of our little show. So let's go over what we learned, shall we?

If you're a blonde, DON'T have sex with Angel when it's raining. If you're Buffy, it means your sweet, broody boyfriend has become a demon.

If you're Darla in "Epiphany," it means your bitter, tortured frenemy doesn't turn back into a demon, but rather realizes what an ass he's been lately and actually becomes nicer.

Bummer.

DO realize that sometimes the Powers that Be are assholes. Cordelia has been tricked into acting as bait by the "eye in the back of the head" demons, which she realizes via vision from the PtB . . . seconds before the assault actually occurs.

Thanks.

For me, the Skilosh demons treatment of Cordy feels squeamishly close to rape, but the point isn't so much Cordelia's plight as much as getting Angel, Wesley, and Gunn fighting (uneasily) on the same team again.

DON'T forget that you can take the boy out of Texas, but, well, you know. For me, this episode belongs to one man.

I know that the key narrative development is the reunion of Angel Investigations, but I will love it most for featuring Lindsey,

in a bitchin' car,

wielding a sledgehammer and aiming to kick some vampire ass.

I want him to be the next Bachelor.

Jenn points out that this episode, though ushering in the fun of the Pylea episodes that conclude season 2, also inextricably points toward the sucky slogfest that are seasons 3 & 4. So enjoy it while you can, folks.

Aslo, Kate gets saved. Whatevs.

"The Body" (Buffy 5.16): Simply a Masterpiece

This episode is not one I would usually list amongst my "favorites" of the series, because it is decidedly not an example of the "hurts so good" catgory of "Amends" or "The Prom." "The Body" is upsetting and uncomfortable and unfair. It's also moving and revelatory and very, very real. Jenn and I agreed that the typical Do's and Don't's format wouldn't be appropriate to discuss what writer/director (and demigod) Joss Whedon achieved with this episode. I decided to recap "The Body" by looking at how Whedon used the tools of his chosen medium, television, to explore and represent grief and loss.

Time. The forty minutes of "The Body" is shorter than the time span covered by the story, but not by much. The show opens with the same scene that closed "I Was Made to Love You," emphasizing the crystallization of the moment Buffy discovers Joyce's body.

It's just as shocking every time.

The same mental process, by which ordinary objects attain disproportionate significance in the moments surrounding a trauma, is visually represented in the lead-up to Buffy telling Dawn the news.

Including an unmoving woman's body. The man's a genius.

Sound. One of the most apparent, and most discussed, directorial choices made by Whedon was the exclusion of anything but ambient sound during the episode There is no instrumental music--only distant sirens, chimes, and a whole lot of silence. After the frenzy of Buffy's attempts to revive Joyce, the arrival of the paramedics, and the pronouncement of Joyce's death, there isn't a whole lot to say.

Script. But there are things that have to be said, obviously. However, the episode isn't very interested in the specifics of relating the news. Buffy's ambiguous phone call to Giles--"She's at the house"--could just as easily refer to Glory, which is what Giles assumes. The audience is placed behind a classroom window when Buffy tells Dawn,

and the details of how Willow, Xander, Tara, and Anya find out are elided completely. Jenn also has a smart reading of the Christmas flashback, the first of the episode: "This episode really seems to center on the futility of wishful thinking, especially when it comes to something (like death) which is so thoroughly beyond our control. So, having Buffy's first flashback / fantasy going to Christmas and the conversation about whether Santa's a myth is an appropriate introduction. The idea of a real Santa would be great. It would be some positive magic in a world full of so much destruction (both the Sunnydale world and our own). Granted, Anya revealing that he would eviscerate children squashes that idea. But, that's the point. Even when we find out something's real, that doesn't necessarily mean it will meet our ideal expectations or be good."

Character. But what does get expressed verbally are a lot of unanswerable questions. From Willow's desperate uncertainty over what to wear in order to express emotional support for Buffy and grief for Joyce,

to Xander's attempt to blame Glory, then the doctors,

then the wall,

and Anya's poignant confusion over not just the how but the why of death

everyone is struggling to speak about the unspeakable.

Tara emerges as the emotional center of the group even more than usual in this episode. She comforts Xander by suggesting she understands how the pain in his hand corresponds to the pain in his heart, and her articulation of the psychic cataclysm occasioned by her own mother's death is the only comfort Buffy receives in the episode.

I'm tempted to quote her speech in full, but then you'd miss the brilliance of Amber Benson's delivery.

