Joy supreme. A thread in which I won’t be accused of being sexist, man-hating, copycatting, etc. Brand new “Angel.” Pacing was a bit too leisurely, but that’s minor. Still one of the best shows on the air.
Man, for a while there you even start wondering–despite everything–whether Jasmine might be on the up and up somehow. And then we hit the halfway mark and Fred sees a face out of the Clive Barker handbook, and bam. Suddenly we’ve got a story of creeping paranoia and “Am I the only one?”-ism that rivals “Bodysnatchers.” Of all the regulars to be on the outside, Fred was the perfect choice. Her slowly dawning realization of just how screwed she was as she watched Wesley rat her out was masterful.
Still wondering why Angel felt the need to intercept the crossbow bolt with his body when we’ve seen him pluck them out of mid-air with a lot less warning. Ah well. I can accept he’s not thinking straight.
That final shot with the guy wandering past the window and kneeling was also great.
I wonder if Gina Torres ever does conventions, if fans will start kneeling to her just for laughs.
I was briefly confused when that guy attacked Jamine early on. His face was so angular that at first I thought he was a vampire. That business later on with “Don’t let her touch you” just played up the “Bodysnatchers” angle even more. I kept waiting for him to shout “You’re next! You’re next!”
“She’s kind of Mocha.” Perhaps she should have been given the name “Starbucks.” Or “Latte.”
And hey…how about those BTVS commercials with strains of “You Gotta Have Faith” playing under them. Really, the promos for BTVS have been better written than some of the episodes…
PAD
• 
Hmm. Charisma Carpenter. Cordelia Chase. Actress and character, both with double-C names. Coincidence? Yoooouuu decide…
Clearly it was her destiny to play this part. I’d wage that, since time immemorial, events have been manipulated to ensure such outcome. 😉
Raphy
I thought this week’s ep was ok, although the words “nowhere fast” kept springing to mind.
It felt like they stretched like 2 ideas out over the whole hour and it dragged by the half way point. Yes, she’s brainwashed everybody and pretends to be Jesus, we get it!
Let’s face, it, you have to be pretty dumb to have been surprised to find out she is evil. HELLO! By this point, anybody vaguely familiar with BUffyverse logic knows the simple axioms
Anybody who says they are friend=Is really a terrible evil bad guy
Anybody who first appears to be evil=turns out to be fighting for the greater good
Everybody kills somebody sometime (wasn’t that a commerical for auto insurance?)
And not to poo-poo next week’s ep without having seen it first..but what’s the deal with Fred? She’s being passed around like a dirty $20 bill. She’s cute and all, in an anorexic, stick-figure way, but I don’t see why every male in Angel-verse is desperate to roll in her hay.
Chris
Peter David: Right, just like her mother, Charisma.
Hmm. Charisma Carpenter. Cordelia Chase. Actress and character, both with double-C names. Coincidence? Yoooouuu decide…**
Luigi Novi: Peter, as a guy, I want you to know how offended I am that comment. That has got to be the most clearly sexist, man-hating thing you’ve said yet. I mean, “double-C”? Are we not supposed to take this as a comment about their cup size? I’m shocked and appalled at your insensitivity. And I also find it telling that that sounds just like a lot of earlier comments you’ve made, as if all you can do is recycle the same old copycatted replies to the posts here. Shame on you. 🙂
Re: Fred talking to Wes. Sorry, I still think it was an out of character dumbness on Fred’s part. There’s no evidence that she doesn’t remember exactly what happened to her when she first saw Jasmine, and how devoted she felt towards her. There’s no reason why she should think talking to Wes, within visual distance of Jasmine to maintain the effect, should snap him out of it nigh immediately. And it has to be nigh immediately, because the only reason Fred is still on the loose is due to not one, but two, deus ex machinas.
The first one; Wes these days is certainly capable of taking out Fred fast and quick. Frankly, if Fred’s so desperate to want to talk to any of the others save possibly Lorne, she should have cut one out of the herd/hotel, then take advantage of their trust in her to bonk ’em on the head/trank ’em, chain them up ala Angelus, and *then* try to turn them against Jasmine. But Fred’s only on the loose because instead of Wes taking out Fred solo, Wes bothers to go talk to the others…in Fred’s sight, letting her know that he’s certainly betraying her.
