Previously: Gina Torres magicked everyone into submission, but Fred saw that she’s actually a crazy bug-flesh monster and ran away after a failed assassination attempt.
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The Magic Bullet
Sweeney: Because Gina Torres, things are decidedly un-Angel-like as we’re played into the episode with The Beach Boys “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” You know shit’s messed up because of all this happiness.
Lorraine: Weirdly, I always associate this song with Drew Barrymore. Thanks, 50 First Dates!
Kirsti: Clearly, there’s some kind of weird connection between Drew Barrymore and The Beach Boys because, you know, Never Been Kissed…
Sweeney: This is interrupted when Fred runs into the side of a car, being chased by Wes and Gunn. They think they’ve caught her but it’s a woman who just got her jacket from a stranger who told her that Gina Torres wanted her to have it. She’s super excited because Gina Torres is the best forever. They pause to fanboy with Jacket Fangirl before continuing their pursuit. The camera pans down to Fred hiding out underground. Electric Cellos.
Hyperion is now converted to Cult HQ as Lorne has to turn people away because they’re so desperate to stay there. One dude even offers his house, which Lorne declines because Gina Torres is the new Big Bag of Racist Money in allowing the gang to do “good” deeds for their own sake with no regard to the cost of living in LA. I’ll take your house, though! Give it to me! He says it has a pool and everything! (L: Spoken like a true, poor blogger.) Lorne and this guy gush about how much they want to be near Gina Torres.
K: Also, it’s revealed that Lorne’s heart is in his butt, which makes me laugh far more than it should.
Lor: Well, we are reminded about his butt-heart, at least, but laugh away.
Sweeney: She appears with Connor and Angel behind her and everyone, “Oohs and aahs.” She touches a pregnant Chinese lady’s stomach and promises (in Mandarin) that it will lead a healthy and loving life. If her touch made that one dude look like he’d been doused in nuclear waste, is this going to make this fetus turn into a demon baby? I suspect fetuses would be extra sensitive to Gina Torres magic.
Lor: She spoke Mandarin which I’m going to have to assume was a kind of nod to Firefly. Can you imagine being Gina Torres at this point? This amazing show you were just on gets cancelled and the brilliant show creator is all, “but I have this other show.” “Awesome,” Gina Torres thought. “This will be great. And what could be weirder than cowboys in space?”
K: I feel for both Gina Torres AND Nathan Fillion when they found out the roles they’d be playing.
Sweeney: Angel asks Gina Torres how she always knows what each person needs to hear. She says she just looks into their hearts. Also their faces. In Spanish, she compliments a man on his excellent mustache. This man is in the presence of what he believes to be a deity of some sort and the thing he most wanted to hear was confirmation that his mustache is the finest in the land. His priorities are clearly in their proper order.
Just as Gina Torres is promising Connor that he can one day see what she sees, Gunn and Wes return. Connor and Angel duck into the office to chat with them. The music gets very spooky as Angel says that Fred learned a thing or two at Angel Inc., (L: OR IN PYLEA.) but they’ll get her soon. Connor asks why anyone would reject love and Gunn says that she has a history of doing that.
Lor: Glad to see that not even perfect happiness will allow Gunn to let that one go.
K: This season has been pretty big with making all the characters into douchebags, huh?
Sweeney: As The Sausage Fest Quartet resolves to go find Fred, Gina Torres asks a woman and the dude who offered up his house to with her up to her room. Bow chicka! I didn’t know you were that kind of faux-deity, GT! Gunn and Wes sigh that maybe it can be their turn one day, but not until after they find Fred.
Segue Magic to her entering a bookstore. She’s met the bookstore guy before and he’s a total That Guy. IMDB tells me he’s had a bit part in damn near everything, and I assumed I just recognized him in that general sense, until I spotted Veronica Mars among his credits. He’s a douchey HR guy in Weevil’s final arc of the series.
Lor: This guy was even on Sister, Sister, which is like an epic feat of being in all the things. But, anyways, I definitely recognize him as Jimmy Barrett in Mad Men.
K: I recognise him from when he was in that episode of Charmed where Phoebe got called for jury duty and decided the guy was innocent and convinced the rest of the jurors of that fact by SUMMONING THE GHOST OF THE MURDER VICTIM. I can’t imagine why it stuck in my mind.
Sweeney: Before he was a Douchey HR Guy, he was the non-emotive owner of a demonic bookstore that lost all its business once Gina Torres made everything perfect. He still believes in all the same stuff, but doesn’t worry now. Our Soon To Be Bankrupted Bookstore Owner rummages through his drawer, rightly scaring the shit out Fred when he pulls out a gun. He’s not going to kill her, though – he guesses that Fred wants mind control books in order to use mind control to make the rest of the world know the love of Gina Torres. Fred earns a retroactive 4×18 gold star when she responds, “That’s exactly right. Why should we be the only shiny happy people.”
