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shadowkatAh time, weird thing time. Tonight when I phoned Kid Bro to wish him a happy birthday, we talked briefly about age. I asked if he had turned 34 now? He said he thought so. But wasn't sure. Time seemed to no longer have much meaning and the years just flow together. I said, that'll change now that you have a kid. But it was an oddly coincidental response, since earlier that day, I had the following conversation with a friend I met online. We'd meet in person once before this. We were discussing Angel's cancellation and Dark Shadows and she said the following:
My friend: "You may have been too young to remember it but there was a second Dark Shadows with Ben Cross-"
Me:"Too young?" (This caught me by surprise since I knew I was two years older than she is, at least) "How young do you think I am?"
My friend taken aback: "27"
Me: "Uh no, I'm 37."
My friend: "You are KIDDING!"
I took it as a compliment of course. But it hit me as odd and made me realize how weird age and time are. Also made me wonder how much her perception of me changed within those five brief minutes. Do we change our perceptions of people when we learn what age they are?
We seem to track our lives by days, weeks, months, years and if you live in the Western Hemisphere and happen to be Christian - your yearly cycle starts on Jan 1, New Year's Eve, and it is now 2004. And the Calendar begins with Christ's Death (AD, or BC (before his death).) Yet, in China, time may be judged differently. And the Jewish Calendar has another New Year's date. But everyone more or less follows the Christian linear calendar to keep confusion to a minimum.
We think linearly - so for us time flows in a straight line or our perception of it does. Yet, what if it didn't? How chaotic and confusing that would be. Jarring in fact.
And if you think about it - how we perceive time may have a lot to do with how we perceive destiny. If we believe it runs in a straight line, we may believe it is cause and effect, that each event equals another one, an inevitable string.
Memory is also affected by time. Our memories are after all sequential. Not scattered. And over time the earlier ones fade and the later ones grow more pronounced. Is it choice on our parts? Do we choose to forget the moment we are born? Or is it inevitable? And Memory does make us who we are in a way. Each memory building on the next one, and as memories melt away or fade or become repressed, we change as well. Take one memory away and it's like pulling a thread on a piece of frabric or tapestry, unraveling the whole thing. I remember watching Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, which like most movies about memory makes the same mistake - the view that you can remove one, without removing or changing all the others, so that person themselves change completely. Think about it. If I were to say remove any concept you had of riding a bike or what a bycycle was - how would that affect all those other memories? Yet time does remove memories, doesn't it? And how we perceive time is partly due to our memories, how we perceive reality is based on the trajectory of memory. Even Eternal Sunshine makes this point. The protagonist states at the start of the film how he didn't seem to do much the last two years, they feel blank to him, empty of movement. (The movie itself plays with time btw, it starts in the present, then we flip to the past, then flip even further to the distant past, then back to the present again. The flips are jarring.)In the film, a vital memory is removed from the protagonist at his bequest. It shows how memory does inform who we are and without it - we cannot learn. We cannot adapt. We are doomed to repeat the same loop. (The movie ends differently than that, but to say more would spoil people who haven't seen it and it's unnecessary to this analysis.)
Angel 5.19 deals with the twin concepts of time and memory, it also deals with our perception and ways of dealing with them both.
In 5.19, TimeBomb, we see a hint of the after-effects of Wesely shattering the Orlon Window, which contained all their memories previous to the mindwipe, on Illyria and Wesely. Two people who are operating sort of outside time and space already due to Fred's tragic death and Illyria's uncertainity of where she fits in in this Brave New World.
Wes and Illyria now have two sets of memories. Illyria actually has three sets - her own, Fred's from mindwipe, Fred's from before the mindwipe. Those new memories are tearing at them both in different ways. Illyria is finding herself overwhelmed a bit with memories that aren't her own and they feel out of synch, she can't figure out which are which. Wes is struggling with the knowledge of what he did in the past and how it may have lead to the present and it may be driving him insane.
