Category Archives: Cultural Catchup Project

July 3, 2010 · 2:41 am

Cultural Catchup Project: A Case of Deja Vu (Angel)

A Case of Deja Vu

July 3rd, 2010

As I get closer to the end of Angel and Buffy’s first and fourth seasons, respectively, the two shows are suffering from opposite problems when it comes to writing about them. While Buffy has gone through a lot of plot development which makes it difficult to write about a single episode as opposed to an arc, Angel is so devoid of plot development that nothing is really jumping out at me. It’s not that either show is depreciating in quality, but rather that Buffy is barreling through while Angel remains in the logical first season holding pattern (albeit with a twist, due to the events of “Hero”).

And so, while it isn’t ideal, I figure it’s best if I offer some quick comments on a large series of episodes for each show as opposed to trying to review them individually. These aren’t really thematic pieces, but more a grab bag assortment of comments regarding particular episodes. Now, I have some reservations about doing this for Buffy, and when that piece goes up later in the weekend I can assure you that it will go a bit more indepth with the growing arcs and some of the character work ongoing in the episodes leading up to the two-parter – however, for Angel, these episodes standalone in such a fashion that a quick paragraph on each seems like a nice way to capture the series’ progress of sorts.

If we can call it that, considering how much of it feels like a case of Deja Vu.

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Tagged as Analysis, Angel, Angelus, Bai Ling, Cordelia, Doyle, Eternity, Expecting, Flashbacks, I've Got You Under My Skin, Kate, Liam, Review, Season 1, She, Television, The Prodigal, The Ring, The WB, TV, Wesley, Wolfram & Hart

July 1, 2010 · 3:08 pm

Cultural Catchup Project: “Hush” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“Hush”

July 1st, 2010

I’ve fairly certain I’ve seen the final few minutes of “Hush” before.

It was some time early in the decade, and Canada’s SPACE was airing the “Top 10 Buffy Episodes” in a day-long marathon which my brother was either watching or recording. I have no memory of watching an entire episode, or even which episodes I was seeing, but I remember Riley crouched down in some sort of crawl space with a gun, and I recognized the Gentlemen in that vague type of recall which is created when you aren’t really paying attention to what you’re watching.

I don’t know if I want to go back in time a la the Doctor and force myself to sit down for the entirety of that marathon, as watching the episode out of order would rob it of some of its appeal, but I do certainly wish that I could go back in time and experience this with everyone else at the turn of the century. More than any other episode of Buffy so far, I wish that I could have been there to write a review and to analyze the myriad of ways in which this is easily the most well-executed hour of television Buffy has produced to this point. While other episodes have been more emotionally resonant or explosive, no other episode has felt this expertly and ingeniously crafted. Compelling both as a standalone piece of entertainment and as an advancement of the season’s story arcs, “Hush” didn’t leave me speechless so much as it made me wish that I could go back to the turn of the century and be part of the initial response to what is rightfully heralded as one of the series’ finest moments.

And since I don’t have a TARDIS sitting around, writing about it now will have to do.

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Tagged as Analysis, Anya, Band Candy, Blink, Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Christophe Beck, Doctor Who, Episode 10, Giles, Hush, Hype, Joss Whedon, Music, Olivia, Projector, Review, Riley, Season 4, Silence, Spike, Sunnydale, Tara, Television, The Gentlemen, The Initiative, TV, Willow, Xander

June 30, 2010 · 6:47 pm

Cultural Catchup Project: “Something Blue” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“Something Blue”

June 30th, 2010

“Something Blue” is one of those episodes of Buffy that is inherently playful, a quality that I think defines many of television’s finest series. While some shows grow content and refuse to “mess with a good thing,” other shows go out of their way to play with expectations to see how things might be different. When a show like How I Met Your Mother tries out a new narrative device, or when Glee gives “Bohemian Rhapsody” an entire act, the shows aren’t clinically experimenting with different structures: rather, they’re playing with their respective narratives, netting results which help define each series as unique within the television landscape (even if the results are at times divisive).

And play is not necessarily a strictly comic notion, either: shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men do not spring to mind when I use the word “playful,” and yet what is “Fly” if not a playful depiction of Walt’s growing psychological struggle, and isn’t “Shut the Door. Have a Seat” a merging of heist film structures with Mad Men’s historical fiction? Sometimes I think people presume that you can’t spell serialized without serious, but these sorts of dramas rely on characters like Saul Goodman or Roger Sterling who make the light observations without damaging the tension within their respective series. – they’re serious dramas, but that doesn’t mean they’re serious all the time, willing to play with our expectations for the sake of dramatic or comic effect.

