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December 19th, 2014 – 4:48pm – Reflections on Buffy and Angel: Enter Connor

If you were to mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer to me around 7 or 8 years ago, I would probably shrug it off, maybe even turn my nose up at it a bit.  Like a lot of people who’d never watched the show, all I had were vague memories of that horrible movie with Kirsty Swanson from back in the early 90s.  But against my will, I was made to watch the series, and once I’d pushed through the first season, I actually enjoyed it.  It took another couple of years, but eventually I watched Angel as well, and was equally (and at times moreso) impressed.

Both of these TV shows belong up there with “best ever” TV shows.  Of course nowadays we are entering a new era of television, and neither Buffy nor Angel will really be able to compete with newcomers like The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, House of Cards, Dexter, and so many others.  Younger generations will have an increasingly hard time getting into older shows after growing up with edgier and more serialized examples; however, Buffy and Angel are shows that are worth watching again.

Recently I’ve been working my way back through both shows on Netflix.  I remember a lot of the bigger plot points, and even some episodes to a great extent, but I’ve also had a good time watching the stories unfold again, especially with the knowledge of what happens next.  Anyway, I don’t want to harp on too much about the shows in general; instead, I wanted to remark on a particular blemish in Angel:  Connor.

Angel got off to a rough start with its noir-ish first season, but really picked up steam in its second.  The third one started off ok but quickly began to work itself into a hole it couldn’t come out of, while the fourth one spiraled completely out of control.  The fifth one was where things got really interesting, and it’s a shame that it was canceled afterwards.  One thing Angel always had going for it over Buffy was its characters.  These individuals were fully formed for the most part, with less of their kiddie behavior and more progressive story arcs.  Buffy was a show about growing up, while Angel was all about redemption.  The characters in Buffy were just discovering themselves, while those in Angel were trying to move past their former selves.  But its biggest mistake was the introduction of Connor, which wasn’t dissimilar to the random introduction of Dawn during Buffy.

Besides being a sneering, impish brat, Connor really ruined the established flow of our characters.  Wesley’s role in the show was utterly obliterated, and I really liked him for coming so far.  During his introduction and short stint on Buffy, he was prudish and annoyingly naive, but on Angel he turned into a solemn, ruthless individual who bore a tremendous weight.  The team wasn’t the same without him, and Gunn and Fred just didn’t have enough gravitas to keep things interesting on their own.  Wesley’s sage-like aura held the team and their mission together.  Sure he made a mistake, but he didn’t deserve the treatment he got from the others.  Maybe he and Angel could’ve been at odds for a season, but I was really disappointed that the rest of the guys (Gunn, Fred, Cordelia, even Lorne) completely abandoned him.  It never set well with me how shittily he was treated, but of course it was to make room for Connor’s increased presence – Fred, Gunn, and Lorne all had to step aside for him, and so would Wesley, so I suppose they had to pick someone to push out of the hotel.

Furthermore, I never cared much for “Daddy Angel.”  Some fans really liked giving Angel a familial link, yet I always saw the show as a coming together of desperate, lonely people to form a family.  I liked the disparate origins of how Angel, Doyle, Cordelia, Wesley, etc. all came together.  Having an actual family didn’t play into it.  For Angel to have something so awful to love unconditionally (Connor) and then throw someone else so loyal and valuable away for one mistake done with the best of intentions (Wesley), it undermined the connectedness that originally drew me into the show.

On a related note, I would like to, for the record, go ahead and state my disapproval for “vampire children” in general.  First of all, I get that vampires are at times portrayed as sexual and erotic, but for shows like Buffy and Angel who have known sets of rules, vampires having sex doesn’t make any sense.  It’s established several times that vampires don’t have a beating heart, therefore I fail to understand how male vampires can even have an erection in the first place, since the process necessitates blood flow.  Second, where does vampire spunk come from?  They have no nutrition outside of blood, and I’m no scientist, but it seems like being a dead being would cut off your bodily fluids.  Procreation is a biological process, not a mystical one – if perhaps they came up with someway for vampires to produce children without sex, maybe I could buy that, but what I can’t reconcile is the fact that vampires have the ability to have sex at all.  Seriously, they have no working heart but a functional circulatory system?  Respiratory and digestive systems don’t work but their endocrine system does?  I can suspend disbelief for a reanimated corpse (or in the case of Buffy/Angel mythos, a vampire is a corpse inhabited by a demon; essentially a form of possession or mutation) but I draw the line at something as silly as “vampires don’t need food, they don’t breathe air, their hearts don’t pump, and they’re invulnerable…yet they can pitch a tent any ol’ time.”