The other thing going on in TimeBomb is time goes wacky for Illyria. She no longer sees it in a straight line. It's out of sync and it jars her. So much so, that we start hearing words Fred would say - scientific terms, scientific analysis, which Illyria herself acknowledges in a soft aside as "not being her words". For Illyria, who has elements of chaos to her - time itself has become a chaotic entity threatening to destroy her. It does not help that her memories of it seem out of wack. She jumps back and forth and around not sure of where she lands within the wave, disoriented - until somewhere along the way she grabs an unwilling hitch-hiker. Angel. And this is where things begin to get *really* interesting.
Angel the king of the linear thought. Angel who follows Prophecies and feels trapped by them. Who believes in predestination. Who does not see time as something he can alter. Now, he's caught in Illyria's time loop and he sees her future - a future which is completely bleak - where everyone dies including him and without much purpose or any glorious send-off. No shanshue here. And he realizes something - you can change it. This is only one possible future. It does not have to happen. Illyria says it does. Angel believes he can change it or at first Illyria must be the one who can change it, he thinks he's powerless...
Then Illyria scolds him - tells him that he's caught in WR&H
web. She describes WR&H as creating a web of sorts. So much power harnassed within it. Yet he does nothing with it. He lets it keep him trapped, like a fly in the web. She suggests the ruthless approach. No morality. No sensitivity. Make ambition your guide.
(I wish I had the exact words - it was a fascinating speech and a speech, that in an odd way not only echos Fred's speech to Angel in Hellbound but is the flip side of it or possibly its twin (?) . In Hellbound Fred tells Angel that what we do is save people. Angel says not everyone can be saved and funds shouldn't be used to save Spike. Fred insists that what they do is save people, that's why they are here. Illyria tells Angel that he has all this power in the web, he can use it, but he quibbles at its *moral* price, just as Fred looked at Angel and Eve quibbling with her over the *financial* price of saving Spike. The difference is - here Illyria is telling Angel to be ruthless, in Hellbound Fred is telling Angel to be merciful. Also in Hellbound, Fred appears to be nuts writing on walls, trying to save Spike - while in Timebomb, Wes appears to be nuts, busy looking through books trying to save Illyria. (The irony is, Fred is sane in Hellbound, it's a mislead, and Wes may actually be going insane - split in two in fact, becoming because of the restored memories, both men in the joke that he described in the dream, in Underneath) Fred uses a nuclear blast of power from WR&H to try and make Spike corporeal in Hellbound, while Illyria tells Angel WR&H have that power (she does) and Wes uses a weapon made at WR&H to pull the power, a nuclear type power, out of Illyria before she explodes. In both episodes - the idea of a web is expressed. Pavayne's web of magic, WR&H using Pavayne's blood to create their firm, Fred's use of a web of magic to catch the incorporal Spike ( a net) which both Pavayne and Spike feel. And in both episodes it's the threat to the gang that is caught and whose power is neutralized.)
Time too is a web. And unlike a tapestry, webs aren't destroyed by pulling one strand, they are alterred. Spiders are very clever creatures, they make their webs so when a strand is pulled it changes the web - like a maze, potentially trapping the fly or setting it free.
Angel goes back in time to the point in which they enter the training room to stop Illyria (he believes to kill her) and Angel pulls a strand of the web. He alters it, by doing the unexpected, saving Spike. And Wes does the unexpected, instead of killing Illyria, he saves her, removing the power she wishes to hold on to. And Angel learns something - you are only a puppet if you choose to be.
But there are other things going on here - we have the woman who trades her child for her husband's memories, an echo perhaps of Angel who trades his friend's memories for his child's welfare. Memories again. Gunn voices to Angel how the worst thing about the penalty cell was the fake life he lead, not the heart being torn from his chest. And we wonder, as I'm sure Angel must, what Gunn would do if he knew his memories had been alterred long before that? He clearly did not get the other memories back. The woman and the child also harkens back to other episodes in the series - Judgement Day S2 ATS (as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
superplin points out in her livejournal). In Judgement Day, Angel is defending a woman from having her child taken from her - it's when he first becomes a champion. It also harkens back to other children - Darla and Connor. Cordelia and Jasmine. And of course Corbin Fries and his son. Now Angel is serving the demons who sacrifice the children, not the mothers? What bizzarro world is this? Or is Angel playing another type of game altogether?
