jetpack_monkey | Another Update Filled with that Chock-Full-o'-Nothing Voidy Goodness!

First off, Happy Birthday, oh,

goalieanna who is called

goalieanna and not, say,

soleilsoul unless one were very drunk and given to mixing up couples' LJs for shits, giggles, and possibly fabulous cash prizes.

Wrote roughly a page's worth of material in the novel last night. Doesn't sound like much, but given that it's the first thing I've cracked in the book in two months, I say bravo for me. I would've done more, but I've hit a sex scene and I'm feeling really squirrely about writing it. I have no intention for it to come off like sophomoric porn, but at the same time... it kind of needs to come off like sophomoric porn. And I was writing in a public place, so every five minutes I'd look up and think, "God, they all know what I'm writing. I'm a bad bad man."

And there will be no references to spilling cold, dead seed. Mainly because Lucas isn't dead, exactly. Again, for chapters that are about three or four behind what I'm actually writing, friend

lanky_writing. You won't regret it. Or you will, but you'll be far too polite to say anything. I would like to note that the thing IS a first draft, so it sucks quite a bit. But the spark of genius is there, and we'll be taking the bellows to it in the second and third drafts.

I found this rather amusing. The part about the Royal Shakespeare Company's poll.

veggiebelle and I will now do the dance of "Oh, how we rock."

I've been listening to Stuart Davis's Flower of a Zero quite a bit, and I think that it would make a fabulous S5 summation vid, once S5 is, in fact, summed. I base this on two lines - "Better forget about halos/You better forget about heroes" and "What's another spike in a muscle." Also, "Can't you take a punch like a lover" (which is meant to be ironic in context) just screams Destiny-style Spike/Angel hoyay. The only problem is that the actual title of the song, I suspect, refers to the feminine genitals. And for a season so entirely lacking in female sexuality... Yeah. So that'd take some working. Also, there's the part where I may be entirely misinterpreting the song. Stuart Davis's lyrics are often ambiguous on top of being deeply oblique.

Drew Goddard can have my babies. I don't care if he can't physically have babies. It's his right to have my babies if I want him to. And don't you go oppressing him with your bourgeois claims of womb-lacking. He's having my babies, dammit. And we're naming them all Loretta.

Goddard is Clever. Goddard is Very Clever. He knows just how Clever he is, and tries to slip it in as much as possible. He's also a whore for canon, which makes him more than okay in my book. He writes Illyria far more richly than anyone previous (a whole whopping two).

However, Goddard tends to be a fan favorite not because he write particularly substantial episodes. His episodes rush along, from one knowing wink to one clever zinger, and at the end one has a million lines to quote, but not a terribly great deal of substance to work off of. His character writing is just deep enough so that mostly intelligent people go, "Oh, I can clearly see the lines of development that would otherwise be obscure to a person who is less smart." - but it can be rather obvious and often more than a little broad. We learned nothing here about Wesley and Gunn that we could not have extrapolated based on previous episodes. You knew Gunn was going to reject Hamilton's offer. You knew Wesley would find the new knowledge to be greatly giving of the angst - and Goddard doesn't give you much more than that.

He's not interested in it, though. He's so excited to be writing Whedon characters and coming up with interesting Whedon things to say. And in many ways, he is the Buffy Fan's Dream. He wrote a single spec script, and based on that, he got paid to write fanfic. And that's what a lot of his episodes feel like - extremely well written fic. Plus, he has a Jossian gift for self-exploitation. It's hard to not like the guy. It's hard to raise a voice against his episodes, too, because they so often embody what we *say* we love about Whedon. To transpose and paraphrase Joy Division, "They get the feeling, but lose the spirit."

And Goddard can be incredibly clumsy, too. Take "Lineage," for instance, which is a brilliant Wes episode... but not so much for any other character. Angel may not always have the right thing to say, but I don't he'd bring in the completely unrelated wholesale slaughter of his own family to try to give Wes comfort. And Spike being so entirely flip about his mother is far and away out of his character. Dear William deals with new information and emotional quandaries pretty quickly, but there's simply no way he could have gotten that comfortable with his actions that soon.

Goddard's also been particularly guilty of the Lorne "Hi again, bye again" jiggity jig game, where our green god of love pops in, says a line, and pops out again.

All of that being said, it was quite an enjoyable episode. The running humor behind a happy, well-adjusted Connor who doesn't know who he is was utilized for maximum effect. "I thought they fixed that." Hamilton making the new rules clear to Angel was good - he's a little darker than they let on in "Underneath" but that makes sense, really. What is it with Joss and Firefly actors popping up in the last 5/6 episodes, though? Weird. If Buffy was still running, I'd put money that Jewel Staite or Ron Glass would be on right now.

Whedon and company haven't been particularly fond of episodes that just cap off a plot thread (unless you're talking season finales), and it was a little different to see that "Origin" did just that, and didn't really open up anything new. Sure, Wesley has his old memories back, and so does Seven of Smurf (not that it does her a lot of good), and given another season, that may be something to really explore. But we don't have that.

What's truly interesting, and about the most interesting thing that Goddard pulled off in the entire ep, is Illyria's unspoken loyalty to Wes. When she says something to the effect of, "He is no longer loyal to you!" when she smacks Angel across the room, there's definitely a layer of, "But I am loyal to him" resonating there, and you have to wonder just how much of Fred is left over in that body, and how deeply the worship-crazed Illyria has twisted it.

I'm interested to find out, myself.