I know we don’t usually do retroactive title stars, but she’s blatantly naming the previous episode and also is having a really shit go of things. It’s the least I can do for her.
Lor: That was awful nice. Is this Gina Torres’s influence?
K: Dude, Fred needs all the help she can get right now.
Sweeney: Anyway, he tells her that they don’t need to use the tools of “the man” when they have “the woman” and they need to trust that Jasmine’s love will reach the rest of the world the same way it reached them.
In the sewers, Connor and Angel have a bonding moment over their shared super sense-o-smell. Creepy, but cute. That’s a combo not yet in our creepcabulary! Creepdorable? (L: Nice.) Less with the -dorable in more with the creep is Connor’s explanation that Holtz used to help him practice his super sense of smell (which he discovered as young as 5 or 6) by tying him to trees and running away. Five days to track him was a sort of personal best. Angel is appropriately horrified by this aspect of Connor’s childhood. I feel for our resident Connor defender because this is the sort of conversation the show should have worked in ages ago. As much as his shitty past was implied, this is the sort of thing we should have heard before we watched him brat around and do dumb shit. It’s too late to change the way all of that was watched and felt and it’s a shame that they gave this character so little chance to be sympathetic.
K: A+. I have more Connor feels in the last couple of episodes than I have spread over his entire arc to date.
Sweeney: Their tracking is interrupted when Gina Torres mind summons them back to Cult Hotel. Now that Jasmine has her full Sausage Fest Quintet assembled in her diva chambers she informs them that they’re mystically connected and she wants to see if they can use that to track Fred. Angel and Connor hold her hands and I hope their superpowers include a resistance to the destructive touch of Gina Torres.
Lor: I love that you keep mentioning her destructive touch. Maybe we if do it enough times, we’ll force the show to address it. Maybe.
Sweeney: Probably not, though.
They stand in a circle and do a Fred Visualization Exercise. “Where are you Fred? I’m looking for you.”
Fred arrives at a dodgy motel (K: Possibly the same one where Holtz hung out when he first came back from Quortoth?) and every random person she passes does an almost Exorcist-like turn of the head towards her as she passes them. Fred notices this and realizes that it’s time to get the fuck out.
Gina Torres tells Fred that there’s nowhere to run because her love is all around. People are chasing her in cars, causing accidents. Car accident driver starts a fire and gets out of the car IN FLAMES telling Fred not to be scared. Understanding PR for the non-converted isn’t a strong suit of the average possessed cultist. (L: A+)
After a Not Break, Connor notices Gina Torres’s hand is smoking. They break the circle and help her sit down as she nearly faints. Her hands are badly burnt. What about her legs and all the rest of her that was totes burnt on this guy? I’m not following this big of magic.
GT insists that she doesn’t need no stinking doctor because she was able to see Fred clear as she sees them. She adds that everybody who loves Gina Torres is now helping her stalk Fred. Somewhere Christian Grey is cursing his misfortune that he didn’t have powers like this. (K: OH GOD, WHAT A CONCEPT.) Sausage Fest also has powers now, though, because they can sense problems in the hotel and who among their guests can fix them.
Gina Torres wants them to GTFO so she can rest, but not before she gets a little solo time with the blonde twins in the lobby. I can no longer tell if I’m projecting the innuendo or if it’s actually there.
Lor: C, all of the above?
Sweeney: Stay tuned to find out!
Fred is walking along a fairly empty street and an SUV passes her by and then violently kicks it in reverse. In her attempt to flee, she stumbles down a hill and into an underground cave where she’s attacked by a green dwarf. She quickly gets the upperhand and grabs an ax. She tells the suspenders-wearing demon to chillax so she can think.
Cult Hotel. Wesley is telling the crowd that Fred is armed, dangerous, and insane, in spite of being graceful and full of gentle beauty. She’s a siren waiting to lure them to heresy and destruction! After that intimidating speech, it’s Lorne’s turn to do his A+ Host thing. He says that tonight is Open Mic night. We cut to a montage of people taking their turns at the mic. A child who wrote a poem, a sobbing woman, a chanting dude, and a deaf woman who signs that she wants to be in Fred’s skull to explode her brain for rejecting Gina Torres. The only musical performances are from Lorne and a Connor/Angel duet. This is an easy victory, but I think it’s the single cutest moment Connor has yet been a part of.