There's also the trust issues. He doesn't trust Gunn. He doesn't trust Wes. He doesn't trust Lorne. And he doesn't quite know what to make of Illyria. Yet, he may trust Spike. It's the flip side of the start of the season - where everyone trusted Angel and he trusted his friends (or appeared to) and no one trusted Spike. Especially *not* Angel. Memory may play a role here as well. Corrupted memory. Because that's what Illyria and Wes have - corrupted memories like the corrupted memory on a computer disc or hard-drive where data is scattered. Gunn's memories are also corrupted by the implants, by the penalty box, and by the mindwipe. As are Lorne's by the mindwipe. So what happens when memory is corrupted - does it explode innward or outward like time? Does reality shift as memories shift?
Another thing about memory - without memory, we can't change or adapt or learn. It's through our memories of past mistakes, we learn not to repeat them. This is shown in the sparing sequence with Spike and Illyria - Illyria wonders about Spike's changes in fighting style, how he's improved with her. He says people adapt with experience. She says compromise. He says learn. Memory - provides us with the means to learn and adapt and evolve. Without it, we don't learn. We are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Make the same moves.
Repeat the same loop. Remembering...makes us try something new.
Finally we have the illusions to kings and kingdoms. Making me think of Shakespearean plays. Illyria is the kingdom of twins in Twelth Night where Sebastian and Viola are mistaken for each other causing all sorts of bizarre misunderstandings. Macbeth is the king who follows the three fates, then says the hell with fate and goes forth ruthlessly to take what is his. Lear is the king who destroys his family to preserve power, yet loses both. And Henry V is the king who comes to power while friends with a fool.
I liked Timebomb. I actually enjoyed it far more than Origin.
In fact Timebomb made me appreciate Origin more and made me far more sympathetic to Angel. But I also like brain teasers.
The more bizarre the episode, the more I like it. I'm weird that way.
My friend: "You may have been too young to remember it but there was a second Dark Shadows with Ben Cross-"
Me:"Too young?" (This caught me by surprise since I knew I was two years older than she is, at least) "How young do you think I am?"
My friend taken aback: "27"
Me: "Uh no, I'm 37."
My friend: "You are KIDDING!"
I took it as a compliment of course. But it hit me as odd and made me realize how weird age and time are. Also made me wonder how much her perception of me changed within those five brief minutes. Do we change our perceptions of people when we learn what age they are?
We seem to track our lives by days, weeks, months, years and if you live in the Western Hemisphere and happen to be Christian - your yearly cycle starts on Jan 1, New Year's Eve, and it is now 2004. And the Calendar begins with Christ's Death (AD, or BC (before his death).) Yet, in China, time may be judged differently. And the Jewish Calendar has another New Year's date. But everyone more or less follows the Christian linear calendar to keep confusion to a minimum.
We think linearly - so for us time flows in a straight line or our perception of it does. Yet, what if it didn't? How chaotic and confusing that would be. Jarring in fact.
And if you think about it - how we perceive time may have a lot to do with how we perceive destiny. If we believe it runs in a straight line, we may believe it is cause and effect, that each event equals another one, an inevitable string.
