embrace the ambiguity

It's pretty obvious, looking back, that I was not a fan of the First Evil as a Big Bad. Thinking about it again, with a few months hindsight, I think you can argue that thematically it works very well as a parallel with Angel season 4. It still doesn't exonerate Buffy season 7 for the neverending uberstory and the lack of great individual episodes (Conversations With Dead People and Lies My Parents Told Me being the exception) but it does tie in with the metaphysical ideas behind the show. Consider:

• In Buffy season 7 she has to unify a disparate band of everyday people in order to prevent the First Evil from cleansing the world of the 'pollution' of humanity's goodness. The First denies others their free will, as exemplified in the cases of Spike and Andrew, and is appeased with ritual sacrifice, as we see in First Date. The First Evil has an army which will control the new, cleansed world.



• In Angel season 4, he has to unify his friends (most of whom are busy hating each other) in order to prevent Jasmine, a former Power That Be, from cleansing the world of the 'pollution' of humanity's badness. Jasmine denies others their free will, as exemplified in Wes and Gunn's pursuit of Fred and in Fred's breaking of Jasmine's hold, and is appeased with the ritual sacrifice of willing followers. Jasmine's followers are an army which will control the new, cleansed world.

Looking back over Angel season 1, when we first encounter the Powers That Be (excluded their decision to let it snow over Sunnydale in Amends) they are clearly intended to be gods. The Oracles wear classical Greek trappings (but can also manifest through talking hamburgers) and the Powers' are above human morals. If we assume, as most people do, that it was the Powers who sent the snow in Amends then they are clearly in opposition to the First Evil ("the whole good versus evil thing? I'm over it"). Both the First Evil and Jasmine look at the bigger picture and consider the ends validate the means and both have a "with us or against us" mentality (if supernatural forces can be said to have a mentality). Both use agencies - Spike, Caleb, etc in Buffy and Cordelia, Darla etc in Angel - to control events in order to bring about their 'birth' into our plane of existence.

Both Buffy and Angel fight for the right to free will instead of control and conformity. They are both fighting on the side of humanity against natural forces, for people to be shades of grey instead of the black and white worlds of the First and Jasmine. Both seasons feature characters pulling themselves out of their private torments - Spike, Faith, Wes - in order to fight for others. Faith even provides the connecting thread between the two: having reconciled herself with Wes, she heads over to Sunnydale to reconcile herself with Buffy. Likewise the amulet: had Angel not chosen to fight Jasmine he would never have had the means to enable Buffy to defeat the First Evil.

The question is, does this running of two parallel themes in two seperate series on two different channels work? If that is what was intended then it was a crazily ambitious idea and one which was executed at the expense of individualised storytelling. Then again, the nature of both uberstories - regardless of any thematic link - put the arc over the individual episodes. Hopefully this year Angel will strike a balance between uberstory and individual tales.

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Meanwhile, I have a fic rec: Endless Encounters
The seven seasons of Buffy, the seven Endless.

A leopard can't change its stripes.
(spoilers for Just Rewards)

I always get to thinking about metephysical stuff when characters return from the dead. The dead dead, in Spike's case. I was a bit alarmed when Spike started talking about knowing that he is not going "where the heroes go. It's the other place. Full of fire." in Just Rewards. BtVS and Ats always seem to skate around the Christian notion of heaven and hell, instead having heavenly dimensions or hell dimensions. Quite why crosses are symbolically meaningful in a universe which accepts the supernatural and mystical but denies Christianity is never explained but I'm digressing. There are a couple of ways of fitting this suggestion of a judgemental afterlife:

Just as Buffy's description of Heaven could be a description of the final moment of her life - the glorious light and sense of freedom and love - so Spike's Hell could be the final moment of his unlife. He describes a pit and the ground cracking beneath him, as well as fire and torment. The slight problem with this theory is that Spike also clearly remembers his second death, displayed in his sarcastic response to Wes's question, so it seems unlikely that he would not spot the similarities. Despite what Angel might say, Spike isn't completely stupid.

Kalima, my latte sister, came up with a smarter theory. The Hell Spike is describing is neither a judgemental metaphysical plane in the Christian sense nor the moment of his second death eternally extended but a physical place linked to the W&H building. Something beneath them which only the "nearly ghost" can sense. She's thinking some kind of Faustian deal is going on, which makes me wonder how Eve is going to come into play. Spike is already telling Angel that the W&H deal is too good to be true - is he going to be the only one to see what lies beneath the surface?

I have to admit to not being wild about Angel season 4. I had a whole theory about the parallel storylines of Buffy season 7 and Angel season 4 being a subtle metephor for international politics (a theory I will get around to writing up here at some point and which, btw, Fred's poster of the Dixie Chicks supports) but I overall felt a bit ground down by it all. The whole Skip-ex-machina stuff with four years of Angel storyline revealed as a plot to bring Jasmine into existence? Urgh. Messy. I know they were working around various backstage crises but I was bored with the continual bleak tone. And Conner. God that lad was dull. So far, I've loved season 5. Angel has rediscovered fun. And then thrown Spike in to give us lots of entertainment watching the two vampires' circling each other like cats.

