Angel 2x21 (Extended) - Through The Looking Glass
Added 2022-10-30 18:00:05 +0000 UTCI am currently driving to the Paramount lot to open up the portal to Pylea because I strongly believe this is the place for me. I need Cordy as my ruler. And of course, I gotta go save my girl Fred. Hopefully they'll have internet in Pylea so I can keep reacting?
Comments
Regarding Angel's breakdown here - first and foremost, I wouldn't apply to much sympathy or empathy to Fred's motivations in offering Angel to stay. This iteration of Fred isn't the Fred you probably remember from later seasons. This Fred has spent the last five years in Pylea - longer than the rest of this series will run - where she has become so reclusive, she lives alone in a cave, writing on the walls; and wasn't entirely unconvinced she wasn't actually dead when Angel rescued her. She's in a very vulnerable place, and this is her refuge. If Angel leaves, a ) he leaves *her* and b ) he goes out to where "bad things always happen," as Fred puts it in this episode. As for Angel, in this episode, he talks about how "They-they saw what I really am." He's not surprised that this in him, he's in shock that the others now know it. This is another instance where I think it's important to make the distinction that there is no "other" when it comes to vampires. No second or alternate consciousness; there's just the one mind and it's the mind of the human that's been turned, mutated into a vampire. Besides a removal of a soul, which would affect their concept of morality and capacity to feel guilt, there would invariably need to be a certain primal instinct. Not to be confused with a personality, but the impulse and drive to feed, and a specific thirst for human blood. Imagine being Angel, your soul keeps you in check, mostly, but there's still going to be that inner monologue. It's still you, but it's like taking your intrusive thoughts and dialing them up to 11. Every thought to ever pass through your brain that makes you go, "what? No, I'd never do that! Why would I even think that," only taken to, what would be by our standards, a truly horrifying place. Because for Angel, these people around him, his friends, the people he cares about, Buffy - there's a part of his instinct telling him they're food. The First in "Amends" taunted Angel by vocalizing that idea of wanting to feed on Buffy; and then he ended up needing to by the finale of season 3. It was played for laughs when Harmony starts talking about drinking human blood and it's getting Angel revved up, before snapping out of it. But it all points to the same thing; this "creature" IS him, his dark thoughts made manifest. He's always known it's there, touched, tapped into it far too many times, but here it's taken completely over. I think a point of comparison might be sleep paralysis. If you've ever started wake up, but aren't fully conscious, you can find yourself incapable of moving; because when we sleep, the brain typically sends signals to our bodies so that when we casually slip into a light coma for a few hours to hallucinate, we don't act out too much of what we're dreaming and hurt ourselves. Sleep paralysis occurs, very broadly, when you haven't fully come out of that state and your brain is still telling your body you're sleeping. I've experienced it a few times, including a couple of nights ago where the awareness of the inability to move my arm was casually incorporated into the dream. But just waking up on your side or in a chair, but not be able to move your arms or open your mouth or even consciously take a deep breath is deeply unsettling. My siblings actually experienced it before I ever did, which gave me a little bit of a heads up at least, since if I didn't have any idea of what was going on, I'd probably have had a panic attack; and even knowing what was happening still required conscious effort to avoid that. Armed with the knowledge though, so to speak, I'll apply more conscious effort on a specific action, like trying to swing my right arm after a count of three; which usually works, but it feels a bit like throwing yourself back into your own body... from the inside. Now take that concept, and imagine you wake up to a state of sleep paralysis, only what you "awake" to is a nightmare where you're attacking your friends. And because it's your brain, it's you, and because it's a nightmare, it feels completely right, because even when you're awake that feels like the right thing to do, but you suppress that impulse; only it's not a dream, you're really doing it, but you are still experiencing a sort of sleep paralysis, in so far as, instead of your body being immobile, it's it's moving. It's acting out the nightmare, but your conscious mind isn't able to exert control without extreme amount of effort. But you finally do, but not before they saw you; and you believe, deep down, that what they saw is what you really ar.
Stargazer1682
2022-11-01 04:04:43 +0000 UTCHuh. I hadn't really thought about Angel also having a nervous breakdown in episode 21 of this season. And, in spite of the Slay Alive watch order, this episode would have aired right after Buffy's "Weight of the World".
Stargazer1682
2022-11-01 03:16:33 +0000 UTC