Going back to Connor, the third major character he managed to ruin was Cordelia.  Ok ok, so it wasn’t really Cordelia in Cordelia’s body at the time, but the whole thing was icky.  Sure Angel was a 200+ year old vampire who had sex with a 17 year old Buffy, but the age discrepancy isn’t nearly as visual as that of a mid-20s Cordelia with a 16 year old Connor.  I don’t think anyone enjoyed watching that unfold, especially considering that Cordelia somewhat acted as a surrogate mother to Connor only months beforehand.  (Months beforehand in our time anyway, plus, it was the “real” Cordelia back then.)  Regardless of Jasmine possessing Cordelia’s body during this time (which we don’t know for quite a while), it still looks like Cordelia, and it’s difficult to separate her actions as Jasmine-Cordelia from those of Cordelia-Cordelia.

Not only is watching her fall for Connor icky, it isn’t very interesting either.  Cordy was vapid and superfluous during her time as a highschool student on Buffy, and she gradually (and believably) matures into a strong woman with an important cross to bear over the first 3 seasons on Angel.  To see her fawning over the massively unlikable Connor really destroys what made her so much more likable in Angel in the first place.  And to make it worse, she rubbed it in Angel’s face, demanding that he “get over it.”  Even though her affair with Connor doesn’t take up that much screen time, it resonates throughout the season.  I know I know, she’s possessed by Jasmine, but being that the fourth season was Cordelia’s last, it was a tremendously shitty send off for, what had been up to that point, one of the greatest character arcs in the Buffyverse.

Single-handedly, Connor ruins the heart of Angel.  Be it his character or his place in the storyline, he emasculates Angel, pushes Wesley all the way from “unwelcome” to “possible traitor,” and subverts the powerful role that Cordelia had spent all this time attaining.  Like I said earlier, it pushes Fred and Gunn to the forefront of interpersonal drama within the agency, which isn’t all that interesting.  Fred might’ve been interesting back when she was skittish and quirky after her stay in Pylea, but by the time she gets involved with Gunn, she’s little more than a demure, half-baked replacement for Wesley’s role as the group’s brain.  She has virtually no connection with Angel and she can no longer do the brainy-brotherly bonding thing with Wesley.  I’ll admit that Gunn’s shifty loyalty was a little irritating in the beginning, but once he has his final blowout with his gang at Lorne’s club and solidified his place within Angel Investigations, he functions as “the sidekick” or “the muscle,” a role which he vaguely struggles with.  As Wesley does try to prove himself invaluable within the group again, Angel manages to push aside his hate and it’s Gunn who can’t quit yelling.

Lastly there’s Lorne, who it seems the writers could never really figure out what to do with – is he a part of the team?  Is he not?  Does he have “the mission”?  His place stays undefined for far too long, and he’s really brushed to the side during most of Connor’s tenure.  Besides the introduction of Connor and all of the surrounding plot points, Angel’s second biggest blunder was the show’s treatment of Lorne’s position.

If (and this is one of the world’s biggest “ifs”) I could look past all of these shitty character decisions, Connor is/was a despicable character on his own.  The writers try to play him as somewhat ambiguous, attempting to elicit both sympathy  and contempt for him at different times.  For some reason, this never really works.  I never liked the kid, even when he was painted in a good light.  His character existed for no other reason than to cause turmoil, both on a professional, personal, and cosmic level.  I have to wonder what the writers wanted to do here.  Most characters had a lighter, funnier side, if even only glimpsed momentarily, but Connor was humorless to the bone.  He was whiny in all the worst teenage ways – the kind of kid you wanted to smack in the face for being so annoying and insistent while clearly having no idea what he was talking about.  I’m not convinced that Vincent Kartheiser was the best actor for the job either.  He was too sullen and insecure without any of that edgy insight that teenagers sometimes offer.

I guess there were a couple of good things that “the season of Connor” brought about.  I enjoyed seeing a partially redeemed Faith on screen, especially alongside a world-weary Wesley.  Rewind to “Bad Girls” (I think) from Buffy season 3 and compare to “Salvage” from Angel’s fourth season – it’s remarkable how both have changed.  Faith would go on to be a fairly likable character late in the seventh (and final) season of Buffy, which took place concurrently with Angel season 4.

