**Miller, **I think you’re partially right. I think the cup was the real deal, even though the actual, physical liquid it contained wasn’t actually important. The kicker is, yes, it really was the Cup of Perpetal Torment, but having drunk from it, he might not start experiencing Torment right away- it might take an episode or two to kick in (reference the bit of rubble from “Lies My Parents Told Me”), and Spike, Angel and the FG may not make the connection for a few more eps after that. Everyone, including Eve and Lindsey, seems to think cup was fake, but I’d be willing to bet that Sirk knows otherwise. I doubt that we’ve seen the last of him.
The Battle of the Souled Vampires probably did have more significance than the drinking from the cup, which was probably actually was a metaphor- a ritual signifying that the vampire drinking from it was The One.
Of course, I’ll wager that His Peroxidedness would have been a bit less disappointed if the Mountain Dew had been serving as a mixer for some fine Kenucky moonshine (I have experienced fine Kentucky moonshine with Mountain Dew, and believe me, it will take the edge off of any torment, perpetual or otherwise.)
Okay. I liked the episode and I gasped at seeing Lindsey and the flashbacks were fun, but… come on! Doesn’t anyone else remember season 2 of Buffy? Do we really need to go back to 1880 to show that Spike and Angel are both nuts when it comes to Dru, and she looooves encouraging it? I suppose there’s some legal issue preventing them from using those old clips, doh.
Funny thing about the cup, when they said it was “The Cup Of Torment”, I actually joked to myself, “it must be full of Mountain Dew!”
It was totally from the times that ‘The Simpsons’ made fun of the stuff, which I suppose the Angel writers watch (like most everybody else). Still, I almost dropped a log when my joke turned out to be true.
I’m not so sure of that. From their dialogue at the end, it seemed to me that Sirk was working for Eve and Lindsey. I think they set up the cup, and used Sirk to feed them info. I think he was just a cat’s paw: he knows as much as Lindsey is willing to tell him.
I also want to say in re: the magic cardboard box, we don’t know what went into making the box in the first place. It could have been ten times as expensive and complex as Fred’s gizmo back in the Pavayne episode. Plus, whoever was behind turning Spike into a spook in the first place would best know how to turn him back.
I loves me some Angel, and I am fine with the level of fighting on the show, but last night’s just dragged (the fighting, I mean). Part of it’s that I’m just tired of movies and TV shows having something of tremendous import be decided by the outcome of a fistfight-- I think it’s lazy and stupid (see: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). But it was made even WORSE by the fatc that Angel could have gotten to the cup first any number of times (at least three, anyway) if he’d just hurried a tiny bit.
I mean, come on! Angel punches Spike. Angel faces cup and walks toward it very, veeerrrry slowly. Spike revives. Spike punches Angel. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. I suppose that’s just supposed to indicate Angel’s general disconnect from the hero status he used to assume. His ennui, or whatever. But really, it was just annoying.
On the positive side, bonus points for:
Any episode with Dru,
Fred hitting Gunn when he went bloody-eyed
A weirdly touching outburst from Harmony when she went bloody-eyed
I agree with Miller. We have no reason to take anything Eve said in this episode, and by extension any other episode, with anything but a salt lick of skepticism. We don’t know that the Shanshu has anything to do with anything, that the Conduit was gone (could have been an illusion) or even that she went to school where she said. Since she’s now bedding a fella who don’t like Angel, her credibility on all fronts takes a hit. I wonder if she told him about her little Halloween bopping with Poufy.
I loves me some Angel, and I am fine with the level of fighting on the show, but last night’s just dragged (the fighting, I mean). Part of it’s that I’m just tired of movies and TV shows having something of tremendous import be decided by the outcome of a fistfight-- I think it’s lazy and stupid (see: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). But it was made even WORSE by the fatc that Angel could have gotten to the cup first any number of times (at least three, anyway) if he’d just hurried a tiny bit.
I mean, come on! Angel punches Spike. Angel faces cup and walks toward it very, veeerrrry slowly. Spike revives. Spike punches Angel. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. I suppose that’s just supposed to indicate Angel’s general disconnect from the hero status he used to assume. His ennui, or whatever. But really, it was just annoying.
On the positive side, bonus points for:
Any episode with Dru,
Fred hitting Gunn when he went bloody-eyed
A weirdly touching outburst from Harmony when she went bloody-eyed
I agree with Miller. We have no reason to take anything Eve said in this episode, and by extension any other episode, with anything but a salt lick of skepticism. We don’t know that the Shanshu has anything to do with anything, that the Conduit was gone (could have been an illusion) or even that she went to school where she said. Since she’s now bedding a fella who don’t like Angel, her credibility on all fronts takes a hit, and it would be to her advantage to spread dissent among the good guys. I wonder if she told him about her little Halloween bopping with Angel.
Miller, just a WAG on my part, but I think Sirk is working for Sirk. He probably had some knowledge that Eve and Lindsey could make use of, and helping them out served his own ends as much as theirs. I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to think that E&L had this idea for cooking up a phoney prophecy as a means of trying to get Spike to kill Angel, Sirk knew of a real one that would fit the bill, but was more than content to let his “employers” think it was phoney.
Sirk may very well be playing both ends and the middle against an entirely different piece of string. He strikes me as being both too intelligent and too arrogant to be E&L’s puppet in this play. I think he has his own agenda. He comes off as too strong of a character to just disappear. He’ll probably end up playing Ethan Rayne to Wesley’s Giles.
