Angel

Date Posted: 22:41:40 05/05/04 Wed

Subject: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead (ATS 5.20 spoilers)

I was slightly spoiled for this episode - to the extent that I knew the premise, I knew it was an audience tease episode, I knew that most of it was Angel and Spike wandering about Italy like fools with their heads (metaphorically) cut off. I also knew that half the audience would love it to pieces and half would despise it with fiery vengeance. (Sort of like Storyteller actually.)

Why? Ahh...because you are in the point of view of two very frustrated characters and you want closure. You want some nice ending wrapped in a bow. You crave it. You want bloody Buffy to appear and tell her two beaux who she chooses or doesn’t choose. But truth is? In life that rarely happens. Usually when you hunt down an ex - you are chasing an illusion through blind alleys. What you are chasing is the memory, not the reality. An idea emphasized by Illyria who appears to pose as Fred - and Wes can’t handle it. He wants the old Fred. The one he fell in love with. This new Illyria/Fred hybrid creature is false to his eyes, she’s not true to the memory. She’s worse, a mockery - like Lilah posing as Fred in one of their many sex-capades, a memory that was contained in the orlon window. Question is, was the memory ever real? Not sure. But I got the feeling that we had three men chasing dreams or girls they’d worshipped, but who in reality didn’t exist. Another "play on perspective" game and yet another distraction from an important task at hand.

Tom Stoppard a while back wrote a comedic satire on Hamlet, called Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead. It’s a nice little romp, or so I’m told - I’ve never actually been able to make it through the play or for that matter the movie Stoppard directed, have tried several times. In Hamlet - Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are minor players with maybe five lines who appear, inadvertently betray Hamlet and are killed by him. In Stoppard’s play, R&G emerge from the shadows and take over, with Hamlet in the background. It’s the flip - the former lead now is barely seen, completely backstage - and the supporting characters who had been in the shadows are *now* front and center. Wicked by Gregory MacGuire does the same thing - Dorothy, the Tinman, The Lion, the Scarecrow - become bit parts (not even seen I’m told in the musical version), while the two Witches become the leads.That’s what happens in The Girl in Question - the bit players in BTVS, the male romantic/villian characters who served Buffy and lurked in the shadows, betrayed her, helped her, and were only really seen when they had something to do with her (on most occassions), are now front and center and it is Buffy lurking in the background, unseen. Actually Spike and Angel are in an odd way the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s of the Buffyverse. More fully fleshed out than Shakespear’s version. They both betray Buffy at some point, are inadvertently killed by Buffy, and inadvertently come back to haunt her. And like in Stoppard’s play, Buffy’s the Hamlet figure doing her thing on the sidelines - the lead in the former, the reason in fact of the Stoppard spin-off, but now barely seen. She’s not in the picture anymore, she’s lurking at the edge of the frame - yet if you peer closely, she’s gone an illusion. Reminds me a little of when Angel showed up in Pangs in S4 BTVS or in Forever S5 BTVs - brief but gone.

The Immortal is an interesting metaphor as well - he symbolizes what Spike and Angel represented to Buffy, that perfect mysterious man, older, ambiguous, who could sweep her off her feet but remained unchanging, inpermanent, and Buffy, as Andrew states, knows this. She is merely moving on. And she’s doing it by finding someone who represents the best of both her two ex-lovers. Two vampires that she loved but could not be with. He also represents what Spike and Angel view themselves as - as vampires. The ideal of the Immortal super-hero. Another illusion. Note Andrew states that the Immortal isn’t that great. And we see Andrew changing - he can be cool James Bond guy or nerdy Andrew, he is human, mortal, and changing - not locked in place doing the same thing over and over and over again like Spike, Angel and to a degree the Immortal and he notes that Buffy will move on from this dance too.

Then there is the metaphor of loops. Or circles. Angel and Spike are chasing their own tails in Italy. Going around and around and around again in smaller and smaller loops. Both physically and emotionally and verbally. Having the same conversation, the same arguement, and the same chase. We see the circle chase with the car around the piazza in Rome. The chase of Buffy to Disco to apt, back to disco back to apt again. Until finally, Andrew tells them, after their third arrival, that they are literally running in place. If they don’t stop - neither of them will ever get Buffy, because she will be way ahead, having *moved on* and they will still be here, stuck in the loop. They get fed up, go home and find themselves back at the beginning, WR&H, again stuck, saying "we’re moving on now".

We also have the bit about the head - losing the head, the exploding head - both metaphors for their own romantic illusions. They’ve lost their heads over Buffy, dropped everything to go chasing after her. When they finally re-focus on the head, their attention still half on Buffy, half on the past - the bag allegedly containing the head explodes in their face. I this this may be an analogy to obtaining Buffy or how they see her - the prize. That they want to control. But they can’t. They get it? And poof! Goes the illusion. As Angel states, she’d break out of any box they attempted to trap her in, she’s too smart for a spell - while tempting, it wouldn’t work. To ever have the girl - they have to let her go, as she finally let them both go in Chosen. Buffy let Angel and Spike go in Chosen, and now in The Girl in Question - Angel and Spike must let go of Buffy and move on.

But that’s hard to do particularly when the Girl in Question was partly responsible for who they became. "I turned out alright", Spike states - "Yeah, after she got done with you," retorts Angel. If it weren’t for Buffy, neither of them would have attempted to save the world - she inspired them. As they in turn inspired and shaped her. The metaphor of the leather jacket partly speaks to this - both Spike and Angel lose their leather jackets in the explosion. Spike is devastated. "This was my second-skin," he states - "it’s a part of me, it can’t be replaced." Well, of course it can - it’s just a jacket after all - has no more meaning that what we attribute to it. Spike needs to move on. Stop holding on to the past. And in a way he compromises - he gets the same jacket, but newer, cleaner, and no longer associated with old crimes or accomplishments. Just as Spike keeps the name Spike, yet isn’t still Spike - the jacket looks the same but isn’t. Angel who appears to be more than happy to move on - isn’t quite as comfortable in the latest style, he looks awkward, uncomfortable, embarrassed. The new skin doesn’t quite fit. A metaphor perhaps for his inablity to find a compromise between the two sides of himself? To intergrate Angelus?

Final notes to this ramble:

The Angel/Spike bickering over who saved the world the most? ROFL!! Honestly, is it just me or do you think the writers have either been spending far too much time on fanboards or perhaps they are bickering over the same thing in their writing dens? I can imagine Fury and Deknight bickering over this as a sequel to the infamous caveman/astronaut debate and in a way the debate is the same - unimportant and unsolvable. Both have saved the world in their own way, both were inspired by the girl in question to do so and to change themselves for the better - what comes next? Is up to them. They can either continue running in circles or break outside the box like Buffy did in Chosen.

Oh regarding Fred/Illyria - ah, it really is Twelth Night, isn’t it? We have twins of everyone now. Wes is the two men in the joke (the one in horrid pain chattering and the stoic one who is almost catanonic), Gunn is Gunn with the street smarts and moral views/ and Gunn with the demon legalese, Lorne is the kind man/ with the demon opportunistic shell, Angel/Angelus, Spike/William, and now Fred/Illyria. Question is who is the real one and who is the false. Or are they all both?