Angel: 2x15 Full Reaction
Added 2024-09-02 02:01:15 +0000 UTC"Reprise"
Comments
There have been plenty of cases of Kate blaming Angel for her own inability to deal, but this episode is not one of them. She has legitimate reason here to be royally pissed off at Angel. She just found out that he not only didn't try to save the massacre victims, but he deliberately locked them in with their attackers.
contextual_sense
2025-02-27 01:32:14 +0000 UTCI never felt a tremendous amount of investment in Wesley and Virginia, mostly because they didn't show us enough of them to allow us to bond with them. But Wesley in the breakup scene, really REALLY got me in the heart. And in a way, he reminded me of Giles, a lot of wisdom and perception we don't always see from him. But it was a beautiful emotional gut punch of a line, never the less. </3 The reveal that the Home Office is really just our world, the evil that exists there and is born there... where the fight will always be, for Angel. The realization that he can't ever really WIN because it will always exist. :(
dreamsofspike
2024-09-05 21:15:57 +0000 UTCYeah and Dru was carrying a doll after she sired Darla in Reunion.
Ahmad
2024-09-03 12:39:49 +0000 UTCi agree with you, I never felt anything for Wes and Virginia. I found Virginia to be quite boring actually. Great episode and reaction! Also side note and highly unpopular opinion but I prefer Cordelia's current hair over any other hair we've seen her with on Angel.
Ahmad
2024-09-02 22:25:05 +0000 UTCYou remembered/ recognized Denver ?? that's really impressive 😃
madfem
2024-09-02 21:59:55 +0000 UTCAbout Kate, I always thought upper echelon police must know about the monsters, and have a special unit. She might have gotten advancement but as right as she is, she IS unstable. She didn't go by the book and didn't cover her tracks well, while apparently loudly talking monsters to other cops. Since the beginning it's clear she wasn't built to handle the supernatural. She would've been much happier in the dark, it's an original take for a character, most of us would be the same.
Melissa Pouliot
2024-09-02 20:13:53 +0000 UTCThe idea of Earth as just another one of the many hell dimensions makes perfect sense, given the bloody history of the human race. But good old Holland deserves Employee of the Month from W&H!
Gaius Frakking Baltar
2024-09-02 16:33:45 +0000 UTCI like how they brought back the character of Denver, the bookstore owner from episode 2x2 Are You Now or Ever Have Been, suitably aged (I used to think it was the same actor in aging makeup, but it's a different actor). He tells Angel that their encounter changed his life, giving us the idea that for the 40+ years since he has been working on the side of Good. I don't know if that's supposed to be a subtle rebuke of Angel's nothing-matters-so-why-fight attitude, or maybe, since he's immediately killed, a bitterly ironic confirmation of it.
DanielOrme
2024-09-02 15:55:27 +0000 UTCAbsolutely. I have no doubt that when Holland signed his soul away he was neither tricked nor deceived. I'm sure he did it quite consciously and willingly. That's why he's a Company Man to the core.
DanielOrme
2024-09-02 14:36:19 +0000 UTCHolland's finest moment. Telling the truth, filtered through his own viewpoint of what is and isn't important. But the honesty at the core makes it devastating; he has immense conviction.
Jorgalorg
2024-09-02 13:06:49 +0000 UTCWolfram & Hart contracts are the “sign your soul away” kind, so Holland works for W&H in perpetuity, alive or dead. Multiple hell dimensions exist as Anya and others have said, so Holland’s soul is in one presumably controlled by W&H
Isaiah Bryant
2024-09-02 12:14:34 +0000 UTCI didn't like the "lore teasing" in this episode when it first aired. We think we are about to meet a senior partner but then it gets a gauntlet to the face; then we are about to see another hell dimension but Holland pulls a fast one. Holland is speaking two half truths: first he hides the power that Angel might have to cross dimensions by taking him on a ride; probably to save Angel's life, they have plans for him after all. Second he is hiding the fact that Wolfram&Hart do want to win but winning for them is keeping the status quo more or less intact while they manipulate in the background to gain more power. Angel feels helpless despite going after bigger fish. He started by attacking Wolfram&Hart's clients, then fought their lawyers and now their founders but nothing he has done seems to stop them. Its partly an illusion, they sometimes pretend to not be upset when he foils their plans but its partly true. How do you fight an enemy that always persists in some form?
The Testimony of Mushroom
2024-09-02 10:58:59 +0000 UTCMy thought with Holland is that when a human dies their soul goes elsewhere. My guess is Wolfram and Hart employees sign a contract saying the firm gets control of their soul. So maybe part of that control is being able to return it to their body at will to kind of make them a slave sentient zombie of sorts. All speculation.
