Thoughts on ATS 5.10, 5.9 & Dreams
Jan. 23rd, 2004 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatYeah, yeah - I know I said I wouldn't discuss, but had some thoughts that I jotted down and felt the desire publish on livejournal.
The following are my thoughts on this weeks' Angel episode. Which I'm only posting on live journal at the moment.
********************************
Dreams like half-finished sentences cloud my mind and spiritus with periods of weariness…
That’s the beginning of a mediocre poem I wrote ages ago, which I’ve forgotten except for the first line.
Dreams. Nightmares.
Heard last night on ABC NEWS that a new journal article in Nature, states that we learn while we’re dreaming. Scientific studies show that dreams and nightmares are the brain processing what to keep and delete from our memories. Learning literally continues as we sleep. The more you sleep – the more you learn. Complex problems you couldn’t solve the day before become clearer after a good night’s sleep – the brain apparently works on them, twisting this way and that, while the body rests.
Numerous filmmakers and authors have explored what it means to dream. Some even use the dreamscape as a means to explore character or to allow the character to enter another parallel world. In some cases the character has more power or control in the dreamscape, in others less.
Here’s a list of the one’s that I remember:
Books:
Wizard of Oz – where a little girl who feels powerless in her own world dreams that she’s been whisked off to a foreign place where she has the power of a witch. The movie version does a good job of showing the dreamscape as more real than the little girl’s reality – by having it in color while the reality is in black and white, in most people’s dreams, studies have found it to be the opposite.
Alice in Wonderland – a little girl dreams she’s fallen down a rabbit hole where nothing makes sense and she has little or no control over her surroundings, even her own size and shape. Upon waking, she wonders who had the dream, Dinah – her cat, or herself.
Alice Through The Looking Glass – similar to In Wonderland, a little girl dreams she’s fallen through a looking glass into a chaotic world of her nightmares. The world represents the riddle she is attempting to memorize, yet can’t quite get for a recital she has to give that day – through the course of the dream she learns the riddle and appreciates the need for memorizing it.
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep - Philip K. Dick explores whether the ability to dream separates a man from a robot. Do our dreams make us human? Or can anything dream?
Films:
The surrealists: Bergman, Fellini, Bunneul, Kuroswa (whose names I can’t spell) – all experimented with dream images to tell a story.
1. Fellini – 8 ½ is a film that is made up of a series of surrealistic dream images describing the internal landscape of the main character’s issues, hopes, and fears.
2. Louis Bunneul – most of his films tend to deal with obscure images from the dream-scape, the Discourse of the Bourgeousi comes to mind. (I think I got that title wrong.)
3. Kuroswa – Dreams – the Japanese director explores the landscape of folklore and the mind through surreal images
Television has also explored dreaming in shows as diverse as Cheers, Mash, Six Feet Under & The Sopranos to sci-fi dramas like Star Trek Next Generation and Babylon 5. Whedon possibly has captured the idea of dreaming best with the episode Restless in BTVS and uses it a great deal as a technique to explore a character’s issues and emotional arc.
Dreams. I tend to see Dreams as being a combination of the fears and hopes nagging at us before we go to sleep at night. Those repressed or suppressed dilemmas that we’ve pushed towards the back of our minds. Also the brain’s way of processing the superfluous data it’s retained over the period we’ve been awake. Friends or colleagues who appear in our dreams represent something other than themselves – often a fear or hope we have, or our own impression of them – an impression we may not have admitted consciously and have either suppressed or pressed to the back of our brain. To cope with life, we often push the stuff that bugs us to the back of the brain, while we sleep the brain deals with it through dreams and nightmares.
Not sure how others dream, can only really speak for myself – but my dreams more often than not make little sense. The more I attempt to control or hold onto something in them, the quicker they shift. One night I dreamed that I was at a movie theater watching Gone with The Wind and a bunch of us got sucked into the movie, which changed and became a modern day cartoon, definitely not Gone With The Wind – the moment I acknowledged this in the dream – I woke up.
We all dream. Numerous books are written on dream analysis. Psychologists such as Jung and Freud developed careers largely based on the interpretation of dreams. The worst dreams are the ones that seem so real, that when you wake up you wonder which is dream and which is real. Am I dreaming now? Or was I dreaming then? TV shows such as Star Trek and Red Dwarf and The Prisoner, have at different points asked the question how much of our reality is real and how much of it is a dream? The movie The Matrix wondered if our reality is in fact a dream that a bunch of machines created to keep us occupied. The landscape between dream and waking life can blur, making it difficult to see the difference. Certain hallucinogenic drugs blur the line even further – creating what is called waking dreams. When one can no longer tell the difference between their dreams and their reality – the mind can become fractured and the person goes insane.
In Angel 5.10 – Soul Purpose – which really needs to be watched after Harm’s Way or you miss out on the set up, Angel spends most of the episode caught in a series of fever dreams. It is by no means the first time the writers have made us privy to Angel’s dreams.
In Somnabulist - Angel dreams that he is going on nightly rampages, killing people he should be saving. The dreams are so vivid that he can’t decide whether or not they are real. Unfortunately, the people he dreams of killing are found dead the next morning. Uncertain if Angel is indeed the culprit, his friends chain him up and conduct an all night vigil. Turns out it’s not Angel, but Angel’s protégée, Penn, who is doing the killing. Angel’s dreams are a reflection of Penn’s psychosis. The reason Angel dreams about being Penn, is in an earlier life – Angel was Penn – taking out his anger towards his father and family on others. The episode explores Angel’s unresolved feelings towards these acts and his responsibility for projecting his own twisted desires on to Penn. Would Penn have become the monster he was without Angelus?
In Season 2 – the dividing line between dream and reality is blurred again, this time with Darla – who enters Angel’s dreams, as well as his actual room, each night. The dreams explore Angel’s repressed feelings for Darla. His guilt at killing her. His hopes regarding her. Through the dreams, we discover that Angel/Angelus may have cared for Darla a lot more than he’s willing to admit.
In Season 4 – we get three dream episodes: The first is a series of nightmares – Deep Down – where Angel lies at the bottom of the ocean and has a series of dreams about his created family and how he fears he’s breaking or will break that family apart. Midway through the season – we get the second dream episode – Awakenings – where Angel has his perfect dream – so perfect, he loses his soul. The dream itself is heavily ironic. It’s the classic hero story – complete with storybook ending. In it, Cordy, Wes, and Connor join with Angel to kill the Beast and bring back the sun. Unfortunately – Cordy, Wes, and Connor in reality aren’t willing to play the parts he’s assigned them. Cordy isn’t going to have the wonderful vision, lead Angel to the problem, and fall into his arms like the damsel in distress. Wes isn’t going to play the mystic, or apologize and tell Angel he was wrong. Connor isn’t going to be the good son – he’s far to much like his father in spirit for that to happen at this point. For the same reasons Angel couldn’t forgive his Dad or see his Dad’s pov, Connor can’t see Angel’s. The dream is completely on Angel’s terms, which is why it’s “Angel’s” perfect dream. Instead of Angel and his family bringing back the sun and killing the Beast, it’s Angel’s evil alter-ego, Angelus who does it. The part of Angel that he holds responsible for pushing Cordy and Connor away. The third dream episode is Orpheus, a drug induced nightmare journey shared by Faith and Angelus in Angel’s subconscious. We are lead to believe the principal dreamer here is Angelus, it’s not, it’s Faith – who like the audience seems but a passenger on a ride. She is forced through the shared dream to see Angel’s duality and realize that the two personas aren’t as separate as both she and Angel think. Something Angelus is brutally aware of, but Angel can’t see.
Finally, we come to S5, which oddly enough does it’s dream episode in the same place in the season that Awakenings fell the year before. Except instead of a lovely candy-coated dream sequence, we get a series of fevered nightmares. Nightmares that may make more sense if you understood Harm’s Way.
Harm’s Way lets us know that Angel has become or feels little more than a figurehead now. Completely out of his depth, bluffing it. And hating the ambiguity being a lover of structure and rules. His team runs W&H not Angel. The Senior Partners run Angel. Not the other way around. Angel, for all his claims of being in charge and changing things - hasn’t been able to change much at all, and is feeling more and more irrelevant.
1. The employee-orientation video, which slyly insists things have changed. Yet have they? Employees still get killed at the whim of the CEO. The underlings are still jockeying for power – Lilah and Lindsey and Gavin have just been replaced by Wes, Gunn and Fred is all. For a more detailed analysis of this see superplin's analysis
The following are my thoughts on this weeks' Angel episode. Which I'm only posting on live journal at the moment.
********************************
Dreams like half-finished sentences cloud my mind and spiritus with periods of weariness…
That’s the beginning of a mediocre poem I wrote ages ago, which I’ve forgotten except for the first line.