I also enjoyed the return of Angelus to some extent, though this was less of an effect of Connor than it was a plot contrivance.  We all kind of expected Angel to revert to Angelus at least once during his own show, though it feels like the writers squeezed it in as filler for a few episodes to pad out and delay the whole Jasmine thing and the prelude to season five.  Back during the second season of Buffy, there was a certain amount of uncertainty regarding the return of Angelus.  Would he be killed?  Could he go back to being Angel?  His character wasn’t quite established well enough at that time and anything could’ve happened.  However, while I like seeing the conflict caused by Angelus, a huge slice of dramatic tension is cut away because we know 2 things, being that the show is called “Angel”:  first, he won’t be killed, and secondly, he’ll be turned back into Angel via some means or another.  It gives off the feeling of “ok, get on with it already, we know you’ll get your soul back at some point…”  I actually think that keeping him in the cage would’ve been smarter.  After all, we’re all waiting for him to break out and cause a ruckus, and I think it would’ve been more surprising had everything not gone wrong.  But like I’ve been alluding to all along, the fourth season was a mess.  Connor couldn’t hold it up (even though the writers desperately wished it so), Fred and Gunn certainly couldn’t (even their breakup was pretty anti-climatic), Cordelia and Angel couldn’t (after their standstill and their respective changes in personality), and Wesley’s path to redemption was about the only thing worth paying attention to.

Thankfully, in true comic book style, (and essentially the inverse of what happened with Dawn in Buffy), Connor is erased from the memory of nearly everyone and the fifth season gets off to a clean start.  And I really wish the show had kept going.  In a weird way, the whole show had built up to Connor, first with Darla’s resurrection at the end of season one and her subsequent quest for redemption, but I don’t believe that it necessarily had to sway in the direction that it did.

Even though neither show survived (to be fair, I think the story in Buffy had already been told; it was a good place to end it) the stories continued in the form of comics.  Admittedly I’ve ever truly sat down with any of the canon comics following the finales of Buffy and Angel, but from the synopses I’ve read, both of them get way too outlandish and comic-booky for my tastes.  The TV shows always retained their fair share of comic book-related ideas – multiple alternate dimensions and realities, natural, preternatural, and supernatural creatures and beings, and thematic elements that borrow from horror, fantasy, and science fiction.  I prefer to remember the characters as they were in the show, and not all this crazy stuff where Angel and his team turned into Lords of Hell and Buffy and her crew managed hundreds of Slayers from some Initiative-like base in Scotland, up against the likes of the US Government while bringing about “the end of Magic.”  The TV shows at least exercised enough restraint to keep it from becoming inaccessible to the average fan.

Ok, done ranting.  Gunn sums it up nicely during a break from the action in season 4 “…a turgid, supernatural soap opera” and that’s a great description; I just wish that the writers were  a little more aware of how tough it was to follow.

December 14th, 2014 – 4:41am – PlayStation TV

Usually I’m pretty good at keeping up with these wacky, offbeat things put out by video gaming companies that generally don’t get much attention in North America, like the GameCube’s Game Boy Player or the Nintendo e-Reader.  But just a few days ago, I stumbled across the “PlayStation TV.”  At first I didn’t pay much attention – I actually figured it was some sort of proprietary TV from Sony.  But then I came back to it for some reason and started digging a little further in.

It turns out that the PS TV is a tiny little box that essentially functions as  PS Vita for a TV!  It’s got a memory card slot and game cartridge slot just like the PSV, along with a power supply and HDMI output.  That right there got me interested, because I love having a way to play handheld games on the big screen.  (To be perfectly honest though, I would much rather have a way to play 3DS games on the TV.)

Long story short I bought it, brought it home, set it up, got it gellin’ with my router and PS Network stuff, and then realized the true potential.  Like the PSV’s Remote Play, the PS TV does the same thing!  So what this means is that I can have my PS4 hooked up elsewhere, in a whole nother room, and then play it on a different TV via the PS TV!  That’s awesome!  A lot of people won’t have much use for this kind of thing but it’s perfect for me.  I live with both my parents and my son, so space is a little cramped around here.  I’ve got every corner (and then some) crammed with boxes of video games and equipment, but when it comes to hooking up systems to TVs, I’m out of space in my room.  This means that my PS4 and Xbox One have to live in the main room where everyone watches TV, which is part of the reason I don’t get to play either of them as often as I’d like.  Plus, that room has a giant HD TV, whereas my room has a reasonably sized old-school TV and a smallish HD TV that I use for the PS3 and Wii U.  But now, with this little PS TV box, I can play my PS4 even though it’s hooked up in the other room!

I’m really excited about all this, and even though it looks to be pretty much an exact translation of the PS Vita to “console” form, I still want to play around with it a little before banging out a hardware review.  It’s a really interesting idea though – no longer does the console have to be physically connected to the TV it’s being used on!  More will come in official review form after I’ve spent some more time with it, so stay tuned.