Captain Hammer
2024-09-02 07:52:08 +0000 UTCThe score in this episode is so wonderfully haunting. Sometimes I'll just watch the montage after Angel gets out of the elevator because I can't find the score that plays over it anywhere else. I thought Kate was annoying too at first, but now I really appreciate her as a cautionary tale of repressing your feelings. After her mom died, her dad told her that "gone's gone, and there is no use wallowing." and she has been bottling her feelings ever since. After her dad died, she killed the vampires that killed him, but that didn't make her grief go away. So, not knowing how to deal with her feelings, she distracted herself by taking out her rage out on all things supernatural. Now that she doesn't have her job to distract herself anymore, her grief that she tried to lock away became too much to handle.
Lime Pie
2024-09-02 05:09:42 +0000 UTCI think the title even meant to be a play on Buffy 2x13, SURprise. (even though reprise is pronounced differently.)
El
2024-09-02 05:06:48 +0000 UTCI think everything else was talked about... I did observe another character development with Wesley in that he actually got angry enough to forget that he had a gunshot wound. As a result, he stood up literally to Angel and popped six stitches. Could we imagine any of that in Buffy? No, it was the Angel show in which he is becoming a complete character instead of a cipher. For Cass, I don't mind the discussion as if most of us haven't seen the show already. It's part of the experience sharing in my view. Happy watching.
Michael Labs
2024-09-02 05:06:21 +0000 UTCThis is one of my favorite Angel episodes. I think the "reprise" in the title means a reprisal of the situation in "Innocence", the Buffy S2 episode where Angel turns evil. I like how that episode was an allegory for traumatic sexual experiences from a teenager's perspective, but this episode is about that kind of self-destructive adult sex, both of which are very relatable despite all the supernatural stuff going on around it.
Raymond Simon
2024-09-02 04:45:16 +0000 UTCI'm not saying I stayed up late specifically in the hopes that you'd post this tonight, but... Kate's character definitely did veer into annoying territory at the beginning of this season with the eternal ally see-saw, but I think they wrapped that up a few episodes ago. The turn started when Angel told her 'I didn't kill your father, stop blaming me for that', and it ended when she chose to let Angel go from her squadcar during Darla and Drusilla's rampage. She accepted that the supernatural is out there, she can't deal with it herself, and it's not Angel's fault. .....BUT....after that the stuff started happening that IS Angel's fault. Letting Darla & Drusilla kill the lawyers, roughing up that cop without hiding that he was working with Kate, etc. Right now you could make a compelling argument that her problems really are his responsibility. And that's an oversimplification of course, but it's got a lot more meat to it than her paranoia and hatred from earlier. So overall I'd say they took what was an annoying writing flop and built an internal framework for it. I didn't get a romantic vibe from Wesley's phone call to Cordelia, I think it was more a search for CONNECTION. He's known Cordelia for longer than anybody else on the show -- even longer than he's known Angel -- and they've got the closest background and life history. Not SUPER close background, but "wealthy parents, posh lifestyle before losing that and getting into demon fighting". So when Virginia dumped him because she couldn't handle his lifestyle, he touched base with somebody that he (hopes) will never walk out on him. Cordelia is the closest thing he has to a best friend or sister, and so he just wanted to feel that bond with somebody. Re: Losing Angel's soul with sex, they've been very explicit on this front over the series. It's not sex ITSELF, it's the moment of "pure happiness". People frequently conflate that with having sex since it happened while he was having sex with Buffy, but he has specifically stated on several occasions that that's not what it means. He also has canonically had sex with other people while having a soul and he didn't lose it then, so it really isn't about the sex. It's about what happens DURING sex with the right partner, the right circumstances, etc.
JBK405
2024-09-02 03:15:53 +0000 UTCWhen I first watched this episode as a teenager; I thought that the Hell-elevator taking Angel to the same place he started rather than wherever they were, was the "Senior Partners" screwing with him. But now as an adult, I think that the ring took Angel where he wanted to go, in a literal genie kind of way. Angel wanted to go to the source of Wolfram&Hart's evil (part a of what he wants) so that he could fight it in a suicide mission and it would be "the end" (part b of what he wants). So the ring takes Angel to Earth where human evil allows this evil law firm to amass wealth, power, influence (part a) and Holland Manners' "Welcome to the Home Office" speech makes Angel want to give up (part b) Also the creepy doll from the previous Buffy episode was a hint that Drusilla was on the train, since she collects dolls as seen in Buffy S2.
James Smith
2024-09-02 03:08:50 +0000 UTC