Dreams. Nightmares.
Heard last night on ABC NEWS that a new journal article in Nature, states that we learn while we’re dreaming. Scientific studies show that dreams and nightmares are the brain processing what to keep and delete from our memories. Learning literally continues as we sleep. The more you sleep – the more you learn. Complex problems you couldn’t solve the day before become clearer after a good night’s sleep – the brain apparently works on them, twisting this way and that, while the body rests.
Numerous filmmakers and authors have explored what it means to dream. Some even use the dreamscape as a means to explore character or to allow the character to enter another parallel world. In some cases the character has more power or control in the dreamscape, in others less.
Here’s a list of the one’s that I remember:
Books:
Wizard of Oz – where a little girl who feels powerless in her own world dreams that she’s been whisked off to a foreign place where she has the power of a witch. The movie version does a good job of showing the dreamscape as more real than the little girl’s reality – by having it in color while the reality is in black and white, in most people’s dreams, studies have found it to be the opposite.
Alice in Wonderland – a little girl dreams she’s fallen down a rabbit hole where nothing makes sense and she has little or no control over her surroundings, even her own size and shape. Upon waking, she wonders who had the dream, Dinah – her cat, or herself.
Alice Through The Looking Glass – similar to In Wonderland, a little girl dreams she’s fallen through a looking glass into a chaotic world of her nightmares. The world represents the riddle she is attempting to memorize, yet can’t quite get for a recital she has to give that day – through the course of the dream she learns the riddle and appreciates the need for memorizing it.
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep - Philip K. Dick explores whether the ability to dream separates a man from a robot. Do our dreams make us human? Or can anything dream?
Films:
The surrealists: Bergman, Fellini, Bunneul, Kuroswa (whose names I can’t spell) – all experimented with dream images to tell a story.
1. Fellini – 8 ½ is a film that is made up of a series of surrealistic dream images describing the internal landscape of the main character’s issues, hopes, and fears.
2. Louis Bunneul – most of his films tend to deal with obscure images from the dream-scape, the Discourse of the Bourgeousi comes to mind. (I think I got that title wrong.)
3. Kuroswa – Dreams – the Japanese director explores the landscape of folklore and the mind through surreal images
Television has also explored dreaming in shows as diverse as Cheers, Mash, Six Feet Under & The Sopranos to sci-fi dramas like Star Trek Next Generation and Babylon 5. Whedon possibly has captured the idea of dreaming best with the episode Restless in BTVS and uses it a great deal as a technique to explore a character’s issues and emotional arc.
Dreams. I tend to see Dreams as being a combination of the fears and hopes nagging at us before we go to sleep at night. Those repressed or suppressed dilemmas that we’ve pushed towards the back of our minds. Also the brain’s way of processing the superfluous data it’s retained over the period we’ve been awake. Friends or colleagues who appear in our dreams represent something other than themselves – often a fear or hope we have, or our own impression of them – an impression we may not have admitted consciously and have either suppressed or pressed to the back of our brain. To cope with life, we often push the stuff that bugs us to the back of the brain, while we sleep the brain deals with it through dreams and nightmares.
Not sure how others dream, can only really speak for myself – but my dreams more often than not make little sense. The more I attempt to control or hold onto something in them, the quicker they shift. One night I dreamed that I was at a movie theater watching Gone with The Wind and a bunch of us got sucked into the movie, which changed and became a modern day cartoon, definitely not Gone With The Wind – the moment I acknowledged this in the dream – I woke up.
We all dream. Numerous books are written on dream analysis. Psychologists such as Jung and Freud developed careers largely based on the interpretation of dreams. The worst dreams are the ones that seem so real, that when you wake up you wonder which is dream and which is real. Am I dreaming now? Or was I dreaming then? TV shows such as Star Trek and Red Dwarf and The Prisoner, have at different points asked the question how much of our reality is real and how much of it is a dream? The movie The Matrix wondered if our reality is in fact a dream that a bunch of machines created to keep us occupied. The landscape between dream and waking life can blur, making it difficult to see the difference. Certain hallucinogenic drugs blur the line even further – creating what is called waking dreams. When one can no longer tell the difference between their dreams and their reality – the mind can become fractured and the person goes insane.
In Angel 5.10 – Soul Purpose – which really needs to be watched after Harm’s Way or you miss out on the set up, Angel spends most of the episode caught in a series of fever dreams. It is by no means the first time the writers have made us privy to Angel’s dreams.
In Somnabulist - Angel dreams that he is going on nightly rampages, killing people he should be saving. The dreams are so vivid that he can’t decide whether or not they are real. Unfortunately, the people he dreams of killing are found dead the next morning. Uncertain if Angel is indeed the culprit, his friends chain him up and conduct an all night vigil. Turns out it’s not Angel, but Angel’s protégée, Penn, who is doing the killing. Angel’s dreams are a reflection of Penn’s psychosis. The reason Angel dreams about being Penn, is in an earlier life – Angel was Penn – taking out his anger towards his father and family on others. The episode explores Angel’s unresolved feelings towards these acts and his responsibility for projecting his own twisted desires on to Penn. Would Penn have become the monster he was without Angelus?
In Season 2 – the dividing line between dream and reality is blurred again, this time with Darla – who enters Angel’s dreams, as well as his actual room, each night. The dreams explore Angel’s repressed feelings for Darla. His guilt at killing her. His hopes regarding her. Through the dreams, we discover that Angel/Angelus may have cared for Darla a lot more than he’s willing to admit.
In Season 4 – we get three dream episodes: The first is a series of nightmares – Deep Down – where Angel lies at the bottom of the ocean and has a series of dreams about his created family and how he fears he’s breaking or will break that family apart. Midway through the season – we get the second dream episode – Awakenings – where Angel has his perfect dream – so perfect, he loses his soul. The dream itself is heavily ironic. It’s the classic hero story – complete with storybook ending. In it, Cordy, Wes, and Connor join with Angel to kill the Beast and bring back the sun. Unfortunately – Cordy, Wes, and Connor in reality aren’t willing to play the parts he’s assigned them. Cordy isn’t going to have the wonderful vision, lead Angel to the problem, and fall into his arms like the damsel in distress. Wes isn’t going to play the mystic, or apologize and tell Angel he was wrong. Connor isn’t going to be the good son – he’s far to much like his father in spirit for that to happen at this point. For the same reasons Angel couldn’t forgive his Dad or see his Dad’s pov, Connor can’t see Angel’s. The dream is completely on Angel’s terms, which is why it’s “Angel’s” perfect dream. Instead of Angel and his family bringing back the sun and killing the Beast, it’s Angel’s evil alter-ego, Angelus who does it. The part of Angel that he holds responsible for pushing Cordy and Connor away. The third dream episode is Orpheus, a drug induced nightmare journey shared by Faith and Angelus in Angel’s subconscious. We are lead to believe the principal dreamer here is Angelus, it’s not, it’s Faith – who like the audience seems but a passenger on a ride. She is forced through the shared dream to see Angel’s duality and realize that the two personas aren’t as separate as both she and Angel think. Something Angelus is brutally aware of, but Angel can’t see.
Finally, we come to S5, which oddly enough does it’s dream episode in the same place in the season that Awakenings fell the year before. Except instead of a lovely candy-coated dream sequence, we get a series of fevered nightmares. Nightmares that may make more sense if you understood Harm’s Way.
Harm’s Way lets us know that Angel has become or feels little more than a figurehead now. Completely out of his depth, bluffing it. And hating the ambiguity being a lover of structure and rules. His team runs W&H not Angel. The Senior Partners run Angel. Not the other way around. Angel, for all his claims of being in charge and changing things - hasn’t been able to change much at all, and is feeling more and more irrelevant.
1. The employee-orientation video, which slyly insists things have changed. Yet have they? Employees still get killed at the whim of the CEO. The underlings are still jockeying for power – Lilah and Lindsey and Gavin have just been replaced by Wes, Gunn and Fred is all. For a more detailed analysis of this see superplin's analysis
[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<ljuser=“superplin”>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]
Yeah, yeah - I know I said I wouldn't discuss, but had some thoughts that I jotted down and felt the desire publish on livejournal.
The following are my thoughts on this weeks' Angel episode. Which I'm only posting on live journal at the moment.
********************************
Dreams like half-finished sentences cloud my mind and spiritus with periods of weariness…
That’s the beginning of a mediocre poem I wrote ages ago, which I’ve forgotten except for the first line.
Dreams. Nightmares.
Heard last night on ABC NEWS that a new journal article in <b>Nature</b>, states that we learn while we’re dreaming. Scientific studies show that dreams and nightmares are the brain processing what to keep and delete from our memories. Learning literally continues as we sleep. The more you sleep – the more you learn. Complex problems you couldn’t solve the day before become clearer after a good night’s sleep – the brain apparently works on them, twisting this way and that, while the body rests.
