Angel - 03/19/03 - Orpheus (spoilers)

Cafe Society
61

{unditLisa,

I watch Buffy in large part just to see Spike.

Uh-huh. When I first saw Angel shirtless early in S1 of Buffy, I thought that big, beefy, all-muscle body looked freakish, and when his face was all bone and angles and shaded eyes, he looked dopey. As for the perfectly lean, sinewy body… up until about the middle of S4, the ever-so-edible James Marsters was packing more bulk, both muscle and body fat, but was never as pumped as DB. And he always looked better. I’ve never liked the ripped look. I’ve heard Joss told JM to slim down because when Spike became a regular on the show, he wanted him to be more gaunt. But he still has just a bit of fat around the waist, and I think it’s sexy.

I really don’t like guys who are too perfect-looking, or too conventionally handsome. They look too good to be real, and all to often, they are completely stuck on themselves.

James Marsters has that scar over the left eyebrow…

62

I disagree completely. First, it wasn’t a joke, second, it was completely in character for Willow, and third, it was a really nice reinforcement of the theme of the episode.

  1. Willow wasn’t joking with Wesley; she was providing perspective. Wesley was in this “I touched the darkness” thing, with an undercurrent of “I’m a bad man,” and Willow said, effectively, “hah! you think you’ve been bad!” to him.

  2. All throughout BtVS, Willow has always talked about very serious, dark things with a light tone. That’s how her character is.

  3. I read into it the message to Wesley that, regardless of what bad he has done in the past, he should keep up the fight for good, a la Angel, Faith, Willow, etc.

  1. Willow hasn’t been shy and retiring for at least 2-3 seasons.

  2. She’s seeing someone now, and she’s not feeling guilty about it. She was flirting.

BTW, no one has mentioned the (IMO) best bit of dialogue

Willow: How you been?
Cordy: Higher Power.
Willow: Ultimate Evil.

Funny by itself, and a nice reference to the brilliant Buffy/Amy “Dead/Rat” dialogue of last year.

Sua

63

I saw this as more of rehashing a joke that really worked the first time, but bombed here.

64

I finally got to see this episode last night. Two Angel non-watchers watched it with three fanatics, myself included, and found it funny which is always a good sign for the episode.

Everyone cracked up on Willow’s lines. AH delivers them perfectly, and what she said to Conner when they first met was great.

I loved the fairwells. “See the brits know how to say good-bye. Angel wanted to hug.”

I’d like to cast in with the people who say Willow would casually mention her flaying of Warren. Strangely light phrasing and bizarre babbling are very in character for her. As she has said “Sometimes I am strange and morbid.” Oh and god her talk of shattering all the jars in the world with magic, and the problem with doing so was great. “Everybody loves fetal pigs.” indeed.

Ok I have a crazy theory. Sahjan is Cordy’s child, Connor kills him. The father kills the son and fulfills the murder prophecy Sahjan was affraid of comming true. It works in theory because Sahjan and his kind apparently used time as silly putty.

65

I saw this last night as well. It was alright, but I get sick of these “I’m evil, I’m not evil” little battles they constantly have throughout the series. I did like the “Puppy Rescue” bit, though. The episode had a lot of good moments, but there was something that’s really pissed me off.

Okay, Willow’s gay, but why does this always have to be the main focus of her character now? I have to admit, I haven’t seen much of the latest season of either show, but it really is bugging me. At first, it upset me when she started dating Tara because it seemed like the producers realized “Hey, we need a gay character, let’s pick the sqeeky, geeky girl who’s just been burned by her boyfriend.” It seemed like a complete publicity stunt, and I hated that. But I liked the way they handled it. It wasn’t that big a deal. It became an aspect of her character, they handled the relationship with Tara very well (like it was a completely normal relationship), and it really worked. My favorite “Touching Moment” from the show is the episode with Tara’s family, where at the end they’re dancing and the camera shows them floating. It was really cute.
But now, it seems with the fans, everytime there’s a female character brought in, people think “Willow needs to nail her,” and this episode seems to feed it. Now, I could be wrong, so someone fill me in: has Fred showed any signs of liking girls? Because from what I recall, she had a huge crush on Angel at first (her “Knight in Shinning Armor”), then she seemed to have a crush on Wesley for a bit, and then she dated Gun. Now, Willow shows up, and all of a sudden, they’re flirting with one another? I liked the whole idea of them just being dorky, but no, Willow has to be super gay, and Fred has to be compliant. It would have been great if when Willow blurts out “I’m seeing someone,” Fred looked confusedly at her and replied with a stiffled “What? No, wait, I wasn’t…I’m mean, I’m not…” and then a quick little awkward moment between the two, and things move on.
Again, I may have missed the point in the show where Fred was smitten with Cordelia, but it seemed very out of place for what I understand to be her character, and I felt there was no need to play up Willow in that light. Her talk with Wessley was good, but I feel that’s all the focus there needed to be on her sexuality. My friend Rita gets really angry when she hears people refering to her as “My lesbian friend Rita,” and I feel that the writers, at least for this episode, were relying too much on “The Lesbian wicca Willow,” and it really bugged me.

Aside from that, it was an interesting episode, and I have to admit, 60’s Angel seemed to have packed on a few pounds. I’m interested to see how things play out with Cordy and the baby.

66

Actually, I found this all pretty realistic. People flirt with people they find attractive, even if they have no intention of going any further than that. And when you are flirted with, people tend to flirt back, regardless of differences in orientation (unless they’ve got “issues”). Having a gay man I’ve just met (and some I’ve known a while) flirt with me is by no means an uncommon event (at least back when I had my hair :D), and usually I’d flirt right back at them.