Second deus ex machina. Fred runs away. Angel and Connor, both much faster than Fred and able to track for long distances by smell start after her. They’re sure to catch her…except Jasmine calls them back.
Fred just wasn’t thinking in that scene. In fact, given that Joss has described part of his creation of Buffy as wanting to turn around the cliche of bubble-headed girl victim from horror movies, it’s ironic that Fred basically turned into that cliche for a scene.
Okay, when I suggested “Carpenter” before, I was referencing the fact that Jesus was a carpenter. I forgot about Charisma’s last name. Unless I was doing it subconciously.
Or perhaps I’m being manipulated by Jasmine or the First. Gaaaah!
Tom Galloway — Re: Fred talking to Wes. Sorry, I still think it was an out of character dumbness on Fred’s part. There’s no evidence that she doesn’t remember exactly what happened to her when she first saw Jasmine, and how devoted she felt towards her.
Well, sure, but what would she remember? She felt a slavish devotion to Jasmine to the point of near worship, and then Jasmine’s true face was revealed to her and she realized she had to act. Why would she have any reason to doubt that, if she tried to reveal Jasmine’s true face to Wesley, it would have any different effect.
It’s not like Fred did anything (as far as she knows); she just went from loving Jasmine to knowing the truth about her — in her mind, it wasn’t a spell being broken, but a realization being reached. I think it was only with Wesley’s betrayal of her that she really figured how extensive Jasmine’s control was.
My opinion, anyhow; hopefully, we’ll see what’s what next week.
Hmm. Charisma Carpenter. Cordelia Chase. Actress and character, both with double-C names. Coincidence? Yoooouuu decide…
The story is, Joss cast Charisma Carpenter before he’d named her character. It turned out to be a real source of aggravation. He kept walking around moaning, “Charisma? How can I top that?” Eventually, his wife–who evidently likes Shakespeare–suggested Cordelia.
–Daniel M.
Daniel M.: The story is, Joss cast Charisma Carpenter before he’d named her character. It turned out to be a real source of aggravation. He kept walking around moaning, “Charisma? How can I top that?” Eventually, his wife–who evidently likes Shakespeare–suggested Cordelia.
But…but… In just about everything I’ve read and seen (including the interview with Joss on the Buffy season 1 DVDs), Sarah Michelle Gellar was originally cast as Cordelia. So they cast SMG, recast her as Buffy, and then cast Charisma, all without having a name for the character?
That seems…iffy.
I don’t think Jasmine calling back Angel and Connor was a deus ex machina. If the blood really is the key, then she couldn’t risk Fred being injured and breaking the spell on one of her thralls. (And I still think it’s a bit much to expect absolute rationality out of people in extremity.)
OK – I’m firmly on the side of the few who think this whole episode could have been done in the space of 15 – 20 minutes tops. “Excruciatingly boring” comes to mind as a description for most of it.
But!! The good parts were really good. My wife and I figured the blood connection as soon as Fred made a point of saying she washed the blouse until her “fingers bled”. That was the transference of blood. Case closed on that issue, we think.
Also – I didn’t see if anyone mentioned this previously on this thread, but check out the guys disfigured face. The scarring is in the shape of a hand, right where Jasmine touched him. You can clearly see the thumb area. Creepy.
I hope they can distill the boring parts out of next week’s episode and get a whole hour’s worth of plot into it – should be great if that’s the case! This week was, largely, soporiferous (and I think I used that word correctly!). But I see a great ending ahead.
I have to admit, I got sucked into Jasmine’s easy solutions right away, what with her casual solutions to Wes/Gunn/Fred and Angel/Connor. After she was revealed as eeeee-vil, I spent the commercial thinking, “Okay, so was she lying the whole time? …But it seemed like such a good idea… what about…” etc.