As for the box- there was obviously some heavy-duty mojo involved in putting that bit of corrugated cardboard together, so yes, it is probably true that whoever made it was probably the party responsible for getting the amulet, and Spike, out of the Hellmouth and into the envelope and thence onto Angel’s desk. Judging by Spike’s elevator conversation with Eve in “Lineage”, it was probably her (and Lindsey’s) intent all along that Spike die and be brought back. Why such an elaborate scheme just to kill Angel? My guess would be that the object isn’t to kill Angel so much as to keep him from becoming the shanshu, and having another souled vampire kill him would simply to be the means to that end. If, and I think it extremely likely, it turns out that the Cup was the real thing, then their purpose has already been accomplished, but they don’t know it yet because Sirk has led them to believe that the thing is a fake.
OK, some serious wild speculation going on here. An alternate theory would be that the cup is a fake, but either Eve was lying about Spike’s recorporialization being the cause of the Rift In The Universe, or there was never really a rift- E&L just worked some heavy duty mojo on the building and it’s occupants (really really heavy if they could make the white room disappear) again, as a means of depriving Angel of the Big Shanshu Cookie.
About the White Room: we don’t know it disappeared, only the Gunn couldn’t get to it. It’s easier to stop someone from getting on a bus than it is to get rid of the bus itself. Eve could easily have made it appear to have vanished, possibly with Sirk’s help.
About the White Room: we don’t know it disappeared, only the Gunn couldn’t get to it. It’s easier to stop someone from getting on a bus than it is to get rid of the bus itself. Eve could easily have made it appear to have vanished, possibly with Sirk’s help. Also, they had to have a way to ensure that neither Eve nor Sirk was affected by what happened. We also don’t know how long Sirk has been working behind the scenes with E&L. Perhaps they want to kick out Angel and his gang and go back to the “good” old days.
Gunn was also a couple of hours away from bleeding-from-his-eyes-madness at the point he reported that too, who knows how it affected his preceptions before the blood started flowing? You can’t tell me Harmony was thinking straight just prior…no matter how hot Spike is, you don’t want to tick off the boss who’s threatened your afterlife already
About the White Room: we don’t know it disappeared, only that Gunn couldn’t get to it. It’s easier to stop someone from getting on a bus than it is to get rid of the bus itself. Eve could easily have made it appear to have vanished, possibly with Sirk’s help.
Also, they had to have a way to ensure that neither Eve nor Sirk was affected by what happened. We also don’t know how long Sirk has been working behind the scenes with E&L. Perhaps they want to kick out Angel and his gang and go back to the “good” old days.
Another solid episode, I think last weeks is still my favorite of the season so far, however seeing Lindsey was great! I wonder what the hell happened to him during the last few years. Good to see we are apparently going to get an arc and a cool “big bad”.
Hmmm. An interesting theory but I don’t quite buy it. First, the cup never made sense to me – despite Sirk’s condescending remarks I think Angel or Wesley would have spotted something in the prophesy about the cup earlier. Anyway from a purely logistical standpoint it is going to be hard to bring the cup back into the story again unless the WB starts running “previously on angel…” segments which I don’t think they are doing this season. My guess is despite the emergence of a shiny new story arc (Yay!) the episodes will still remain reasonably self contained. But it is a cool theory.
Does anyone have the straight-dope on Angel’s ratings this season? I was just checking them out, but don’t know what the WB wants. From what I can tell, it seems that the ratings have unfortunately been slipping from the season premier and fewer of the crowd from Smallville seem to be sticking around. Luckily Angel does seem to be doing a lot better than the WB’s big new (and apparently canceled) Tarzan show. Does anyone have the inside scoop? When do we find out if we get another season? I heard Angel had budget cuts – any chance of Mutant Enemy reclaiming some of that cash?
joshmaker, I’ve seen a few rumors floated around that Angel has been picked up for a sixth season.
Also, the reason Angel or Wesley didn’t find the Cup o’ Torment references was (according to Sirk, anyhoo) that they were newly translated. So it is fairly plausible that (assuming only one copy of the text exists) the material was on the translator’s desk instead of in the archives, and therefore unavailable for viewing, even in the orginal language, at the time Wesley or Angel would have been reading them.
Er, Eve is just not a good actress. A zombie Lilah would have been so much slicker, but of course that wouldn’t have worked too well for the Lindsay twist.
The thing is, what’s Lindsay’s game here? When last we saw him, he wasn’t quite a good guy, but he was looking to turn things around. He certainly wasn’t itching to kill Angel (though maybe he did get stopped by the cops and…). He didn’t have any huge master plan or vendetta. He mostly just wanted to get away from WH. Now it seems that he’s either working against them, using Team Angel to hurt them big time, or working for them again. Color me confused: massive offscreen character development like this just seems a little kooky.
I thought Spike’s tryst with Harm was a little disturbing. For a second I thought we were going to see another attempted rape debate springing up.
I hope they do someday explain what the heck made Spike the Vampire so different. Why wasn’t he a monster right away like all other vamps? And how could he “come back” and pretty much become a genuinely good guy even before he got a soul back? He’s an anomaly.
joshmaker - This episode was #96, so we’re closing in on 100, which is some magical number for syndication, which in turn is where the WB get some of its money back. I haven’t heard the rumours Thea mentions, but then again, I haven’t been paying attention.
And about the episodes being self contained - are they really? Would this episode make any kind of sense to someone tuning in for the very first time?
Was this the first time this year Angel had his vamp-face on?