Lor: Plus another Barry Manilow reference. It all helps you forget that Connor’s cutest moment is essentially singing a ballad to an evil deity who is also his child with his dad’s almost girlfriend.
K: Unfortunately, Connor seems to have inherited Angel’s inability to hold a tune because in addition to being kind of hilarious, it’s also incredibly painful to listen to. No, Gunn, we should NOT be doing this every night.
Sweeney: I disagree. MOAR CRAPPY FATHER/SON DUETS. LESS MISUNDERSTANDING AND BROODING.
Fugitive Cave. Fred and Suspenders Demon discuss how they’ve both been exiled by Gina Torres. Suspenders wants to worry about it in the morning, but Fred notices that he’s got some human hands on the floor and Suspenders attacks, taking a good bite out of Fred’s shoulder. She reaches for the ax again, this time lodging it in his skull. So much for that ally.
She gets srsbsns face before we cut to her standing outside Magic Bullet Books. No gold stars for shop window signs. She says she’s there and Gina Torres can come get her, to the crowd of crazies gathered around her. Inside the store, she holds her ax, but That Guy promises that Gina Torres gave her strict orders not to hurt Fred. He asks for her autograph. Fred reaches in his drawer for a pen, asking who to make it out to as Gina Torres enter-nounces that she should make it out to her. She thanks That Guy by confirming that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, without a second gunman. Fun fact: the JFK museum was one of the first activities on our mini Snark Lady retreat, because we know how to have good, educational fun! You know, spending a couple hours in museums on presidential assassinations. Bonding!
Lor: So far, the two stories we’ve told on this blog about Dallas (both on Angel recaps) have been about being without our stuff and going to see the JFK museum. EVERYONE WANTS TO HANG OUT WITH US RIGHT NOW. I’m sure of it.
K: Especially once you add in the “What time do the panties come off?” story from when we were all in Chicago… The answer is still Never O’Clock, weird man. Sorry not sorry.
Sweeney: Gina Torres tells Fred that she loves her and nothing she does or says can change that. “I’m so sorry,” Fred answers. She’s talking to Angel, though, hoping that he can forgive her. She fires a bullet into Gina Torres’s shoulder. It goes through her and it hits Angel. (I don’t know enough about bullets to comment on the sense-making of this moment. My ignorance accepts it at face value, but my recapper self feels obligated to note that a more knowledgeable person might call bullshit.) (I do call bullshit on the delayed reaction to the gun thing, though.)
Lor: It seems to be something of an echo of last episode too. Fred apologized, fired at Gina, and ended up hitting Angel. Same sort of deal here as well. Maybe we ignore logistics for cool callbacks!
K: Isn’t ignoring logistics what this show does best?
Sweeney: He vamps out and attacks Fred. I’m a little slow because I truly didn’t get where this was going until it happened — I assumed she was going to try to murder Gina Torres with the gun. As vamped!Angel has Fred by the throat, she tells him to look at Gina Torres. He does and sees the same worm faced nastiness that Fred saw last time.
Angel drops the gun and backs away, sans vamp grill. Gina Torres realizes that it was her blood that showed Fred and now Angel her true self. Connor goes towards Angel, but Gina Torres tells him that he’s as dead to them as Fred is. After those cute Father/son fun-times! Sads. Also inevitable. Fred grabs the gun again and fires a few more shots into Gina Torres.
Connor knocks Fred out and grabs the gun before attacking Angel. After Angel gets thrown across the room, he picks up an unconscious Fred and flees through the back. Connor wants to chase them down, but Gina Torres is bleeding from her multiple bullet wounds and, as such, has bigger shit to worry about.
That Guy emerges from hiding to note that there’s a lot of blood. Gina Torres tells them to stay away from it. Connor asks if they should clean it up, but she says they should just burn it to the ground and That Guy happily agrees. He lights a book on fire and calls after them to ask if he she should stay in his burning book store. For the egregious sin of book burning, he should definitely consider it.
Cult Hotel. Tables are set up in the lobby and everyone is eating a big happy meal. Lorne, Gunn, and Wesley (whose departure apparently came before Angel saw the worms, but I don’t really recall when that happened) can’t properly enjoy their meal without Gina Torres present. Something is off but they can’t pinpoint it without her there. Lorne spots her arriving with Connor. She’s got a cloak to cover her bullet wounds.
Upstairs, Gina Torres informs the men that Fred infected Angel, making Angel lost to them. Gina Torres claims that her kindness to Fred opened the door to Fred’s hate and she won’t allow that to happen again. “We must eradicate their hate.”