Memory is also affected by time. Our memories are after all sequential. Not scattered. And over time the earlier ones fade and the later ones grow more pronounced. Is it choice on our parts? Do we choose to forget the moment we are born? Or is it inevitable? And Memory does make us who we are in a way. Each memory building on the next one, and as memories melt away or fade or become repressed, we change as well. Take one memory away and it's like pulling a thread on a piece of frabric or tapestry, unraveling the whole thing. I remember watching Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, which like most movies about memory makes the same mistake - the view that you can remove one, without removing or changing all the others, so that person themselves change completely. Think about it. If I were to say remove any concept you had of riding a bike or what a bycycle was - how would that affect all those other memories? Yet time does remove memories, doesn't it? And how we perceive time is partly due to our memories, how we perceive reality is based on the trajectory of memory. Even Eternal Sunshine makes this point. The protagonist states at the start of the film how he didn't seem to do much the last two years, they feel blank to him, empty of movement. (The movie itself plays with time btw, it starts in the present, then we flip to the past, then flip even further to the distant past, then back to the present again. The flips are jarring.)In the film, a vital memory is removed from the protagonist at his bequest. It shows how memory does inform who we are and without it - we cannot learn. We cannot adapt. We are doomed to repeat the same loop. (The movie ends differently than that, but to say more would spoil people who haven't seen it and it's unnecessary to this analysis.)
Angel 5.19 deals with the twin concepts of time and memory, it also deals with our perception and ways of dealing with them both.
In 5.19, TimeBomb, we see a hint of the after-effects of Wesely shattering the Orlon Window, which contained all their memories previous to the mindwipe, on Illyria and Wesely. Two people who are operating sort of outside time and space already due to Fred's tragic death and Illyria's uncertainity of where she fits in in this Brave New World.
Wes and Illyria now have two sets of memories. Illyria actually has three sets - her own, Fred's from mindwipe, Fred's from before the mindwipe. Those new memories are tearing at them both in different ways. Illyria is finding herself overwhelmed a bit with memories that aren't her own and they feel out of synch, she can't figure out which are which. Wes is struggling with the knowledge of what he did in the past and how it may have lead to the present and it may be driving him insane.
The other thing going on in TimeBomb is time goes wacky for Illyria. She no longer sees it in a straight line. It's out of sync and it jars her. So much so, that we start hearing words Fred would say - scientific terms, scientific analysis, which Illyria herself acknowledges in a soft aside as "not being her words". For Illyria, who has elements of chaos to her - time itself has become a chaotic entity threatening to destroy her. It does not help that her memories of it seem out of wack. She jumps back and forth and around not sure of where she lands within the wave, disoriented - until somewhere along the way she grabs an unwilling hitch-hiker. Angel. And this is where things begin to get *really* interesting.
Angel the king of the linear thought. Angel who follows Prophecies and feels trapped by them. Who believes in predestination. Who does not see time as something he can alter. Now, he's caught in Illyria's time loop and he sees her future - a future which is completely bleak - where everyone dies including him and without much purpose or any glorious send-off. No shanshue here. And he realizes something - you can change it. This is only one possible future. It does not have to happen. Illyria says it does. Angel believes he can change it or at first Illyria must be the one who can change it, he thinks he's powerless...
Then Illyria scolds him - tells him that he's caught in WR&H
web. She describes WR&H as creating a web of sorts. So much power harnassed within it. Yet he does nothing with it. He lets it keep him trapped, like a fly in the web. She suggests the ruthless approach. No morality. No sensitivity. Make ambition your guide.
(I wish I had the exact words - it was a fascinating speech and a speech, that in an odd way not only echos Fred's speech to Angel in Hellbound but is the flip side of it or possibly its twin (?) . In Hellbound Fred tells Angel that what we do is save people. Angel says not everyone can be saved and funds shouldn't be used to save Spike. Fred insists that what they do is save people, that's why they are here. Illyria tells Angel that he has all this power in the web, he can use it, but he quibbles at its *moral* price, just as Fred looked at Angel and Eve quibbling with her over the *financial* price of saving Spike. The difference is - here Illyria is telling Angel to be ruthless, in Hellbound Fred is telling Angel to be merciful. Also in Hellbound, Fred appears to be nuts writing on walls, trying to save Spike - while in Timebomb, Wes appears to be nuts, busy looking through books trying to save Illyria. (The irony is, Fred is sane in Hellbound, it's a mislead, and Wes may actually be going insane - split in two in fact, becoming because of the restored memories, both men in the joke that he described in the dream, in Underneath) Fred uses a nuclear blast of power from WR&H to try and make Spike corporeal in Hellbound, while Illyria tells Angel WR&H have that power (she does) and Wes uses a weapon made at WR&H to pull the power, a nuclear type power, out of Illyria before she explodes. In both episodes - the idea of a web is expressed. Pavayne's web of magic, WR&H using Pavayne's blood to create their firm, Fred's use of a web of magic to catch the incorporal Spike ( a net) which both Pavayne and Spike feel. And in both episodes it's the threat to the gang that is caught and whose power is neutralized.)
