Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 14, 2017 19:13:38 GMT -8
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 15, 2017 18:32:20 GMT -8
"Conviction" [5x01]Writer: Joss Whedon Director: Joss Whedon Previously on Angel: in the last five minutes of "Home," Angel makes an "executive decision" and sells the Fang Gang out to Wolfram and Hart. Strangely, not only do they all seem to consent to this, but they also seem to forget who Connor is in the process! This might seem odd, given the lack of explanation. Was there a mystical whammy involved? Were they all brainwashed? Why would Angel of all people consent to this?? Luckily, "Conviction" offers a potential explanation, because minutes into the episode, it becomes obvious that Angel has gotten a lobotomy. In one of the few moments where Joss Whedon's directoral presence is felt throughout "Conviction", much of act one is dedicated to a long, cutless take of the Fang Gang acclimatizing to W&H. We see Wesley, back to happily collaborating with the gang and still desperately crushing on Fred, but otherwise retaining his gritty S4 patina. Fred has been retooled as an attractive yet ditzy young career woman whose ostensible amorality is overshadowed by her cloying cutesiness. Hearkening (read: regressing) back to the days of yore, they are once again relegated to a love triangle, as Fred now making heart eyes at the affably dorky Knoxy. Wesley then meets Gunn, and they squabble over feng shui and blah blah blah and we pan out to see Lorne, whose ethical scruples about working for a multidimensional paranormal paralegal cabal are outweighed by his desire to kibitz with celebs and pick out furniture. We then see Angel get out of an elevator and meet up with Wesley and Gunn, loudly declaring his intent to take out W&H from the inside out! I synopsize in such detail because there's a lot to take in. Okay, that's a lie, the main thing of note is that the character dynamics are back to how they were circa "Fredless," except minus Cordelia. But mostly, I just want to delay talking about Eve. Ok. So, Eve. In theory, Eve is a fascinating quasi-antagonist in the vein of Lilah Morgan, personally connected to the senior partners and pointing out hard truths the Fang Gang is unwilling to acknowledge. In practice, Eve is an attractive yet ditzy young career woman whose ostensible amorality is overshadowed by her cloying cutesiness. And she gets some of the worst dialogue in the entire series. Holy shit. And this isn't even the worst line in the episode. She's just awful in so many ways, and yet the episode seems unaware that her antics are cloying and not clever. See, she makes a funny joke about how she's named Eve, like that Eve, get it, and she tosses Angel an apple because she's so self-aware about how's she's a lady in red with her legs crossed, tempting our heroes to the dark side with her feminine wiles. Except... didn't this show have an episode two seasons back where they point out the misogyny inherent in invoking Eve-the-temptress as a trope? Now, far be it from me to accuse Angel of sexism. (What am I, some sort of feminist critic??) But Eve is an amalgamation of cliched feminine archetypes which run the gamut from infantilizing to outright misogynist, with no actual character traits, and not even the benefit of a Stephanie Romanov to make her shit dialogue soar. Although, honestly, I'm not sure even Stephanie Romanov could convincingly ask "what would you like passing through my lips?" Heck, I'm glad that Morena Baccarin didn't get the part; Eve's dialogue was about as nuanced as the firefly episode about the space hookers. Girl deserves better than that. But wait, there's more! Harmony is back! How exciting! Not merely the soulless cultist we left behind in Season 2, she's now an attractive yet ditzy young career woman whose ostensible amorality is... you know. She is fun, though. I've refrained from mentioning the plot of the episode, not because it is awful, but because it is boring. This might seem like an odd reason to single "Conviction" out, because Seasons 3 and 4 were full of boring episodes with dumb plots, even ignoring the stinkers like "First Impressions" and "I Fall to Pieces" scattered throughout seasons 1 and 2. But, you know, even something crappy like "The House Always Wins" had what makes Angel (and every Whedon show) special-- a genre mashup. Outside of Angel not using his windpipe, "Conviction" seems to eschew the supernatural entirely after the first act, turning the show into a drab procedural. I mean, honestly, mystical window dressing aside, the third and fourth acts are entirely built around a bomb threat and the world's shittiest Law and Order episode. Not that the attempts to add color to the Corbin Fries stuff work, because Fries himself is so cartoonish that it goes from dumb to perversely funny to dumb again. Oh, and they don't actually defuse the bomb, they'll do that offscreen a couple episodes later because of course they do. And there's an entire plot about Angel's SWAT team, which then tries to kill him because... um... uh... And Spike shows up because why the hell not. Booooooooooo. 40/100
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Post by bean32 on Jun 16, 2017 8:08:10 GMT -8
Great Review. Eve is a universally disliked character and I think this write-up is a good explanation on why that is. Looking forward to hearing more about Season 5.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 21, 2017 18:41:42 GMT -8
Aw, thanks Bean. Watched the second episode (I can't remember the name, to give you an idea of its quality) and "Untouched 2: Lycanthropic Boogaloo." Were they good? The answer may surprise you! (Actually, I thought they were both awful, so, um, no surprise there)
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Post by ThirdMan on Jun 21, 2017 23:12:45 GMT -8
It picks up, once they move away from those early case-of-the-weeks. I don't know, you probably won't like the fourth episode either, but I do remember it being way more hard-core horror than the show typically does, so...we'll see.
