Being Human - A Twofer

 

“The Times They Are a Changin”

Nora and Xander (who I’m sure has a character name but I don’t care) are ok after the standoff in the storage unit.  He helpfully reminds her of some wolfy code that “there is no worse sin than turning on one of your own.”  Oy.  This is the last we see of Xander but I’m guessing he’ll be back soon enough.

In other Josh and Nora news, Josh meets a teen patient, Erin, who got scratched during the last full moon.  Erin’s parents are meth addicts or some such so she’s been stuck in the foster system, which is why Josh and Nora break some rules and bring Erin home to help her through her first shift.  She finds their prediction about her turning into a wolf a bit hard to swallow.  Even more difficult is watching Josh’s video of him turning, especially the nekkid bits.  Heh.  The night of the full moon, they send her and Nora into the woods with a slab of meat and tips for pre and post-shifting.  Josh reveals that he’s packing some tiny heat (not a euphemism) just in case things go sideways.  The shift goes fine…bringing a new meaning to terms like ‘female bonding,’ ‘that time of the month,’ and ‘ladies’ night.’

If you remember, Sally kissed a guy from her past, Trent, and he died.  She wants to go to his funeral but there’s too much risk that other folks from her past would be there.  She manages to find his ghost and explains how she’s sort of responsible for his death. He takes it as well as you might expect.  To help make amends and to possibly help him get his door, Sally agrees to talk to his fiancé and apologize on his behalf for cheating on her with Sally.  Turns out the fiancé had been cheating on him for over a year so she felt a lot less guilty.  Trent yells at Sally a bit more, eventually finds his door and goes through it.  On the other side of the door is Donna the witch, with a really big knife.  She slices him, turns him to dust and eats it.  Then Donna the witch gets younger.

And Aidan?  Well Aidan and Henry are trying to find folks with clean blood.  It doesn’t go well and Henry is still pretty pissed at Aidan for setting his blood-slave girlfriend free.  Aidan asks Josh for help finding folks at the hospital who never got sick.  Josh is hesitant at first but agrees.  Henry is weak and has apparently fed on a tainted human because he’s sick now.  Oh and he feels the need to remind Aidan that everyone who loves him dies.  Nice.

“I’m So Lonesome I Could Die” aka Aidan Dances!!!

It’s 3am and Aidan is having a party while Josh and Nora are trying to sleep.  Erin’s drinking and Josh shuts that down quickly (she’s 15).  Sally spot checks to make sure she doesn’t know anyone and then joins the party.  She’s dancing with Aidan and it’s pretty cute.  Unfortunately Aidan is just covering up his pain with frat parties. 

Nora’s going home for her mom’s birthday and Josh wants to come along.  Nora doesn’t think this is such a good idea but he wears her down.  So he and Erin go with her and Erin makes an impression on Nora’s brother, RJ.  Josh was hoping to make a good impression on Nora’s dad (by asking his permission to marry his daughter) but the dude doesn’t have much personality.  Later RJ shows up at their house and makes out with Erin.  Josh shuts that down pretty quickly and they throw him out of the house.  This pisses off Erin and she runs away.

Sally has a dream that she’s killing people she knows.  She decides she needs a new identity and goes to Aidan for suggestions since vampires have been doing just that for hundreds of years.  He takes her to a dive bar where she’s sure to not run into anyone from her past but he’s really only interested in the rather large tattooed gentleman at the end of the bar.  Aidan follows tattooed dude outside and leaves Sally alone.  She goes outside and finds tattooed dude on the ground with fresh bite marks.  Later Sally yells at Aidan for being so careless but he makes a point about even people who didn’t get the virus before could be getting it now so there’s no way to be totally safe.  Aidan awakens to find Sally straddling him with a stake pointed near his heart.  They have a heart to heart, he shows her where the heart actually is and he decides to get his life together.  He takes a shower, the universal symbol for starting over and goes back to the hospital to get his job back.  At the hospital he finds a bubble boy who’s been locked up for the past eight months.  Oh boy.  Oh and Sally gets caught at the funeral home where she talked to Trent’s finace.  She was looking for possible new identities in the dead baby files (ew!).  The hot funeral director offers to help her and offers her a job too.

"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!

"Disharmony" (Angel 2.17): Not the Most Cleverly Titled Episode

Yeah. She's in it.

In a synchronicity that in this case makes Angel suffer mightily by comparison, the Angelites are still processing Angel's return and hope for forgiveness for acting like a dolt for several previous episodes. Wesley makes him sit outside his own office and fetch coffee, and Cordelia tells him they're "not friends." Which, rather touchingly, bothers Angel a lot.

Look. He makes the sad Angel face.

The theme of friendship is central to this episode, because Cordelia is forced to radically reexamine hers with fellow Mean Girl Harmony. So though we're operating in a pre-Facebook world, here's the Angel guide to friending and unfriending vampires.

DO expect to pay your dues. Angel's pre-credit muttering of "atonement's a bitch" is a refreshingly funny take on what tends to be his bete noir. But it's true--Angel spends much of the episode desperately trying to make it up to Wesley, Cordy, and Gunn. By the end, he's succeeded with pretty much all of them.