Having revived this blog for Angel season 5, I decided I'd best do a quick check of the rest of the site. In the essay Sins of the Father, comparing the parallelism of Spike and Angel, I remarked "Although that suggests that at the end of season 7 we'll get the Spike spin-off in which he goes to San Francisco to start a detective agency... "
Well, I guess I was sort of close...

I've also reneged on my plan to stop writing fanfic and produced the inevitable post-Chosen story, Nineteen Days. I find it sort of amusing that they skipped the usual sense of a summer holiday, instead deliberately starting Angel season 5 less than a month after season 4 ended.

And in what amounts to a constructive moment, I've added a random quote generator to the front page.


The plan went something like this:
1. Chosen provided a surprising sense of closure for the audience whilst giving the characters totally open futures. Futures without their past, in fact, since everything fell into a bloody great big hole.
2. Despite knowing that Spike was coming back, I felt there had been a farewell to the character. Especially any wicked energy thoughts I may have had about him.
3. Going to see Ghost of the Robot in London was supposed to be the final nail in the -ahem- coffin for naughty Spike thoughts.
4. The above senses of closure would mean I no longer felt the desire to appropriate the series for my own meanings.

Obviously, such logic has failed me as one glimpse of Angel season 5 has broken all my careful 12 steps of recovery from Slayer-addiction and I'm as obsessed as ever.

a hit, a palpable hit!
(spoilers for Lies My Parents Told Me)

I was thinking about this on the way to work, because I'm tragic that way.

In Reading the Vampire Slayer Dave West argues that the fight scenes in Buffy, whilst often having a subtextual meaning (e.g. the ineffectual anger Buffy displays in Innocence's fight with Angel is the emotion of one hurt rejected puppy), do not use the grammar of the HK action movie in which the style of fighting encodes a specific narrative meaning.

Which made me think of Spike. In the big fight scene with Wood at the end of Lies, Spike suddenly displays a new fight move. He is able to push Wood across the room with a open-palmed slap to the sternum which is very
different to his old fist and fangs approach. On the most obvious level, each physical blow to Wood's heart is accompanied by a verbal blow but, and this is where it gets interesting for me...the blow used is very similar to the one inch palm (minimal physical expenditure, maximum effect). Now you can talk about that purely in terms of how the blow is physically achieved but it also has a large spiritual element as it is a chi based move.

I've commented on the possible yin/yang elements of Spike and Angel before, even down to the hair colour ;-). And let's not get started on Angel and his tai-chi. In essence, and to go all Yoda on us, it refers to the "balance of the force". If the yin (female, heart, moon) and yang (male, mind, sun) are fighting, then the person is weak and their energy wasted on internal battles. The aim of tai-chi is to balance the two elements - make them complementary instead of conflicting. Chi is the energy released when this balance is achieved.

It could be said that Lies is when Spike finally balances everything - the demon and the soul working in harmony, even if the soul isn't particularly nice. And I've been muttering about how surely the series has to go for a balance at the end with all the different parallel characters reaching equilibriums (hence the return of F - she and Buffy were one of the first dichotomies set up). In light of which, Spike suddenly and very effectively using a chi-based move is not merely a neat visual effect and an immediate metaphor for his ability to strike Wood to the heart verbally but also a narrative metaphor for his own internal struggle having been resolved.

I did say I was tragically over-analysing this....

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[1] Well, OK, looking at a packet of crisps can make me think of Spike but anyway...
[2] with a small 'h', obviously

I just love your wicked energy


After watching First Date, I griped that the removal of the chip seemed to have turned Spike rather stoic. Somewhat prosaic. Sure, he had a certain keen-ness to interupt Buffy's date but he was just so lacking in vibrancy, in that wicked energy that Buffy seems finally to have accepted is one of her favourite things in men. Spike has been many different moral shades: the Big Bad, the cuckold, the drunken heartbroken, the angry victim, someone who fights with the good side simply so he can have a "spot of violence before bed", the too-ardent lover. Whatever he's been though, he's been passionate about it. He threw himself into things, body and demon. He was a dancing, seductively smiling, bundle of wicked energy. Tightly coiled and always ready to explode.

I privately remarked that the unbelievably placid, house-broken Spike had better be the calm before the storm.

Oh yes. Tonight I got Get It Done. When he loses the muted shirts and pulls on that coat...when he leans back and howls with laughter...when he lights the cigarette...when he realises that killing is part of him...his definition...oh yes. The coat is obviously going to end up being ripped away again but it's not really about the coat. It's that swagger, that confidence, that wicked energy.

It's Spike, and he's wearing the coat.

spoilers, and the art of avoiding them

I've been doing really well this year. Not reading any sites which contain spoilers for future, as yet unseen, episodes. It's cut into my options for discussing the series somewhat but if you're spoilerphobic, you know that's one of the side-effects of the affliction. I never read any livejournals for a start, as even assuming the journaler you're reading doesn't mention any spoilers there's no way of being sure someone answering them will be so considerate. I don't visit the usenet groups or the ezboards either. I'm cautious on general sites, making sure not to click on anything I'm not sure about and having my spoiler-defenses up and ready to deflect my eyes if I see something suspicious. Obviously, on mailing lists it's easy to avoid any emails which contain a spoiler warning in the subject line, or an episode title for something I've not seen yet. Like all good spoilerphobics, I do pretty much everything, short of unplugging the modem, to avoid being spoiled.

