Angel Season 2, Ep 2
Added 2022-09-09 15:58:48 +0000 UTCokay but this one is kinda fun!
once you get passed the extremely creepy hallway...π³
Comments
I'm so glad you're i discord but i'd miss your long comments if you stopped posting them here!! i think others enjoy them too :) i really love this epiosde too - the way it switches between the current timeline and the past while also switching the way the acting/shooting is done is SO SO good. Even in editing I was like.. this was so well done. I also love seeing more of angels journey with a soul - like you said, he wasnt just hanging out with rats in alleys, he tried to immerse into society a little, and wasn't always ready to save the souls. i hope we get to see more pieces like that of his story... we have MANY years to catch up on LOL
darciesnothere
2022-09-23 17:59:14 +0000 UTCAfter reading this, I decided to look it up. The exterior shots of the Hyperion were actually the Los Altos Apartments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Altos_Apartments). According to that wiki entry, it has 75 units. It also looks like it has 5 floors, so that would make it ~15 units per floor (possibly 19 or so, if the ground floor doesn't have any). Of course, the plus side of setting it in a hotel is you really only need the lobby set, and one hallway set and one room set you can redress as needed and reuse as needed. :-) The downside is the rooms as depicted in the show are probably smaller than the ones from the real building, so yeah, 68 seems like not very many for the apparent size of the building.
Pooga
2022-09-14 04:31:52 +0000 UTCI'm on discord now, but I'm still going to post here when I have something *long* to say since this seems like a better place for long comments haha :D I love this episode; I think it's one of the best "monster of the week" episodes of the show. The ambience, the unease... it does a great job recreating the atmosphere of 1950s California at the height of the second Red Scare, and the social commentary fits together well with the more personal story of guilt, atonement, and forgiveness that sits at the forefront of the episode. My only criticism of that aspect of the episode is that for a story that is very much "about" racism (among other things), there sure aren't very many non-white characters in it, are there? Just the black family that the hotel manager turns away at the beginning, Gunn, and of course Judy, who is white-passing. I imagine that they would try to avoid that situation if this were made today. Apart from that, though, I think it holds up extremely well. As far as the personal story goes, the flashback side of this episode ends with us seeing Angel doing what is probably the worst thing he's done while in possession of a soul: abandoning a hotel full of people to a demon. We knew from his backstory on Buffy that he didn't immediately become some noble defender of the helpless as soon as he got his soul back, but the flashback in Becoming left us with the impression that he had spent most of the century afterward in abject misery, feeding off rats in alleyways. It's surprising at first to see him somewhat integrated into human society, living in a hotel, feeding on donated human blood, and mostly just trying to keep his head down and avoid conflict. The seeds of the Angel we know are still in there, though, and he eventually does stick his neck out for others--and, as the demon says, they promptly put a rope around it. When he turns his back on the people in the hotel, it serves as a stark reminder that a soul alone merely gives Angel the capacity to make moral decisions--it doesn't guarantee that he will. It's not hard to understand how the added guilt from this act might have led him to become who we saw in the flashback from Becoming, just before he met Whistler. And it's also not hard to understand how easily he is able to forgive Judy in the present day, as that guilt gives him another reason to empathize with her. They both failed each other about as thoroughly as it's possible for anyone to fail anyone else. I appreciate that he doesn't tell her that, though--he knows that what she needs to hear, after all these years, is that he forgives her, not that he feels guilty too. Something that didn't occur to me until rewatching this episode with another reactor a while ago is that the final scene ties everything together and emphasizes another theme of the episode: that the events of the past weigh upon and shape the present. Or, if you'd like: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." (A Marx quote, which I thought was appropriate given the title of the episode!)
ghostofdurruti
2022-09-12 03:20:19 +0000 UTCI never noticed it before but 68 rooms makes no sense for this hotel. If Angel is in 217 and there are more rooms further down the hall, and the hall turns into another hall where the ice machine is, there are at least 20+ rooms per floor, and certainly in later episodes, it looks like more than 3 floors (plus the ground floor). Am I wrong? (Trying to remember from the Bugs Bunny episode)
Richard Lucas
2022-09-11 20:08:08 +0000 UTC
