“Conviction” Written by Joss Whedon Directed by Joss Whedon The Story Holy crap I’m on my final season of Buffyverse reviews. Here we go! We open on a woman getting attacked by a vampire in an alley. Angel leaps rooftops and swings down very heroically to kick the vampire’s butt. There’s a fight, Angel wins, the woman is very grateful, if confused, and before Angel can disappear into the night anonymously, the alley gets swarmed by a W&H Special Ops team and several lawyers, including...Hodgins from Bones. Weird. They also do a photo op and make the lady sign a bunch of papers. Angel does not enjoy this version of helping the helpless at all. Kids are on their way to class at an elementary school. The camera follows one kid in particular, a blond. We don’t find out why before it cuts to W&H, where Fred is bringing in a box for her office. Whoa, so this picks up very shortly after S4, huh? And S4’s timeline was like a month? This feels very cramped (though admittedly, it’s kind of real time for the speed I’m watching). Fred runs into Wes, who listens to her vent her overwhelmed feelings about her enormous new lab with a fond smile in his eyes. The whole team is still feeling antsy about having signed up to run the evil company that’s been at their throats for several years. Knox, the science dude who definitely isn’t Holden Webster, bounces over to talk to Fred. (Oh, also, it’s a different W&H set than in “Home.” It’s very cool. But I already miss the Hyperion. *pout*) Fred and Knox are rather friendly, which Wes isn’t very happy about. They skip off together, and Gunn arrives. He’s in a good mood. He drags Wes over to check out his office. They’re next door to each other. Just as Wes and Gunn have settled that they all feel very uncomfortable at W&H, Lorne cuts across the foreground, choosing carpet swatches an assistant is holding up for him while chatting on the phone to someone about something completely unrelated. He’s completely in his element. The camera moves on (everything at W&H so far has been a single shot, by the way—Joss Whedon’s signature directing move) to Angel getting off the elevator, clearly disoriented. He finds Gunn and Wes and WHY IS HIS HAIR SO TERRIBLE? What is the stylist thinking? Angel’s signature look is tall spiky hair. It is not supposed to be tall, then gelled over awkwardly. Also, he’s wearing a suit coat. It’s weird. Anyway. He tells Wes and Gunn about how his simple “save the girl in the alley” thing turned into a press conference. He wants to completely overhaul the system. He leads the way into his own office (which might still be the same as in “Home”), where an unfamiliar woman is sitting on his desk. The long take ends on her. She is Eve, Angel’s liaison to the Senior Partners. She’s about on par with Lilah when it comes to banter, but she’s a bit more coy and less cynical. She explains that Angel can take the client list and use it as a hit list if he wants, but then he’d lose all the resources and all that evil would just relocate. They basically have to decide which clients they consider evil enough to be expendable. It’s an extremely uncomfortable and morally dubious position to be in. Also, she gave Angel an apple because irony, and when she asks him if he’s scared of handling W&H, he looks her right in the eye and takes a huge bite out of it. It’s the apple of challenge accepted.
It’s night now, and the team has spent the whole day looking through their client files. Fred is so disturbed that she’s not hungry, which is extremely unusual. It occurs to Fred that they’ll have to check out all their employees on top of their clients. Now, what confuses me about the “catch” Eve explained is that there is kind of a third option. They could keep their clients happy or they could kill them all and tank the branch, or they could gradually take on good clients while just as gradually weeding out their evil ones, until eventually they’re running what’s essentially a large-scale version of Nelson & Murdock. Then they’d have the resources and they’d be doing good. Angel sends everyone home while he keeps working. Eve intercepts Gunn in his office. He appreciates it about as much as Angel. She wants to offer him an upgrade from being “the muscle.” Gunn doesn’t object, unsurprisingly. Wes catches the tail end of their conversation, and Gunn lies about it. During the smash-cut scene change thing, one of the images shown is that black panther. Angel is in his office. He tries to use his desk phone to have someone bring him a coffee, but initially stumbles into the goat sacrifice line. *snort* Then he reaches his new secretary, who sounds...familiar. Oh hey, and he can get a glass of blood instead of coffee. Nice. Then Wes calls, just as the familiar secretary brings the blood. It’s Harmony. Nooooooooooo. Angel agrees with me. He wants to know what the hell she’s doing there. She explains that it’s a great opportunity for a young undead girl like her, especially with the windows that stop her from bursting into flames in the sun. He still wants to kill her, but she does kind of a pitch on why she’s a perfect fit for this job. The pig’s blood mixed with otter is what seals the deal, I think. In comes Wes, who, it turns out, is the one who hired Harmony. Angel thinks this bodes ill for Wesley’s moral alignment. Also, Harmony doesn’t know Cordy is in a coma. Angel and Wes explain, quietly. Harmony is shocked, because Cordy was her best friend. But then she perks right back up, creepily, restating her value at W&H before bouncing off. Wes shows Angel