December 6th, 2014 – 6:19am – Why are Vampires always Victorian?

So something got my imagination rolling when it comes to vampires.  When it comes to most stories, usually we have something taking place in modern times.  Inevitably, there’s some kind of flashback scene where we see how the vampire was made, and they almost always go back to 19th century Europe (and London more often than not, maybe Paris).  Cobblestone streets, gas lights, carriages, parasols, corsets and petticoats, top hats, ruffles…that’s where “the vampire” is born.

Now I understand the much of “horror” as we understand the term came out of this era of history, but why do storytellers feel the need to resort to this tired old cliche again and again?  It would be so much more interesting if we had a vampire that went back much further.  I mean the obvious choice is the Middle Ages, a world racked with fear and superstition.  This dark world of the unknown is a much scarier backdrop for the origin of a vampire than an age of powdered wigs and monocles.

Or better yet why don’t follow vampires back even further, into the Roman empire, or even further, to the shores of the Aegean and Ancient Greece?  Vampires have become pretty stale over the years, but there’s so much territory that no one even bothers with.  Someone could even retool the legend a bit and throw them into Egypt, or feudal Japan, or biblical settings like Sumer.

And for that matter, we need some better werewolf stories too.

November 24th, 2014 – 4:46pm – Amiibo Number 3!

November 21st, 2014 – 11:03am – More…New…GAMES! or, Too Many to Keep Up With

Too much is happening right now!  In addition to the last entry’s photo, and Lego Batman 3, all kinds of stuff is pouring out.  I didn’t even know that Pokemon Alpha and Omega were dropping today!  Anyway, check out the stuff below:  Super Smash Bros. Wii U (of course) with a couple of Amiibo, and the LittleBigPlanet 3 Plush/Day One Edition (which I didn’t even know existed; I walked by and spotted it a couple of days ago) for PS4!

November 15th, 2014 – 3:30am – New Games!

In addition to picking up Lego Batman 3 the other day and checking out the new Mario Kart 8 DLC, I took advantage of Target’s “buy 2 get 1 free” sale on all video games to pick up some new ones:

Yes, there are little water droplets on them from my kid splashing in the tub.

November 12th, 2014 – 1:42am – So Many Games!

Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham has been a game I’ve been dying to get my hands on, especially after the awesome time I had with Lego Marvel.  There haven’t been a lot of games on my radar lately but when I went out today I realized how much stuff I wanted to get my hands on, not to mention all the incredible stuff coming out in the next couple of months!  I hesitated a bit about whether to get Lego Batman 3 on a home console or portable, but really, the 3DS is the only chance I’ve had to get in much gaming lately, so 3DS it is.  Plus I saved $20-$30 that I can put towards something else.  I’ve probably played enough Super Smash Bros. 3DS to write a review, I just feel so inadequate when it comes to the level of expertise that other folks have when it comes to the series.

Anyway, just a few recent-ish and upcoming releases I’m looking forward to:

• Forza Horizon 2
• Bayonetta 2
• Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric
• Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal
• Super Smash Bros. Wii U
• Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
• LittleBigPlanet 3
• Mario Maker
• Halo: Master Chief Collection

I don’t know how much longer Target’s sale is going on, but I might take advantage of their buy 2 get 1 free to snatch up a few of these tomorrow!

October 11th, 2014 – 4:54am – How I Met Your Mother…NOT.

Alright, so call me silly, but I am fucking pissed about the end of How I Met Your Mother.  Why was I watching it?  I don’t know, but I got hooked on it on Netflix a couple of months before the 9th season dropped on DVD.  So when I saw NEW EPISODES a few days ago, I was excited to finally finish up this long and convoluted story.  So I blazed through that last season in a couple of days, and man…if I’d actually been watching the show for 9 years, I’d be pissed.  I mean I’m pissed anyway, but I’d be even more pissed if I’d kept up with it for so long.

