Intro thoughts on Pylea
If there was one thing I thought was utterly predictable, it was a Whedonesque seasonal arc. Little bad, big bad, defeat of the big bad, end of season. O.K., maybe there might not be a little bad, but the rest of it? I’m not sure why I had such absolute faith that that would happen in AtS Season 2. After all, Angel didn’t defeat the “big bad” of Season 1. Wolfram and Hart and each of its little minions were still around when the curtain closed on that season. Still, expectations die hard, and I was all prepped for a big final confrontation between Angel and Darla in the final episodes of Season 2, and instead we wandered off into a hell dimension and got a lame story line with melodramatic medievalism, belly-dancing dresses and “cows”.
But it wasn’t evident at first that the entire rest of the season was going to be taken up by that tangent (if you were unspoiled, anyway). When “Belonging” aired I figured it was just a stand-alone to give us more background about the Host, and that the last three episodes would be arcy. Then Cordelia got sucked into a hell dimension. “Well OK,” I thought, “they’ll go in, get her out and then get to the arc in the final two episodes.” But at the end of Episode 20 they were still friggin’ there!!
I went over to http://www.cityofangel.com at that point, and I remember that they didn’t have the title “There’s No Place Like Plrtz Glrb” for the final episode of the season. They had some other title. And the little picture that was beside the episode title was simply the AtS logo, with the Los Angeles skyline. And so I held out hope that they would be back in L.A. wrapping up the Angel/Darla story line in the final episode. Which of course didn’t happen.
Years later, I would decide this bizarre inability to defeat the seasonal big bad in the final episodes of Seasons 1 and 2 was actually in AtS’ favor. Unlike that *scoff* other show, the superior AtS didn’t succumb to predictable seasonal arc patterns–and even when they did, Holtz was no black-and-white bad guy and neither was Jasmine.
Seriously, though, in retrospect, I wouldn’t have traded the Angel/Darla interaction in early Season 3 for a cooler season 2 ending.
But at the time? I was like, Pylea? WTF? Are they asking to have this show cancelled?
Belonging
As I understand it, the Pylean arc was planned and written when Julie Benz was unable to come in and finish season 2. M.E. needed some way to fill out the rest of the season, and they did it by creating a metaphorical landscape in which they could explore each member of the Fang Gang. The gang travels into Pylea and the dimension transforms each of them into something different (and yet personally significant) than s/he was on Earth.
Being in Pylea actually physically transforms Angel so that his human and demon sides become more clearly differentiated. The laws and prophecies of Pylea turn Cordelia into a princess. The rebel outlaws of Pylea make Wesley their general. Lorne, the flamboyant demon hiding under hats among humans back home, becomes just another face in the crowd in Pylea. And Gunn? Well, it’s telling that Gunn seems the one exception to all these transformations. In Pylea, he’s just one of Wesley’s soldiers–the “muscle” and an antagonistic advisor. Which actually might be a transformation–into less than he is on Earth.
“Belonging” sets up the transformations to come by exploring each of the characters’ lives as they are on Earth.
We see Wesley talking to the critical father who takes every success his son achieves and turns it into a failure. He is the source of all Wesley’s awkward self-doubt and bullying: I am the pathetic shadow of a man that my father made me, except sometimes I am simply my father.
Overhearing this conversation was like a promissory note–that someday we’d get full, real story behind Wesley’s childhood. Do you think we did? Did Lineage fulfill that promise or just raise more questions?
At any rate, Wesley doubts his leadership abilities, so that’s what will be explored in Pylea.
Cordelia gets an acting job that makes her feel worse about herself than better. Stardom was that thing that was supposed to surround her with appreciative, sycophantic fans like she had in high school. And of course, M.E. is starting to make the visions more and more painful for her, so that she questions her role in Angel’s mission. Is it really worth the trouble?
Gunn gets caught up in divided loyalties (to which I can only say, it’s about time they explored this). When his old friends need his help, he is called to duty by his new friends and can’t be there for the old friends, and then, one of his old friends dies.
And when Caritas is attacked by a Pylean Drokken, the Host (as we called him then) comes to the gang to get help chasing down the beast, but he fails to mention the connection to the home dimension he just wants to forget.
And Angel… well, Angel’s mostly about his need to feel like a champion again after a season of descending into pesky moral ambiguities. But it’s hard to feel like a 100% good guy when you have a demon inside you– a demon who plays significant role in your ability to BE a champion.
Over The Rainbow
So Cordelia gets sucked into a hell dimension, forcing “Lorne” to ‘fess up about Pylea. Angel, as champion and friend, of course immediately wants to hop dimensions and save her. Wesley works on trying to find a way there, but Gunn and Lorne are less than eager.
Gunn is feeling the tug of divided loyalties. George is dead and Gunn, who has been off playing detective with his new “family” all season, suddenly feels that things could have been different if he hadn’t “abandoned” his old gang. In “This Old Gang of Mine” Rondell will say Gunn left the old gang because it was a reminder of the mistakes he made that resulted in losing his sister. I suppose that works as well as anything, but here in season 2, Gunn is realizing you can make mistakes that result in death no matter who you’re working with. At any rate, he is feeling guilty about abandoning his friends and doesn’t want to go to Pylea if the trip there might prove to be one-way.
Lorne of course doesn’t want to go to Pylea at all. He hated growing up there and who can blame him. He may be green and horny like every other Deathwok, but he doesn’t fit in among his own. He blossoms like a flower on Earth, an alien dimension. Who would want to go home to the most alien creatures of all–his own family?