<lj-cut text:"no spoilers in this section, just about dreams in films, books, etc">
Numerous filmmakers and authors have explored what it means to dream. Some even use the dreamscape as a means to explore character or to allow the character to enter another parallel world. In some cases the character has more power or control in the dreamscape, in others less.
Here’s a list of the one’s that I remember:
Books:
<u>Wizard of Oz</u> – where a little girl who feels powerless in her own world dreams that she’s been whisked off to a foreign place where she has the power of a witch. The movie version does a good job of showing the dreamscape as more real than the little girl’s reality – by having it in color while the reality is in black and white, in most people’s dreams, studies have found it to be the opposite.
<u>Alice in Wonderland</u> – a little girl dreams she’s fallen down a rabbit hole where nothing makes sense and she has little or no control over her surroundings, even her own size and shape. Upon waking, she wonders who had the dream, Dinah – her cat, or herself.
<u>Alice Through The Looking Glass</u> – similar to In Wonderland, a little girl dreams she’s fallen through a looking glass into a chaotic world of her nightmares. The world represents the riddle she is attempting to memorize, yet can’t quite get for a recital she has to give that day – through the course of the dream she learns the riddle and appreciates the need for memorizing it.
<u>Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep</u> - Philip K. Dick explores whether the ability to dream separates a man from a robot. Do our dreams make us human? Or can anything dream?
Films:
The surrealists: Bergman, Fellini, Bunneul, Kuroswa (whose names I can’t spell) – all experimented with dream images to tell a story.
1. Fellini –<u> 8 ½ </u>is a film that is made up of a series of surrealistic dream images describing the internal landscape of the main character’s issues, hopes, and fears.
2. Louis Bunneul – most of his films tend to deal with obscure images from the dream-scape, the <u>Discourse of the Bourgeousi</u> comes to mind. (I think I got that title wrong.)
3. Kuroswa – <u>Dreams</u> – the Japanese director explores the landscape of folklore and the mind through surreal images
Television has also explored dreaming in shows as diverse as Cheers, Mash, Six Feet Under & The Sopranos to sci-fi dramas like Star Trek Next Generation and Babylon 5. Whedon possibly has captured the idea of dreaming best with the episode Restless in BTVS and uses it a great deal as a technique to explore a character’s issues and emotional arc.
Dreams. I tend to see Dreams as being a combination of the fears and hopes nagging at us before we go to sleep at night. Those repressed or suppressed dilemmas that we’ve pushed towards the back of our minds. Also the brain’s way of processing the superfluous data it’s retained over the period we’ve been awake. Friends or colleagues who appear in our dreams represent something other than themselves – often a fear or hope we have, or our own impression of them – an impression we may not have admitted consciously and have either suppressed or pressed to the back of our brain. To cope with life, we often push the stuff that bugs us to the back of the brain, while we sleep the brain deals with it through dreams and nightmares.
Not sure how others dream, can only really speak for myself – but my dreams more often than not make little sense. The more I attempt to control or hold onto something in them, the quicker they shift. One night I dreamed that I was at a movie theater watching Gone with The Wind and a bunch of us got sucked into the movie, which changed and became a modern day cartoon, definitely not Gone With The Wind – the moment I acknowledged this in the dream – I woke up.
We all dream. Numerous books are written on dream analysis. Psychologists such as Jung and Freud developed careers largely based on the interpretation of dreams. The worst dreams are the ones that seem so real, that when you wake up you wonder which is dream and which is real. Am I dreaming now? Or was I dreaming then? TV shows such as Star Trek and Red Dwarf and The Prisoner, have at different points asked the question how much of our reality is real and how much of it is a dream? The movie The Matrix wondered if our reality is in fact a dream that a bunch of machines created to keep us occupied. The landscape between dream and waking life can blur, making it difficult to see the difference. Certain hallucinogenic drugs blur the line even further – creating what is called waking dreams. When one can no longer tell the difference between their dreams and their reality – the mind can become fractured and the person goes insane.
</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text="vague spoilers for 5.10, discusses the ATS episodes Somnabulist, Awakenings, Deep Down and Orpheus mainly">
In Angel 5.10 – <b>Soul Purpose</b> – which really needs to be watched after Harm’s Way or you miss out on the set up, Angel spends most of the episode caught in a series of fever dreams. It is by no means the first time the writers have made us privy to Angel’s dreams.
In <b> Somnabulist</b> - Angel dreams that he is going on nightly rampages, killing people he should be saving. The dreams are so vivid that he can’t decide whether or not they are real. Unfortunately, the people he dreams of killing are found dead the next morning. Uncertain if Angel is indeed the culprit, his friends chain him up and conduct an all night vigil. Turns out it’s not Angel, but Angel’s protégée, Penn, who is doing the killing. Angel’s dreams are a reflection of Penn’s psychosis. The reason Angel dreams about being Penn, is in an earlier life – Angel was Penn – taking out his anger towards his father and family on others. The episode explores Angel’s unresolved feelings towards these acts and his responsibility for projecting his own twisted desires on to Penn. Would Penn have become the monster he was without Angelus?
In Season 2 – the dividing line between dream and reality is blurred again, this time with Darla – who enters Angel’s dreams, as well as his actual room, each night. The dreams explore Angel’s repressed feelings for Darla. His guilt at killing her. His hopes regarding her. Through the dreams, we discover that Angel/Angelus may have cared for Darla a lot more than he’s willing to admit.
In Season 4 – we get three dream episodes: The first is a series of nightmares – <b>Deep Down</b> – where Angel lies at the bottom of the ocean and has a series of dreams about his created family and how he fears he’s breaking or will break that family apart. Midway through the season – we get the second dream episode – <b>Awakenings</b> – where Angel has his perfect dream – so perfect, he loses his soul. The dream itself is heavily ironic. It’s the classic hero story – complete with storybook ending. In it, Cordy, Wes, and Connor join with Angel to kill the Beast and bring back the sun. Unfortunately – Cordy, Wes, and Connor in reality aren’t willing to play the parts he’s assigned them. Cordy isn’t going to have the wonderful vision, lead Angel to the problem, and fall into his arms like the damsel in distress. Wes isn’t going to play the mystic, or apologize and tell Angel he was wrong. Connor isn’t going to be the good son – he’s far to much like his father in spirit for that to happen at this point. For the same reasons Angel couldn’t forgive his Dad or see his Dad’s pov, Connor can’t see Angel’s. The dream is completely on Angel’s terms, which is why it’s “Angel’s” perfect dream. Instead of Angel and his family bringing back the sun and killing the Beast, it’s Angel’s evil alter-ego, Angelus who does it. The part of Angel that he holds responsible for pushing Cordy and Connor away. The third dream episode is <b>Orpheus</b>, a drug induced nightmare journey shared by Faith and Angelus in Angel’s subconscious. We are lead to believe the principal dreamer here is Angelus, it’s not, it’s Faith – who like the audience seems but a passenger on a ride. She is forced through the shared dream to see Angel’s duality and realize that the two personas aren’t as separate as both she and Angel think. Something Angelus is brutally aware of, but Angel can’t see.
Finally, we come to S5, which oddly enough does it’s dream episode in the same place in the season that Awakenings fell the year before. Except instead of a lovely candy-coated dream sequence, we get a series of fevered nightmares. Nightmares that may make more sense if you understood <b>Harm’s Way</b>.
</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text="Spoilers for Ats 5.9">
<b>Harm’s Way</b> lets us know that Angel has become or feels little more than a figurehead now. Completely out of his depth, bluffing it. And hating the ambiguity being a lover of structure and rules. His team runs W&H not Angel. The Senior Partners run Angel. Not the other way around. Angel, for all his claims of being in charge and changing things - hasn’t been able to change much at all, and is feeling more and more irrelevant.
1. The employee-orientation video, which slyly insists things have changed. Yet have they? Employees still get killed at the whim of the CEO. The underlings are still jockeying for power – Lilah and Lindsey and Gavin have just been replaced by Wes, Gunn and Fred is all. For a more detailed analysis of this see superplin's analysis <ljuser=“superplin”> or the link I posted in a previous journal entry.
2. Harm’s lunch time conversations slyly juxtaposed with Angel’s conference with the demon clans. Harm keeps trying to get people to pay attention to her, but they could care less about Harmony or Angel – they are more interested in Wes, Gunn, Lorne, and Fred. Angel may be the big boss but he’s of no consequence. Some fans complained online that this wasn’t realistic, because wouldn’t the boss’ secretary be treated with reverence? That’s the point. The employees don’t see Harm as important because they don’t see Angel as important. It’s Gunn and Wes who scare them.