a file on one of their clients, who is threatening them if they don’t make sure he wins his case. This guy comes in and sits down. He’s a major scumbag. He’s unrepentantly guilty, and he has no patience for the justice system. He gets in Angel’s face, and then he clarifies that his threat is to drop a bomb that would wipe out California. Lorne is heading up the “vetting the employees” project by having them sing for him one by one, after which he checks a box by their name according to where they fall on the scale from “okay” to “yikes!” Let the singing begin! Fred explains Lorne’s aura-reading thing to Knox, who volunteers to go sing immediately if it makes her more confident about him. Her phone rings. She’s still getting used to answering it in an official way, but it’s fine, because it’s Angel asking her to his office, where the team is debating whether or not Angel should be able to do something about this jerk client. Wes doubts the “bomb” is an actual explosive. It could be mystical or pathogenic. Gunn is weirdly unavailable. Harmony got Angel a lead. He will pursue it in one of his new cars! But...but I liked the Plymouth. I don’t like any of these. A slightly beat up old Plymouth is so much more Angel’s personality than these flashy things. The special ops guys show up and try to take over the wet--fieldwork for Angel. He does not appreciate it at all. He leaves. The special ops guys do not seem to be backing down. Angel shows up to pursue that lead, who is a dude named Spanky. He thinks Angel’s there for some spanking, but he only spanks women. Yeah, that’s not why Angel’s there. He wants to know what Spanky did for the jerk client. He admits he built him a mystical container. Absolutely anything could go in there, and the container dissolves with a magic word. Spanky tries to knock Angel out with a choke-hold, which Angel finds amusing. Angel twists him around, then smacks him across the room with one of his paddles. *snort* Gunn is in a wood-paneled waiting room somewhere. A doctor comes out to get him. He’s been waiting for five hours, and he’s not happy. The doctor takes him into an operating room that looks rather daunting. Whatever the procedure is, it involves removing Gunn’s shirt. Well...that part’s okay. Fred and Knox are trying to learn more about the jerk client. They find out that he has links to groups that design plagues. Angel calls again, and she tells him about how the client is going to unleash a plague if he doesn’t get what he wants. On Angel’s end, he’s learned what the containers is. It’s the man’s kid, who is the blond boy from earlier. Gunn’s procedure seems to be a rather unpleasant one, but Gunn insists they keep going. Hmmm. At the office, Fred and Wes are discussing the plague. They’re both at a loss for how to stop it. They don’t know what kind of disease it is, so they can’t treat/prevent it, and Wes doesn’t know the magic word, so he can’t disable it. Also, killing the client might be some kind of failsafe that sets off the bomb anyway. They both feel Angel is taking this particularly personally. Eve finds Angel in his office. He’s still stuck on the whole “the client is using his own kid as the container for the bomb” thing. Eve knows what Angel did about Connor. He forbids her from saying Connor’s name. She wants to know what his plan is. He’s willing to isolate the boy if they have no other options, and he wants her gone if she’s not there to be helpful. Cut to somewhere with a ton of horrifying disease pictures. Oh, it’s Fred’s lab. Knox has figured out what they’re looking at, probably. Fred is not satisfied with his work. She yells at everyone there to get their butts in gear and solve this already. Court is in session! Lorne walks out of the room to update Angel on the situation. The defense is stalling, but the client will probably be dropping the bomb soon. The special ops team is listening in on this conversation, and they decide to kill the kid to impress Angel. Wow, they’re very stupid. Angel is on his way to the kid’s school, but Harmony tells him where the special ops guys just went. They have a ten minute headstart. Back to court, where I give the prosecutor serious props for using the word “obfuscate.” They’re majorly running out of time now. Also, the special ops guys are in the school. They kick open the kid’s classroom door and toss in smoke grenades. Oh no! Wait. The only one in there is Angel. Because part of the W&H package is a helicopter. Bahaha. Angel will be firing these guys, at the very least. So they start shooting at him with their automatic rifles. But they...missed? He beats them all up while they continue trying to shoot him. He uses one as a shield, then breaks his neck. He kicks holy water out of another guy’s hand, then does a flying spin kick that really doesn’t look as cool as they were going for. Gunn shows up in court in a snappy suit, and he takes over for the defense attorney. He moves for a mistrial on grounds of conflict of interest. The judge has business connections to the client. Gunn...knows his stuff, somehow. The client is very smug. Angel is still beating up the special ops guys. I like this. This lack of hesitation to use lethal force on a bunch of trigger-happy jerks using lethal force on him. The leader has a good gloat about how he and his men are going to win because they have more conviction in evil than the A.I. team has in good. Angel tells him mercy trumps conviction, then kicks his shotgun into his chin and fires it. Ouch. Gunn is explaining his upgrade to the team. He