Time too is a web. And unlike a tapestry, webs aren't destroyed by pulling one strand, they are alterred. Spiders are very clever creatures, they make their webs so when a strand is pulled it changes the web - like a maze, potentially trapping the fly or setting it free.
Angel goes back in time to the point in which they enter the training room to stop Illyria (he believes to kill her) and Angel pulls a strand of the web. He alters it, by doing the unexpected, saving Spike. And Wes does the unexpected, instead of killing Illyria, he saves her, removing the power she wishes to hold on to. And Angel learns something - you are only a puppet if you choose to be.
But there are other things going on here - we have the woman who trades her child for her husband's memories, an echo perhaps of Angel who trades his friend's memories for his child's welfare. Memories again. Gunn voices to Angel how the worst thing about the penalty cell was the fake life he lead, not the heart being torn from his chest. And we wonder, as I'm sure Angel must, what Gunn would do if he knew his memories had been alterred long before that? He clearly did not get the other memories back. The woman and the child also harkens back to other episodes in the series - Judgement Day S2 ATS (as
superplin points out in her livejournal). In Judgement Day, Angel is defending a woman from having her child taken from her - it's when he first becomes a champion. It also harkens back to other children - Darla and Connor. Cordelia and Jasmine. And of course Corbin Fries and his son. Now Angel is serving the demons who sacrifice the children, not the mothers? What bizzarro world is this? Or is Angel playing another type of game altogether? There's also the trust issues. He doesn't trust Gunn. He doesn't trust Wes. He doesn't trust Lorne. And he doesn't quite know what to make of Illyria. Yet, he may trust Spike. It's the flip side of the start of the season - where everyone trusted Angel and he trusted his friends (or appeared to) and no one trusted Spike. Especially *not* Angel. Memory may play a role here as well. Corrupted memory. Because that's what Illyria and Wes have - corrupted memories like the corrupted memory on a computer disc or hard-drive where data is scattered. Gunn's memories are also corrupted by the implants, by the penalty box, and by the mindwipe. As are Lorne's by the mindwipe. So what happens when memory is corrupted - does it explode innward or outward like time? Does reality shift as memories shift?
Another thing about memory - without memory, we can't change or adapt or learn. It's through our memories of past mistakes, we learn not to repeat them. This is shown in the sparing sequence with Spike and Illyria - Illyria wonders about Spike's changes in fighting style, how he's improved with her. He says people adapt with experience. She says compromise. He says learn. Memory - provides us with the means to learn and adapt and evolve. Without it, we don't learn. We are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Make the same moves.
Repeat the same loop. Remembering...makes us try something new.
Finally we have the illusions to kings and kingdoms. Making me think of Shakespearean plays. Illyria is the kingdom of twins in Twelth Night where Sebastian and Viola are mistaken for each other causing all sorts of bizarre misunderstandings. Macbeth is the king who follows the three fates, then says the hell with fate and goes forth ruthlessly to take what is his. Lear is the king who destroys his family to preserve power, yet loses both. And Henry V is the king who comes to power while friends with a fool.
I liked Timebomb. I actually enjoyed it far more than Origin.
In fact Timebomb made me appreciate Origin more and made me far more sympathetic to Angel. But I also like brain teasers.
The more bizarre the episode, the more I like it. I'm weird that way.
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-29 11:14 pm (UTC)At the same time - she gives him a clue in the midst of it all. It's a web.
