selenak

Lj not delivering any comment notifications is annoying, but what else is new? On a more fun note, I put up some of my newer fanfic in various fandoms and wrote another DS9 drabble. Here are the links.

"Stain" (aka yours truly has a revisionist take on Vedek Bareil and The Collaborator)

"Ghost in the Machine" (my Star Wars/ Farscape crossover, in which Obi-Wan Kenobi encounters Scorpius)

"Faith Manages" (Kai Winn, through the seasons)

"End of the Affair" (Londo/G'Kar slash I originally wrote for theatrical_muse and rewrote to fit with B5 canon instead of roleplaying canon)

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My local comicstore finally delivered Astonishing X-Men #3 and #4, so I've been revelling in Jossian goodness. So many things to love - the way many of the mutants react to the "cure" news, Beast's argument with Wolverine (note to self: must find good fanfic about Hank McCoy), the ongoing Emma and Kitty bickering, Emma Frost in general (is it me, or does Joss continue to give her the best lines), Dr. Rao (hooray for not-evil, not-mad female scientist still on opposing sides of Our Heroes)… Oh, and when Scott started to talk to this one-eyed chap, something in my memory triggered. "I know him," I thought, and then recalled 1602 which featured, among many others, the Elizabethan version of one Nicholas Fury. 1602 was the first time I encountered the gentleman and I was disappointed when andrastewhite told me he isn't that complex in the usual Marvelverse. (The Elizabethan Fury is a most intriguing antihero who owes something to Walsingham and even more to Neil Gaiman's knack of great twists.) Anyway, modern-day Fury as written by Joss Whedon might not be that complex, but he's got something up his sleeve, and I'm sure we'll see him again.

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Now, the first part of my Angel season 4 rewatching: As I said before, this is the season plotted most tightly. Which probably makes it impossible to watch for newbies, but it's ever so rewarding for the faithful fan.

Deep Down is Steven DeKnight's AtS debut. He came fresh from delivering dark and controversial episodes like Dead Things and Seeing Red on BtVS, so I knew he'd be good for the team, but the opening episode is more than good. It also, incidentally, served to wipe out the bad taste of Tomorrow had left when I first watched it.

The opening sequence, Angel's first hallicunation, will be echoed by the very last scene of the season in Home, and it's interesting even if you don't know that. The friends and family dinner Angel imagines, with everyone getting along fine, includes, most poignantly at this point in canon when they had last seen each other when Angel was trying to kill him for abducting Connor, Wesley. Wesley with glasses, hailing back to season 1 and early season 2, when he, Angel and Cordy were closest. "Family," Cordelia said in To Shanshu in LA. "To family," Wesley says in Angel's dream, Wesley who like Angel came from an extremely dysfunctional one. Which Angel knows. Family, the blood one and the one formed by friends, is a concept investigated again and again in any Joss Whedon show, and it will be a main theme in season 4.

Angel's one and only living blood relation, Connor, is the loving son here, bright and happy, the way he won't be until Angel has him mindwiped. And yet even before the reality of the sea intrudes again, you also get some literary foreshadowing: "Do I have to watch?" Connor asks when Angel and Cordelia are about to kiss. "Poke out your eyes," Angel replies playfully. The most prominent mythical figure who poked out his own eyes is, of course, Oedipus, who did this when finding out that his wife was his mother. Angelus, much later in the season, will harp on the Oedipus comparison for Connor, but it is not really fitting the way he means it. Connor did never regard Cordelia as his mother, nor does he remember her fulfilling maternal functions.

But then, Oedipus never had an Oedipus complex in the Freudian sense. Oedipus went out of his way to avoid the prophecy about killing his father and marrying his mother he was given. He exiled himself from what he believed to be his home country, and was determined never to see the people he believed to be his parents again. Which was, inevitably, how he ended up in Thebes, his real home country, marrying the widowed Queen, his real mother, after defeating the Sphinx and her riddles. One French version of the story is called La Machine Infernale. The Gods really have it in for Oedipus, and no matter what he tries to avoid, it still comes true. Though he is not without fault. He killed a stranger on the road because of a petty argument and his hot temper. He could have avoided this with a little more self-restraint, by making the wise choice, and thus avoided killing his unknown father. He could have listened to the seer Tiresias, who tells him he does not want to know the answer to his questions. But he did not listen, and he made the wrong choice.