The irony is that the event that gave Lorne the opportunity to find a new home is probably what trapped Fred in his old home. The date of both cross-overs (5 years) can’t be a coincidence. So I’m thinking that either Fred opened the Caritas portal from the library on the other side L.A. before or at the same time she opened the portal in the library, or maybe she inadvertently opened Lorne’s portal *from* Pylea after she crossed over, trying to get back home. But I think we’re supposed to assume that Fred opened the portal that gave Lorne his get-out-of-jail free card.
Anyway, Gunn eventually decides to go with Angel and Wesley to Pylea, and I think it’s because he realizes he can’t do anything for poor dead George, but that he would be making the same mistake twice–abandoning a friend–if he doesn’t try to help rescue Cordelia. And Lorne is ordered to go to Pylea by his psychic friend (and how cool AND hot was she in one five-minute appearance? Wish she could have come back) to finally put to rest all those residual family/origin issues he has.
So the guys gather in Angel’s convertible and set a collision course for Paramount Studios. And both literally and symbolically, they don’t actually get inside the studio lot. Instead they end up in Pylea. Let the transformations begin.
Through The Looking Glass
So yeah, I had problems with the Pylea thing. I mean, seriously. So lame. M.E. is writing a fairy tale and you get the over-the-top melodramatics that go along with it. The beautiful princess. The handsome, earnest hero. Castles. Scary monsters. Evil priests. Damsels in distress. Important Lessons To Be Learned By ALL. I was sitting watching loyally, but my heart was back in L.A. wanting Angel/Darla angst. And if I had actually remembered to ask, “Why do these human-hating demons from another dimension speak English?” I would have blown a gasket. Luckily, I forgot.
Anyway, time heals all wounds I’ve found, especially in my roller-coastery love-hate relationship with My Show, and now I can appreciate Pylea, even if I still feel a bit manipulated by it.
Like Cordelia– who, on the surface, has been given back everything she ever lost and then some–she’s the Queen again, with doting minions and the gorgeous fawning date. But underneath it all, it’s a sham. The real powers of Pylea want something from her–her visions. Well, of course they do! Because Cordelia must learn to appreciate her painful visions, and the way to do that is to threaten to take them away (through, ironically, an act of pleasure).
Meanwhile, the Host has to deal with family issues. Though his cousin seems fairly open-minded, Mom is a bearded bitca. I kind of liked that Lorne got to have his *own* issues, albeit briefly, issues he had to DEAL with. Even when he suffered the loss of his business in season 3, we never saw him grow much from that. He just went right back to being Angel’s helpful side-kick-in-the-pants. Changing diapers instead of reading auras.
Angel’s transformations in Pylea were perhaps the most interesting ones. At first, he is merely transformed into a celebrity. The broody, no-personality, lawyer-torturing dork is someone to be *admired* among the Deathwok. But that doesn’t last long. Angel isn’t going to stand by and soak up the praise when there’s damsels to save. And there is another transformation awaiting him.
Turning into the Angel-beast. This raised some seriously sticky metaphysical issues. Angel goes from near human, standing in the sunlight, seeing his own reflection, to a dumb, mindless beast that doesn’t even recognize his own friends. Wesley explained this as the separation of his human and demon sides “being more pronounced in Pylea”. If *that* didn’t put fans in an uproar. Because if the vampire demon is in its purest form a dumb, mindless beast, then how is Angelus Angel’s demon?
The answer: Angelus is *not* the demon, never was. Which means that the true evil of Angel(us)–and indeed, all vampires–is not the blood lust that fuels his fire, but the HUMAN in him. The unique monster that is Angelus is just Liam himself sans soul, his dark side– his hatreds, fears, angers, ISSUES, fed by blood lust and unrestrained by conscience.
Of course, that’s not the Important Lesson Angel learns in Pylea. The Important Lesson he learns is that “he is not the beast”–that the beast is something IN him, but not OF him. This is supposed to provide a resolution to his season 2 “struggle against darkness” story line, as he learns he is in control of the source of that darkness. Except–in the process of differentiating Angel from his inner beast, Mutant Enemy proved that the worst parts of Angel were from his human side (not that he can’t control that as well, but ME sort of missed the metaphorical mark).
“Through the Looking Glass” ends with Lorne beheaded. Many of us genuinely believed that that was the end for his character. He was introduced in Season 2, so it made a certain amount of sense that he would be gone in Season 2 as well. After all, he wasn’t part of the gang. And Joss had made a habit of randomly killing off well-liked characters–Jenny, Principal Snyder, Doyle, Joyce. There was no reason *not* to believe Lorne was dead. So for a week, we mourned.
There’s No Place Like Plrtz Glrb
In the midst of all these transformations altering and yet revealing familiar aspects of well-established characters, there was a peculiar, spazzy new face who I rather liked at the time, Fred.
Pylea had also transformed Fred–from an intelligent young woman on her way to becoming a physicist, into a slave with virtually no self-identity. She’d forgotten her name, forgotten how to laugh. And yet, she had a strength in Pylea she seemed to lose once she got back in L.A.
The girl who survived as a fugitive and rolled the bad guys into the Drokken gully became the girl on the pedestal in season 3, there to incite Wesley’s slow path into alienation. And just as she was getting kind of strong again in Season 5, well– What’s the point of saving and slowly re-empowering a regular character when you’re just going to slaughter her like a cow a few years later?? I love Joss, I love his shows, but I got so tired of him killing somebody whenever he ran out of ideas about how to up the drama quotient.