Time too is a web. And unlike a tapestry, webs aren't destroyed by pulling one strand, they are altered. Spiders are very clever creatures, they make their webs so when a strand is pulled it changes the web - like a maze, potentially trapping the fly or setting it free.
I love this web metaphor, it's so apt. It also ties in very well to the discussion of string theory (have you read those posts at TATF?), the strands that cross dimensions and can be pulled and stretched like rubber bands, even though we can't see them. Fascinating stuff.
The really interesting thing about your analogy, to me, is that Illyria is also caught in a web: her past glory. She can't conceive of giving up her power, she's having trouble adjusting (adapting/compromising/learning/selling out) to this new world. She is disparaging of Angel & Co. for allowing themselves to be trapped in the W&H game, while she herself is also a prisoner of her own concept of time and self and reality. "The world is what it is," she says in Origin, and "Define change?" She works at a completely different scale. Here, in Time Bomb, she's discovering things (important things, not just details of the lives and society of insignificant humans) she didn't know before, and that is throwing her for a loop.
Because that's what Illyria and Wes have - corrupted memories like the corrupted memory on a computer disc or hard-drive where data is scattered. Gunn's memories are also corrupted by the implants, by the penalty box, and by the mindwipe. As are Lorne's by the mindwipe.
Great analogy. The whole gang now has different sets of memories. This is always the case to some extent, we all remember different things from shared experiences; how many times have you reminisced with someone and found that your recollections differed or even conflicted? Here, though, it's exacerbated by the corrupting influence of the mindwipe and partial undoing thereof.
It's like deleting a program from your hard disk rather than doing an uninstall: now we get the live action docudrama of how that can mess up your data. ;)
Another thing about memory - without memory, we can't change or adapt or learn. It's through our memories of past mistakes, we learn not to repeat them. This is shown in the sparing sequence with Spike and Illyria - Illyria wonders about Spike's changes in fighting, how he's improved with her. He says people adapt with experience. She says compromise. He says learn. Memory - provides us with the means to learn and adapt and evolve. Without it, we don't learn. We are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Make the same moves.
Repeat the same loop. Remembering...makes us try something new.
I have so much to say about this aspect (most of which is probably deadly dull to anyone else, so it's a good thing I'm too tired to expound, heh--and just think, I've had to delete a lot of this comment because it was too long!). So I'll just say this: History is an essential component of a complex system, because each iteration--say, of a fractal--is entirely contextual and depends on everything that has come before.
Finally we have the allusions to kings and kingdoms.
Have you read the draft of macha's poetic exegesis on this episode?
In fact Timebomb made me appreciate Origin more and made me far more sympathetic to Angel.
I have been surprised to see (now that I'm scanning other commentary) how many people thought Origin was all sweetness and light. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, since it's the same thing that happened with You're Welcome. I saw both of those episodes as pretty ominous, but it seems most people were focusing on "yay, old-skool Cordy" and "yay, happy, well-adjusted Connor!". Both of which I can certainly appreciate, but there was a lot more under the surface.
I actually liked Origin a lot, because of the way it brought into play so many of the themes of the season (and the show). That's pretty much all it takes to entertain me, I'm easy. ;)
no subject
Date: 2004-04-30 05:40 am (UTC)Hmm, very interesting. So if we think time is largely a matter of perception, that plays into belief in free will? I can buy that.
we have the woman who trades her child for her husband's memories, an echo perhaps of Angel who trades his friend's memories for his child's welfare.
Ooh, I didn't make that connection! She's not just giving up the child; she's giving him up for something very particular. And Angel's call in this instance is the same as his call in "Home" - but for vastly different reasons, it seems.
Angel as an amalgam of Shakespearean kings - fascinating, but doesn't bode well for anyone's long-term survival.
I think you have it about time bomb
Date: 2004-04-30 05:45 am (UTC)Thanks!