3. The demon clan negotiation scenes – Gunn runs the show, Angel just makes stupid remarks and is called manwhore. Gunn does the translations. Angel is completely out of his depth and would probably be more helpful if he went on a lunch run – as Wes orders Harm to do in an earlier scene.
4. The signing of the documents in the video – Angel does what Gunn tells him.
Harm’s Way sets the stage, in Soul Purpose – we see the play acted out. </lj-cut>
<lj-cut text="major spoilers and in depth analysis for Ats 5.10">
Two points of view in Soul Purpose – Angel’s and the indivisible point of view of everyone else – specifically: Lindsey, Gunn, Wes, Fred, and Spike. To get this episode, you have to be able to track whose point of view you are in. When we are in Angel’s – we’re in the dream. When we’re in any of the others – we’re not. The two points of view comment on each other. So to understand what’s going on in Angel’s dream – I think you have to look back on what’s happening with the other characters. Also the title – which is a nifty play on words – sole/soul purpose – Angel’s need to have a sole or only purpose with rules and structure and the purpose of the soul. Soul Purpose comments on the structuralist’s dilemma in a chaotic/unstructured universe – a universe that may not have a sole purpose.
Step by step:
1. Spike – interesting character Spike. Angel doesn’t understand Spike at all and is basically guilty of what Spike accused him of doing in Destiny – projecting his fears onto Spike. (Wondering if Angel has been reading his fan mail?)
The dream sequences open with a warped vision of Destiny, or rather what Angel feared would happen when Spike lifted that cup. This vision is juxtaposed with Spike’s meeting with Lindsey, where Spike is shown as being highly skeptical of Lindsey. And literally throws Lindsey against a wall regarding the whole cup of perpetual torment scam. Lindsey has to work a bit to get Spike’s interest – playing the sympathy card. What’s interesting about the Spike/Lindsey scenes is how they slyly make fun of Angel/Doyle relationship and most of Season 1 ATS. Pointing out to the audience that Angel may have been manipulated by external forces at the very beginning. Like Doyle does with Angel, Lindsey convinces Spike by stating – how would you feel if you knew someone was going to die and you weren’t there to stop it.
Spike seems lost prior to this statement. Like Angel was and currently is. Vulnerable and uncertain what to do next. Both have left the woman they adored. Both are approached by person claiming to have visions named Doyle. Angel unlike Spike trusts Doyle almost at the start. Spike is a bit more skeptical. But Spike’s always been skeptical of things like fate, destiny, prophecies – he’s one of those folk who believes in making your own fate. That’s Angel’s stick – fate. Angel is the fatalist of the two. But – the common demnominator between the two is the genuine desire to help. They both want to help others and no, not just to impress people. They just don’t always know how to go about it. Something I can identify with. We all want to help others, to be good people, but we’re a bit lost sometimes on how to accomplish it. Is there a specific road or path to take? Are we predestined for someone or something? Can an oracle or tarot card reading or priest tell us? Wouldn’t it be great if they could? Thousands, actually millions, of dollars are spent annually on fortune tellers, mystics, soothsayers – to tell people what the future holds – what’s their destiny? It would be great to have a blue fairy or God or a Doyle or a Whistler show up on our doorstep one day and tell us what to do. Tell us we are special and have been chosen for a specific mission. With a wave of a wand – we become, presto, the hero. No worries about those nasty gray areas, it’s all about good vs. evil – we’re superman! And if we take a moment to look back at Angel’s story – this is exactly what has happened to Angel. Whistler picked him up out of the gutter in Becoming and directed him towards Buffy, telling Angel he’s the chosen one, the special vampire. Later Whistler reappears and tells Buffy, that Angel was the one who was supposed to save the world from Acathla, Buffy screwed things up. Then we get the magic snow which appears on a hot day and saves Angel from committing suicide at the taunting of the First Evil. Angel’s living most people’s dream life – the boy of destiny. Doyle shows up when he’s down and out in LA and tells him who to save – via visions. When Doyle dies, Cordelia inherits the visions. But…and here’s the thing, how do we know the visions were legitimate? Why does Angel believe in the PTB? Is Angel just a puppet? W&H seems to wonder about this and being good at manipulating things they figure out a way to use the visions to their advantage along with the prophecies. So now it’s questionable whose controlling Angel’s actions: the PTB, the Senior Partners, The W&H lackeys, or Angel himself. You see – the problem with depending on visions or some prophecy to tell you your role in life or path is after a while you become it’s puppet and when that prophecy or vision or person is yanked away or disappears? What do you do then? Cease to be relevant? Cease to exist?
Using Lindsey in this way is a sly way of commenting on how Angel is his own worst enemy. While Lindsey is manipulating things from outside W&H, Angel is attempting to control them from within W&H. The two have changed places more or less. Lindsey has always been to some degree or another – Angel’s shadow. The human who wants approval, who wants to rise above his means, who is ruthless yet at the same time…uncertain. Who wants someone to guide him along a clear path. Lindsey’s battles with Holland Manners in S1 echoed Angel’s with the Master and his own father. Both Lindsey and Angel desire to save Darla – Lindsey by making her a vampire, Angel by keeping her human. So it’s fitting to have Lindsey be the one pulling Spike’s strings – an odd commentary on how it is really Angel’s own fears and desires that are playing with Spike, as we see in Angel’s nightmares. Lindsey sent Spike to Angel. Lindsey made Spike corporeal so he’d fight with Angel. Lindsey shows up to Spike as Angel’s old friend and helpmate to convince a lost Spike to take over Angel’s old identity. The difficulty with Lindsey’s plan is Spike isn’t Angel, Spike has no interest in being Angel – if he did he’d have taken Hainsely up on his offer in Just Rewards. It may appear from Angel’s pov that Spike wants this – hence Lindsey’s manipulations, but it’s not what Spike wants. We have a tendency sometimes to project our own desires on to our siblings, believing they are competing for the same things, when in reality? They aren’t. Spike does want to be a hero, he does want to help. But whether he wants the shanshue thing or even believes in it? That’s uncertain.
The other dream image regarding Spike is an odd bit with Buffy – which says a lot about Angel. So many ways to analyze this scene and it is a hard scene to analyze without biases getting in the way. First, why the Prom? Of all the episodes to choose for a Buffy voice-over, why did they choose that one? Why not I Will Remember You? Or Chosen? Or End of Days? Or Forever? Is it because The Prom was the last time Angel felt he had Buffy, was it the moment that he and Buffy broke up which sticks in his memory? And what bugs him about this moment – Buffy mentioning the Prom and how she kills her goldfish – the goldfish Fred pulled out in a prior scene which symbolizes his soul? Or just happens to be swimming next to it? Juxtapose this with the differences between Spike and Angel – how they deal with their victims and with Buffy – Angel acts more paternal – I don’t want to take you to Prom, I think you’re great at caring for children, oh you poor victim – here I’ll help you home. Spike acts more like a peer or equal – he’s having sex with Buffy, he has no problem taking her to Prom or not, he asks the victims to hang out. Yet, how much of the dream sequence is truly Spike and not Angel’s own representation of Spike? Angel’s own fear that Spike is taking his place with Buffy – and if you think about it, if Angel hadn’t broken up with her in The Prom, maybe Spike never would have gotten together with Buffy to begin with. Actually if Angel hadn’t turned back time in I Will Remember You – Spike wouldn’t have.
2. Wes – Angel has such odd feelings about Wesley. Wes like Angel loves rules, but unlike Angel he sees the gray area. Lilah made it clear to him as did the Watcher’s Council. Wes seems to like ambiguity. Wes also is a tad dangerous in his willingness to take ruthless measures. Angel’s subconscious has referenced this, even though his conscious mind refuses to deal with it. Eve’s line at the end of the episode points this out as well – Angel refuses to deal with the idea that his friends, himself – all could be the enemy. It was an idea that he refused to deal with in Season 4 with horrible results. The dream sequence with Wes is done in such a way that reality and dream blur around the edges. The audience is not, at first, sure where the reality ends and dream begins. It starts with Angel’s outburst to the AI team about not liking the gray areas and wanting to go back to a time where there was a little less ambiguity, things were more black and white. The two people arguing in the scene are Wes and Gunn – who are arguing over tactics and seem to be ignoring Angel, possibly even seeing Angel as irrelevant. When Angel takes off to sleep, they seem oddly relieved. Wes even gets an odd look on his face. Next scene – we see Wes follow Angel and tell him he’s no longer relevant and that it makes it easier for Wes to stake him. Odd. Considering it is Wes who goes out of his way in S4 to save Angel, not once but twice – first in Deep Down and second in Salvage- Release. Yet, of the group, Angel foresees Wes as being the one most likely to stake him.
