Another sad thing if Angel doesn’t get picked up by another network, is the loss of these threads. I really look forward to them every Thursday. Too lose the show and these discussions is a kick in the nuts, followed by a hard shove down the stairs.
Okay, who’s Leslie? I know a Wesley and I know a Lindsay, Lilah, and Lorne but for the sake of me I can’t think of a Leslie.
I thought this episode was okay. I’ve said this before but Spike is a redundant character, and in retrospect now that I know this is Angel’s last year, wish he would have never made the crossover. Dying on the cross (so to speak) was a far superior way to end his character. Much better than to be written off as Robin to Angel’s Batman. That’s a digression in his character development, dammit.
I wish TPTB would have just said to ME at the beginning of the season that this was their last year. That would have given them ample opportunity to write a great, cohesive final season, ending perhaps with the wonderful episode that was the 100th episode (where Cordy dies). Then Angel could have walked off into the lamplight, loved yet very much alone, as is fitting his character and the theme of the show.
If Lindsay and Eve can hide their intentions from the SP with a few tattoos and a paint job, presumably the doctor and Knox, in service of this uber-demon, could do something similar.
And is it just me, or is Wes getting just a little too gun-happy?
I was thinking much the same thing.
“I’m sorry Mr. Wyndam-Price, but we have no sugar for your coffee.”
BLAM
Anyway, as much as I’m enjoying this episode from an emotional perspective, the plot is too much like a checklist of previous stories:
Main female character taken over by evil. See above RE: Cordelia
Old demon wants to learn how to live in modern world. See above RE: Anya
Horrible relationship angst. See above RE: Everybody
And I gotta say, if I was part of Angel’s team I’d be rethinking my 401K. What with Doyle Cordie and Fred, I’d probably do better putting my money into a long term disability fund. And that’s being optamistic.
One of the things that struck me after thinking about it is, how could they writers do such a terrible thing to Fred? There’s good precedent in the Buffiverse that there IS a heaven and it’s a swell place. Fred’s soul was destroyed, she has pretty much the worse fate possible in the Buffiverse.
I’m also thinking Illiria is a little too much 7 of 9 with a smaller rack. “I must learn to be human in my ultra tight cat suit.”
Glory, that’s another thing that really bothered me about what happened to Fred. They said her soul was ‘destroyed’…what does that mean? Does that mean that Fred ceased to exist? Whereas Buffy, upon dieing went to a heavenly dimension that she seemed to be enjoying. Also, what happens to a human’s soul when a Vampire turns them? Apparently it’s not destroyed, becasue Angel and Spike’s were returned to them. This created a lot of questions. But yeah, if Fred’s soul really was destroyed, that was the worst death to date in the Buffyverse.
This is true. Joss&Co are good at leading me to expect certain things and turning them on their head. Even after BtVS7 I still don’t feel like I’ve been betrayed in any way by any plotline. Angel, in my opinion, has proven to be even superior to BtVS for me, and I think they won’t let me down.
My hope for the outcome of this storyline is that a new soul for Fred is created by combining bits of her parents’ souls, Ilyria is destroyed and the new soul inhabits Fred’s body. Even better would be if the new soul inhabited Eve’s body, which was then transformed into an exact duplicate of Fred.
Suppose they undo the mindwipe by basically saying the last year never happened (except of course for Angel remembering it). Fred might get her soul back that way. Of course, that means that she’ll still be with Gunn and Wes may still be in his Dark Place [sup]TM[/sup].
Two things here –
First, I agree with Sir Prize: there really isn’t another viable choice for Wes. Certainly, the Fang Gang doesn’t need another goddess for an enemny, and if he can establish a peacable relationship with her, that’s for the best.
Second, Wes already has established that he will accept a passing resemblence to Fred when he can’t have the real thing. He boinked Lilah’s brains out when she put her hair in pigtails and wore glasses, like Fred. Not only that, but he asked (commanded, really) Lilah to do that again in another episode. Though it pains him to see her memories re-enacted by Illyria, I think he can’t bear to part with what is literally all that is left of Fred.
Anyway. Agreed, fantastic acting by Acker.
I don’t have any problem with the seeming re-hash of other, older plotlines. It’s not like there’s only one way for a goddess to act once she’s managed to come back to Earth, or for a demon to learn to live in modern times, or whatever. I’ll agree that I have had enough of the angst, though.
Off topic, but it is Angel news. SMG open to working Angel now. I will withhold my comments for some other thread, but it is news to know where they might be going…
Although people have pointed out the parallel between Fred and Cordelia’s possessions, I’m thinking that what happened to Fred is not all that dissimilar to what happened to Angel and Spike, e.g. demon took over the body. The only real differences (in result, if not in execution) is that the soul of the possessed got destroyed in the process and Illyria seemed to retain less of the shell’s memories, due to the whole liquefaction of the organs thing.
With Fred, the demon that took over the body was much higher up in the superpower hierarchy than your standard vampire, but * possibly * not as intrinsically evil.
I disagree that Fred’s death was the worst ever – while having your soul completely destroyed sucks, spending an eternity in a hell dimension having demons playing tic-tac-toe on your metaphysical liver might be a tad worse. Given the choice, I know which I’d pick.