So I’ll move on. To Wesley. Wesley and Gunn’s run-in with the (wooden, melodramatic) human rebels of Pylea results in Wesley being made their General. Why? Because he has a plan. Well, a better plan than the rebels have been able to come up with. Of course, that plan involves sacrificing some men in a diversion so that others can launch a sneak attack, but this is vintage Wesley. He would have sacrificed Willow in “Choices” to stop the Mayor. He tried to sacrifice himself in AtS season 4 to stop Angelus. He sacrifices Angel in Pylea by asking him to fight the Groosalug. Want to win the game? Sacrifice a pawn. Or a knight. Or the king.
Gunn is of course against all this. He doesn’t like losing soldiers in battle. But then, Gunn’s soldiers are invariably his friends and family, not random underlings. Not that Wesley ever let intimacy with anyone get in the way of sacrificing them in the name of The Greater Good.
So Gunn’s journey to Pylea seems to have significance mostly in the decision to go to Pylea in the first place. Once he’s there, he doesn’t seem to have any personal journey of his own; he’s simply there to provide Wesley with another point of view that Wesley then ignores. And in the end, Gunn participates in Wesley’s plan–after all, that’s why he’s there, to help. Oh, and Gunn is also apparently there to explain the concept of “reconstruction after a civil war”. Because you really need a black guy to explain that. And the Gang imparts an Important Lesson about how all intelligent beings are created equal (whether the Pyleans actually understand such a concept is another issue entirely).
Speaking of slavery–the priests have a machine to kill all the slaves in their society? Does that make economic sense to *anyone*??
Anyway, Wesley gains confidence in himself by successfully overthrowing the government, the bad guys are conquered, the slaves are freed, and the handsome prince is put in charge of the kingdom and the fugitive girl is rescued and taken back home.
And so we had the end of season 2, and the end of the back-to-back BtVS and AtS every Tuesday night on the WB. I guess it was sort of fitting, then, that as the dimensions were caving in on themselves over on BtVS, the dimension that the AtS gang were in showed no sign of this whatsoever, not even one stray anomalous dragon streaking across a wound in the sky. I heard that they had planned on having a dragon from BtVS cut across the sky in Pylea, but decided the special effect was too expensive or something.
Despite my dislike for Pylean episodes, I was absolutely excited about the return on the show for season 3. It didn’t occur to me that the show might not come back at all, even though that spring had been the time of the Big Shake-up over Buffy leaving the WB and moving over to UPN. I was blissfully ignorant of the fight Joss had every spring to keep AtS on the air. Ignorance was bliss.
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 
For me, “Over the Rainbow” is all about gender identity, down to the title. Lorne’s speech about hearing music in Pylea could as easily be about being in the closet–“something beautiful, and painful, and right.” Lorne exists in a world where men are men–they fight, they butt heads, they act like macho action heroes. And Lorne hears music. It’s the only time they even come close to touching on the fact that they have created an incredibly flamboyant character yet never had the courage to take that to the obvious conclusion and present a fully realized gay character.
But here Lorne gets his moment–he gets to accept himself as different despite rejection by his family, he gets to affirm the value of his “effeminate” world view, which includes music and art and not using violence to solve everything. He gets to be totally secure in his identity for one short arc.
ME is all about the metaphor, and the more I look at this episode the more I see it as yet another attempt to address one of the big twenty-something struggles: coming out.
I really, really liked Pylea, but then I’m just weird. Season Two was my favourite Season until Season Five, and my favourite of the Greenwalt era; I think Angel Season Five took on elements of Buffyness from Joss’ increased devotion to the show after boht Buffy and Firefly were cancelled.
On your Wesley question: I was actually a bit disappointed by ‘Lineage’s exploration of Wesley’s father and how it formed his character. Partly because we find out at the end that Wes was talking to a robot throughout, and so as good an appriximation as it was to his issues, it wasn’t the father himself. And partly because the episode spun bizarrely off to the Fred/Wes/Knox triangle at the end when it should have been addressing the parallels between Angel and his father’s relationship, with Wes’ relationship with both Angel and his own father. It was fun Goddardy goodness, but it wasn’t a blue riband investigation of Wesley’s parental issues.
I also spent the end of Buffy 7 and Angel 4 pining for the days when I saw there was an episode of Buffy 4 on and thought, ‘Oooh, I might stay up for that, it’s quite fun.’ The halcyon days when you took genius for granted.
TCH
I had the opposite feeling when they suddenly switched gears and went off to Pylea. Frankly I thought the Angel/Darla business had gotten very stale. It looked like season 2 Buffy all over again, “My lover’s gone all evil. Should I kill him/her or not?” It wasn’t that there weren’t more possibilities, but it seemed like ME had used up what the had in mind. Of course, that wasn’t true at all, given what was planned for season three.
Frankly I thought the show needed a breath of fresh air, and Pylea supplied that from the beginning. I thought Pylea was probably a sign the network was unhappy, and that ME decided it needed to make changes or face not being renewed. Looking back on it, except as a long-winded stand alone to introduce Fred it didn’t accomplish much in terms of the over all series. The Cordelia sub-plot in Pylea frankly was just annoying; predictable to the point of being hackneyed. The rest I think was quite enjoyable, even if it was largely a planned distraction while Darla’s pregnancy developed.