Connor, whose strings got pulled as relentlessly as Oedipus' ever did, who had a hellish machine going on against him and yet contributed by making several choices himself, who saw Jasmine for what she was but did not want to understand and chose wilful blindness every time, could definitely relate.

Incidentally, methinks the reason that Angel is projecting Oedipus issues (in the Freudian sense as well as the mythical one) that early onto Connor already, as well as later when he's soulless, is that he himself does have that famous complex going on. Tim Minear once memorably summarized Angel's feelings for Darla as "you're my mother and my lover and my damnation, and you're really pretty". When pregnant Darla in season 3's Offspring says "my darling boy" when Angel puts his hand on her belly, she could be talking to either him or Connor. Liam's real mother never talks during the Prodigal flashbacks, and he takes leave of his sister, not of her. It's his father all his issues are about; his natural mother is a pale figure never mentioned. Darla, otoh, is an obsession he wants to return to even two years after regaining his soul. "You made me," he tells her in Five by Five desperately, when she banishes him. Ah, parents throwing one out. Sounds familiar?

Angel practising tough love on Connor near the end of the episode is a very cool scene. In retrospect, it did contribute to the tragedy in the making, and yet it's hard to say what Angel could have done differently at that point. It's the repetition of the "I love you. Now get out" in Habeas Corpses that will prove fatal.

Connor's decision to remain in the Hyperion with Fred and Gunn during these three summer months might have been partly for strategic reasons (he could keep them from finding Angel this way), but it also speaks of his need for family, that need that made him respond to Angel against his will in Benediction. His repeated "that was cool, wasn't it?" sounds eerily like mind-wiped Connor in Origin, and says something about his need to get acknowledgment from Fred and Gunn even while he's deceiving them. For those summer months, they formed a family triad, as Connor, Cordy and Jasmine do, or Connor, Jasmine and Angel, or the one he never experienced, Connor, Angel and Darla. When Connor, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, rescues strangers and tries to talk to them only to be suspected as a freak and/or a menace, they are again the classic family triad, father, mother and son. In retrospect, they're also much like Mindwiped! Connor and the Rileys in an identical situation in Origin.

Speaking of Fred and Gunn, parts of their dialogue again reminds me of my bafflement about the "Fred was hardest on Wesley" fanon. When Fred, as she did at least once in every late season 3 episode, suggests again that they should ask Wesley for help, Gunn brusquely replies that Wesley doesn't care about them anymore.

Fred: Did we give him any reason to?

Interestingly, Fred reacts much harsher to the discovery of Connor's deception than she ever did to Wesley's. Of course Wesley, while lying and kidnapping, was trying to save Angel and Connor both, as Fred had found out herself when hunting for Wesley's diaries. Connor, otoh, had deceived them to keep his father sunk in the ocean. But it's more than that. Fred using the tazer on Connor repeatedly and being in an unforgiving mood for months to come (again as opposed to the Wesley affair) is connected to that tentative family bond which had started to form, and the way she saw Connor as an innocent child. Season 3 Wesley had been her friend, but Billy had ensured she didn't let him get too close. Whereas she had let herself care for Connor.

Billy was arguably the first time we got a strong hint that his dysfunctional childhood with Wyndham-Pryce Père and all that time locked under the stairs had resulted in Wesley having more that just some issues boiling under the skin. Deep Down, like many AtS titles, refers to more than just one thing. It's Angel under the water, true. But it's also Wesley. What he does to Justine, keeping her prisoner in a closet, is more than just ruthlessness in order to find Angel. It's sadism. (Quentin Travers and his father would no doubt approve.) The relationship with Lilah looks downright healthy in comparison. When last we saw them in season 3, he had told her "I didn't even think about you while you were there" (talk about post coital cruelty - that beats Buffy's "you were just convenient" in Wrecked any time of the day, but hey, Wesley is a guy, so it doesn't elicit the same fannish reaction). Three months of splendid sex later, they have progressed to conversations (which mix truths with deliberate lies on both their parts) and, more revealingly, post-coital cuddles.