“Something Blue” is an episode about Willow’s struggle to overcome tremendous grief, and while the episode is inherently comical and wistfully playful at times, there is no point at which Willow’s emotional pain feels as if it is being mocked or disrespected. While Willow’s attempts to overcome her own pain result in a series of humorous events, the playfulness of the consequences always remains connected to Willow’s feelings, allowing for the episode to capture a character’s fragile state of mind and have some fun at the same time, a feat worthy of some discussion.

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Tagged as Amy, Analysis, Anya, Blindness, Buffy, D'Hoffryn, Demon Magnet, Episode 9, Giles, Oz, Passions, Playfulness, Review, Season 4, Something Blue, Spike, Television, TV, Vengeance Demon, Wedding, Willow, Xander

June 29, 2010 · 9:00 pm

Cultural Catchup Project: When One Door Closes… (Angel)

When One Door Closes…

June 29th, 2010

There’s been some concern in the comments as of late about how much I’m being spoiled by their contents, which is a legitimate concern that I’ve sort of accepted as the cost of doing business. I certainly appreciate those who avoid spoilers, but I also don’t begrudge those who can’t contain themselves and reveal something small from the future. In some cases, you’re simply being reassuring or helpful: it is technically a spoiler that, for example, Wesley and Cordelia’s character arcs would be continuing on Angel, but it’s not as if the real value of those character arcs comes from the surprise of their appearance. Knowing that fact does not take away the impact of each character becoming part of a different series, but rather puts that seed into my mind for the future.

The one legitimate spoiler I’ve had in regards to Angel arrived far sooner than I expected it to: while a certain Twitter compatriot to remain unnamed mistakenly spoiled the central event in “Hero,” I had no context for when that event was going to arrive, and so I sort of presumed that it was a spoiler for a much later period in the series rather than the midway point of its first season. Yes, I would have been much more viscerally shocked had this closed door come as a complete surprise, but since I didn’t know when it was coming its impact on the narrative remains quite the same. If “I Will Remember You” closed the door on any hope of Buffy and Angel truly reconciling, then “Hero” closes the door on the notion that Los Angeles will be any less dark than Sunnydale.

Although, strangely though, the door that opens is awfully familiar for those who’ve spent time around southern California’s Hellmouth.

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Tagged as Alexis Denisof, Angel, Cordelia, David Greenwalt, Death, Doyle, Elisabeth Rohm, Glenn Quinn, Hero, Jeremy Renner, Joss Whedon, Parting Gifts, Penn, Sacrifice, Season 1, Somnambulist, Spoilers, The Scourge, Wesley, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce

June 28, 2010 · 10:35 pm

Cultural Catchup Project: “Pangs”/”I Will Remember You” (Buffy and Angel)

“Pangs”/”I Will Remember You”

June 28th, 2010

I noted in my review of the episodes of Angel which led up to “I Will Remember You” that Angel, as a character, wasn’t really the focus of the episodes in question. As pointed out in the comments, this is quite logical: Doyle is the new character who needs to be introduced properly for the series to succeed, and Cordelia best bridges the gap between Angel’s business and the kind of person he tends to help (the helpless). However, since “Bachelor Party” closed with Angel running off to rescue Buffy from peril, I sort of presumed that the latest crossover between the two series would help rectify this particular issue.

“Pangs” and “I Will Remember You” do, in fact, bring Angel back to the forefront of his own series, but I find it interesting how imbalanced the episodes are in his favour: while Buffy may appear in “I Will Remember You,” the episode’s narrative devalues the crossover from Buffy’s perspective to the point where these episodes don’t actually impact Buffy’s character in any substantial fashion. Buffy is a series currently juggling a large number of storylines, while Angel is by comparison fairly open-ended: as a result, while Buffy and Angel’s relationship completely takes over in “I Will Remember You,” “Pangs” remains grounded by Buffy’s ongoing arc to the point where the episode actually feels fairly uneventful (if still functional).

However, the value of the crossover is found in “I Will Remember You,” which is an incredibly important episode if we consider Angel as its own standalone series. To this point left in abstraction for viewers to fill in either through watching Buffy or learning about it from someone who watched the earlier series, Angel’s relationship with Buffy invades the spinoff in its nascent stages, a decision which is especially dangerous considering the narrative arc created in the episode. There’s every chance that this crossover, merging the two worlds together, will make it so viewers will wonder why they were ever split apart in the first place, and lead to resentment over the fact that they won’t truly be reconciling.

I’d argue, though, that a heavy dose of character-appropriate tragedy leads “I Will Remember You” away from nostalgic desires towards further building Angel as a protagonist in his own right, an important step for the spinoff series.