Ugh I hated Pylea! I understood the desire for a change of pace but it seemed like an abrupt reversal. Everything was bright and sunny and had no consequences – watching Lorne’s non-death directly after the first airing of The Gift didn’t help for me. And talk about taking the romance out of the vampire legend – Angel in “pure demon form” looked like some sort of Star Trek alien.
Numfar redeemed much… but not all.
I thought Angel in pure demon form looked a little like Doyle in demon form.
I always got that, but to me, Lorne’s story rang eqaully as an update on The Jazz Singer — Lorne’s not just an apparently gay character. In many ways, he reads to me as stereotypically Jewish.
The answer: Angelus is *not* the demon, never was. Which means that the true evil of Angel(us)–and indeed, all vampires–is not the blood lust that fuels his fire, but the HUMAN in him. The unique monster that is Angelus is just Liam himself sans soul, his dark side– his hatreds, fears, angers, ISSUES, fed by blood lust and unrestrained by conscience.
*blink blink* Wow. Nice. And yes, that makes more sense considering how close vampires are to their human previous selves, how much they are controlled by the same issues. It can even be applied to previous things, like “The Dark Age” where vamp-angel fights the demon-guy (whose name I forget). That’s not Angelus fighting, it’s the Vampire, the blood lust that is constantly in check. Angelus isn’t the demon or the vampire, he’s the result when the soul is subtracted.
Of course, that plan involves sacrificing some men in a diversion so that others can launch a sneak attack, but this is vintage Wesley. He would have sacrificed Willow in “Choices” to stop the Mayor. He tried to sacrifice himself in AtS season 4 to stop Angelus. He sacrifices Angel in Pylea by asking him to fight the Groosalug. Want to win the game? Sacrifice a pawn. Or a knight. Or the king.
I remember being very offended by that moment in AtS, the season 2 one. I was happy that at least it was questioned by Gunn. But there was no resolution to it, the show didn’t come down on one side or the other about what was right. It always seemd on Buffy that she chose to save everyone, or die trying, and that she didn’t waver from this. Wes might have recommended sacrificing Willow in “choices” but he was obviously thought to be wrong by the show. Buffy wouldn’t do that, even up until Dawn in season 5. And I loved that about her, even if it was stupid. Then they changed it all in season 7 and I got mad, but that’s another story.
So, Wes. I thought his passionless sacrifice of those guys in Pylea was kind of awful, until I saw what you just pointed out: that he’s always been like that, and his loved ones and even himself are just as likely to get snipped. I’m still not sure what to make of it, but at least he’s very consistant and he’s not just killing people who don’t matter to him.
Speaking of slavery–the priests have a machine to kill all the slaves in their society? Does that make economic sense to *anyone*??
heee. Well, I guess it makes sense if you don’t plan to use it unless there’s some kind of extreme uprising where the slaves might kill you all and conquer you. It shows they’re kind of afraid of their slaves.
hmm comment too long.
It plays broadly as any kind of difference, I suppose. I don’t think there is a qualitative difference between sexual/gender difference, racial difference, and religious difference. All these things are alienating, no one is more alienating than the other.
Ok, 1) I didn’t do that. I just asked it to post comment and it sat there for 10 mintues. Apparantly it was busy posting itself five times. I’ll leave it to you to delete them ’cause I think it was your comments that looked odd to me before and I’m not sure if it’s really there five times.
Also, here’s the 2nd half. Hopefully only once. 🙂
Overhearing this conversation was like a promissory note–that someday we’d get full, real story behind Wesley’s childhood. Do you think we did? Did Lineage fulfill that promise or just raise more questions?
For some reason I never needed the details. Wes was a weird loser who tried too hard when he first appeared on Buffy, and he slowly grew out of that on Angel. In the first season you got that possessed boy who alluded to Wes being locked under the stairs as a kid. While I think that was probably retroactively dismissed (I think his father was more of an emotional torture room that squashed your confidence and killed your soul, and not the sort who’d do any sort of physical mistreatment. He probably thought he was a great guy. Then again, he was a watcher, and look what watchers think is a sane rite of adulthood for slayers.) there were other things in the conversation and in Wes’s reaction that I noticed and took to heart. I guess I came up wtih a story already in my head about what Wes’s childhood was like, and any hints that happened over the course of the show were just repetetive allusions, so the other viewers wouldn’t forget. So that excruciating call to his father, and his comments after they meet Fred’s parents in season 3.
I never really needed the details. It was more Wes’s reaction that was important to me, rather than what had happened. So when “Lineage” came around I was very apprehensive. Here we have verydark!Wes trying to deal with his father, what will happen? And I watched the first half of the show and thought the balance was pretty good, he was stronger than before but he was still able to be undone by his father some of the time. But I was very afraid; here we have the confrontation between father and son, what will happen? It looked like the kind of thing where they’d both be resolute and fight and actually clear some air, and then move to a greater understanding, or some crap like that. That’s how that scene usually goes down. So I watched the first half being apprehensive but thinking, “this is Mutant Enemy and they usually don’t write things like that, Ok, I trust them, lets see where it goes.” And we were threatened with the greater understanding scene and then his father betrays him and steals his stuff and was working with the threat all along. He threatens Fred and Wes shoots him. The fact that they took it all back afterwards only ruins it a little for me. Wes still had to choose it. And that phone call at the end was interesting–he tries to call because of all that’s happened, and gets smacked down again, yet he doesn’t seem to mind as much.
Hmm that was rambling. But I’ve always been a little touched by those random allusions to Wes’s life.
