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
















Angel 5.19: Time Bomb


This week on Angel: David Boreanaz gets his wife an acting gig, and I say bully for him! I’d expect no less from my boy if he was in a position to slip me on in to the spotlight! Tonight Mrs. Boreanaz is a sassy, desperate, pregnant young woman who’s living off of disability because her husband is suffering from irreversible brain damage. To solve these pesky problems she’s signing her baby over to some demons that promise to love it and pet it and name it George. Or, at the very least, love it and pet it and treat it like royalty until it turns 13, when they will murder it in a ritual sacrifice.

 

Always, and I mean ALWAYS, read the small print, folks.

 

Also this week: speeches. Lots and lots of speeches. Most of them the same. Most of them long. Most of them you’ve heard before. In other words, the speechifying? There was a lot of it. And god bless ME for pointing out, via Angel, that the speeches? They are tiring. Because we didn’t get enough of that self-aggrandizing “aren’t we funny” back patting bullshit in season seven of BtVS, right? Bastards.

 

ME’s desire to piss me off aside, what kicks off these speeches? Illyria’s lack of compassion for my sanity, mostly.

 

The Blue Ineffectual One becomes unstuck in time sort of like the protagonist in Slaughterhouse Five, but way less cool. She flits back and forth through time, officially because his/her/its power is too much for Fred’s string bean of a shell to hold, bouncing between a few very selective parts of the day. Along the way she discovers that the Fang Gang wants her dead. Surprise surprise. For an all knowing, seen-it-all kind of long-dead demon, she’s not very quick on the uptake. This makes her cranky, and understandably so. Incredibly pissed off that her nearest and dearest bestest buds want her dead, Illyria decides that the best course of action is to do them in before they can do her in. It’s fabulous, really. She stakes Spike, and massive hugs and kisses to whomever makes me an icon of that very moment on a continuous loop, shoots a stake through Wesley, kills Lorne in some fashion that I think involves stabbing and then chops off Angel’s head in mid-heroic leap.

 

Fucking fabulous. And because her weak human shell’s breaking apart literally, she blows up. What more could one ask for? Once again, questioning this god’s omnimpotence here—would not an all powerful, wicked crazy god forsee this might be an issue and send out an edict that whichever lackey brings it back from the pit, ensures that its shell weighs more than 85 pounds? Stupid ex-god.


Unfortunately, she chooses to go back in time again at this point, resurrecting each and every dumbass in her wake. Also in her wake: Angel. He got sucked up in all the suckage, one might say, for no real reason other than that he needed to be there so he could eventually stop their deaths. Our own little version of the odd couple flit back and forth together, arguing about things like how to maintain a kingdom and whether or not Angel wanted Illyria dead. Long, long, long speeches short: To maintain a kingdom or attain ones goal, one must only serve oneself (that’ll be important later, unfortunately), and yes, Angel did want Illyria dead. Shes’ a loose cannon, yo. He’s loose enough as it is, he doesn’t need to be looking after any other psychos when he’s got an evil law firm to run, ya know?

 

 

It's not murder if you say yes.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, Wesley’s gone mad. Or madder than usual. While I’d like to believe it’s due to his freshly restored memories and guilt and their ensuing battle with his manufactured memories, because that would be interesting, it seems to be more a combination of no sleep, scotch and his fascination with Illyria looking like Fred. There’s a hilarious scene where Wes sort of just skitters around his office, mumbling things to Gunn like he could apologize for stabbing him but he’s sure it’d just be awkward that was pretty winning, actually. If you pretend he’s crazy because he remembers too much.

 

And that brings us to Gunn, newly rescued by Illyria in the beginning of the episode, and pretty damn confused by it. Plus there’s that whole had-my-heart-ripped-out-on-a-daily-basis trauma thing he’s probably got going on. And unfortunately, nobody explained subtlety to Illyria and Angel and company are being billed for the damage she caused (especially for the ice cream truck she took out) to W&H’s alternate suburban hell dimension.

 

 

It's a business, boys, not a bat cave.

 

 

 

Gunn decides he can’t live the lie anymore so he stops wearing suits and spends his time in this episode reading the small print and trying to convince David’s wife to back out of the whole child-selling deal. This upsets the Frell clan that’s adopting the child, because Gunn’s actually supposed to be on his side. Not hers. Which means, I guess, spilling the beans about the whole sacrifice and urine feeding was a slight faux pas.

Lorne spends his time trailing Illyria and saying things into his Nextel product placed walkie-talkie. He spends his spare time berating Angel for not knowing how to use one. I can see why he shows up for hours of make up every day, it’s totally worth it for these in-depth looks into his character.

 

 

Hey, Leery, now, when did you catch on to me? In the elevator? That was a tough one.

 

 

 

Anyway, all of the really boring speeches were not for naught, because after Wesley stabilizes Illyria by shooting her with a ray gun and sucking out some of her energy leaving only the energy that Fred’s shell could sustain, Angel thinks about all of the stuff Illyria said and decides that he’d better get his wicked on. He marches on up, is polite to Hamilton and rude to Gunn for a change of pace, and informs Gunn that they’re not going to try to find a loophole, and that the baby belongs to the crazy demon clan. Oooooooh.

 

 

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