Once viewers are so far gone into disliking a show, sometimes they (stubbornly) won't even acknowledge when it experiences an upswing in quality. So we'll have to wait until the acclaimed second half to really get a barometer of things.
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 22, 2017 12:22:51 GMT -8
Oh, dear, I'm only now realizing that it's been nearly five years since I reviewed "Just Rewards."
Way to make me feel old, Quiara.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 22, 2017 13:38:29 GMT -8
Oh, dear, I'm only now realizing that it's been nearly five years since I reviewed "Just Rewards." Way to make me feel old, Quiara. Hey, I've spent four full years by this point posting on CT! It is, how you say, a trip.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 25, 2017 9:27:37 GMT -8
"Just Rewards" [5x02]Writers: Ben Edlund and David Fury Director: James A. Contner Angel has lost its purpose. Weirdly enough, the clearest sign of this is not Spike's nonstop heckling of how Angel has been reduced to making boardroom calls, nor the random insertion of Spike into the narrative to begin with. No, it's a little line of dialogue espoused by the monster of the week, expressing sympathy for Spike's For a split second, Spike's apparition starts looking less like a transparent S1-style ratings grab (e.g. "In The Dark") whose incorporeality is more than a plot device meant to reduce Spike to pithy quippage with no tangible impact on the plot. Suddenly we realize that in his sojourn over to Angel, Spike has mutated into a liminal character. As you will recall, throughout Season 2 I would refer to refer to the liminality of the Fang Gang, how everyone on Angel's side was stuck between two worlds. Spurred on by the parallel drawn in "Are You Now..." and the racial subtext throughout "Hero," I'd often refer to Angel as a tragic mulatto story, where the psychology of the protagonist is defined largely by their struggle to conceal, compartmentalize, or come to terms with a dichotomous background. Most of our regulars is stuck in such a conflict: Vampires in Buffyverse lore are a hybrid between human and demon, Doyle is "half-demon on his mother's side" and hides it to score with Cordelia, who also becomes half-demon in "Birthday." You also have Gunn the cultural mulatto, Fred and Lorne who each have one foot on Earth and the other in Pylea... etc. Angel the show is about coming to grips with this, and having a healthy relationship with one's dichotomous background. At least, it is during Seasons 2 and 3. Sometime either before or during Season 4, all the interesting contradictions are erased. Fred no longer has to deal with the disconnect between her Earthly scientific background and spending five years in Xena: Warrior Princess; now she's cute science girl! Gunn's struggle to navigate between his two gangs is replaced by some half-assed plot about "being the muscle" or something? Anyway, where are we in Season 5? Well, it seems we've evolved from sympathy towards the liminal character towards viewing them as predatory infiltrators. Uh... what? Seriously, what the hell. Setting aside the metaphors of Season 2, how does Angel-- a demon who passes as human-- say something like this with a straight face? It would be unfair to dock points here just because "Just Rewards" doesn't comply with my pet lens. Luckily, I can instead dock it for being an overall piece of shit. Being the twelfth and final season of the combined Buffyverse, we have plenty of episodes we can compare "Just Rewards" to. The double fakeout here reminds us of "Enemies," or possibly the B-plot in "Players." Spike being neutered against his will hearkens back to "Doomed." And of course, being season 5 episode 2 reminds us of "The Real Me," which also had to introduce a character inserted into the story in the last few seconds of the season premiere. The main thread connecting these four episodes is that they are not exactly Buffyverse classics, but they're all unfairly maligned bordering on good. And they provide useful points of comparison. To wit: "Enemies" and "Players" used their fakeouts to expose a major character's duplicity, and in the case of the former, to give us a glimpse into Faith's psyche and fantasies. But even "Players" understood that the mark is the real focus of the episode, because they're the one that isn't acting; hence why we describe it as a Gunn-centric episode, not a Gwen-centric one. "Just Rewards" is built around a con that is 1. not surprising and 2. has a shallow villain as the mark, meaning the episode has zero long-term relevance. Which would be fine if it was thematically on-point, but, uh, we've been over that. Also note that Spike is not