Wes. I thought his passionless sacrifice of those guys in Pylea was kind of awful, until I saw what you just pointed out: that he’s always been like that, and his loved ones and even himself are just as likely to get snipped. I’m still not sure what to make of it
For me, over time, I started to develop this question about Wesley — was he loooking to make that sacrifice because he truly, dispassionately, believed the sacrifice was necessary, as part of some calculation of outcomes. Or whether he was suggesting the sacrifice because there was some element of his psychology (Father, council training) which biased him in favor of making sacrifices — whether they were truly necessary or not.
That’s definitely true. I just bring up the “Jewishness” because I happen to be a Jew — and stories in which the young man runs away from his family (and dominating mother) because he wants to be an entertainer/artist, while they stress a traditional vocation (doctor/lawyer/rabbi/warrior) is so very common in my culture.
Plus, Lorne behaves almost exactly like one of my fathers aunts.
For the most parts, the Pylea episodes did not impress me all that much. Gunn, once he gets there, is pretty cardboard, and it does seem a bit formulaic. My understanding is that, not only was Julie Benz a factor in the rewriting, but the BtVS network split as well. I don’t remember where, but I’d heard rumors that there was initially some thoughts as to a crossover at the close of BtVS5 and beginning of BtVS6 that ME scrapped.
In any case, having Angel & crew trapped in Pylea provides a credible explanation as to why:
1. No one in Sunnydale calls them for help in the dramatic showdown with a god.
2. Cordelia doesn’t have a vision of Buffy’s death*.
* Though, in retrospect, one could imagine that this is something Jasmine might not have wanted Angel involved with anyway.
The answer: Angelus is *not* the demon, never was. Which means that the true evil of Angel(us)–and indeed, all vampires–is not the blood lust that fuels his fire, but the HUMAN in him. The unique monster that is Angelus is just Liam himself sans soul, his dark side– his hatreds, fears, angers, ISSUES, fed by blood lust and unrestrained by conscience.
(snip)
Except–in the process of differentiating Angel from his inner beast, Mutant Enemy proved that the worst parts of Angel were from his human side (not that he can’t control that as well, but ME sort of missed the metaphorical mark).
They really did. Which became particularly apparent as they began to do more and more with that other vampire. I like the opportunities for metaphorical and maetaphysical contstruction Pylea provided along this line, but I wish they’d really done more with that metaphor, and applied it a bit more consistently to all their vampires at such points as the shows chose to examine and explore them more.
Well, one can certainly see that trend in the council. But I’m not sure those things are separable. He thinks they’re necessary but then he also kind of looks for them; when things go horribly wrong he thinks they are called for.
You can take a boy away from his Jewish roots, but you can’t take the Jew out of the boy? ; )
That’s always the thing about those “kid leaves home so he can be who he really is” stories. As a kid growing up “different”, you really relate to that. You can’t wait to get away from the pressures and expectations that grate so painfully against your own grain. But you also lose something stepping away from your roots, you lose a connection to your heritage. Which makes finding other people out there in the world who share your difference AND your heritage one of the most healing things world.
I tend to think we got a fairly good picture of Wesley’s childhood and relationship with his father drawn using “negative space”. Instead of actually showing us a flashback, or Wesley in the present day dealing with his flesh-and-blood real father, we got instead a whole variety of bits and pieces and hints and deductive premises:
(1) We get Wesley’s behavior in and of itself, from season 3 BtVS up to season 5 AtS–the awkward, insecure boy, the bullying Watcher priss, the ruthless Utilitarian. (2) Then we get Wesley’s stray but vivid comments about his father’s treatment of him (there’s one in “Fredless” that’s particularly bald). (3) Then there’s the one-sided conversation with his actual father in “Belonging’ where we can indirectly witness Mr. Pryce “grinding him down into a self-conscious nub”. (4) Then there’s the “flashback” of young Wesley in Spin the Bottle. (5) and finally Wesley’s interaction with the faxu Roger W-P in “Lineage”.
One could argue, I think, that M.E. never intended to EVER show us the actual Roger Wyndam-Pryce in interaction with Wesley, but only wanted to gradually build up a picture of him through these indirect means.
I got the impression, as I indicated, that they were forced to come up with the Pylea thing for actor non-availability reasons, and that it was only AFTER season 2 filming was over and they started planning season 3, that Joss came up with the pregnancy idea. In fact, there was some article I read, an interview or something, where Joss relates the story that he and Greenwalt sat down in the hiatus after season 2 and started throwing around ideas for season 3, and Joss said something to the effect of, “well, last year we brought Darla back in a box. How about this year we bring something back IN Darla’s box?”
Regardless, Pylea was such a radical left turn from the story momentum of the season that there has to be extraneous reasons it happened the way it did. Joss is creative enough not to rehash Buffy killing Angel or Angel killing Darla one.more.time.
Once I figured out the metaphysical conclusions that arose from the way the “pure vampire demon” was presented, I was quite enthused about Angel’s split in Pylea.
But the whole Cordy Queen thing, and the over-acting on the part of every guest star just… grated on the nerves. Especially since I was like, “I want Darla. Where’s Darla? What happened to Darla!”
Years later, I don’t fee the incredible ::jar:: the Pylea arc was at the time. I mean, it was a total What.The.Fuck???
I think the tendency to see sacrifice and the weighing of human lives against victory over the bad guys is a strategy Wesley learned in Watcher School, and more particularly, at his daddy’s knee. To many of the Watchers, the Slayers were canon fodder. One dies, the next is called. The Watchers are what “always remain”.