Sua

67

As someone who is not a teen girl I would like to point out that I like the character Angel and think that David Boreanaz does a fine job playing him, especially in Angels darker moments.

His performance gets compared to that of James Marsters which I don’t think is fair, because the characters are so different. While Marsters does a great job with Spike’s wild emotional mood swings (some might say he overacts, not me though I think he is great) I don’t think that those characteristics would fit at all for a character like Angel. Boreanaz does a good job of portraying a very restrained character… the image I have of Angel is of someone who must constantly stay in control of his emotions, this has lead many people to call him wooden… however, looking at the episodes this season, notably “Spin the Bottle” and the more recent episodes where he plays Angelus, I think he has shown that he can do more than act ‘restrained’.

So, while David Boreanaz may not be the greatest living thespian, I think he works for the role, which I think is an intersting one. I would even go so far as to say that Angel is my favorite character on the show. For the record, I think that James Marsters does a terrific job as Spike, another great character. I guess I don’t quite understand why a lot of fans feel the urge to constantly pit one character against each other and see other characters as competing somehow….

68

El Elvis Rojo, I got the impression that Fred was surprised that Willow thought she was flirting. I believe that Fred was just having a great time geeking out with a fellow occult-lore geek, and Willow misinterpreted that as flirting, so she clarified her attatched relationship status.

Happens all the time. Without the whole demonology subtext.

69

Drat it all, I avoided this thread until I got around to watching my tape of the episode, and what do I discover? The bloody war coverage instead of the last few minutes of Angel, and the fact that the WB rebroadcast it on Sunday and I missed it because I didn’t read this thread!

Feh. Thank goodness for Psyche .

Oh, and SolGrundy, Faith has killed at least 2 humans that I can remember off the top of my head (the deputy mayor and the vulcanologist who discovered the skeleton of the demon the mayor planned to turn into). I can’t remember if there were more, but she was working for the Evil Mayor (best bad guy on Buffy, ever) for several months. There may well have been others “off screen”.

70

I didn’t have the problem with CNN coverage interrupting the last half of the show. I had my mother to do it for me. I get home, start watching my tape of the show, and right when Willow and Wes were whiping out their evils for comparitive measuremen, the damn tape jumped to Animal Planet! Anyway, thanks to Gaspode for giving me the heads up on the Sunday repeat.

Anyway, for the record, I really like Angel. Boreanz does a good job with him, and has shown in a number of episodes (particularly the Sadie Hawkins Day episode from Buffy season two) stronger acting chops than Angel’s normal brood-o-rama lets him express. Plus, the woodeness that is Angel’s normal personality is a great foil for jokes that rely on Boreanz breaking character. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as hard at anything in either show than I did at Angel’s dancing in “She,” from Angel’s first season. It might help that I started watching both shows late, in season five/two, and so was introduced to the character deep into his arc, instead of at the beginning of it.

Lastly, I agree with MrV. Fred, it seemed to me, just thought Willow was a cool person with whom she had a lot in common. Willow thought Fred was a cool person with whom she had a lot in common, but who was also a smokin’ hottie. Willow was flirting with Fred, but not vice versa.

71

Quick question about Willow breaking the soul jar:

Didn’t she tell Cordelia that the jar is impervious to magic? Willow said she tried a locator spell that failed. Yet she’s able to shatter the jar by magic because it’s just a jar, and she says to Wesley something about how it’s not the jar that’s sacred, or it’s only sacred because of what’s in it, or something. So was this just horrifyingly sloppy writing or am I missing something?

72

Yeah, I was kinda confused by that as well. I’m thinking that she finally realized that she could use a spell to find Angel’s soul, as opposed to focusing on finding the jar itself. The jar may be impervious to magic, but physically, it’s still a jar, so it can be broken. By sending the marble to find Angel’s soul, it would go through the jar in order to get to it. Whereas the magic propelling the metal marble would stop once it hit the jar, the force of the marble would still be able to shatter it, thus making everything hunky doorey.
Of course, that’s just what I think, so I could be way off.

73

I thought that she couldn’t locate the soul because of the jar nor the jar. However she could send out a destructive force that targetted jars and specify it enough that it would follow its nose as it were to the particular jar. Clearly the jarness was central to the spell as she could have destroyed all the jars in the world, or a large area, to get that one if it were around.

74

Cordelia’s deception is in big trouble now. Now that Angel’s back, for example, he can tell the gang that it wasn’t Angelus who killed Lilah.

The trailer for tomorrow’s episode was spectacularly unhelpful in telling us if EvilCordy will be outed.

75

Um, I think EvilCordy pretty much outed herself at the end of last week’s ep. The whole showing off her pregnantness and saying “It’s going to get a lot worse” accomplished that pretty well, IMHO. Then there’s the whole going from a fairly concealable 4-5 months lookingness to looking about 8 months in about three days of show time makes it kind of obvious that the baby ain’t exactly human.

But I really did love that dress she was wearing.

76

I do hope that Skip appears at some point to help clarify things though.

Maybe I am just hallucinating, but I thought the beast’s voice sounded similar to skip’s voice.

Oh and I do like Angel and David Boreanaz (sp?) playing him, too :slight_smile:
As for the best season of Angel, I’d have to say that so far season 3 was better than season 4, even though 4 is very good as well. Season 3 (quite a coincidence, the best Buffy Season was #3) had one of the greatest bad guys. For me, Daniel Holtz ranks right up there with Doctor Doom, Darth Vader and the Poetic Fiend when it comes to story villains.