beginning | blinding torment | boils | lies | making me bitter | evil compounds evil | blah blah bity blah

 

 

Gunn's real sad Fred's dead.

 

 

Harmony's real sad Fred's dead. She liked Fred.




Lorne's sad Fred's dead, too.

 

 


Spike? He's sad because Fred's dead.




Wesley's sad Fred's dead. Now he'll never get any.



Angel? Wicked sad.



 


Illyria? Totally sad about Fred.

No. Not really. We love her.












 

Angel 5.16: Shells


 

Once again, missed the first half. It’s not my fault, people! It’s not! It’s on against King of Queens! What the hell do you want me to do? My own mother, were she somehow involved with ME, which she is not, but if she were, would totally forgive me. Mostly. Anyway, I could download it and watch the first half, but eh. Maybe you’ll get lucky, maybe SP will watch! (though the holding of ones breath is not recommended.) But just because I didn’t watch it doesn’t mean I can’t recap it! Hell, I can recap the entire last half of last season without ever having watched a minute. God bless spoilers, eh?

 

The fang gang (minus Fred, cuz she’s dead) hold an emergency “go team go” meeting once Angel and Spike mope their way back from the really deep hole in the ground in England and decide to bank on the fact that nothing in the Buffy/Angelverse ever really dies (Tara, Ms. Calendar, Cordy, Amanda, Lilah, millions of red shirts and Riley’s dignity notwithstanding) and they rally to bring back Miss Winifred Burkle. Because they love her. They really, really love her. As do I. Or would. If I could stand her.

 

 

 

 

Humans rule the earth. Ruled the earth for millennia. Like roaches, crawling everywhere, crying and sweating and puking their feelings all over you.

 

 

Illyria-in-Fred’s-skinny-ass-body is up and about after smacking Wesley around for a bit, going to W&H because she needs some dandy new clothes she left in her sarcophagus and to pick up her high priest of nerdly cool, Knoxy. Earning points, she also smacks down Harmony (yay!) and tosses Angel through a few windows and down a few (20 or so) floors. (woo!)

 

Meanwhile, Gunn’s feeling all sorts of guilty and goes to beg the evil doctor who made him super smart to return Fred to the living, because he loves her like he loves cake, and of course psycho!Wesley (is there any other kind? I swear, the man completely lost his sanity when he was stripped of his tweed and dignified leather elbow patches. Please, give the man some tweed. It’s all he has.) overhears this private conversation regarding Fred and her no-longer-eternal soul and reacts badly to the news that Gunn was sort of involved. Unimpressed at Gunn’s logic that he didn’t think it would be one of them that would get eaten alive from the inside out to pay for his brain, the psycho promptly shivs the guilt-ridden braniac (skipping all vital organs, natch. Geez, he’s not THAT mad, folks.). Which was rude of Wesley. One should never interrupt the ex-boyfriend of your dead girlfriend when he’s trying to talk an evil doctor into taking his life and restoring ones dead girlfriend’s, and then shiv him before he can finish the conversation, should one? But we all know Wesley has no manners and his ungentlemanly act promptly earns him a slap on the hand from Angel. Naughty Wesley. Wesley sobs and whines and is all “we can’t bring her back because her soul is gone. The bad doctor said so.” We are now, apparently, believing evil, sneaky, worshipper-of-Illyria doctors at their evil word. Righty-o then.

 

 

 

I've loved you from the moment I saw you. I was eleven, you were ancient, pressed between the pages of the forbidden texts. I would stare at your for hours, locked in my room. My mom thought I was looking at porn.