given any time to interact with the rest of the cast! "The Real Me" had a minimal-bordering-on-nonexistent plot so that we could get to see how Dawn fits into the character dynamics. This episode does not have that-- Spike has some interactions with Fred at the very end, but for the most part he's confined to haunting Angel. We know that Spike doesn't like Angel, damnit! Tell us something new about the guy! Oh, and he still doesn't care about Harmony. The main thing the episode has going for it is that some of the gore is rather funny-- bucket-o-lawyer, for instance, or Angel killing the butler with a teaspoon. But when I'm singling out Bucket-O-Lawyer as a highlight of the episode, you know we're in a dire sitch. 40/100
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 28, 2017 19:40:23 GMT -8
"Unleashed" [5x03] Writer: Sarah Fain & Elizabeth Craft Director: Marita Grabiak
A damsel in distress ("City of...", "I Fall to Pieces," etc.). An epic monologue about the need for connection (every Doyle episode, "To Shanshu in LA," etc.). Upper-class socialites paying top dollar to exploit the bodies of others ("Parting Gifts," "The Ring," etc.). While its title reminds one of "Untouched," "Unleashed" is mostly interested in reenacting the tropes of Season 1 standalones, and to the episode's detriment. Not because the first season of Angel is bad, mind you-- I much prefer it to the love triangles of Season 3 or the plot thrombosis of Season 4.
The problem is that being a Season 1-style standalone, "Unleashed" accordingly has Season 1-style cast dynamics. Which is alarming because there were only three cast members in Season 1, and it sure feels like there are only three cast members here. Angel gets to be Angel, Fred gets to be Cordelia (her friendly scene with Nina is straight out of "Untouched"), and everyone else gets to be Doyle simultaneously, delivering interchangeable exposition/moral advice. Seriously:
Ripping off Iguana here: can you tell whose dialogue belongs to who here? Certainly you can use context clues to help you out here, but so much of the episode is built around group exposition, where suddenly everyone becomes Giles or Wesley. (Bizarrely, later on in this exchange Wesley makes a quip about The Initiative, an organization which he should by no means know nothing about... which makes me wonder whether the line was originally intended for Spike, and then plopped in Wesley's mouth.)
The other large problem about doing a Season 1 standalone this late in the game is that it hearkens back to Buffy-style metaphorical monsters, but can't fully commit because said monsters are now the show's protagonists. To elaborate: vampires have always been sexual monsters, and in Buffy lore, typically vamps stood for sexual predators. Spike's stalker behavior is sometimes played for laughs ("The Initiative"), but we're never supposed to forget the incestuous elements of his character. Except that starting in Season 4, with the arbitrary Angel and Angelus are different people malarkey, Angel starts to sweep this aspect of the lore under the rug. Spike being brought back as a ghost who's literally incapable of physical contact is a helpful illustration of this principle.
Metaphors are allowed to evolve, of course, and redundancy of theme is not a virtue, but in an episode about a young woman being violently assaulted and bitten in the middle of the night, Angel's reluctance to address sexual predation is palpable. This is the really big way in which the episode falls short of the Season 1 episodes it's trying to ape. Far be it from me to praise a clunker like "I Fall to Pieces," but at least it wasn't afraid to let Angel be metaphorically related to Dr. Katz, Professional Serial-Rapist. It's especially obvious in the second act, when Nina's mother admonishes her for her strange behavior, and asks if something happened-- something that's made her lethargic and closed off, something that's resulted in "bruises you don't remember getting"-- lines where the subtext is seriously close to becoming text!!-- and this is never followed up on, because the show is far more comfortable with cannibalism (of a living, breathing, named character) than it is addressing rape.
(It doesn't help that Nina's mother and sister are such boring characters. I'm not even sure that is her mother and sister. None of them are interesting characters, is the point. Gwen Raiden had some fascinating psychic issues that were communicated almost entirely in one four-minute flashback. Nina gets much more background and is never more interesting because of it, because she's a boring damsel in distress who fawns over Angel. A character archetype we abandoned in Season 1, for good reason.)