Date: 2004-04-30 07:52 am (UTC)So did I. It was very odd when I came online both times to see the reactions. I found both to be very omnious in certain ways. You're Welcome with the copy of Cordelia who reminds Angel of his purpose yet also ironically gets him to stay in WR&H? Origin with the well-rounded, happy boy who wants to be a superhero and chooses to protect his adoptive family - except it's a false family and false life built by magic and lies. Nothing happy about either. Both to me are fantastic misleads - trapping Angel even more in the web.
History is an essential component of a complex system, because each iteration--say, of a fractal--is entirely contextual and depends on everything that has come before.
I was thinking much the same thing when I re-watched the episode. Illyria talks about time as fracturing or a series of fractuals. And history, well our knowledge of it keeps changing depending on the teller. Each historian provides their own twist or perception of the past. If taken too far - we get revisionist history - or the lie.
Examples include - people who have convinced themselves certain horrific events that happened in the past did not happen - that it was fabricated. And I've heard the comment that we revise history as we move away from it, remembering what we want to, deleting what we can't handle and as a result corrupting the data. It's not lost. But it becomes harder to find. (As a child I remember how the history textbooks kept changing - one year the pilgrims were nice to the native americans, the next horrible to them.)
So, if we forget a portion of our history? Attempt to delete it from our records or memory bank - what happens? There are instances in which we don't forget so much as choose to ignore the lessons and that also has an effect.
It also ties in very well to the discussion of string theory (have you read those posts at TATF?), the strands that cross dimensions and can be pulled and stretched like rubber bands, even though we can't see them. Fascinating stuff.
Yes - I was thinking about this as I wrote the anaology. Superstring.
The idea of strings crossing dimensions and the universe a tightly or loosely contructed web of dimensional strings. I wonder if that may be what ME are going for - is WR&H the spider at the center of the cross-dimentional web? Or more likely the spiders navigating and maintaining the web? In the Greek stories - the Fates are often depicted as web-spinners, we see a spider corollary.. and when they pull a string - a life strand, it's from a connected web. (Maybe my memory's off slightly but I vaguely remember this since whenever they came on screen, I'd flinch (I have a phobia of spiders). )
Haven't had a chance to read macha's exegisis on the episode yet or post on teaattheford. Considering posting part of this, but since I don't have time to read the whole conversation, I'm leery of repeating others thoughts.
Thanks for the wonderful response!
no subject
Date: 2004-04-30 09:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-01 06:43 pm (UTC)Excellent analysis -- Angel has been a 'Calvinist' vampire if ever there was one, but now, suddenly, some of Spike's 'Unitarian' attitudes seem to be rubbing off on him. [Sorry for sectarian analogies -- I knew a Unitarian minister a year or two ago who did a whole worship service on theme of Spike as Unitarian-Universalist, and I just couldn't resist!]
"...without memory, we can't change or adapt or learn. It's through our memories of past mistakes, we learn not to repeat them. This is shown in the sparring sequence with Spike and Illyria - ... Memory provides us with the means to learn and adapt and evolve. Without it, we don't learn. We are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Make the same moves."
Again, yes! Being of the "Everything I Need to Know I Learned When I Was An Omnipotent God-King and You Were the Ooze at My Feet" school of thought, Illyria isn't exactly an eager student of human emotions or behavior, most of the time, and doesn't exactly embrace the idea of "change." But humans (and pre-souled vampires who fall in love and ensouled vampires who become champions) MUST learn and grow and change, or die from trying to stay the same (which is what Angel tells Illyria she's doing -- "Fighting to hold on to what you were -- it's destroying you").
And the speech/quote from Illyria you were talking about went like this:
"... That you learn when you become a king. You learn... to destroy everything that's not utterly yours. All that matters is victory. That's how your reign persists.
"You are a slave to an insane construct. You are moral. A true ruler is as moral as a hurricane. Empty, but for the force of his gale. But you... trapped in the web of the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart -- so much power here, and you quibble at its price. If you want to win a war, you must serve no master but your ambition."