Genre. We are watching a show entitled Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Whedon never lets the horror and fantasy elements of the show's modus operandi be trumped by the all-too-natural story of loss. For example, Anya's pleas for understanding, which at first read as her characteristic blunt insensitivity to the way people communicate due to only recently becoming mortal develops into a very human assault on the inescapable unknowability and brutal stupidity of death. This one I will quote in full. It's famous and it should be.

"I don't understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she's, ... there's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead anymore. It's stupid. It's mortal and stupid. And, and Xander's crying and not talking, and, and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch ever, and she'll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why."

The closing scene, where Dawn encounters a vampire after sneaking into the morgue to look at her mom, has occasioned some debate as to whether the intrusion of the supernatural interrupts the dramatic power of the episode. It seems to me that this is just another version of the argument that fantasy and horror, especially if televised, are somehow less serious or important than other methods of narration. Whedon demonstrates how fantasy and horror are intrinsically human responses to the body blow of loss. Buffy's fantasies that she arrived in time to save her mother are just as unlikely and impossible as the notion that vampires live and walk amongst us.

It's called magical thinking for a reason.

And Dawn's slow approach to her mother's dead body is the kind of horror story that the appearance of a vampire intensifies, not negates.

The closing battle graphically illustrates that, though in some ways death stops time, time refuses to stop because of death. Buffy is still the Slayer, and can't absent herself from the world because of her overwhelming grief. But the episode doesn't give us any closure, or any easy answers. The closing shot is of Dawn reaching out to touch her mother's face, and collapsing into blankness.

"Reprise" (Angel 2.15): Why You Shouldn't Booty Call an Ex During an Existential Crisis

Remember the earlier prefixed "Re" episodes form this season? "Reunion"? "Redefinition"? They were all a bit Darla-centric, yes? Well, this episode is called "Reprise" for a reason. As Jenn puts it, there's only one big "DON'T" in this ep, and I referenced it in the title of the post. But before we get there, quite a few RElationship hazards are REhearsed in this Angel guide to getting your heart broken fifty ways from Sunday.

DON'T nurse a crush on a vengeful vamp. Poor Lindsey. Poor, poor Lindsey. He's still carrying a flame for Darla, though she's just using him for a place to crash, regrow her skin, and drink all the free blood he provides for her. In some ways, Lindsey the Whipped is making the same mistake as Angel--believing Darla can be REdeemed.

She's rolling her eyes at his despair. It's fairly hilarious.

Jenn also points out how this episode reminds us that Lindsey really struggles with his evil responsibilities at W&H. Whereas it comes as natural as breathing to Lilah, angsty Lindz has to shower after work everyday. And this seems a good place to note how much I look forward to when he sings at Lorne's.

DON'T fall for a girl who can't handle the heat. Poor Wesley. His rich and hot ginger gf Virginia gets out gets out of the kitchen in this episode. Wes's recent gunshot wound from the weak sauce zombie cops makes her realize that she can't love someone whom she very well might lose.

Your loss, Ginny.

DON'T be snookered by a dead man. The climax of this episode is, for me, both very cool and a bit of a cheat. Angel goes to some trouble to REtrieve a magical glove to defeat an embodied blah blah blah; what he wants is to visit the "home office" of Wolfram & Hart. And who shows up to guide him? None other than Holland Manners!

Death becomes you, big guy!

As they take a long elevator ride down (natch), accompanied with a cheeky instrumental, HM gives Angel the standard "we're the embodiment of evil" speech. It would have been nice if he quoted his soulmate and deflated the diatribe as Buff did to the First in "Amends": "All right, I get it, you're evil. Do we have to chat about it all day?"

The big REveal is that the home office is . . . Earth itself! Everyone's unredeemable and fallen! Angel's quest is doomed! And while I like the shock of the elevator opening to the same street scene they left, I think Angel's walk through L.A., hearing people fight and whatnot, isn't quite enough to sell the idea that everyone is crap. I mean, hasn't he seen enough of love and sacrifice at this point to look for and believe in the best in people? People with souls? But the main point is his REsponse--getting laid.

DON'T, well, see title. My freshman year in college, my friend Dana told me that the two words I should get comfortable with using were "fuck" and "it." Angel responds in a similar manner to his newfound existential despair.

And by "it," I mean Darla.

He figures that if we're all screwed (pun intended), well, why not just be Angelus already?

I don't mean to be glib (much). It's a huge moment in the series and in Angel's psychic development. And just in case anyone isn't familiar with the REpercussions of this little assignation I won't reproduce the chain of events Jenn details, but trust me, it ain't good.

Gross case in awkward point.

Oh, and Kate might have killed herself and Cordy is heading to her certain doom. It was a rough week.