3. Fred – Fred has become more and more the heart of the group, the compassionate one. And she’s also questioned Angel’s lack of compassion on more than one occasion. She seems unemotional – the stereotype of the scientist – yet from previous episodes it’s clear Fred is anything but. Her dissection of Angel – refers to comments she’s made to Angel in the past, which he’s referenced – the idea of having no heart – my heart is the size of a dried walnut, which is why the heart eating demon didn’t take it. The water-logged license plate and pearls – references to Deep Down. The Bear – the odd dream image – showing the rules no longer stand. The soul swimming with the fish in the goldfish bowl – or the idea of a waterlogged soul that no longer has a purpose. Once these items are removed, Angel appears to be hollow and T.S. Eliot’s classic poem runs through my head: we are the stuffed men, we are the hollow men…this is how the world ends not with a bang but a whimper… Angel fears he is nothing, an empty shell, without a destiny.
4. Gunn – minor appearances in Angel’s dreams – indicating that Angel isn’t sure what to make of Gunn and like Awakenings may not even be noticing him. A mistake – as is shown in the scene with Lorne playing the piano. Wes and Fred both comment on Angel’s inability to perform for them like an organ grinder’s monkey. We paid in blood for this, Wes mutters. (A reference to Angel telling Wes to consult his local Judas for information on the warlock.) And when Angel looks at Gunn? He roars and hisses like the cat in the white room. In Angel’s mind – has Gunn merged with the Cat?
5. Lorne – the song and dance man, who seems to have no purpose here but to entertain.
As these dreams are happening – we get what is really going on outside Angel’s dream. Wes, Gunn and Fred have uncovered Spike’s vigilante actions and in an interesting twist on Lindsey and Lilah – attempt to pull Spike back into the corporate structure without telling their boss. Lilah tried to do the same thing with Angel in The Ring and Billy. Lindsey tries it in Blind Date, and City of. Wes and Gunn fail just as Lilah and Lindsey did. Spike even calls them on their actions, suggesting maybe their moral compasses have turned just a little bit to the left. Or is it the right? He tells them that you can’t change a place like W&H – it changes you. And just in case we’re wondering how right Spike can be on this point – up pops Eve with Fred – ordering Fred to get results on a rune that the senior partners are worried about. Instead of checking on Angel, Fred goes off to do the senior partners bidding. Same thing on Wes – instead of running the runes by Angel, he does it. These scenes bugged me for two reasons: 1) Why are the senior partners ordering the AI team around? Since when did they become the boss? 2) Why aren’t Fred, Gunn or Wes more concerned about Angel and why are they working to do things behind his back or around him as if he were more of an obstacle?
Perhaps Spike has a point – maybe W&H is corrupting Team Angel from within. More than they realize. Gunn seems to be disturbed by Spike’s points. Wes seems to rationalize them. Fred remains on the fence. Yet none of them think to discuss bringing Spike back in or what Spike is even doing with Angel. Any more than they think to discuss the runes with Angel.
As this bit is going on – we have Angel’s vision of waking up in time to witness Spike saving the world from the apocalypse and getting shanshued by a blue fairy. Angel meanwhile is relegated to mail room status, wandering the halls aimlessly like Numero Cinquo. And the reference is an interesting one – since Angel like Numero 5 doesn’t get it. Like Numero 5 – Angel’s identity is wrapped up in childhood fantasy – the luchadores who were comic book heroes who wrestled by day and saved the world at night. He didn’t, in his pov, have an identity outside of that. Angel has the same problem. They both say they save the world or help because it’s the right thing to do, but truth is, like most of us, they like the applause – they want to be remembered and worshipped as heroes. They like the superman costume. The danger in that is if you take all of your identity from a costume or a prop or the applause or even a role some external force has thrust upon you – then you give that force or external people/things power. They can take your identity away just as easily as they gave it. Numero 5’s identity was not in being a luchadore, it was being a good brother, a caring man, it was the person who lay beneath the mask he never removed. Just as Angel’s identity is not in being the chosen vampire with a soul – the true hero who will shanshue – that’s an identity that can be swiped, it’s one thrust on him, the fairy tale, his identity is what Angel makes it – the man who befriended Cordy, Wes, Gunn, Fred, and Lorne. The man who does care about younger brother Spike and couldn’t let Pavayne win. I think the writers are attempting to get across the view that we have control over our own identity and shouldn’t let it be whatever someone else makes it.
6. Eve and Lindsey, our puppeteers. Eve seems to be into putting the parasite on Angel’s chest, more so than Lindsey is. She tells him she’s just part of his dream…yet he is coherent enough to through it off of him as she leaves. But he doesn’t kill it and he’s far to weak to throw it off again when it sinks its teeth in him. Turning Angel into its puppet, paralyzed beneath it. And we get the final dream – Angel is put out to pasture in an armchair surrounded by Wes, Lorne, Gunn and Fred who inform him that he’s better off out here, where nothing can harm him. This reminds me of what he did to Connor in Home – put the boy out to pasture – where he would have a well-adjusted normal life. Or what was done to Cordelia who lies in her own vegetative coma in the W&H infirmary. Then, suddenly they all scream – echoing the scream of the parasite as Spike intrudes on the dream and rips the parasite away. Freeing Angel with oddly enough Angel’s own quote – “No need to Thank Me, I’m just helping the helpless…” Reminding Angel perhaps of what his role used to be and still is, should he decide to grab it. Eve and Lindsey seek to remove Angel’s identity, yet Spike seems to remind Angel what his identity is. Equally odd is that Lindsey tells Spike that Angel is in danger and lets Spike know it’s a vision that will interest him. Spike’s line before that says a lot about the differences between Spike and Angel –“Just because you got a vision, doesn’t mean I’m going to jump” – he’s not going to let Lindsey’s visions control him, yet at the same time, he can’t deal with the idea that someone could die if he does nothing. The fact that person is Angel in this instance, is telling. As Lorne and Wes state if Spike hadn’t swooped in – Angel would have been a goner.
The final line again – “Look inward – unless you’re afraid of what you might see?”
Has the Belly of the Beast changed the Angel Team more than they know? Have they become the flunkies now? Have they taken the places of Holland Manners, Gavin, Linwood, Lindsey, and Lilah in the heart of Wolfram and Hart? And has Lindsey, Eve and Spike taken the roles of Cordelia, Doyle and Angel in a twisted universe?
Not quite. No, I think the line may refer to two things – first the line uttered a year ago by Eve’s doppleganger the little girl in the White Room – the answer’s amongst you. Where we were mislead to believe it’s Angel. And to Angel’s own visions and fears. It’s disturbing that no one bothered to check on Angel during the episode. Except Eve. They didn’t even really try to see him. Odd. Before in Hyperion or the office – they were always barging in whether or not he wanted them too. They also barge in on Spike. It’s equally disturbing that they don’t discuss any of what they are doing with Angel. But then Angel isn’t the sharing type either – he didn’t share what happened to Connor, he mind-wiped them. We have no clue how much they remember and how much they don’t. Look inward, indeed. Not as easy as it looks, for any of us – or our dreams wouldn’t be so difficult to hold onto when we awake. They wouldn't feel like half-finished sentences missing verbs and nouns and adjectives. </lj-cut>
Miscellaneous theories online about things in 5.10
<lj-cut text="symbols in 5.10">
pearl necklace = the amulet that Angel gave to Buffy. Also referenced in the scene where Spike sips from the cup and Angel turns to dust screaming as Spike had turned to dust screaming while wearing the bauble. A bauble that Lindsey sent to Angel.
raisons = Angels lost hopes and dreams
gold-fish = Angel's soul which needed to be flushed out
(more than one source on this one - seen on ASSB and Sunnydale U - so it's probably accurate.)
the bear = the bear in Apocalypse Nowish - Connor's Bear that he wished he killed or got as a pet
license plate = the viper, what Angel sold his soul for?
Jaws reference, or reference to Angel under the sea
walnut = reference to tale of numero cinquo, when Gunn describes it like a dried up walnut
parasite = symbolic of Angel's jealousy of Spike which is eating him up inside or Angel's fears regarding the AI team, W&H, and his loss of identity? Or Eve, and shanshue destiny which has become a parasite?
Not sure how I feel about any of them. Just thought I'd share.
</lj-cut>
The following are my thoughts on this weeks' Angel episode. Which I'm only posting on live journal at the moment.
********************************
Dreams like half-finished sentences cloud my mind and spiritus with periods of weariness…
That’s the beginning of a mediocre poem I wrote ages ago, which I’ve forgotten except for the first line.
Dreams. Nightmares.
Heard last night on ABC NEWS that a new journal article in <b>Nature</b>, states that we learn while we’re dreaming. Scientific studies show that dreams and nightmares are the brain processing what to keep and delete from our memories. Learning literally continues as we sleep. The more you sleep – the more you learn. Complex problems you couldn’t solve the day before become clearer after a good night’s sleep – the brain apparently works on them, twisting this way and that, while the body rests.
