I'm waiting....

[lirazel]

Replies to my last few posts are forthcoming (I've loved all of y'all's thoughts!), but first:

I am disappointed in y'all! No one on my flist has posted about the new Season 8 preview? I need y'all's thoughts! Your fury or excitement! Where's the drama?

Come on. With the way y'all are not talking, you'd think you had actual lives or something.

Comments

[eilowyn.livejournal.com]

If he's not the really real Angel, then we've got some questionable consent issues up the wazoo again. Who, exactly, was it that Buffy space frakked?

[angearia.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's a question it's not really Angel, though. Rather, I suspect Angel coming from the IDW comics story somehow gets jettisoned into the future to witness the ruins fallout. Then is sent back to do his Rocky training as Twilight.

The Angel zooming through time caught up in Illyria's coattails in Time Bomb was still the real Angel. So, it's still him. He's just been jumping around in time and seeing scurrrrrrry things.

I just don't have faith Joss can do a time travel story well. He doesn't care enough about the details to get them right. Not the way Moffat can or the way Ben Edlund did when he wrote Time Bomb.

Tbh, I don't understand why people say a future traveler is somehow less real. That sort of thing is never mentioned in Doctor Who, is it? I don't get it.

[shapinglight]

I share your concern about Joss and time travel stories.

For one thing, I thought he's on record as saying he hates them. For another, time travel I can just about deal with in the Doctor Who way, but when they get all paradox-y, with people meeting themselves, I hate it. :(

[quinara]

I think when people say 'not real' (or at least what I mean, because I'd happily say it) is that it's not 'our' Angel. In Doctor Who and Time Bomb we see the travelling take place, so we know and understand the character progression. Without seeing it, though, the writers have an excuse to change the character however they want and explain it by saying 'something happened in another time that we didn't see', which we might buy, but at the same time it can feel like quite a large cop-out. Not that character-altering time-leaps are new for S8, but even things like future!Willow hinged on us recognising her as some form of Dark Willow from S6. This Angel? It's as yet unknown whether we'll be able to recognise him.

(For me it's the same reason why it's unusual that I'll enjoy Spuffy timetravel/portal-hopping stories where only one of them has travelled - if they're from different realities, to me they aren't 'each other's' Spike and Buffy, so it feels kind of fake.)

[kerry-220.livejournal.com]

I thought the consensus is that it's Angel from the pocket/alternate dimension where the 'time flip' at the end of AtF didn't happen. Connor's gone, W&H exist and the world's gone to hell in a hand basket. Angel's grand plan of a glorious end has shown itself to be the ludicrous self indulgent mistake it was and he's gone off his rocker.... oh, and there's two Angel's running about

That's what I heard :)

[angearia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a good theory King was speculating on. But really, everyone is flying blind with this until the issue comes out.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

Angel saw a future, but Whistler still has to school him on possible time lines, so Angel still doesn't KNOW that the only way to go is to put on a mask and manipulate Buffy into becoming his Superhoney.

I'm holding fire on all of this. It's been clear all along that time travel was in play (#10 -- If this is a time loop I'm going to do it different, being the earliest mention I can think of, though dreamspace also gives the idea of infinite possibility). But it's just now sinking in how much I don't like it. The world went badly so DOG resets the world, brings Angel back and says let's have a do-over? It might be the 'real' Angel -- but now we're in a world where nothing matters, so why should we care. But who knows? This is all quite confusing.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

So the these snowflakes are so special they get world-wide do-overs now?

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

exactly. :(

[angearia.livejournal.com]

Haha, well I think it's still jumping the gun to say future stories inevitably lead to a world where nothing matters. Terminator, Doctor Who, ST:TNG (the time loop episode)--sure, we can speculate of a way in which time travel leads to a world where nothing matters, but maybe I'm okay with this because this is what I was asking for earlier: for Angel to actually witness the dark future with his own eyes.

Who knows about the seeming conflict with Angel later conversing with Whistler.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

But, see, I think Terminator and Dr. Who both suffer from this problem -- it's why I could never be a huge fan. And as someone said above, that's not even taking into account the fact that we haven't been following this Angel's story, so it's all deus ex machina.

I'm not giving up! I hope it'll make sense, etc. etc. But we'll have to see.

(And yeah, the good aspect of it would be if Angel actually knew -- but I don't read him as actually knowing, so...)

[angearia.livejournal.com]

Terminator and Doctor Who are two of my favorite shows (just rewatched T:SCC and just saw Series 5) and I never had a problem with that, so I guess it's a suspension of disbelief hurdle for some folks.

I think deus ex machina isn't the correct term, especially if Angel's time travel is linked to ToYL (time loops, alternate futures, being sent to a future to be warned).

It seems to me this is being called deus ex machina merely because the development is coming to light at the end. I think it's a plot twist reveal, not deus ex machina.

Now there's no doubt it's problematic all of Angel's story is being crammed into this finale. A few months ago, I was one of the first people to say this was a problem and that if Season 8 hadn't kept the audience in the dark but revealed his identity to the audience, then they could've more deftly built up his story. But simply by keeping him in the mask and shifting his development backstory to the finale doesn't read as deus ex machina to me.

This preview is reminding me more and more of Becoming, starting with all these Angel flashbacks that will lead into present Buffy interaction where she's teamed up with Spike.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean the term in any precise sense -- more just a short hand to say that there's a difference between a show following characters as they move back and forth in time and a story where the time traveller gets blasted in to the plot to do whatever it is that time travelling Angel is to do. Whatever Angel's experiences have been, they aren't the main story here.

I liked T:SCC (except for the cumbersome name), but it really was a problem for me that actions just never were going to matter... everything was just going to get reset and undone all the time. Dr. Who I still can't make sense of.

I like your last thought! Though I'm sure part of my grumpiness at present (besides the fact that yesterday was just a bag of disappointment on all my personal fronts) is Moscow's -- I wanted this issue to start with the guy on the cover. Throw in a bit of LOST fatigue -- at some point you need to be answering more questions than you're raising. But leaving aside the fact that these pages are about the wrong guy, I have in general been hoping for the comics to follow the structure not just of becoming, but of the whole show (of which Becoming was a nice mini-mirror).

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Best answer is probably Meltzer.