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Tagged as Analysis, Angel, Anya, Bear, Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Chumash, Cordelia, Crossover, David Boreanaz, David Greenwalt, Episode 8, I Will Remember You, Joss Whedon, Native Americans, Pangs, Review, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Season 1, Season 4, Spike, Spirit, Television, Thanksgiving, TV, Xander

June 24, 2010 · 11:00 am

Cultural Catchup Project: Seeing What Sticks in Season One (Angel)

Seeing What Sticks in Season One

June 24th, 2010

If Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s first season was demonized adolescence, then Angel’s first season is very much a demonized take on the struggles facing twenty-somethings (or two-hundred-and-twenty-somethings) as they negotiate life on their own. As Angel continues to search for its identity as a series, it largely presents situations which tap into Angel’s primary characterization: loneliness defines who Angel is, especially after having left Buffy behind, and so he logically meets people and associates with people who are, to some degree, like him.

I spent some time on Twitter discussing how much these episodes remind me of a supernatural Burn Notice, and this inherent loneliness is part of it. On that (quite good) show, for those Buffy fans who don’t have a penchant for USA Network series, Michael Westen is a former CIA agent who is “burned,” blacklisted and dropped in his former hometown to fend for himself. He reconnects with two former associates (one male, one female, who play comic relief to his straight man) who are themselves lone wolves, and together they form a strong team dynamic which is nonetheless fed by each character’s loneliness (as they have nothing else to go home to, so why not dole out some vigilante justice?). Michael, like Angel, does have a past: his family is still in Miami, but he cut them out of his life a long time previous, and a lot of the show is Michael helping others and connecting with them in part to redeem himself for some of the things he did in the past.

My point isn’t to suggest that Angel and Burn Notice are the same series, but rather that there is something distinctly human about Angel’s first season to this point. While Buffy’s first season felt like it was having fun with high school cliches, Angel feels like it’s applying the supernatural to the “real world,” free from the liminal space of higher education and able to look a bit deeper at parts of life that Buffy hasn’t been able to touch, free to escape the confines of one space to try various different types of storylines in its search for its own identity.

The result is a show that I would very much want to watch, if not yet a great show worthy of intense discussion.

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Tagged as Analysis, Angel, Ano-movics, Bachelor Party, Beth Grant, Burn Notice, Carlos Jacott, Charisma Carpenter, Cordelia, David Boreanaz, Doyle, Elisabeth Rohm, Glenn Quinn, Harry, I Fall to Pieces, Jane Espenson, Joss Whedon, Kate, Otherness, Oz, Review, Rm w/a Vu, Sense & Sensitivity, Television, Tim Minear, TV, Wolfram & Hart

June 23, 2010 · 5:56 pm

Cultural Catchup Project: Pulling Back the Curtain (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Pulling Back the Curtain

June 23rd, 2010

I’ve talked a bit along the way about the notion of spoilers as it relates to watching these series. I know enough about Buffy as a whole that there are certain things I have unknowingly committed to memory which have effectively spoiled certain elements of the series. For example, I distinctly remember a marathon of the “Top 10” Buffy episodes that my brother taped on television at some point early in the decade, and during that time I remember seeing bits and pieces of “Hush,” and “Once More with Feeling!” As a result, there are certain images etched in my mind, in some cases mistakenly (as we learned when I thought it was Cordelia with Xander in “Once More with Feeling”) but in all cases meaningfully. For better or for worse, Buffy’s substantial cultural capital meant that there were things about the show I internalized without fully understanding the context.

In some ways, the Cultural Catchup Project is a dangerous way to watch the show if I’m concerned about further spoilers, but in reality nothing that has been “revealed” by the comments on these posts hasn’t been fairly clearly choreographed by other signifiers. While I remain wary of substantial plot spoilers which may not be so easily predicted, it is only inevitable that watching a series which aired a decade ago and doing so with an observational eye will undoubtedly reveal things that may have surprised other viewers at the time.

So long as the show around them remains entertaining, as it does when Joss Whedon and Co. finally pull back the curtain on Buffy’s fourth season in “Wild at Heart” and (particularly) “The Initiative,” all these subtle spoilers will do is alter the experience from one of shock and surprise to one of appreciation and curiosity. It may not be the same, but it is not definitively less rewarding either, indicating how no one person will view a series in an identical fashion as any other.

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Tagged as Alyson Hannigan, Analysis, Beer Bad, Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fear Itself, Giles, Halloween, Harmony, Implant, James Marsters, Joss Whedon, Lindsay Crouse, Maggie Walsh, Marc Blucas, Oz, Review, Riley, Season 4, Seth Green, Spike, Spoilers, Television, The Initiative, TV, Veruca, Wild at Heart, Willow, Xander

June 22, 2010 · 2:50 pm

Cultural Catchup Project: “The Harsh Light of Day”/”In The Dark” (Buffy and Angel)

“The Harsh Light of Day”/”In the Dark”

June 22nd, 2010

I don’t think the crossovers were really a huge part of my decision to watch Buffy and Angel simultaneously at the end of the day, but they certainly helped justify the decision. The idea of doing crossovers is logical for the two series, airing back-to-back as they were, but I’ll admit that watching “The Harsh Light of Day” and “In the Dark” makes me wonder just how crucial watching this particular crossover together really is. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it highly unnecessary, although I’ll admit that there’s some interesting storytelling within the connection.