 

 

The gang catches up to Illyria and Knox at the site where her temple sits on another plane or in another time or maybe it’s just an SEP (someone else’s problem) and Slartibartfast got distracted by something shiny and math-like. There’s a confrontation with lots of talking and Wesley, bored with Angel’s pontificating on humans and how their propensity to fight for each other or something like that makes them different from the stupid old ones, shoots Knoxy. To no one’s surprise, Knox dies. I’m telling you, people, it’s in his contract. According to imdb he’s scheduled to be on an episode of Still Life and I can’t wait to see how the Mistress of Masochism offs him. Seriously. Will Marti make him sit in front of a TV, watching reruns of season 7 Buffy endlessly? Will she hook him on majicks? Will she afterschool special his ass to death? Only time will tell, my friends. Hey, maybe we should start a pool! Guess how Knox dies, win a prize!

 

There’s a fight, ME once again proves that they can rip off the Matrix as good as the next guy with the slow motion and the action and the sword play and I find myself quickly getting tired. Especially of the swordplay. Sure, it’s cool. But she’s a big, powerful demon who can manipulate time. Freeze her with nitrous and run a tank over her ass, drop a bomb—do something, anything besides swinging ineffectual pointy things at her. It just seems with all their resources, which is ostentatiously why they signed on the dotted line with the devil anyway, they’d be a bit more efficient and a lot less archaic in their demon-ridding methods. They have a wetworks squad! Or they did, at least, before Angel got all bitchy. Pull some of them out of the unemployment line and send ‘em after the really bad demon! Let’s use our heads here! Angel’s got an excuse, there’s on blood flowing to that brain—but what about Mr. Smarty Pants Wesley? Or Super Smart Gunn? Let’s fucking use those brains Fred died for.

 

Anyway, Angel breaks the whammy with a gem from Illyria’s sarcophagus that Wesley knocked out of it when he beat the shit out of it in anger. Angel took the gem, we all know how he loves pretty, shiny things, and uses it to be on the same time plane (or whatever the hell they’re using for an explanation here) as Illyria, rendering her swishing of time useless. Snappy banter, thrown punches and a refreshing lack of histrionics for once are displayed before Illyria opens a portal and jumps on through, with Wesley throwing himself into the abyss head first before it closes. My god, that man is such a drama queen.

 

Illyria’s all sad on the other side because her hordes of evil things are gone. Dead. Dust. Wesley’s all neiner neiner, welcome to my sad, empty world. Illyria runs off through a portal, but thoughtfully leaves it open for the dour-faced one.

 

Later, everyone looks really sad because Fred’s gone gone, not just mostly gone. Wesley’s in the lab, packing up all of Fred’s stuff because she’s gone, oh she’s so very gone. Illyria shows back up because she has no where else to go and doesn’t understand the world and she feels lost and apparently can’t find anyone else alive who knows who she is and thinks she’s the keenest, but I think she’s got a pretty good handle on this world already, considering she’s already pegged Wesley for the whipped little man that he is. It is decided that if she’ll work on cutting down on the murder, mayhem and just general naughtiness, he’ll teach her to live in this world and deal with all the grief because life is hard but sometimes you find a bit of something to live for, and because she looks like Fred. Woot. Woot.

 

Things that also happened, but which I didn’t feel warranted being worked in in any real fashion:

 

Gunn had to sign papers saying he wouldn’t sign papers, delivered to his hospital bed by Harmony because no one else wanted to talk to him. Because he killed Fred. He kiiiiiiiiilllllllllllled Fred. Fred didn’t kill Fred by going to work for the evil Man in the first place. Nor did she kill herself by investigating an old, mysterious sarcophagus sans biohazard outfit. Nope. Blame, it does not rest on her shoulders.

 

Harmony acted all sad about Fred and was confused as to how Gunn could do something that horrible to his friend. Must be that non-soul of hers shining through all that evil.

 

Angel called Giles in hopes of contacting Willow to bring Fred’s soul back, only to be turned down because Willow was on an astral plane and because Giles doesn’t like Angel anymore.

 

Spike decided to stay put rather than becoming a roaming undead-man-of-action, much to my chagrin, because Fred would have wanted it that way. The bitch.

 

What they lack in strength they make up for in extraordinary sneakiness.

 

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