Latest Posts by intheaisleyelling - Page 5
This is so perfectly put together.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/SE8dTpjB-sU?fs=1&feature=oembed
#the little smile she gets in that first one #she’s more amused than annoyed #(probably because she knows this means she gets to hit him) #ugh smg i am obsessed with the things you do with your face
Totally.
It's a shame that we never got to meet Alice. I imagine her as perhaps a mixture of Bridget and Veronika.
The Wonderful Maladys Wardrobe Fittings, 2009
intheaisleyelling replied to your post:
The winter here’s cold… and bitter…
WHY
Played in BTVS S01E06 - “The Pack”
The music always set the mood for that show so well.
How cute does Sarah look in a hat. Seriously.
A little fuffy won’t hurt
Buffy episode review: S2E17 'Passion'
Think I slip the net / But I cut myself free Morcheeba plays and Passion opens with Sarah Michelle Gellar dancing, Sarah getting undressed, Sarah getting into bed... wait, rewind. If for one second we reluctantly tear our eyes away from our leading lady in the foreground, Passion actually opens with reinforcement of Angelus' obsession with She who Hangs Out In Cemeteries. His passion.
It has only been three episodes since that soul was taken from him, and the opening scenes show where his intentions now lie. The love that Angel had for Buffy has translated into a sick obsession for Angelus. 'The joy of love... the clarity of hatred.' He's watching her, stalking her, mocking her by feeding behind her back - in the literal sense - and creepiest of all he's in her room while she sleeps...
Here he has the focus of his passion at his mercy, as the ever-tactful Cordy will point out later on, yet he chooses merely to spook her. As we know, this breed of monster is not all about the kill; he gets his sick joy from slow torture and lingering torment.
Innocence (S2E14) DRUSILLA: You don't want to kill her, do you? You want to hurt her. Just like you hurt me. ANGELUS: Nobody knows me like you do, Dru.
Angelus wants to savour his lover's destruction piece by piece, not murder her in her sleep. Where's the fun in that? After all: 'no weapons... No friends... No hope. Take all that away... and what's left?' Well, in five episodes' time we will find out, but Angelus doesn't yet. At the moment he's ruled by passion just like everyone else.
Back to the opening sequence to comment that the phsyical arrangement of this first scene visually echoes the wonderful When She Was Bad (S2E01) - Buffy dancing with Xander in the Bronze while Willow sits at the table and Angel looks on from across the room. Of course under very different circumstances, and with less of Cibo Matto's clog dancing.
The next morning in command central, the gang hear of the threatening visit:
BUFFY: Angel. He was in my room last night. GILES: Are you sure? BUFFY: Positive. When I woke up, I found a picture he'd left me on my pillow. XANDER: A visit from the pointed-tooth fairy.
Cordelia's subsequent worried realisation that she "invited him in my car once" is a continuity nod to Some Assembly Required (S2E02), which, like Passion, was also written by Ty King. (Aside: It has always bugged me here that when Jonathan returns from his Stalin-search in the stacks to find that the library is suddenly deserted, the gang has only left the edge of the screen like a split second before. They were nowhere near the door! Ah, the magic of television.) Giles then makes an unknowingly hypocritical attempt to dispense some advice:
GILES: Buffy, I-I understand your concern, but it's imperative that you keep a level head through all this. BUFFY: That's easy for you to say. You don't have Angel lurking in your bedroom at night. GILES: ...But as the Slayer, you don't have the luxury of being a slave to your, your passions.
Hmm... by the end of the episode it turns out that Giles' head is "the one things would roll off of", not long after Angelus has been in his room, in fact. Oh the irony. Speaking of which, cut to Ms Calendar's computer science class:
JENNY: Oh, and I want both a paper printout and a copy on disk. Thank you.
It's a good job for Becoming (S2E21) that, unlike Giles in this case, she practices what she preaches. Then Jenny, in her penultimate conversation with Giles, tells him that she's fallen in love with him. Sniff. This has Whedon stench all over it.
Meanwhile, back at the Summers ranch we're wrapping things in neat packages. First, Buffy acknowledges Joyce's summing up of the entire season...
JOYCE: Don't tell me. He's changed. He's not the same guy you fell for? BUFFY: (smiles nervously) In a nutshell.