So for 8 damn years, there’d been all sorts of back and forth between Ted and Robin.  And frankly, the writers weren’t doing anything to much move them apart from each other.  Season 8 even closed out with Ted looking furiously for the locket that she’d lost, even though her and Barney were about to get married.  So then I’m thinking, “ok, he’s going to meet the mom and it’s going to just totally get his mind off of Robin.”  But what happens?  The entire 9th season takes place over like 2 damn days with all sorts of stupid ass out of sequence flashforwards to try to explain more about the mother, saving up the proverbial meeting for the very end.  Ok cool, no problem…

Except Ted is STILL in love with Robin.  The whole time.  She even momentarily tries to runaway with him when he tells her the story of how he found the locket.  And when she leaves Lily in the apartment for the last time, she also admits that Ted is “probably the guy she should get with.”  So with virtually no explanation, from one scene to the next, Robin and Barney’s marriage has fallen apart within 3 years and just like that it’s over.  I mean literally, the show spends about 40 seconds explaining the whole thing.  And so then, the very end comes, and Ted finishes the story with a passing blurb about “mom got sick” and the damn callous ass kids are like “this shit ain’t bout mom, you love Aunt Robin, go get her!” and then he shows up with that damn horn and “boom” it’s over.

What the fuck.  What the fuck was the point of it?  I thought that at the end of it all it would be some endearing story about Ted’s tireless quest to find “the one” and about how people can grow and change and yadda yadda…but no.  The mother was a goddamn cheap plot device, and he and Robin (presumably) end up together.  Don’t get me wrong, I was pulling for Ted and Robin, but we know VERY early on that Robin isn’t the mother, so I was also waiting for the grand payoff of the show that would resolve everything.  Could Ted have ended up with Robin?  Yeah, sure, I wouldn’t be totally against the idea, but at the complete expense of the mother?  It’s fucked up.  Not to mention the whack ass reaction from the kids, who would’ve been way more attached to their mother.  It’s like the mother only existed to provide the kids that Robin couldn’t have.

A smaller but no less egregious fault is how Barney was handled.  There are all these events during his relationship with Robin that make him struggle with his womanizing ways but ultimately lead him back to Robin out of love.  It was endearing to see someone like that go through such a realistic change, but for what?  It was completely undone after his divorce.  Now there is the stupid matter of him having the child from some nameless broad we never meet…I guess this was supposed to suddenly change him overnight and perhaps fill the hole that he tried to fill with women…but it was really, really flimsy since it unfolded over like 3 minutes.

Writers want to divorce Robin and Barney?  Writers want to get rid of mom?  Writers want Ted and Robin to get together?  Writers want kids to pull for Ted and Robin?  Ok whatever, maybe, but if they were going to do all of this, they should’ve built the 9th season around all these events that get crammed into the last few episodes, mentioned in passing, instead of stretching the shit out for a wedding that really don’t mean shit 5 minutes after it happens.  The could’ve done a much better job setting all of this up instead of pulling a complete 180 at the end that didn’t make any damn sense except in the weirdest possible reality.

But of course we know what the problem was.  Everyone went behind closed doors around Season 2 with the kids and filmed that last scene before the kids got too old.  So the writers knew how they wanted the show to end 7 years before it ended.  The problem was that they weren’t clever enough to construct those 7 years to lead to that ending.  They were so intent on this ending that they went against most of what they’d built up throughout the series and changed EVERYTHING by inserting bizarre pieces of dialog here and there that had MAJOR plot consequences.  UGH.  The way the whole thing was handled was just awful.

I’ve watched a fair number of sitcoms and dramas from start to finish, and How I Met Your Mother easily has one of the WORST finales of all time.  The idea was shaky, but I could’ve lived with it.  What was flat out awful was the execution.  So much time wasted on the two days leading up to the wedding, and then there are years worth of material shuffled around, paraphrased, and implied with just a few words between characters.  It was handled so bad.  And the worst part is that the show was called How I Met Your Mother, so the climax should have something to do with said mother.  Honestly, I did have my doubts about how they were going to make it work by keeping her hidden so long, and it turns out, they couldn’t.  But the problem wasn’t one of having the mother’s presence be lackluster, it was that she was absolutely disposable.  They create this whole person, seemingly perfect for Ted, and just cross her off just like that.  If this shit were real, I would feel horrible for that mom; it’s like she existed just so Ted and Robin would eventually get together or something…

This led such a bad damn taste in my mouth.

October 4th, 2014 – 8:48am – My Favorite Albums!

Anyone noticed the music articles popping up?  No?  Well, I’ve kept them from popping up on the homepage just yet, but they do still appear in the “Recent Posts” box and are also visible in the list of posts on the backend.  We’re going to make an official announcement about this soon enough and invite other members to engage in similar projects of their choosing, but for now, I’m keeping it low key while we get through October and while I build some content up.

However, if anyone’s interested, I urge you to check out my little non-gaming side-project (I was writing all this stuff over at Rate Your Music .com and wondered why I wasn’t don’t it here!): – The Cubist’s Favorite Albums of the 90’s – http://nerdbacon.com/beyond-bacon/cubist-90s/

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