I do think Angel and Spike missed a possibility when they were in the big Hole to New Zealand. If the demon would kill everyone on a path between it and wherever the spell was being cast, it seems like you could have jumped down the rabbit hole and done it from a few miles down. Not too many people on a direct tangent from L.A. to the middle of the Earth.
I thought the concept for the episode was beautiful. Illyria has to start all over again, fresh, in a completely different world, where she has no army and no worshippers. I love it.
And I miss Fred horribly, horribly, horribly.
I thought this ep was great. The WB must be crazy for cancelling this show.
1–Her soul was destroyed the same way Halfrek’s was destroyed in Selfless. In the Jossverse, it seems that souls just pass through dimensions when they die, unless they literally cease to be. Heh. Joss wanted to really pound the idea home that Fred is not coming back. There will be no resurrecting of her because there’s literally nothing left to resurrect.
2–Buffy and supposedly every other soul that dies goes to either a heaven dimension or a hell dimension. Not Heaven or Hell as we tend to think of it, just one of many dimensions. We’ve only one heard Heaven dimension mentioned, but there are at least 5 Hell dimensions. And didn’t AtS 2.16 Epiphany strongly imply that Earth itself is a hell dimension?
- When a person is turned, the soul goes to the Ether. The Orb of Thesulah (or however you spell it) is what you can use to pull said soul out of the Ether and then transfer it to a vampire. That, or a big cave demon in Africa. Now once a vampire is dusted, I don’t know what happens to the soul, though Spike and Angel are apparently convinced it’ll go to hell. I think they’re wrong, but I’m not a writer for ME and I guess it goes wherever Joss says it goes.
And finally, I agree that what’s happened to Fred is more like what happened to Angel and Spike and less like Cordelia or Dark!Willow. In fact, I don’t think Illyria should be compared to Cordelia’s situation at all. Cordy didn’t go evil…she gave birth to a Goddess that was controlling her body. Cordy herself still existed, but her body was being used as an incubator. Fred is, as Wes put it, gone.
Remember how vampires were created? Back millions of years ago, as demons were drove out of the dimension by humans, one bit a human and essentially infected the human, turning it into a vampire. That’s pretty much what happened to Fred. She was infected by an Old One–that’s all a vampire is. Come to think of it, that’s all a Slayer is too.
Anyway, I don’t think this is a retread of previous storylines. Fred isn’t evil. Fred is dead.
So perhaps the Curtis Mayfield song would have been more appropriate for the end of the show than the Kim Richey song they chose.
I’m kind of scared for the end - I had a similar list for Buffy where they had way more notice that it was to be the final season…and to say ME dropped the ball would be a massive understatement. There were just so many things that they failed to wrap up, and they failed in a seriously clumsy fashion.
I have hopes for the season arc - but not for the series-long arcs, of course I could be pleasantly surprised.
Only saw the episode today. I liked it, I like where the whole story is going. Feel bad about Fred, but the story sure as heck has me interested. I don’t think Illyria wants to learn how to be human, she just wants to know what humans are like. I hope the writers keep that distance, and don’t humanize the character too much. Although it would be interesting to see her manifest more and more of Fred’s characteristics. Just to watch Wesley squirm, if nothing else.
So, someone mentioned the mindwipe. Here’s my thought. Assume that the mindwipe didn’t erase memories, it just made them inaccessible. Locked off in some corner of the brain, with false memories laid on top. Wes remembers getting his throat cut, but he thinks the Beast did it. Something like that. When Fred died, some of her memories were passed to Illyria, but all jumbled up - including the hidden ones, and she can access them more or less at random. She starts asking questions about Connor, Wesley gets curious, maybe bring Gunn in somehow to look up the records of the deal Angel struck with W&H in the Library of Demonic Congress… and BAM. Whole thing unravels. Wesley suddenly remembering his banishment from Angel Inc. would be a perfect incentive for him to forgive Gunn, the door is opened for a Vincent Kartheiser cameo, except now that he knows what a normal life is like, his character isn’t as sullen and bitchy.
Speaking of Epiphany, what was that big robed demon Angel killed? Wasn’t it strongly hinted that that was a senior partner? And what about the little girl the Beast killed? Might be, out of Wolf, Ram, and Hart, there’s only one left. As for Earth being a hell dimension, at the very least, it used to be. Demons once ruled the Earth. That’s pretty much the definition of a hell dimension, no? Then the demons were overthrown, humans became the dominent species, and the Earth is a little less helly. Joss loves redemption stories: maybe Earth is an entire plane of exsistence that is going through the process of redemption.
Were demons driven out by humans? I’d gotten the impression that they left for reasons of their own, or that humanity had very little to do with the driving out part, at least. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the first episode of Buffy, where Giles explains the whole thing, so I’m not sure. Was it the Slayer that got the demon-killing business started?
And Miller, good catch on the Earth-as-hell-dimension thing. So in Buffyverse, is Earth the place where bad angels get sent to?
Also, my knowledge of human evolution kind of ruins the whole “demons are millions of years old” thing for me, considering that the Old Ones supposedly terrorized humans, and that anatomically modern humans are at best 500 000 years old (and that’s kind of stretching it). Meaning that it was australopithecines and Homo erectus that demons were pushing around, making them less terrifying to me, considering that australopithecines were only as tall as 12 year old kids today, and that Homo erectus was armed only with stone tools. But the idea of a Neanderthal vampire is kind of interesting.
From The Harvest