DON'T be too subtle with Cordelia. Harmony shows up in L.A., post-break-up with Spike, eager to find her purpose. If you think that's a flimsy excuse for a guest spot, you're sort of right, but it does fit into the episode's thematic interest in friendship. Cordelia is genuinely excited to be spending time with Harmony again, and in recovering her powerful and ruthless high school self.

Sorry guys--no be-pantied pillow fight.

However, when Harmony drops subtle hints (you do have to invite me to your house, I'm not the same girl I used to be) and not-so-subtle hints (showing up in Cordy's bedroom at night, talking about how delicious she looks), Cordelia assumes she's a "big lesbo." This rather tasteless attempt at homophobic humor is thankfully defused by the fact that she says it to Willow.

Sigh.

DO look for authenticity. Though this episode is a bit of a throwaway in terms of the season-long arc, the more I think about it, the more tightly it's written (thanks, David Fury). The Monster of This Week is a Tony Robbins-esque vamp motivational speaker and self-help guru, who promotes a pyramid scheme neatly encapsulated by the slogan "turn two, the rest is food."

It's a pitch-perfect parody.

The way these types of groups tend to foster a false sense of intimacy, both emotional and financial, sets us up nicely for . . .

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

DO remember that on this show, a soul matters. And a credit card. Angel warns Cordy that Harmony is bound to turn on her, because she has no soul. The complicated metaphysics of ensoulment on Buffy aside, Angel is right on the money here. Harmony turns the Angelites over to Tony Robbins, and they only narrowly escape (of course--do they ever escape by a wide margin?). Cordy decides to spare Harmony, though they are no longer BFFs. And Angel's last act of interpersonal atonement? He buys Cordelia a ton of clothes. She does a happy dance, in which Angel joins her, in a moment Jenn terms disturbing yet priceless.

And makes the happy Angel face.

"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.

Last Night's Being Human

"(Dead) Girls Just Want to Have Fun"

I’m trying to make these recaps a bit shorter because I don’t need to recount absolutely everything that happens on the show.  Like Will says, “Brevity is the soul of wit” and wit is a goal of mine so I'm gonna attempt some brevity.  I just love the show and the actors so very much that I want everyone else to love them too.

Xander Berkeley (if you don’t recognize his name, you’ll recognize his face) opens the episode and he’s on a hunt for his son.  He’s under the impression some vampy Amish might have some information about him.  Xander looks off to the side, sees a wolf head tacked to the wall, and gets the unfortunate answer to his question.  After dusting the vampy Amish he vows, to the wolf head, to avenge his death and take out the killer’s loved ones too. 

Sally is back and in a new outfit!  Plus her hair looks very cute.  Apparently they found and unearthed Stevie and Nick and they’re looking pretty good in Josh’s clothes.  Nick is reunited with his girlfriend, Zoe the medium. Stevie wants to see the world so they send him on his way but before he departs, he promises not to kill himself again. 

Josh and Sally reunite with Aidan (yay!) and he’s understandably confused as to why he can hug a now corporeal Sally.  Oh and he notices that Josh doesn’t smell like a dog anymore.  Aidan’s been buried for a year but it seems like some pretty huge things have happened.  Back at the house and Aidan’s beard is gone.  Boo.  They throw out some literary jokes about him looking like a young Mark Twain, etc. and I’m bummed because I think he could have totally rocked a well-tended beard.  Oh well.

Sally is dying to get out of the house but they’re very nervous she could be recognized.  It’s a tv show, so it’s bound to happen, but I’m out all the time and never run into people I know and Charleston is a SMALL town compared to Boston.  Predictably she runs into a guy who cried at her funeral.  She tells him some unbelievable story about how she had to fake her death to get away from her abusive fiancé.  He walks her home, they kiss, she invites him in, but he refuses (huh?).  Apparently he’s not feeling well but would love to take her on a date tomorrow.  The next day he’s found dead on her street.  Uh oh.  Josh surmises that this is part of that clause about not talking to people who knew you before you died.

Aidan is nervous to drink from the blood bags Josh brought home for him because they could be infected.  Josh offers himself but is afraid that if there are still traces of the wolf inside him that it might send Aidan into fits.  So Aidan heads out in search of fresh blood, tries to buy baby blood (really?!?!) and gets beaten up by werewolves because of it.  Hottie Henry swoops in and saves him.  Henry brings him back to his place where he introduces Aidan to his uninfected but also compelled girlfriend, Emma.  Poor Emma hasn’t left the apartment in months because Henry doesn’t want her to risk getting sick.  Aidan is not ok with this and sets her free.  Henry is not ok with that and storms off.

Josh and Nora are sweet as usual.  She wants him to go enjoy his new life as a human and to stop babysitting her during her special time of the month.  No, not that time of the month; the one where the moon is full.  Josh has plans to propose to Nora but Sally doesn’t want him doing it the morning after a shift.  She probably has a point considering Nora will be all tired and bloody, etc.  Remember how Xander Berkeley was in town?  Well he finds Nora in her protective storage locker.  He catches her up on his search for his daughter, Brynn, and his wanting revenge for the death of his son, Connor.  We flashback to how Aidan killed Connor last season and we know it was to protect Josh and Nora but I’m guessing Xander won’t care.  Instead he wants to shift in the storage locker with Nora to find out what kind of wolf she is.  Ooookay.  The next morning, Josh shows up but there’s a huge hole in the door and no Nora inside.  Not good.