<lj-cut text:"no spoilers in this section, just about dreams in films, books, etc">
Numerous filmmakers and authors have explored what it means to dream. Some even use the dreamscape as a means to explore character or to allow the character to enter another parallel world. In some cases the character has more power or control in the dreamscape, in others less.
Here’s a list of the one’s that I remember:
Books:
<u>Wizard of Oz</u> – where a little girl who feels powerless in her own world dreams that she’s been whisked off to a foreign place where she has the power of a witch. The movie version does a good job of showing the dreamscape as more real than the little girl’s reality – by having it in color while the reality is in black and white, in most people’s dreams, studies have found it to be the opposite.
<u>Alice in Wonderland</u> – a little girl dreams she’s fallen down a rabbit hole where nothing makes sense and she has little or no control over her surroundings, even her own size and shape. Upon waking, she wonders who had the dream, Dinah – her cat, or herself.
<u>Alice Through The Looking Glass</u> – similar to In Wonderland, a little girl dreams she’s fallen through a looking glass into a chaotic world of her nightmares. The world represents the riddle she is attempting to memorize, yet can’t quite get for a recital she has to give that day – through the course of the dream she learns the riddle and appreciates the need for memorizing it.
<u>Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep</u> - Philip K. Dick explores whether the ability to dream separates a man from a robot. Do our dreams make us human? Or can anything dream?
Films:
The surrealists: Bergman, Fellini, Bunneul, Kuroswa (whose names I can’t spell) – all experimented with dream images to tell a story.
1. Fellini –<u> 8 ½ </u>is a film that is made up of a series of surrealistic dream images describing the internal landscape of the main character’s issues, hopes, and fears.
2. Louis Bunneul – most of his films tend to deal with obscure images from the dream-scape, the <u>Discourse of the Bourgeousi</u> comes to mind. (I think I got that title wrong.)
3. Kuroswa – <u>Dreams</u> – the Japanese director explores the landscape of folklore and the mind through surreal images
Television has also explored dreaming in shows as diverse as Cheers, Mash, Six Feet Under & The Sopranos to sci-fi dramas like Star Trek Next Generation and Babylon 5. Whedon possibly has captured the idea of dreaming best with the episode Restless in BTVS and uses it a great deal as a technique to explore a character’s issues and emotional arc.
Dreams. I tend to see Dreams as being a combination of the fears and hopes nagging at us before we go to sleep at night. Those repressed or suppressed dilemmas that we’ve pushed towards the back of our minds. Also the brain’s way of processing the superfluous data it’s retained over the period we’ve been awake. Friends or colleagues who appear in our dreams represent something other than themselves – often a fear or hope we have, or our own impression of them – an impression we may not have admitted consciously and have either suppressed or pressed to the back of our brain. To cope with life, we often push the stuff that bugs us to the back of the brain, while we sleep the brain deals with it through dreams and nightmares.
Not sure how others dream, can only really speak for myself – but my dreams more often than not make little sense. The more I attempt to control or hold onto something in them, the quicker they shift. One night I dreamed that I was at a movie theater watching Gone with The Wind and a bunch of us got sucked into the movie, which changed and became a modern day cartoon, definitely not Gone With The Wind – the moment I acknowledged this in the dream – I woke up.
We all dream. Numerous books are written on dream analysis. Psychologists such as Jung and Freud developed careers largely based on the interpretation of dreams. The worst dreams are the ones that seem so real, that when you wake up you wonder which is dream and which is real. Am I dreaming now? Or was I dreaming then? TV shows such as Star Trek and Red Dwarf and The Prisoner, have at different points asked the question how much of our reality is real and how much of it is a dream? The movie The Matrix wondered if our reality is in fact a dream that a bunch of machines created to keep us occupied. The landscape between dream and waking life can blur, making it difficult to see the difference. Certain hallucinogenic drugs blur the line even further – creating what is called waking dreams. When one can no longer tell the difference between their dreams and their reality – the mind can become fractured and the person goes insane.
</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text="vague spoilers for 5.10, discusses the ATS episodes Somnabulist, Awakenings, Deep Down and Orpheus mainly">
In Angel 5.10 – <b>Soul Purpose</b> – which really needs to be watched after Harm’s Way or you miss out on the set up, Angel spends most of the episode caught in a series of fever dreams. It is by no means the first time the writers have made us privy to Angel’s dreams.
In <b> Somnabulist</b> - Angel dreams that he is going on nightly rampages, killing people he should be saving. The dreams are so vivid that he can’t decide whether or not they are real. Unfortunately, the people he dreams of killing are found dead the next morning. Uncertain if Angel is indeed the culprit, his friends chain him up and conduct an all night vigil. Turns out it’s not Angel, but Angel’s protégée, Penn, who is doing the killing. Angel’s dreams are a reflection of Penn’s psychosis. The reason Angel dreams about being Penn, is in an earlier life – Angel was Penn – taking out his anger towards his father and family on others. The episode explores Angel’s unresolved feelings towards these acts and his responsibility for projecting his own twisted desires on to Penn. Would Penn have become the monster he was without Angelus?
In Season 2 – the dividing line between dream and reality is blurred again, this time with Darla – who enters Angel’s dreams, as well as his actual room, each night. The dreams explore Angel’s repressed feelings for Darla. His guilt at killing her. His hopes regarding her. Through the dreams, we discover that Angel/Angelus may have cared for Darla a lot more than he’s willing to admit.
In Season 4 – we get three dream episodes: The first is a series of nightmares – <b>Deep Down</b> – where Angel lies at the bottom of the ocean and has a series of dreams about his created family and how he fears he’s breaking or will break that family apart. Midway through the season – we get the second dream episode – <b>Awakenings</b> – where Angel has his perfect dream – so perfect, he loses his soul. The dream itself is heavily ironic. It’s the classic hero story – complete with storybook ending. In it, Cordy, Wes, and Connor join with Angel to kill the Beast and bring back the sun. Unfortunately – Cordy, Wes, and Connor in reality aren’t willing to play the parts he’s assigned them. Cordy isn’t going to have the wonderful vision, lead Angel to the problem, and fall into his arms like the damsel in distress. Wes isn’t going to play the mystic, or apologize and tell Angel he was wrong. Connor isn’t going to be the good son – he’s far to much like his father in spirit for that to happen at this point. For the same reasons Angel couldn’t forgive his Dad or see his Dad’s pov, Connor can’t see Angel’s. The dream is completely on Angel’s terms, which is why it’s “Angel’s” perfect dream. Instead of Angel and his family bringing back the sun and killing the Beast, it’s Angel’s evil alter-ego, Angelus who does it. The part of Angel that he holds responsible for pushing Cordy and Connor away. The third dream episode is <b>Orpheus</b>, a drug induced nightmare journey shared by Faith and Angelus in Angel’s subconscious. We are lead to believe the principal dreamer here is Angelus, it’s not, it’s Faith – who like the audience seems but a passenger on a ride. She is forced through the shared dream to see Angel’s duality and realize that the two personas aren’t as separate as both she and Angel think. Something Angelus is brutally aware of, but Angel can’t see.
Finally, we come to S5, which oddly enough does it’s dream episode in the same place in the season that Awakenings fell the year before. Except instead of a lovely candy-coated dream sequence, we get a series of fevered nightmares. Nightmares that may make more sense if you understood <b>Harm’s Way</b>.
</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text="Spoilers for Ats 5.9">
<b>Harm’s Way</b> lets us know that Angel has become or feels little more than a figurehead now. Completely out of his depth, bluffing it. And hating the ambiguity being a lover of structure and rules. His team runs W&H not Angel. The Senior Partners run Angel. Not the other way around. Angel, for all his claims of being in charge and changing things - hasn’t been able to change much at all, and is feeling more and more irrelevant.
1. The employee-orientation video, which slyly insists things have changed. Yet have they? Employees still get killed at the whim of the CEO. The underlings are still jockeying for power – Lilah and Lindsey and Gavin have just been replaced by Wes, Gunn and Fred is all. For a more detailed analysis of this see superplin's analysis <ljuser=“superplin”> or the link I posted in a previous journal entry.
2. Harm’s lunch time conversations slyly juxtaposed with Angel’s conference with the demon clans. Harm keeps trying to get people to pay attention to her, but they could care less about Harmony or Angel – they are more interested in Wes, Gunn, Lorne, and Fred. Angel may be the big boss but he’s of no consequence. Some fans complained online that this wasn’t realistic, because wouldn’t the boss’ secretary be treated with reverence? That’s the point. The employees don’t see Harm as important because they don’t see Angel as important. It’s Gunn and Wes who scare them.
3. The demon clan negotiation scenes – Gunn runs the show, Angel just makes stupid remarks and is called manwhore. Gunn does the translations. Angel is completely out of his depth and would probably be more helpful if he went on a lunch run – as Wes orders Harm to do in an earlier scene.
