
I'm watching your average commercial break during an episode of Law and Order. In this episode, the characters investigate a brutal murder where a pit bull trained to kill breaks loose and chases down a jogger.
I'm commenting on this because half of the commercials were about dogs and dogfood.
Doesn't anybody vet these things?
Rimshot!
What do you do in the event of a terrorist attack? Consult these useful signs. It's quite a funny website.
I enjoyed this week's Buffy. It was interesting how they linked to Willow's appearance on :Angel:, one week after that episode happened. I'll talk more, here, but be warned, there are spoilers, so don't click (or don't scroll down) if you don't want to see...
The Buffy episode was the standard high-quality fare. Not the spectacular Storyteller, but it still had plenty to recommend it: more Spike, Spike and Wood finally having that confrontation, and more of Spike's past revealed. There were some icky moments -- the slug stone in Spike's eye was one thing, but Spike's mother getting all Freudian on him was quite another.
I'm sure the Spike Redemption Society had a fit when, after all was said and done, and the trigger removed from Spike's mind, Spike still went for Principle Wood. Of course Wood lives, but Spike walks away from that encounter as edgy as ever. He's still unpredictable, although I still give 50-50 odds of him not living out the series.
:Angel:'s episode the week before was better, in my opinion. There was more action in it, and Eliza Dushku stood out more as Faith. They took a risk inserting yet another virtual reality episode into the show (says the fanzine editor who put in no less than five such stories in :Trenchcoat:). I know from experience that when these stories work, they can blow the lid off of the storyline that had been building up to that time. When they don't work, they disrupt the narrative and stick out like a sore thumb.
Truth be told, the virtual reality element of this story (Angel, this is your life!) was nothing to write home about. However, the story carried itself along with the help of Faith, Angelus and guest-star Willow Rosenberg. The writers were smart enough to insert a fair amount of comic relief into the storyline, which the actors carried off with aplomb. The best line of the night was Faith's delighted, "Man, you saved a puppy!" That was laugh-out-loud funny.
Willow's appearance was welcome as well. Not only was she a breath of light that the Angel crew needed at that point (her scene with Wesley -- especially interesting because these two actors are married to each other, now -- really contrasted and compared these two characters; and I think Willow has given Wesley a lot to think about). Willow was powerful. Just like Faith, she came in and kicked butt. And, just like Faith, she was nicely matched. The beastmaster (nicely played in the guise of Cordelia) was a worthy opponent. The scenes between Willow and Cordelia were tense, and Cordelia's fight back was well played.
So, Angel has hit a high spot, and Buffy is just cruising along. Given all of the major problems that occurred behind the scenes early this season, the production crew has really pulled things out of a hat. I'm less enamoured of how much scrambling they had to do on Angel to get here (piling on big bad after big bad in a way that felt like an act of desperation), but Cameron is right: the upshot of this is that I've no idea what's happening next. And the recent episodes are good enough that I believe that things will make sense in the end.