Angel 5.05, "Life of the Party"
Nov. 13th, 2003 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hermionesviolin[original U.S. airdate 29 October 2003; written by Ben Edlund and directed by Bill Norton]
This episode had shades of Where the Wild Things Are (my first call), Something Blue (Meredith’s more accurate call), and perhaps even Fear Itself (this may just be because the demon who had the human mask reminded me of Gachnar in terms of physical appearance).
Spike: Back in my day...
“Thank you!” i literally shouted. I get the rationale for
M pointed out that Spike did go out on Halloween once (though it ended badly for him), but i also point you to this ficlet.
Hmm, in my brief post-ep jottings i have:
Wes/Angel, Angel/Spike, no Fred/Knox, Wes/Fred
I don’t remember the specific Wes/Angel and Spike/Angel moments, but i know they were there. I like Wes/Fred, so sue me. Of course you could see it coming a mile away that while he’s romantically into Fred she just wanted to be slumber party buddies. When we come to the morning and everyone’s saying how great the party was and Knox comes in i felt bad for him ‘cause he had missed it, but Fred/Knox holds no real interest for me, perhaps in part because Knox the character holds little interest for me. He’s not a bad character, just not that interesting.
Sometimes when i’m really on a “Everything has to make sense” kick around Christianity, my mother reminds me that there comes a point when one has to make a leap of faith. I reply that i make the God leap, but everything else has to make sense in a logical semi-provable way. I operate the same way with narrative fantasy worlds. So when we learned Lorne had his sleep removed, my first thought was that your brain needs sleep to process everything it’s taken in during the day, to rest and rejuvenate, so forth, that if you go too long without sleeping you literally go crazy. So i was waiting for a tossaway line explaining how demon physiology operates differently. So i was pleased to see that actually the same rules apply, and they even said interesting things about empath demons and their subconsciouses to boot. Hulk!Lorne was lame in a sense, but it also made a lot of sense as a manifestation of his subconscious since he feels like he has no real powers to help out the gang, that the entertainment work he does is important but not anywhere near the level of the rest of them.
The Pylean coat gag should have been saved for another time when it would be more potent. When the guy said it was Pylean i totally knew it was made from the skin of Pyleans since it was green and creepy people do that kind of stuff, but i think it was treated like a throwaway gag and should have been saved for a time when it would have been more poignant. Though i suppose it fits with the theme of Lorne feeling useless, worried about being discarded and such.
Glitterati! Okay, earlier that day (or maybe the day before) Shep had been talking about the Glitterati, the Gay Mafia, so hearing Lorne refer to the demonic royalty as such amused me. I was troubled when the Duke said something about his friendship with Lorne since it had been established that the Duke was one of the baddest of the bad, but Meredith and i discussed and really, when Lorne was running Caritas before he met Angel he was just doing his thing, not picking sides, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s friendly with lots of bad guys.
Angel was watching hockey.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
evemac points to a Connor parallel.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve had sex under a mystical influence. I went to UC Santa Cruz.” Meredith tells me Marti Noxon (she who gets blamed for the horrible Spike-as-bad-boyfriend plotlines of BtVS S7) went to UCSC, and TBQ points out that [assuming Eve was telling the truth] that one throwaway line ruined her "How do you know I'm either of those things?"
She also shares my nitpick both about the Lorne/Spike tango (hello, incorporeal) and “Once they figured out that Lorne was affecting people, why didn't he tell them to stop doing what they were doing? Even just to try it to see if it would work?” (my immediate thought once they realized the catalyst was Lorne telling people to do things).
I love Gunn and the panther.
He [Angel] wore leather. Sure, it was a strategically placed couch cushion, but you have to take the bad with the good.
I giggled at that commentary.
Is there anything in S4 which gives “Home” a definite time? Because in this episode we definitively fuzzy-timed to RL time.
This episode had shades of Where the Wild Things Are (my first call), Something Blue (Meredith’s more accurate call), and perhaps even Fear Itself (this may just be because the demon who had the human mask reminded me of Gachnar in terms of physical appearance).
Spike: Back in my day...
“Thank you!” i literally shouted. I get the rationale for
M pointed out that Spike did go out on Halloween once (though it ended badly for him), but i also point you to this ficlet.
Hmm, in my brief post-ep jottings i have:
Wes/Angel, Angel/Spike, no Fred/Knox, Wes/Fred
I don’t remember the specific Wes/Angel and Spike/Angel moments, but i know they were there. I like Wes/Fred, so sue me. Of course you could see it coming a mile away that while he’s romantically into Fred she just wanted to be slumber party buddies. When we come to the morning and everyone’s saying how great the party was and Knox comes in i felt bad for him ‘cause he had missed it, but Fred/Knox holds no real interest for me, perhaps in part because Knox the character holds little interest for me. He’s not a bad character, just not that interesting.
Sometimes when i’m really on a “Everything has to make sense” kick around Christianity, my mother reminds me that there comes a point when one has to make a leap of faith. I reply that i make the God leap, but everything else has to make sense in a logical semi-provable way. I operate the same way with narrative fantasy worlds. So when we learned Lorne had his sleep removed, my first thought was that your brain needs sleep to process everything it’s taken in during the day, to rest and rejuvenate, so forth, that if you go too long without sleeping you literally go crazy. So i was waiting for a tossaway line explaining how demon physiology operates differently. So i was pleased to see that actually the same rules apply, and they even said interesting things about empath demons and their subconsciouses to boot. Hulk!Lorne was lame in a sense, but it also made a lot of sense as a manifestation of his subconscious since he feels like he has no real powers to help out the gang, that the entertainment work he does is important but not anywhere near the level of the rest of them.
The Pylean coat gag should have been saved for another time when it would be more potent. When the guy said it was Pylean i totally knew it was made from the skin of Pyleans since it was green and creepy people do that kind of stuff, but i think it was treated like a throwaway gag and should have been saved for a time when it would have been more poignant. Though i suppose it fits with the theme of Lorne feeling useless, worried about being discarded and such.
Glitterati! Okay, earlier that day (or maybe the day before) Shep had been talking about the Glitterati, the Gay Mafia, so hearing Lorne refer to the demonic royalty as such amused me. I was troubled when the Duke said something about his friendship with Lorne since it had been established that the Duke was one of the baddest of the bad, but Meredith and i discussed and really, when Lorne was running Caritas before he met Angel he was just doing his thing, not picking sides, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s friendly with lots of bad guys.
Angel was watching hockey.
evemac points to a Connor parallel.“This isn’t the first time I’ve had sex under a mystical influence. I went to UC Santa Cruz.” Meredith tells me Marti Noxon (she who gets blamed for the horrible Spike-as-bad-boyfriend plotlines of BtVS S7) went to UCSC, and TBQ points out that [assuming Eve was telling the truth] that one throwaway line ruined her "How do you know I'm either of those things?"
She also shares my nitpick both about the Lorne/Spike tango (hello, incorporeal) and “Once they figured out that Lorne was affecting people, why didn't he tell them to stop doing what they were doing? Even just to try it to see if it would work?” (my immediate thought once they realized the catalyst was Lorne telling people to do things).
I love Gunn and the panther.
He [Angel] wore leather. Sure, it was a strategically placed couch cushion, but you have to take the bad with the good.
I giggled at that commentary.
Is there anything in S4 which gives “Home” a definite time? Because in this episode we definitively fuzzy-timed to RL time.