4. The signing of the documents in the video – Angel does what Gunn tells him.
Harm’s Way sets the stage, in Soul Purpose – we see the play acted out. </lj-cut>
<lj-cut text="major spoilers and in depth analysis for Ats 5.10">
Two points of view in Soul Purpose – Angel’s and the indivisible point of view of everyone else – specifically: Lindsey, Gunn, Wes, Fred, and Spike. To get this episode, you have to be able to track whose point of view you are in. When we are in Angel’s – we’re in the dream. When we’re in any of the others – we’re not. The two points of view comment on each other. So to understand what’s going on in Angel’s dream – I think you have to look back on what’s happening with the other characters. Also the title – which is a nifty play on words – sole/soul purpose – Angel’s need to have a sole or only purpose with rules and structure and the purpose of the soul. Soul Purpose comments on the structuralist’s dilemma in a chaotic/unstructured universe – a universe that may not have a sole purpose.
Step by step:
1. Spike – interesting character Spike. Angel doesn’t understand Spike at all and is basically guilty of what Spike accused him of doing in Destiny – projecting his fears onto Spike. (Wondering if Angel has been reading his fan mail?)
The dream sequences open with a warped vision of Destiny, or rather what Angel feared would happen when Spike lifted that cup. This vision is juxtaposed with Spike’s meeting with Lindsey, where Spike is shown as being highly skeptical of Lindsey. And literally throws Lindsey against a wall regarding the whole cup of perpetual torment scam. Lindsey has to work a bit to get Spike’s interest – playing the sympathy card. What’s interesting about the Spike/Lindsey scenes is how they slyly make fun of Angel/Doyle relationship and most of Season 1 ATS. Pointing out to the audience that Angel may have been manipulated by external forces at the very beginning. Like Doyle does with Angel, Lindsey convinces Spike by stating – how would you feel if you knew someone was going to die and you weren’t there to stop it.
Spike seems lost prior to this statement. Like Angel was and currently is. Vulnerable and uncertain what to do next. Both have left the woman they adored. Both are approached by person claiming to have visions named Doyle. Angel unlike Spike trusts Doyle almost at the start. Spike is a bit more skeptical. But Spike’s always been skeptical of things like fate, destiny, prophecies – he’s one of those folk who believes in making your own fate. That’s Angel’s stick – fate. Angel is the fatalist of the two. But – the common demnominator between the two is the genuine desire to help. They both want to help others and no, not just to impress people. They just don’t always know how to go about it. Something I can identify with. We all want to help others, to be good people, but we’re a bit lost sometimes on how to accomplish it. Is there a specific road or path to take? Are we predestined for someone or something? Can an oracle or tarot card reading or priest tell us? Wouldn’t it be great if they could? Thousands, actually millions, of dollars are spent annually on fortune tellers, mystics, soothsayers – to tell people what the future holds – what’s their destiny? It would be great to have a blue fairy or God or a Doyle or a Whistler show up on our doorstep one day and tell us what to do. Tell us we are special and have been chosen for a specific mission. With a wave of a wand – we become, presto, the hero. No worries about those nasty gray areas, it’s all about good vs. evil – we’re superman! And if we take a moment to look back at Angel’s story – this is exactly what has happened to Angel. Whistler picked him up out of the gutter in Becoming and directed him towards Buffy, telling Angel he’s the chosen one, the special vampire. Later Whistler reappears and tells Buffy, that Angel was the one who was supposed to save the world from Acathla, Buffy screwed things up. Then we get the magic snow which appears on a hot day and saves Angel from committing suicide at the taunting of the First Evil. Angel’s living most people’s dream life – the boy of destiny. Doyle shows up when he’s down and out in LA and tells him who to save – via visions. When Doyle dies, Cordelia inherits the visions. But…and here’s the thing, how do we know the visions were legitimate? Why does Angel believe in the PTB? Is Angel just a puppet? W&H seems to wonder about this and being good at manipulating things they figure out a way to use the visions to their advantage along with the prophecies. So now it’s questionable whose controlling Angel’s actions: the PTB, the Senior Partners, The W&H lackeys, or Angel himself. You see – the problem with depending on visions or some prophecy to tell you your role in life or path is after a while you become it’s puppet and when that prophecy or vision or person is yanked away or disappears? What do you do then? Cease to be relevant? Cease to exist?
Using Lindsey in this way is a sly way of commenting on how Angel is his own worst enemy. While Lindsey is manipulating things from outside W&H, Angel is attempting to control them from within W&H. The two have changed places more or less. Lindsey has always been to some degree or another – Angel’s shadow. The human who wants approval, who wants to rise above his means, who is ruthless yet at the same time…uncertain. Who wants someone to guide him along a clear path. Lindsey’s battles with Holland Manners in S1 echoed Angel’s with the Master and his own father. Both Lindsey and Angel desire to save Darla – Lindsey by making her a vampire, Angel by keeping her human. So it’s fitting to have Lindsey be the one pulling Spike’s strings – an odd commentary on how it is really Angel’s own fears and desires that are playing with Spike, as we see in Angel’s nightmares. Lindsey sent Spike to Angel. Lindsey made Spike corporeal so he’d fight with Angel. Lindsey shows up to Spike as Angel’s old friend and helpmate to convince a lost Spike to take over Angel’s old identity. The difficulty with Lindsey’s plan is Spike isn’t Angel, Spike has no interest in being Angel – if he did he’d have taken Hainsely up on his offer in Just Rewards. It may appear from Angel’s pov that Spike wants this – hence Lindsey’s manipulations, but it’s not what Spike wants. We have a tendency sometimes to project our own desires on to our siblings, believing they are competing for the same things, when in reality? They aren’t. Spike does want to be a hero, he does want to help. But whether he wants the shanshue thing or even believes in it? That’s uncertain.
The other dream image regarding Spike is an odd bit with Buffy – which says a lot about Angel. So many ways to analyze this scene and it is a hard scene to analyze without biases getting in the way. First, why the Prom? Of all the episodes to choose for a Buffy voice-over, why did they choose that one? Why not I Will Remember You? Or Chosen? Or End of Days? Or Forever? Is it because The Prom was the last time Angel felt he had Buffy, was it the moment that he and Buffy broke up which sticks in his memory? And what bugs him about this moment – Buffy mentioning the Prom and how she kills her goldfish – the goldfish Fred pulled out in a prior scene which symbolizes his soul? Or just happens to be swimming next to it? Juxtapose this with the differences between Spike and Angel – how they deal with their victims and with Buffy – Angel acts more paternal – I don’t want to take you to Prom, I think you’re great at caring for children, oh you poor victim – here I’ll help you home. Spike acts more like a peer or equal – he’s having sex with Buffy, he has no problem taking her to Prom or not, he asks the victims to hang out. Yet, how much of the dream sequence is truly Spike and not Angel’s own representation of Spike? Angel’s own fear that Spike is taking his place with Buffy – and if you think about it, if Angel hadn’t broken up with her in The Prom, maybe Spike never would have gotten together with Buffy to begin with. Actually if Angel hadn’t turned back time in I Will Remember You – Spike wouldn’t have.
2. Wes – Angel has such odd feelings about Wesley. Wes like Angel loves rules, but unlike Angel he sees the gray area. Lilah made it clear to him as did the Watcher’s Council. Wes seems to like ambiguity. Wes also is a tad dangerous in his willingness to take ruthless measures. Angel’s subconscious has referenced this, even though his conscious mind refuses to deal with it. Eve’s line at the end of the episode points this out as well – Angel refuses to deal with the idea that his friends, himself – all could be the enemy. It was an idea that he refused to deal with in Season 4 with horrible results. The dream sequence with Wes is done in such a way that reality and dream blur around the edges. The audience is not, at first, sure where the reality ends and dream begins. It starts with Angel’s outburst to the AI team about not liking the gray areas and wanting to go back to a time where there was a little less ambiguity, things were more black and white. The two people arguing in the scene are Wes and Gunn – who are arguing over tactics and seem to be ignoring Angel, possibly even seeing Angel as irrelevant. When Angel takes off to sleep, they seem oddly relieved. Wes even gets an odd look on his face. Next scene – we see Wes follow Angel and tell him he’s no longer relevant and that it makes it easier for Wes to stake him. Odd. Considering it is Wes who goes out of his way in S4 to save Angel, not once but twice – first in Deep Down and second in Salvage- Release. Yet, of the group, Angel foresees Wes as being the one most likely to stake him.