was downloaded with comprehensive knowledge of law. He knows that’s all they did to him because he has the word of the panther in the White Room, which doesn’t lie. Eve is very smug about how Gunn is the one who saved the day, and then she saunters off. The team makes the best of it. Fred and Wes will have more time to make sure nothing happens to the kid or with the plague bomb while Gunn forces the client to remain on his best behavior by dragging out the trial. Fred isn’t entirely happy with the turn their work has taken. She’s not sure they’re doing any good. Angel is. He’s confident W&H will tip their hand sooner or later, and they’ll figure out what they’re really after. He opens a package from his desk, and the amulet he gave Buffy falls out. A cloud of ash emerges from it and reforms itself into Spike. Wes is shocked. Angel is displeased. Harmony is delighted! “Conviction” largely feels like the part two of “Home.” It answers a lot of the questions raised by the S4 finale. It’s a very effective season opener, which was particularly crucial after such a massive game-changer. The team is overwhelmed and unsure how to swim against the current at W&H. What I particularly like about the way the story unfolds is that it’s the perfect Plot A scenario to let us see what every member of the team will be up to at W&H. Lorne screens employees, Wes does supernatural research, Fred does science, Gunn does Law, and Angel...well, he hasn’t really found his role yet. He’s still trying to figure out how being the CEO of W&H can mix with his desire to help people on a personal basis. So it seems like, for now, he’s only focusing on the parts of W&H that are getting in the way of his helping the helpless. Even though I dislike Harmony, this is probably the least annoyed I’ve been by her presence since she became a vampire. I still don’t think it makes sense at all from an in-story perspective that she hasn’t been staked by one of the good guys yet (or by another vampire who found her insufferable), but so far, she’s at least not grating. Her absurd levels of enthusiasm are an amusing contrast to Angel’s permanent scowl. I also liked the hints about Connor and Cordelia. They’ve left a major emotional impact, even if they’re no longer onscreen. Nicely done. The Characters Angel took the W&H deal to save Connor, and now he has to figure out how to make it work. Whatever happens to his people is at least partially on him for his executive decision, and he clearly feels that. Hence the long hours and the many group meetings. He’s trying to keep things as black-and-white as possible. Harmony is evil, innocents need saving, evil clients should be stopped (especially when they’re being horrible fathers), and evil special ops dudes shouldn’t be allowed to keep working for him. Spike is only in this one for two seconds so I’m not analyzing him. Also, seriously? They put him in the intro credits already? That completely ruins the twist of him coming back. (Or maybe they did that because they were annoyed the WB forced them to bring Spike back, so they sabotaged what could’ve been a shocking twist in a similar fashion to how they sabotaged the whole “Angel needs a love interest” mandate in S3.) Gunn is definitely no longer the muscle. Now we have not just two, but three characters on the team who are valuable because they are geniuses in their fields. It makes perfect sense that Gunn would do this. It really wasn’t everyone on the team who made him feel insignificant in comparison—it was Fred and Wes in particular. And man, does he look good in that suit tossing around all that legal jargon. He has always been charming, and that translates exceptionally well to the courtroom. Fred is slightly more surprising. Not the part where she continues to be the one most anxious about their W&H takeover or where she can’t get the hang of how she’s supposed to answer her phone—the part where she is a boss who takes no crap from her employees. She will accept nothing but the best possible efforts, and she’s not afraid to tell them that to their faces. Nicely done, Fred. It was kind of played for a joke how much fun Lorne was having with W&H’s perks in “Home,” and while that’s still the case, “Conviction” makes it much clearer that just because he likes the nice things they’re giving him, he’s still not remotely fooled by the organization as a whole. They haven’t suckered him in at all. Wesley takes second place to Fred in the hesitation to get comfortable department. He might be the most suspicious of the team, but he’s also the most pragmatic. And he’s definitely still interested in Fred. We’ll see how that plays out now that there’s no love triangle. Except there might be, what with Knox and all. Essentially, at this point, Knox appears to be in the same position for Wesley that Wesley was for Gunn. Gunn felt like he couldn’t relate to Fred as well as someone smarter, like Wes. Wes now feels like he can’t relate to Fred as well as someone who knows science, like Knox. Favorite Quotes “Your run-on sentences have gotten a lot less pointless.” “That’s so sweet! And a tad condescending.” “Don’t you think it’s a bit unseemly to add Y’s to the end of people’s names?” “Does that mean I have to call you ‘Wesl?’” “You have reached Ritual Sacrifice. For goats, press 1 or say ‘goats’.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
The Watcher's Diary
In this blog, I'll be reviewing, analyzing, and generally fangirling over excellent television. Exhibit A: the Whedonverse. Archives
March 2018
Categories
All
|