Which is why they chastize Giles against getting to fatherly with Buffy. They fear he won’t be able to sacrifice her if that is called upon “to win”.
I also think Wesley’s choice to continue to use this strategy even after he is no longer a Watcher and no longer under his father’s shadow comes from the fact that he will ALWAYS be under his father’s shadow in some respect. Like he has something to prove to his father, that he can be just as much of a “man” as daddy, “making the hard choices, getting the job done”. But he’s internalized all that reasoning so far deep down inside, he doesn’t even know what his behavior is all about anymore.
See my comment to above, where I make arguments similar to yours, that in the end we didn’t need the details, or an actual flesh-and-blood confrontation between father and son, because we got the story told to us piece by piece in a dozen different ways over the years. Never DIRECTLy, but the story nevertheless.
And as to whether Wesley ever grew OUT OF that relationship to become his own man, well, yes of course he did, and at the same time, no, he never grew out of it entirely.
Which is much like life.
Well, the Pylean vampire beast went a long way towards explaining to me why most vampires we meet are evil in a way that’s just a twist on or an extension of their old human personalities. Because the beast is all about bloodlust and physical transformation, not psychological transformation. The psychological transformation come from the loss of the soul, which is just the same thing as and no more than the conscience. What remains is everything else that made the human individual who they were.
The psychological transformation come from the loss of the soul, which is just the same thing as and no more than the conscience.
Right. The beast doesn’t add intellect or psychology — that comes from the human. But it does add that extra biological impulse to destroy, which, I think, serves to amplify the “sinful” urges of the original human, which now run unchecked by a conscience.
Right. The beast doesn’t add intellect or psychology — that comes from the human. But it does add that extra biological impulse to destroy, which, I think, serves to amplify the “sinful” urges of the original human, which now run unchecked by a conscience.
Right.
Yes, that’s very true, and I think in that sense they handle the relationship very successfully.
TCH
Whedon’s love of exploring father-son and father-daughter relationship issues over and over makes me *really* want to know something about his relationship with his own father.
Except, in that ME tends to not follow through on this connection or metaphor all that much. Or at least that’s the sense I got. (The way ME seems to frequently play to the implication that the bad things Spike did, are more because of what other people did to him, rather than because of the sort of man he was.)
Yeah, I think at the time it was a rare instance where having BtVS as a lead-in actually hurt – it was a double WTF to see Pylea after all the intensity of end of s5. And Cordy… shudder… even though I loved the setup at the start of the arc with her life in such shambles.
Oh and Masq, someone over at ASSB is posting about their library being banned from Atp http://www.voy.com/14810/10424.html I guess that’s fallout from old trolls, just an fyi.
Actually, I think that’s more what fans take away from it. Spike is who Angelus made him, Angelus is who Darla made him, Harmony wouldn’t have been evil if “Angel had just had confidence in her”.
People see the influence of one character on another, and there IS influence, we’re all influenced, and then they decide to not hold their favorite character responsible for any of his actions (indeed the character himself tries to blame others for his actions), like he was a mere blob to be molded by others. They do the same thing to real-life murderers and monsters some times.
Yeah, I banned the Los Angeles public library from ATPo because of a certain troll. I didn’t want to do it, which is why I didn’t ban that troll for the longest time. Then another person started e-mailing me asking me to unban the library. I was pretty sure it wasn’t our same old troll, but not entirely sure. Then I just sort of forgot about the whole thing.
Is this a recent post?
I’ve seen nothing in Spike over the past seven years that contradicts Masq’s analysis of vampire psychology. Everything he’s done, no matter how horrific, stems from William. The stifled Momma’s Boy and would-be poet, now free to experience all the thrills and sensations the world has to offer. Including inflicting pain. And death. Angelus was his tutor in all these things, but proto-Spike was a willing student.
Indeed, after intensive metaphysical and character study over eight years of both shows, I’ve concluded that M.E. were amazingingly consistent in the way they portrayed their vampires, whether it was their behavior we were observing, or the metaphysics of vampires they were showing.
As long as we attribute the ocassional lip-service paid to, “that isn’t your friend/son/wife anymore, it’s just a monster with his/her face” to Watcher dogma, the view we’re discussing above is sound.
I certainly agree that it’s more a case with the fans than the writers. But, I also think that there’s still the case of ME going a bit easy too. Moreso among the S7 era, where the writing was sloppier. There’s also that worry of wanting to tell the challenging story, but not wanting to paint the characters in an unsympathetic light that loses viewers.
Keeping the characters sympathetic while painting them as monsters is difficult. Especially when the thing the writers want sympathy for is the souled not-a-monster part of them.
I was talking about this in ‘s LJ last week–about sympathizing with a character. I wrote something along the lines of “I loved Angelus and Darla, but I had no sympathy for them”. I was trying to differentiate between *liking* a character and *having sympathy* for them.
The problem with my argument is that we have seen *both* Angelus and Darla as human, as souled vampires, and those moments tugged on our sympathies, and that played into our reasons for *liking* the characters.
If a character was presented as an unambiguous monster and never shown as something to sympathize with (even Dru had her moments as a human in flashbacks), we might not like them at all.
I also took away from the Pylea arc that the evil of Angelus was essentially human evil. A vampire = person minus soul (which equals an easy disregard for human morals), plus a biological urge to drink blood and, perhaps, destroy. But the vampire is the person.