And I think the pacing of the episode fits a bit better when viewed from AI’s Jasmine-besotted perspective; Jasmine became a “main character”, at least in their minds, clearly taking over Angel’s role as leader. Sorta like that one episode of “Buffy” where the loser Jonathan abruptly becomes a central character, much to the confusion of the audience. If you view the first half of the show not as “Angel” but as “Jasmine”, it seems to flow better.
I don’t know why but the image of the true face of Jasmine has been etched into my brain for the last few days. At least the last ten minutes of The Ring are finally gone from my nightly sleep routine. I actually think the reason that Fred saw through it is that she cried. Maybe if your emotions change from bliss to anything else it causes you to see past the mask. Everyone seems so happy around Jasmine that this is one of the theories that makes sense. Maybe the guy who saw through it was in an emotional funk of some sort…
Jasmine is that kind of creepy evil, because she offers such great things and happiness, yet she ruins/rots whatever she touches(kind of like Rob Liefield). I am really enjoying Jasmine because she is that subtle evil and you keep asking yourself ‘what is she really up to?’
A very interesting episode. Though, I am getting sick of our heroes been turned into lackeys. First there was just Connor, now it’s the whole squad except Fred.
I’m pretty sure I’m the only one, but the minute I saw the guy in the psych ward’s deformity I thought “Oh my God, she turned him into Two-Face.” Sometimes it’s scary being a comic fan.
I don’t have anything to say about the major plot points, you folks covered all of them I think.
>>Who just bought a pair of Hulk Hands based on PAD’s recommendation <<
I’ve seen these – do they fit on adult hands?
Yes–they’re not gloves per se. The inside of the fist is hollow and there’s a bar you grab onto, so the size of the hand is irrelevant (within reason).
To the best of my knowledge, Angel’s last name (his surname from when he was Liam) has never been revealed. The name “Angel” was derived from when Liam first returned from the dead, and was invited into his former home by his little sister who mistook him for an angel…a fatal mistake.
PAD
Well, sometimes in addition to powerful fictional beings on the show lying, sometimes there’s false foreshadowing.
However, my guess from the foreshadowing, is that if Cordelia were to wake up Jasmine would bite the big one or be severly de-powered. Jasmine seems to be using Cordelia’s life-force or soul to keep going — or at least for Jasmine’s powers to through the “human-deamon” body she has through her parents’ line.
We’re only as far as ‘Calvary’ on Angel and ‘The Killer in Me’ on Buffy here in merry old England, but I find that after a really good start I’m now tiring of Angel and seem to be prefering Buffy again, Angel’s certainly not as good as the previous two seasons. Hopefully it’s going to get better, though I’m waiting more for ‘Lies My Parents Told Me’ on Buffy more than anything. Though from all the conversations Jasmine seems to have shades of Billy about her, the not quite human guy Skip was guarding when we first met him.
Looks like I came in late for this one, but I noticed something wild last night that I wanted to throw out.
I saw this McDonald’s commercial where they try to re-create “Kids Say the Darndest Things” where Ronald asks, “What would you do to help a friend?” perhaps you’ve seen it. Anyway, I noticed that Ronald sounded a lot like Lorne. And though it was kind of hard to tell under all the makeup, he seemed to kind of resemble him too. For all I know, this is common knowledge, but is it possible that our favorite singing demon is moonlighting as a clown?
http://www.usatoday.com/life/front.htm
with Farscape gone (WAAAAHHHH!!!), Angel is my new #1. however, all i kept thinking when Jasmine was on was “Hey look! It’s Cleopatra 2525!” at least she got saved from the mediocre Firefly.
anyway, this link lets you vote for shows that you think need to be saved. Angel is on the list. you know what to do.
He kept walking around moaning, ‘Charisma? How can I top that?’
“And have you met our other two daughters? Constitution! Dexterity! Come and meet the nice man.”
Another episode, another person who controls Connor. Has he had a thought originating from himself this season? 🙂
Forget season, try his life. Come on, since he was a baby, he’s been used as someone’s tool. First Holtz, then Holtz’s assistant, then Cordelia, now Jasmine. I think the only free-thinking moment he’s had thus far was going on about how wonderful Faith was.
maybe you guys are watching a different version of Angel than myself. If this show gets any more boring I hope they dont bring it back………