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

[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).