The high point of the Wesley/Lilah relationship, the moment when they're genuinely happy with each other and ready to admit this, comes in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, when he calls it a relationship and she makes him sign a dollar. But this is also the scene where you can see why it will never work at the end. They both deceive each other within minutes after this gesture; Wesley listens in to Lilah's telephone conversation while pretending to be asleep, and Lilah deliberately sets him up to give Team Angel misleading information so she can go after Lorne. The signed dollar note falls on the floor when Lilah leaves, and she does not notice. I could not love thee, dear, as much, loved I not business more.

Lilah spent season 1 and 2 in competition with Lindsey, Holland Manners' favourite boy who got indulged in his flirts with the other side again and again, and aware that it was a competition she was in the process of losing. In season 3, she came into her own, as Gavin the toadie and Manners' poor replacement really were no match against her, but she still had to defer to said poor replacement. In season 4, that changes. She gets herself a promotion in the very first episode. Gone is the Lilah who swallowed pills in secret to preserve her smug façade; she is at her confident glowing best, and sparks not just in her scenes with Wesley but also with Angel, in Ground State. Lilah on top of her game makes that other brunette with a sharp tongue look somewhat pale in comparison, and that had never been true in the past.

When we see Cordelia in her higher being state, it's worth noting that the aura of light surrounding her has the same tentacle shape Jasmine has when being born. As Skip works for Jasmine, I'm assuming that Cordy in effect never was with the Powers. So where is she until the end of The House Always Wins? With Jasmine, I assume, not that Cordy knows it, experiencing the Jasminiac bliss (and being bored by it already, but then she's supposed to be). When she comes back in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she's a fragmentary creature, trying to stitch together what was her old life. Looking at remnants of it, including (thanks, continuity gods!) the Sunnydale year of 1998 book. Seeing the photos of chearleader Cordy with her gorgeous long hair is heartbreaking for other reasons, too, if you allow me the frivolous aside. So, with the knowledge that Jasmine is in her already, how much of this is Cordy?

Almost everything, I'd say, with the arguable exception of being drawn to Connor and trusting him. (Though I could see Amnesiac!Cordy even without a Power That Was inside her pulling the strings appreciating his honesty that much.) We see her alone when no one else is watching her, so her confusion and comments have to be the genuine article, not a manipulation. And yet, as she tells Connor, she feels something horrible coming. Lorne reads it, and gets his Yeats quote in. "…What rough beast/slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" That same poem, The Second Coming, has the line "the good lost all conviction and the worst/ are full of passionate intensity", which certainly fits season 4.

Throughout the first four episodes, the photo we first saw Wesley carrying in his wallet during the Pylea episodes of season 2, that photo showing him, Angel and Cordelia, keeps turning up. Angel looks at it in Ground State and goes off to talk to Wesley, who does not believe he wants anything else but help in the search for Cordelia. Wesley radiates intensity, and he's not the worst, but he's certainly still deep down. Whether or not he's correct with his estimation of Angel's motives is besides the point here; what is important is that Wesley's self-esteem, despite outwardly quite a good status quo (he has his own gang of demon-fighters, and a gorgeous girl friend), continues to be at an all-time low and does not allow for a belief Angel might genuinely want him back. His feeding Angel with his own blood in Deep Down is more than just a method of saving Angel; it's a very self-destructive move, right after hearing the words "I should have killed you" from Angel. (Wesley doesn't know they were addressed to Connor.) I think that every since Loyalty, Wesley subconsciously or consciously expected and even wanted Angel to kill him. Or to die for Angel. No matter how you interpret the relationship, Angel was the most important person in Wesley's life (Fred comes close, but note that when Wesley believes Gunn to be responsible for her fate, he knifes him; when he thinks Angel might be, he tries to find explanations).

A few closing words about the episode which got quite a few complaints when it was originally broadcast, The House Always Wins. Aka The Angel Gang Does Las Vegas. Honestly, I like it. It's a good David Fury comedy, arguably way better than those other Lorne vehicles, that episode in season 2 with a name I don't recall in which Lorne and Noir!Angel stop a mini apocalypse, and Life of the Party in season 5. (What was the season 3 Lorne vehicle, btw?) The explanation for the slot machine zombies even the most casual visitor of a casino is bound to be weirded out by rings amusingly true, and the plot provides a credible excuse for Lorne to rejoin the LA team. Would that he had remained away, of course, considering what Angel is going to ask him to do, but it all makes Angelverse sense. Also, Andy Hallet's rendition of Lady Marmalade rocks.