So I've been good this year: pretty much all I know is a casting detail for the final few episodes of Buffy.

Today, I though I'd spend the afternoon checking the fanfiction WIPs I've been following. My first port of call was Annie Sewell Jenning's Waking the Dead which, sadly, has not been updated. So next I headed over to Barb C's site, to check on the progress of Necessary Evils. It's a great story, continuing the alternate season 6 started in A Raising in the Sun. It's got good characterisation, including a wonderful Dark Willow, a enjoyable plot and, did I mention, hot sex. It's one of the few WIPs that I follow.

Now maybe you could say it's my own fault for having the shortcut pointing to the main page instead of directly to the index page of the story but, when scrolling down to see if new chapters have been added, I didn't expect to find a bloody great big spoiler for episode 7.17. No warning, no flagging that a spoiler was there, just the spoiler. Thanks. Thanks a bunch.

OK, I appreciate Barb C is hacked off because she may have been Jossed by the series but I'm pretty damn mad that all my spoilerphobic habits have been wrecked when all I wanted to do was read an alternate season 6 story.

careful! the ink's still wet!

I startled several people who know my Spike-alholism by not being wild about the epilogue of Showtime. How can a self-confessed Dark Spuffy fan (if that isn't a contradiction - I like the idea of them loving each other in a big non-soppy, non-happy-ever-after way) not be happy when Buffy walks over, cuts Spike down and they start into each others' eyes as the music swirls? Well, this one.

It's farily easy to spot, looking back over this blog, that I am not enamoured with the whole First Evil storyline and have felt ME are going down the lazy plotting route. Easy, routine, predictable. So after weeks of Spike being a little torture puppy who just hangs about getting hurt, and with the recent bad habit of characters standing about talking instead of the old-fashioned (in BtVS terms) use of monsters as metaphors, the whole rising-music, soulful eye contact stuff just made me shudder with horror at the thought of the inevitable hurt/comfort episode which was to follow.

So much so that I went and wrote a fanfic, trying to reconcile my desire for some B/S interaction with my dread of a run-of-the-mill hurt/comfort scene. Thankfully, Potentials skips the whole thing and instead has Spike bursting back into the narrative as an active participant instead of a passive victim. Yay! BtVS has confounded my expectations. In a good way. Of course, I do suspect some of my enjoyment of Potentials is due to the First Evil plot being in remission but this was the first episode for several weeks which I actually enjoyed. I also think a single shot of his belly was the most sexy thing we've seen this season. I was in such a good mood that I even almost forgave Molly her accent. Almost.

By George, I think she's got it!

No, really, she hasn't. Are there truly absolutely no English actresses for hire in Hollywood? Do we really have to have a bad Cockerney accented Slayer in Training, Mary Poppins?

Now you'd think, after watching Bring on the Night and Showtime, I'd have some complex point to make about the ongoing storyline. Maybe how the Hurt/Comfort thing with Spike is starting to get old and how I'm shocked that I've actually seen enough of Spike in chains? Or the whole Giles: FE fake or Benevolent Renevant? question. Or how come all the scoobies can skive off work/school so easily and why Andrew is still around. But no, I'm going to rage about the accents.

There is a reason for this.

If you're a fan of BtVS or Ats then the idea of Americans doing European accents badly is not new or totally unwelcome. Well, yes, I laughed at the early season 2 Spike 'English' accent but there's no doubt that James Marsters has really gone to town on his voice. Not only does Spike now have two accents - London and RP - but they are used to subtly indicate the mood swings of Unstable Spike. Not to mention the ret-con ( "when did you start speaking like that?" ). Even Boreanez's laughable Oirish accent has come to be an endearing facet of him (especially in Spin the Bottle). Though Kendra's accent is bewildering ( "I am Ken-dra, de vampire slay-er" ). And I'll leave Dru's insane babble about mines in London for another time.

Obviously, all English people with RP accents are evil, apart from Giles who is stuffy and wore tweed. Travers, Ethan, Gwendoline. Even Wes, until he grew up. We'll let that go though since most American tv and film is the same. So, given English fans are rather used to some dodgy accents and cultural stereotyping, why does Molly's accent bug me?

It drops me stone cold sober out of the narrative, that's why. As soon as her Dick van Dyke vowels come out I stop giving a toss about these SIT. I start noticing the flaws in the episode more (hmmmm, Molly the Cockerney and Annabelle the posh totty, huh? I've known one Molly in all my life - and that's my friend's kitten). I'm not seeing Buffy as a narrative drama with characters whose development is compelling but as a television programme which couldn't even find someone capable of doing a working class London accent.

I saw Bring on the Night in a room full of Londoners, in London, on New Year's Day. Have you ever seen an entire room of people wince in unison? Really, truly. If you want to save the show, ME, kill Molly.