...and Willow clarifies for the audience the Passion of the Anti-Christ once more:
BUFFY: I can't believe it's the same person. He's completely different from the guy that I knew. WILLOW: Well, sort of, except... BUFFY: Except what? WILLOW: You're still the only thing he thinks about.
While the gang set about their invitation-revoking rituals, Angelus targets Joyce for some more twisted psychological hi-jinks. He's not here to harm Joyce - yet - just cause mayhem in the Summers family.
ANGELUS: You don't understand, Joyce. I'll die without Buffy. She'll die without me. JOYCE: Are you threatening her? ANGELUS: Please... Why is she doing this to me? JOYCE: I'm calling the police now. ANGELUS: I haven't been able to sleep since the night we made love...
He gets to gloat over it, shock Joyce and set Buffy up for some mother-daughter strife in one fell swoop. Denied any further fun, Angelus casually decides to go and commit perhaps the greatest death scene in the entire show.
I would pity anyone who was spoiled for this when it was first aired because the impact was tremendous. A virgin Season Two viewing was quite something, with this episode and largely this scene at the heart of it. It was shocking, it was unexpected. Even when running for her life through the school, through the cool rotating-carousel lighting, you kinda think Jenny will still get away. Then Angelus shows up so suddenly in front of the window - he giggles for crying out loud - and the brutal neck snap is gruesomely glorious. Joss Whedon's frank views on Jenny's death:
"We needed to kill somebody, because we needed to tell the audience that not everything is safe, that not everyone is safe, that we are willing to take a character who is interesting and integral and get rid of them to show that death is final and death is scary. We also wanted to show that no, Angel isn’t just pretending to be evil. He’s not just...a little bit evil. He’s not just grouchy. He is...now her enemy... We spent a lot of time discussing how to kill Jenny Calendar. Obviously, the first idea would be that he should bite her, but we didn’t want people thinking that she might come back as a vampire. We wanted to make it very clear that he just killed her, and there was something about the fact of him breaking her neck instead of biting her that was almost an insult. It was off-hand. I’m not even gonna bother to feed... There was a lot of discussion whether he should kill her with his human face on or his vampire face on, and we ended up using the vampire face because we thought it would just be too disturbing if he had his human face on and that nobody would ever want to see that face kissing Buffy again... We wanted to make it as hard for our characters and for the audience as possible. We wanted to make them as unhappy as possible, and we wanted to make them know that redeeming or getting Angel back would be either impossible or so difficult and fraught with consequences that they themselves would be unsure if they would want to."
And writer Ty King's views:
"Don't blame me for Jenny's death. I said it before - I did not write in Jenny's death... David Boreanaz improvised that. You believe that, don't you?"
And as if that wasn't enough, the coup de grace. All the trouble that Angelus goes to at Giles' place to concoct the most twisted of scenes - the champagne on ice, the individually lit candles on each step, the message, the roses, and the opera theme that so brilliantly punctuates the climax as the bottle shatters on the floor. Poor Giles.
It doesn't even end there. Next stop the Summers residence, to stand outside and watch the tragic news being received. Willow pours out her grief, Buffy - as becomes a character trait - retracts inside herself in stunned silence, and Angelus enjoys it all with a smile. 'The ecstacy of grief'. After Buffy has saved Giles, punched him down, sobbed at him never to leave her and then attended Jenny's funeral, she apologises for not being able to take her chance under the sprinklers in Innocence.
BUFFY: I'm sorry. I'm sorry I couldn't kill him for you... for her... when I had the chance. I wasn't ready. But I think I finally am. I can't hold on to the past anymore. Angel has gone. Nothing's ever gonna bring him back.
And someone drops a floppy. How nineties.
Part of the greatness of Passion is that it is one of the most emotionally intense episodes of the entire series, a piece of television that grabs you and drags you right through the angst and hurt. It's also a pivotal moment in one of the most prominent arcs of the show, the Buffy-Angel saga, as Buffy finally realises she has to do her duty. So says Joss:
"This episode...is there to make Buffy realize once and for all that she needs to confront Angel, she needs to get him behind her, she needs to kill him. She needs to get him out of her life, because he's not coming back. He really is...that evil, and she must do something about it."
'To kill this girl... you have to love her.'
Memorable. As an aside, the lighting in this whole sequence is incredible. I don't think Michael Gershman gets anywhere near the credit he deserves for what his cinematography contributed to this show.