My husband insists that Liam was always a bit asocial, and that being a vampire just empowered him, and then the gyspies, did more then give him a soul. They gave him the conscience he’s always lacked. Personally, I think he’s being a bit hard on poor Liam.
William had anger managment issues, and a wealth of human grief. I’ve always thought of his encounter with Dru as more suicide by vampire then seduction.
Well, here’s a note from someone who used to read waaaay too many interviews ’cause she was a fanatic:
When Buffy was in its early years and still considered mostly horror genre, Whedon would get asked the horror-guy interview questions: what scares you, what scared you as a kid, that kind of thing.
When asked what scares him, he immediately said “people.” He said things like that up into the Firefly interviews. When asked what scared him as a kid, he said his brothers and especially his father. He’d then add that his father turned out to not be such a bad guy after all, so he got over it. (He never adds a similar note about the brothers. 🙂
That’s more intimidation (perhaps from an emotionally distant father) than actual “fear”, right? I mean, I’m assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the elder Whedon was not a child-beater or anything? And maybe his brothers picked on him a little?
I think that is harsh. I think Liam loved his little sister. I think “Spin the Bottle” depicts a Liam who was an earnest young man who just resented his father’s puritanical bullying and eventually rebelled against it by becoming a scoundrel.
Fascinating discussion. I agree with you that the evil in the vampire is human evil, the darkest side of the person coming out, without any controls over it. Mixed with demon blood lust, it gives us the vampire as we see him/her. It really explains why most of the vampires we see for longer than it takes to make dust bunnies seem to retain so much of their former human characteristics.
This is the view of Buffyverse vampires I’ve been arguing for on my website at least since AtS started.
I think it was probably fear, actually, though I really doubt of the child-beating variety. Just temper tantrum-like behavior can scare the hell out of kids. And who knows about the brothers.
Well, I had a mother prone to temper tantrums, and an older sister who picked on me with regularity, which goes a long way to explaining why family issues pop up a lot in *my* writing, too. ; )
🙂
That’s probably good–I usually don’t even try.
I would suggest that this is a strategy Wesley learned in Watcher School. Remember BtVS Season 5 “THE GIFT”;
BUFFY: No, you don’t understand. We are not talking about this.
GILES: Yes, we bloody well are!
GILES: If Glory begins the ritual … if we can’t stop her…
BUFFY: Come on. Say it. We’re bloody well talking about this. Tell me to kill my sister.
(additional conversation)
GILES: I love Dawn.
BUFFY: I know.
GILES: But I’ve sworn to protect this sorry world, and sometimes that means saying and doing … what other people can’t. What they shouldn’t have to.
BUFFY: You try and hurt her, and you know I’ll stop you.
GILES: I know.
That was the most heated interchange of the series between Giles & Buffy until the end of LMPTM (S7). If Giles took an oath to protect “this Sorry world” – even at the cost of an innocent life – chances are good Wes took the same oath.
Finally had time to think about my comments. Of course, there are places I don’t see eye to eye (big shock I know but mostly that’s because there are a few characters I just don’t like) let’s see if I get the Italics right. I always screw this up.
BELONGING
and even when they did, Holtz was no black-and-white bad guy and neither was Jasmine.
Excellent point. I didn’t care much for Jasmine but at least she was in that grey area that made you think. The same with Holtz.
But at the time? I was like, Pylea? WTF? Are they asking to have this show cancelled?
Trust me, that was my reaction at the time (well it still is. I despised the Pylea arc and that hasn’t changed)
As I understand it, the Pylean arc was planned and written when Julie Benz was unable to come in and finish season 2. M.E. needed some way to fill out the rest of the season, and they did it by creating a metaphorical landscape in which they could explore each member of the Fang Gang. The gang travels into Pylea and the dimension transforms each of them into something different (and yet personally significant) than s/he was on Earth.
Okay I didn’t know this (that would actually mean me paying attention to interviews etc) I know Benz was doing Roswell which I think was at the same time. Well if that was their aim, they were rather hit and miss about it. I didn’t see much change in Wes or Gunn (Wes was already trying to run things albeit not well and Gunn well as you pointed out, took a step backwards). For that matter Cordy’s always thought she was a princess, at least in Sunnydale so I don’t see that as much of a change for her. It finally fleshed out Lorne but since I never cared for him, it just irritated me that we were wasting time with him. About the only thing I liked with the whole arc was the changes in Angel.
Overhearing this conversation was like a promissory note–that someday we’d get full, real story behind Wesley’s childhood. Do you think we did? Did Lineage fulfill that promise or just raise more questions?
Actually I think it raised more questions. Ditto with Billy. We never really learn how abusive Dad was. Physically (Billy suggested it) Mentally, very likely. I wouldn’t have minded more on ANYONE’S background frankly.
Cordelia gets an acting job that makes her feel worse about herself than better.
You know that episode struck me as so dumb, I’ve never watched more than 10 minutes of it.
Gunn gets caught up in divided loyalties (to which I can only say, it’s about time they explored this).
I agree there.
Over The Rainbow
Lorne of course doesn’t want to go to Pylea at all. He hated growing up there and who can blame him. He may be green and horny like every other Deathwok, but he doesn’t fit in among his own. He blossoms like a flower on Earth, an alien dimension. Who would want to go home to the most alien creatures of all–his own family?
I didn’t mind this revealtion about him though I’m STILL trying to figure out a) how he could learn to sing in a place with no music…okay that’s not a real puzzler, the puzzler is how do you not have any kind of music? And b) HOW do you dance if there’s no music. We know they dance. That was just nonsensical to me.