3. Fred – Fred has become more and more the heart of the group, the compassionate one. And she’s also questioned Angel’s lack of compassion on more than one occasion. She seems unemotional – the stereotype of the scientist – yet from previous episodes it’s clear Fred is anything but. Her dissection of Angel – refers to comments she’s made to Angel in the past, which he’s referenced – the idea of having no heart – my heart is the size of a dried walnut, which is why the heart eating demon didn’t take it. The water-logged license plate and pearls – references to Deep Down. The Bear – the odd dream image – showing the rules no longer stand. The soul swimming with the fish in the goldfish bowl – or the idea of a waterlogged soul that no longer has a purpose. Once these items are removed, Angel appears to be hollow and T.S. Eliot’s classic poem runs through my head: we are the stuffed men, we are the hollow men…this is how the world ends not with a bang but a whimper… Angel fears he is nothing, an empty shell, without a destiny.
4. Gunn – minor appearances in Angel’s dreams – indicating that Angel isn’t sure what to make of Gunn and like Awakenings may not even be noticing him. A mistake – as is shown in the scene with Lorne playing the piano. Wes and Fred both comment on Angel’s inability to perform for them like an organ grinder’s monkey. We paid in blood for this, Wes mutters. (A reference to Angel telling Wes to consult his local Judas for information on the warlock.) And when Angel looks at Gunn? He roars and hisses like the cat in the white room. In Angel’s mind – has Gunn merged with the Cat?
5. Lorne – the song and dance man, who seems to have no purpose here but to entertain.
As these dreams are happening – we get what is really going on outside Angel’s dream. Wes, Gunn and Fred have uncovered Spike’s vigilante actions and in an interesting twist on Lindsey and Lilah – attempt to pull Spike back into the corporate structure without telling their boss. Lilah tried to do the same thing with Angel in The Ring and Billy. Lindsey tries it in Blind Date, and City of. Wes and Gunn fail just as Lilah and Lindsey did. Spike even calls them on their actions, suggesting maybe their moral compasses have turned just a little bit to the left. Or is it the right? He tells them that you can’t change a place like W&H – it changes you. And just in case we’re wondering how right Spike can be on this point – up pops Eve with Fred – ordering Fred to get results on a rune that the senior partners are worried about. Instead of checking on Angel, Fred goes off to do the senior partners bidding. Same thing on Wes – instead of running the runes by Angel, he does it. These scenes bugged me for two reasons: 1) Why are the senior partners ordering the AI team around? Since when did they become the boss? 2) Why aren’t Fred, Gunn or Wes more concerned about Angel and why are they working to do things behind his back or around him as if he were more of an obstacle?
Perhaps Spike has a point – maybe W&H is corrupting Team Angel from within. More than they realize. Gunn seems to be disturbed by Spike’s points. Wes seems to rationalize them. Fred remains on the fence. Yet none of them think to discuss bringing Spike back in or what Spike is even doing with Angel. Any more than they think to discuss the runes with Angel.
As this bit is going on – we have Angel’s vision of waking up in time to witness Spike saving the world from the apocalypse and getting shanshued by a blue fairy. Angel meanwhile is relegated to mail room status, wandering the halls aimlessly like Numero Cinquo. And the reference is an interesting one – since Angel like Numero 5 doesn’t get it. Like Numero 5 – Angel’s identity is wrapped up in childhood fantasy – the luchadores who were comic book heroes who wrestled by day and saved the world at night. He didn’t, in his pov, have an identity outside of that. Angel has the same problem. They both say they save the world or help because it’s the right thing to do, but truth is, like most of us, they like the applause – they want to be remembered and worshipped as heroes. They like the superman costume. The danger in that is if you take all of your identity from a costume or a prop or the applause or even a role some external force has thrust upon you – then you give that force or external people/things power. They can take your identity away just as easily as they gave it. Numero 5’s identity was not in being a luchadore, it was being a good brother, a caring man, it was the person who lay beneath the mask he never removed. Just as Angel’s identity is not in being the chosen vampire with a soul – the true hero who will shanshue – that’s an identity that can be swiped, it’s one thrust on him, the fairy tale, his identity is what Angel makes it – the man who befriended Cordy, Wes, Gunn, Fred, and Lorne. The man who does care about younger brother Spike and couldn’t let Pavayne win. I think the writers are attempting to get across the view that we have control over our own identity and shouldn’t let it be whatever someone else makes it.
6. Eve and Lindsey, our puppeteers. Eve seems to be into putting the parasite on Angel’s chest, more so than Lindsey is. She tells him she’s just part of his dream…yet he is coherent enough to through it off of him as she leaves. But he doesn’t kill it and he’s far to weak to throw it off again when it sinks its teeth in him. Turning Angel into its puppet, paralyzed beneath it. And we get the final dream – Angel is put out to pasture in an armchair surrounded by Wes, Lorne, Gunn and Fred who inform him that he’s better off out here, where nothing can harm him. This reminds me of what he did to Connor in Home – put the boy out to pasture – where he would have a well-adjusted normal life. Or what was done to Cordelia who lies in her own vegetative coma in the W&H infirmary. Then, suddenly they all scream – echoing the scream of the parasite as Spike intrudes on the dream and rips the parasite away. Freeing Angel with oddly enough Angel’s own quote – “No need to Thank Me, I’m just helping the helpless…” Reminding Angel perhaps of what his role used to be and still is, should he decide to grab it. Eve and Lindsey seek to remove Angel’s identity, yet Spike seems to remind Angel what his identity is. Equally odd is that Lindsey tells Spike that Angel is in danger and lets Spike know it’s a vision that will interest him. Spike’s line before that says a lot about the differences between Spike and Angel –“Just because you got a vision, doesn’t mean I’m going to jump” – he’s not going to let Lindsey’s visions control him, yet at the same time, he can’t deal with the idea that someone could die if he does nothing. The fact that person is Angel in this instance, is telling. As Lorne and Wes state if Spike hadn’t swooped in – Angel would have been a goner.
The final line again – “Look inward – unless you’re afraid of what you might see?”
Has the Belly of the Beast changed the Angel Team more than they know? Have they become the flunkies now? Have they taken the places of Holland Manners, Gavin, Linwood, Lindsey, and Lilah in the heart of Wolfram and Hart? And has Lindsey, Eve and Spike taken the roles of Cordelia, Doyle and Angel in a twisted universe?
Not quite. No, I think the line may refer to two things – first the line uttered a year ago by Eve’s doppleganger the little girl in the White Room – the answer’s amongst you. Where we were mislead to believe it’s Angel. And to Angel’s own visions and fears. It’s disturbing that no one bothered to check on Angel during the episode. Except Eve. They didn’t even really try to see him. Odd. Before in Hyperion or the office – they were always barging in whether or not he wanted them too. They also barge in on Spike. It’s equally disturbing that they don’t discuss any of what they are doing with Angel. But then Angel isn’t the sharing type either – he didn’t share what happened to Connor, he mind-wiped them. We have no clue how much they remember and how much they don’t. Look inward, indeed. Not as easy as it looks, for any of us – or our dreams wouldn’t be so difficult to hold onto when we awake. They wouldn't feel like half-finished sentences missing verbs and nouns and adjectives. </lj-cut>
Miscellaneous theories online about things in 5.10
<lj-cut text="symbols in 5.10">
pearl necklace = the amulet that Angel gave to Buffy. Also referenced in the scene where Spike sips from the cup and Angel turns to dust screaming as Spike had turned to dust screaming while wearing the bauble. A bauble that Lindsey sent to Angel.
raisons = Angels lost hopes and dreams
gold-fish = Angel's soul which needed to be flushed out
(more than one source on this one - seen on ASSB and Sunnydale U - so it's probably accurate.)
the bear = the bear in Apocalypse Nowish - Connor's Bear that he wished he killed or got as a pet
license plate = the viper, what Angel sold his soul for?
Jaws reference, or reference to Angel under the sea
walnut = reference to tale of numero cinquo, when Gunn describes it like a dried up walnut
parasite = symbolic of Angel's jealousy of Spike which is eating him up inside or Angel's fears regarding the AI team, W&H, and his loss of identity? Or Eve, and shanshue destiny which has become a parasite?
Not sure how I feel about any of them. Just thought I'd share.
</lj-cut>
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Angel/Spike
Date: 2004-01-27 12:29 pm (UTC)W&H has always tried to disconnect Angel from his friends. Lindsey's trying to take away the hope of shanshu, but that might be what Angel needs. When Angel reject Jasmine and therefore the PTB, W&H rushed in to fill the vacuum. Spike however is living proof that one can be a vampire and still connect to humanity. And Angel is proof that a vampire can be a good man. They are two sides to the same coin, who complete and compliment each other. Spike can teach Angel that being a hero doesn't fill the emptiness inside if you're still always alone (as Angel is now, mostly), and Angel can teach Spike to value what he is. Perhaps Lindsey is doing that with Spike, who can in turn help Angel. Which would be wonderfully ironic.