I need a hug

[herewiss13]

That was...gutsy. Gut-wrenchingly painful, but gutsy. Fred isn't dead. We've had dead characters before. Fred isn't possessed, we've had possessed characters before. Fred is ERASED! No soul, no actual body left, just a hardened shell and a few memory traces from a brain that's been liquified. Oh _ouch_. And they considered the whole ressurection thing very thoroughly too, bringing up the "dead doesn't mean dead to our kind of people" thing.

You forget, occasionally, that the Joss-verse is a painful place full of abrupt and agonizing loss; especially when you've just seen Puppet!Angel. But this goes beyonding killing a major character (who I happened to like, though many others didn't). Within the millieu of the show, dying is an option. Instead, they annihillated her, thus boosting it to an entirely new level of tragic.

So now we have Illyria; and can I just say that Amy Acker is playing her soooo well that I forget, at times, that we're looking at Fred? The contacts help tremendously, but we've seen "possession" before and you can't get away from the perception of "same actor doing the character differently." Illyria is not like that. She's not a character "inhabiting" Fred, she's something totally different that happens to have a close resemblance to the lost one...but that's all. What a tribute to AA's acting ability. Same face, utterly different person.

And poor Wes. The quiet ones are always the most dangerous. Angel speechified a lot this episode, but unlike Speechifying!Buffy from s7, Angel keeps getting undercut by his "subordinates". Practice and principle no longer match and Wes is very much on the side of practice. He's enabling his impulses using the tools of rationality, but I don't think you can say Wes is rational anymore. His future interaction with Illyria is going to be unbelievably poignant, as the former Demon (with a capital "D") learns humanity from a man whose been stripped of most of his own. Teaching her is probably going to cost him most of what he has left. Between Fred, Crazy!Wes and poor, poor Judas Gunn, I'm beginning to fear that we won't have anyone left around by finale-time...let alone afterwards.

And does Lorne seem to be acquiring a drinking problem? He got hit really hard by this, but we didn't see a whole lot of him. Wandering away from the briefing was quite telling.

I haven't seen a lot of this season yet, just started with "Your Welcome", but I'm beginning to think that it could be subtitled "Exercises in Futility". When you sup with the devil, you better have a damn long spoon.