Somebody else has probably already given you that quote, but I'm so far behind with the conversations about this episode (end of the semester grading keeps interfering) that I'm having trouble catching up with all the wonderful stuff that's been written already -- like yours!
Thanks for this
Date: 2004-05-01 07:25 pm (UTC)"... That you learn when you become a king. You learn... to destroy everything that's not utterly yours. All that matters is victory. That's how your reign persists.
"You are a slave to an insane construct. You are moral. A true ruler is as moral as a hurricane. Empty, but for the force of his gale. But you... trapped in the web of the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart -- so much power here, and you quibble at its price. If you want to win a war, you must serve no master but your ambition."
Somebody else has probably already given you that quote, but I'm so far behind with the conversations about this episode (end of the semester grading keeps interfering) that I'm having trouble catching up with all the wonderful stuff that's been written already -- like yours!
No, no one had posted it. So thank you so much for including it.
The quote reminds me a lot of Macbeth in Shakespear, although I've been told that's not exactly where we are headed. Illyria is a bit of an absolutist and in that sense she reminds me a little of Angelus,
the idea of care for no one, go your own way, make it about your ambition.
But what really hits me is this phrase: But you... trapped in the web of the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart -- so much power here, and you quibble at its price. Note Illyria is the only one to separate Wolfram to Wolf, Ram. Also she describes their power as a web. Three
fates? And what power is it that they weild which from Illyria's pov is Angel's for the taking?
Thanks again for your response!
Re: Thanks for this
Date: 2004-05-01 07:43 pm (UTC)Could that relate to your three fates and web metaphors? Perhaps that's the secret that makes their power Angel's for the taking (at least now that he's already paid so much to get to that point)? That ALONE they are each impotent, powerless, useless, and therefore vulnerable? That it is only their interwoven-ness which makes them potent and dangerous?
I like that idea!
Re: Thanks for this
Date: 2004-05-01 09:14 pm (UTC)I'd completely forgotten about that. The books Wes finds are partially deciphered by Fred. Fred helps him figure it out. But she couldn't do it alone, because she didn't have the books.
Could that relate to your three fates and web metaphors? Perhaps that's the secret that makes their power Angel's for the taking (at least now that he's already paid so much to get to that point)? That ALONE they are each impotent, powerless, useless, and therefore vulnerable? That it is only their interwoven-ness which makes them potent and dangerous?
The idea that we are more powerful together than alone is another interesting metaphor. Yes, I like the idea that alone he can get them, but interwoven, they are able to manipulate him. And it does remind me of the fates - except instead of the three female fates: Maiden, Mother, Crone - we have the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart - are these the male equivalent? The wolf - young man, the ram - prime, the hart - stag or sage? Not sure.
Re: Thanks for this
Date: 2004-05-03 09:05 am (UTC)On her own, Fred had figured out the math and had (without realizing it) been opening portals (like the one which brought the Pylean beast into Lorne's bar, in the first place) all along -- but without the books, she didn't have the logarithms or whatever tables or variables were needed to calculate WHERE in that world the portal would open, so she'd been stuck there. I wonder if that has any parallels or relevance to the current situation? That Illyria, perhaps, has the power or insight they need, but she's kind of a loose cannon and impotent, as far as taking on WR&H is concerned, because she (the demon) lacks the crucial HUMAN elements and abilities that will tip the balance (just as Fred, the human, once needed the DEMON knowledge in order to complete her own and bring everyone home to L.A. safe and sound)?
Another parallel to the Pylean story arc that I hadn't considered before was the fact that, in that universe, Angel's demon was REALLY demonic-looking, and that -- though he needed to turn into his demon form in order to survive and best the Gruselugg -- he was rightly concerned about whether he would be able to come back from that, to revert to the more humane Angel who recognizes his friends instead of looking upon them as menu items or enemies. Is that some sort of hint as to what may happen here? That Angel will have to go way over to his demon side in order to triumph and preserve the good, and it's going to look awfully doubtful whether he'll ever be able to come back from that, but in the end, all will be well?