Through The Looking Glass
So yeah, I had problems with the Pylea thing. I mean, seriously. So lame. M.E. is writing a fairy tale and you get the over-the-top melodramatics that go along with it. The beautiful princess. The handsome, earnest hero. Castles. Scary monsters. Evil priests. Damsels in distress. Important Lessons To Be Learned By ALL. I was sitting watching loyally, but my heart was back in L.A. wanting Angel/Darla angst. And if I had actually remembered to ask, “Why do these human-hating demons from another dimension speak English?” I would have blown a gasket. Luckily, I forgot.
I didn’t forget to ask. I about chewed through my tv and wrote nasty letters to Greenwalt (that I never posted. I just write the letters as a cathersis and dump them) about the absolute stupidity of this whole arc. It nearly made me quit watching (Greenwalt achieved that later the next year)
Meanwhile, the Host has to deal with family issues. Though his cousin seems fairly open-minded, Mom is a bearded bitca. I kind of liked that Lorne got to have his *own* issues, albeit briefly, issues he had to DEAL with. Even when he suffered the loss of his business in season 3, we never saw him grow much from that. He just went right back to being Angel’s helpful side-kick-in-the-pants. Changing diapers instead of reading auras.
Good point. I think what bothered me most about Lorne is that suddenly Angel was constantly turning to him. I guess it makes sense to check with your seers and all but after a while I started to think how did Angel survive 200+ years without Lorne there to guide him.
Angel’s transformations in Pylea were perhaps the most interesting ones.
Agreed. It was the only thing I liked about the whole arc which I think I’ve said already
The answer: Angelus is *not* the demon, never was. Which means that the true evil of Angel(us)–and indeed, all vampires–is not the blood lust that fuels his fire, but the HUMAN in him. The unique monster that is Angelus is just Liam himself sans soul, his dark side– his hatreds, fears, angers, ISSUES, fed by blood lust and unrestrained by conscience.
That’s an interesting take on it. I saw it more as the demon couldn’t fully express itself on earth. We’re only seeing a fraction of it.
There was no reason *not* to believe Lorne was dead. So for a week, we mourned.
Well I’ll be honest I celebrated. I was so glad he was dead. You have no idea how furious I was when he wasn’t dead. Of course as soon as I saw the head on the platter I said, ‘he ain’t dead. Damn it.’
In the midst of all these transformations altering and yet revealing familiar aspects of well-established characters, there was a peculiar, spazzy new face who I rather liked at the time, Fred.
On Pylea was the only time I didn’t hate Fred. I don’t know why I hated her so much but I did. You think a dorky science gal would instantly hit it off with me, a dorky gal with 4 degrees in science. I think it was the fact Fred was paired off with everyone but Lorne that kinda irritated me but more than that, she became TOO good with everything that it got a little unbelievable (or maybe it’s because I have all those degrees in science and know how unbelievable it is that spoiled it for me). I was thrilled to see her go at the end. I actually liked Illyria but that’s me.
So. Of course, that plan involves sacrificing some men in a diversion so that others can launch a sneak attack, but this is vintage Wesley.
You know, I never thought about it that way but you’re absolutely right.
Speaking of slavery–the priests have a machine to kill all the slaves in their society? Does that make economic sense to *anyone*??
NO and that certainly helped with the whole WTF aspect of Pylea and explains why I’ve only ever seen those episodes once. I won’t rewatch them. I was just mentioning the slave thing to a friend who’s doing a Pylea story
Buffy leaving the WB and moving over to UPN.
Turns out that Angel would have been better off if it had followed Buffy. An article just came out talking about the reason for the cancellation. WB is owned by AOL and they wanted to cut costs so bye-bye Angel in spite of great ratings.
See, when I watch I try not to dislike a character if I can at all avoid it. There are some characters I simply don’t have much use for — Spike, Anya, Andrew, Harmony, and it annoys me if they get more than their share of screen time that could go to other characters, but I after five years of doing my website where I force myself to analyze the story and characters as M.E. wrote it rather than based on what I’d like to see, I’ve found depths in all of them. I understand what the writers are trying to do with them in the story, even if I yawned my way through it.
Sometimes, I really had to bite the bullet as I thought through my analysis and wrote it up (not these reviews, their pretty subjective, but my website episode analyses) because I was so big with the not caring about a certain character, but I think in the end I get a lot more out of the show trying to like them and understand them than being irritated by them.
Well, this is part of the reason I no longer bother to pay money for cable TV or invest in the new shows. I’ll wait for them to come out on DVD and catch the ones my friends rec to me or that look interesting. I’m tired of getting caught up in shows only to lose them. I’m tired of the idiocy of the American public and the ratings system.
You’re probably much better at it than I am. But with me there are those I’m indifferent to, Anya, Xander and others I actively dislike which from this is obviously Fred, Lorne and most especially Andrew.
I try to put that aside so I can enjoy the show and for the most part I’m successful at it (barring Andrew but the whole thing with Katrina ensured I’d never like him). I can for the most part write any of them, even ones I don’t like but I mostly just ignore them the best I can or else I’d be flipping to another show.
ANd it’s only going to get worse from that article I’ve read. It certainly explains the stupidity of reality shows not really mattering because they’re relatively cheap to make.
It’s gotten to be the only thing I watch on cable is endless forensic programs. I’m jonesing real bad for them right now.
I love those cable forensics programs. They’re like brain candy. But I only really catch them when I’m visiting my parents these days.