I want to talk a bit about how the Gem of Amara serves as a crossover element, but I also want to discuss how each show’s respective seasons are shaping up a few episodes in. At this point, Whedon needs to be careful about crossovers, as Angel needs to be establishing its own identity rather than relying on its connections with Buffy. As a result, “In the Dark” is less a continuation of “The Harsh Light of Day” and more a spin-off of its central plot element in order to tell a different story with more weight for Angel and the future of his series. The result is two episodes that are connected, yes, but are primarily continuations and introductions of key themes moving forward into independent, rather than connected seasons.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no value in watching them together, but it does mean that I don’t consider it a necessity.

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Tagged as Analysis, Angel, Anya, Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia, Crossovers, David Fury, Doyle, Elisabeth Rohm, Gem of Amara, Harmony, In the Dark, James Marsters, Jane Espenson, Joss Whedon, Living Conditions, Lonely Hearts, MacGuffin, Marti Noxon, Mercedes McNab, Oz, Review, Spike, Television, The Harsh Light of Day, TV, Willow, Xander

June 19, 2010 · 1:44 pm

Cultural Catchup Project: New Beginnings in “The Freshman” and “City Of” (Buffy and Angel)

New Beginnings in “The Freshman” and “City Of”

It’s only fitting that, as Buffy and Angel’s paths diverge into two separate series, the Cultural Catchup Project forces them back together for the sake of analysis.

There is no plot-based connection between “The Freshman,” Buffy’s fourth season premiere, and “City Of,” Angel’s “pilot” of sorts which started off its first season: while there is a brief moment shared between the two episodes, it is an easter egg more than a substantial development. However, both episodes tell more or less the same story: our protagonist moves onto a new stage in their life in an unfamiliar location and struggles to reconcile their past life with their present situation.

In that sense, both episodes serve the function of a pilot: while “The Freshman” isn’t debuting a new series, it is ushering in a new era for Buffy, as she heads down the road to UC Sunnydale and discovers that it is truly a “whole new world” in more ways than she bargained for. And “City Of,” while unique in that Buffy viewers have a greater understanding of Angel and Cordelia’s characters than those tuning in for the first time, still needs to introduce Angel’s current goals and set up just what kind of show Angel wants to be.

And while both episodes were entertaining, I’m going to make the argument that neither of them were actually that successful when considered as the beginning of their respective seasons.

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Tagged as Analysis, Angel, Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Celine Dion, City Of, College, Cordelia, David Boreanaz, Doyle, Editing, Giles, Josh Holloway, Joss Whedon, Los Angeles, Makeup, Pilot, Premiere, Review, Riley, Season 1, Season 4, Season Premiere, Series Premiere, Sunday, Television, The Freshman, Tina, TV, UC Sunnydale, Willow, Wolfram & Hart, Xander

June 13, 2010 · 1:39 pm

Cultural Catchup Project: Decision Time (Buffy and Angel)

Decision Time

June 13th, 2010

When I sat down to considering the overwhelming amount of feedback in regards to the future of the Cultural Catchup Project, I felt as if I was a supreme court justice considering the fairness of a long-standing law. There were clear arguments from both sides, and it wasn’t as if any one opinion was wrong: for a while, it seemed like my decision would in some way serve as a definitive argument in favour of a particular side, a power that comes with a great responsibility which is a little bit exciting.

However, I realized when I really sat down to consider the situation that it is a power that I am not capable of wielding. What the response to that post demonstrate is that everyone feels differently about this issue, and prioritizing any one person’s opinion or even the majority opinion would be almost impossible. I’d love to be the one to finally determine the absolute best way to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, but it’s impossible to make that determination unless I’ve, you know, actually watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in various different configurations with an objective eye towards what I’ve been watching.

And when I really think about it, as much as I remain objective regarding my view of this series due to my position as a critical observer of television, I ultimately want my experience with Buffy and Angel to be as subjective as possible without losing all semblance of objectivity. I want to follow not necessarily what will result in the best experience but rather what will result in the most satisfying experience even if it is objectively inferior to other alternatives.

As a result, I can officially announce that…

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Tagged as Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Crossovers, Joss Whedon, Schedule, Season 1, Season 4, Television, TV