The end result is an episode that's superficially fun in its latter half compared to S1's dreckiest episodes, but feels strangely cowardly as a trade-off.
59/100
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 30, 2017 13:09:53 GMT -8
Don'tcha love when you sit down to watch a horror comedy, only to find a horror episode that isn't scary and a comedy episode that isn't funny? It's like, ironic or whatever.
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Post by Jay on Jun 30, 2017 13:33:11 GMT -8
I expect to get some use out of this.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 30, 2017 14:45:49 GMT -8
Isn't something that is on the surface one thing but on closer inspection is in fact the opposite of that one thing the textbook definition of situational irony?
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Post by ThirdMan on Jul 1, 2017 1:01:35 GMT -8
A horror-themed episode doesn't have to be scary to be good or interesting. Most of us are too jaded to be scared by much anyways.
Comedy's a little more touchy, but sometimes I register things that don't necessarily make me laugh as still clever and/or enjoyable.
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Post by buffyholic on Jul 1, 2017 1:26:33 GMT -8
My main problem with "Just Rewards" is that it is boring as hell. I really donĀ“t care for the episode. For me, one of the worst of season five and the whole series.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jul 2, 2017 17:32:33 GMT -8
"Hell Bound" [5x04]Writer: Steven S. DeKnight Director: Steven S. DeKnight So, the thing with Buffy and Angel is that despite ostensibly belonging to the horror genre, neither show is really all that scary. In Buffy's case, this is because the show loves kitschy B-movie horror but is more interested in using the iconography and tropes of horror cinema as building blocks in a feminist bildungsroman. (Or should I say, bildung blocks? ...Okay, that was bad.) Angel's relationship with genre is more pedestrian, and frankly, more disappointing. A lot of the time, the show is slavishly imitating procedural staples but not even in a way that's interesting to fans of said procedurals because they're so half-baked. (For instance, I often compare elements of Angel to a show like Law and Order. But you know what? Law and Order is a fun {or at the very least, competent} show because of its relentless forward momentum. Now look at the choppy half-baked legal drama of "Conviction," which is like all the crappy jargony parts of a legal drama with none of the plus sides.) It is thus understandable that when Buffy does a straight-up horror episode in "Hush" it is genuinely spooky, while Angel's take on many of the same tropes is a bore. So rather than talk about how the attempts at horror in this episode, let's talk about something actually horrifying: how after only two hours of screentime, Spike has somehow become more important than the rest of Angel's cast. I know Fred doesn't really have any personality to speak of. Most sex objects don't. (And that's really all she is, it's just that her appeal is calibrated towards people who think they're above sex objects.) So it's understandable that her world seems to revolve around Knoxy. But why the hell is she so devoted to Spike? She jokes that she's not a schoolgirl falling for his charms but that really is the only explanation for why she seems to be devoting her career to recorporealizing a dude she barely knows. And hell, why isn't this episode about Gunn, who just underwent a massive character change that might warrant an episode built around him? But no, let's have an episode where Spike is haunted by yet another mystically-literate WASP of the week (hey, four for four with these guys), and has Angel boredly explain the CLiff Notes tenets of absurdism to him, and has yet another chance to prove that he's really a good guy beneath that gruff ghosty exterior. Fuck me for wanting one of the characters I've spent ninety hours of my life watching to do something, yeah? It makes me so angry, that I feel like I'm going to burst out into song... When Spike was brought onto this show Dislike! Why can't you let him go now, writers? Although I thought "Chosen" blew It resolved Spike's series arc Why revive his character For a sodding lark? That's all his role here is (A source of trifling quips) No spark Of inspiration here now, writers! All I know is that to me, Angel's getting kind of dumb. The fifth season's future is Looking rather glum This show is hell bound, baby, hell bound Spike is wrecking Angel Frown, frown, frown, frown This show is hell bound, baby, hell bound Spike is bringing Angel down, down, down, down (wicked slap bass solo) I (I, I, I, I) am noting a weird trend now, baby The cast Is totally out of focus! I don't know what's Wesley's deal. Where the hell are Fred and Gunn All their lines are syphoned off Towards a bleach blond bum The cast is drowned out, writers, drowned out By a reckless pithy Brit that's what I've found The cast is now just there to surround a cadaver who should be six underground 40/100
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