(no subject)

[doyle]

Buffy, Fool For Love

I have all seven seasons on DVD, and *this* disc had to be the only one that won't play... Anyway, the shot that reappears in the Angel episode Darla, the Fanged Four striding in slo-mo through the burning street in the middle of the Boxer Rebellion.

Angel, Home

Well, there's rampant Wes/Lilah shagging in Ground State, or anything with the Angelpuppet or... ahem. Just one, okay. Angel and Connor's final scene in the shopping mall kills me. Boreanaz and Kartheiser hit it out of the park and then some.

Smallville, Hourglass

The vision of Lex's future, so horrific it kills the old woman who sees it: President Luthor in a field of sunflowers that crumble away to ash when he touches one; blood raining from the sky, the ground covered in bones, and Lex just keeps up that creepy little smile. I'm not even much of a Superman geek but I loved the continuity nod in Lex wearing one black glove.

Firefly, Objects in Space

The opener, with River's surreal walk through the ship, is so beautiful and strange. Now I'm torn between that one and River's speech when she tells Early she's become Serenity.

You're wrong about River. River's not on the ship. They didn't want her here, but she couldn't make herself leave. So she melted... Melted away. I'm not on the ship. I'm in the ship. I am the ship.


Queer as Folk UK, episode 1.8

"You're supposed to ask if I love him."
"You can't. You can't even respect him. He loves Vince Tyler and that makes him stupid."
"No, it's nothing like that! It's just... me, though? I can't be the best shag he's ever had, he's Australian! I don't even know if I'm a good kisser, how'd you know if you're a good kisser?"
"You just know."
"It's not like I've ever done... anything."
"You've done nothing, Vince. You go to work, you sit and watch cheap science fiction. What is there that's special about that, what is there to love?"
"...yeah."
"It was good enough for me."

That dialogue may not be exact seeing as it's from memory, having seen the show once in the last five years, but the acting in that scene is amazing.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

I'm so pleased you didn't go for the trite (no Hush, no The Body, no Once More With Feeling). Those are great episodes with great moments in them, but they've been picked over so much and adored so thoroughly that it's essential to gaze specifically at some moments in other episodes, moments which show the depth and beauty of the Whedonverse just as thoroughly and emotionally as those better-known episodes (if not more so).

The Fool for Love imagery is so strong and meaningful, especially in the context of the overall imagery used by Mutant Enemy. Their favorite iconic Hero and scooby Group moments are carefully culled from the episodes and are shown every week during the musical introduction. The imagery of a band of Heroes marching or sallying purposefully on toward their Destiny is so common as to be trite, but the imagery is powerful and lasting and is used for that very reason. Striding along with the rocket launcher, striding toward the Initiative in Primeval, moving purposefully through the halls of that nursing home on AtS. A Hero alone also accomplishes this -- Angel's sweepy coat never loses its effectiveness for all its repetition and potential for triteness.

To take that same visual composition and capture the anti-heroes rather than the heroes, at their most complex, their most horrible, their most base and fallen, and yet also a pinnacle, and to repeat that image, is to give it significant importance and weight. Because that moment encompasses so much complexity and because it contains within itself so much contraction about who these people are/were/will be (heroes, anti-heroes, strugglers on the path of redemption), it is an essentially more powerful image and more powerful representative of the Whedonverse, than the simpler ones of the Fang Gang or the Scoobies. The slow-motion and the lighting only emphasize this more, burn it futher into our brains, make us think about it more deeply.

The Home scene is a whole other kettle of fish, and doubles in importance when you think about how pivotal that episode is in the entire shaping of Season Five and of Angel's psychological and emotional approach to the W & H compromise. Few episodes retrospectively carry so much emotional weight, which is why re-watching that episode and that scene only deepen those emotions.