She selects three more randoms to go upstairs with her. She’s building up to full-fledged orgies. Gunn, Wesley, and Lorne lament Angel’s flip-flopping on the good/evil thing, but it’s NBD now because Gina Torres wants him dead so he’s going to die.
Cut to Fred, coming to in a dark abandoned space of some sort. Angel is sitting in the shadows brooding. You know, it’s been a surprisingly long time since I’ve written what should be such a ubiquitous sentence. Angel says he misses Gina Torres so much, and Fred says that she still does too even after a week. She explains the blood thing, and by extension why she shot Gina Torres and Angel, guessing that she got some in her system during the shirt cleaning.
Lor: My first thought was, “was she licking the shirt clean?” but then I remembered that we got a very specific, “I washed this until my fingers bled,” line earlier. Got it. Because shirt licking would be weird.
Sweeney: Angel tells Fred that she did the right thing and was very brave. She’s scared and not like Angel. “Not a CHAMPION.” (Mentioned solely because it’s Kirsti’s favorite drinking game.)
Lor: And still, never once during this whole ordeal was it mentioned or alluded to that homegirl is a SURVIVOR and has already proved that.
K: SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS!!! (The funny part of this being my favourite game is that the strongest thing I drink is pear cider…) And YES, LOR. I hate that the minute any of the guys turn up in this season, Fred’s character automatically becomes all weak and “I’m not a man, so I can’t do this”-y.
Sweeney: I have mixed emotions about that. On the one hand, I don’t feel like Fred has grown tremendously as a character. I would really like to see the other members of the gang step the fuck up and point Fred’s bravery out to her. An additional line to that effect from Angel would have served this scene greatly. That said, it’s also nice to see someone actually freak the fuck out in this circumstance, you know? I loved Fred’s range of panicked emotion in the last episode. It’s made all the better this time around as we watch Angel grapple with it instantly (because he sees her right away) whereas Fred presumably had these same, “It’s all a lie” feelings, but wasn’t able to accept them until (a) seeing maggot-faced Gina Torres -and- (b) confirming with the other dude who saw what she saw. Her freakout, then, is partially a product of her isolation. As such, I mind Fred’s reaction a lot less than the fact that Angel didn’t bring up any of the vast evidence to the contrary.
Moving on. Angel is starting to come up with an idea when they hear voices nearby. Fred grabs Angel and kisses him, hoping the people will keep going. They do not. They identify Fred and Angel and attack.
Cult Hotel. Gina Torres leads her new picks into Diva Chambers and tells Connor to stand watch. He’s clearly bummed because he thought he was invited to the orgy. Inside, she makes them take their clothes off, lending an awful lot of credence to my orgy theory.
Elsewhere forgotten and comatose Cordelia is sleeping. Two people watch over her, I guess a “being in the presence of Mary” kind of thing. They leave and Angel and Fred come tumbling into the window. Angel’s not happy about their plan, but accepts that they’ve got to do it. He pulls out a knife and just as he’s about to stick her with it, Cordelia grabs his hand.
After a Not Break, he’s freaking out that she’s awake, but Fred insists that comatose people sometimes do weird involuntary shit like that. Angel tears up as he says that she could be waking up – stranger things have happened. (L: Like putting Charisma Carpenter in a freaking coma…) Fred tells him that they should just get this over with. Using that “we” when it seems like Angel’s the only one doing the slicing.
In the hallway outside Diva Chambers, Connor rests his head against the door and closes his eyes as we see glowy green light through the cracks.
K: So Jasmine’s the Key? I thought we already dealt with that storyline…
Sweeney: Coma Suite. As they’re wrapping up, Lorne enters the room, wanting to pay his respects. They stay silent, anxiously hoping to just wait him out. As Lorne is saying a little prayer for heeeer (super loudly, I might add – if you go into a space where people are silently getting down with their supreme being of choice, isn’t it rude as fuck to be so chatty?) he notices that her hand is bleeding. He starts to ask what the hell they’re doing and Angel jumps up and covers his mouth.
Diva Chambers. Gina Torres emerges, glowing green. Connor tells her that she’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. He asks where those people are and she says she ate them. “Cool.” he answers. Blame it on possession all you want, but that reply was spoken like someone who would wear your skin. (L: YEP.) (K: DEFINITELY.)
Coma Suite. Lorne takes a swig of a flask, presumably having come around to the truth. “Hallelujah,” he mutters before we cut to him in the lobby, preparing for his turn as Judas. The lobby is nearly empty, save for Gunn and Wesley, who Lorne beckons upstairs. As soon as they’re in the room we hear Lorne knock them both out with a baseball bat.
K: I call bullshit on Lorne being able to knock out Wes AND Gunn. Like, as much as I love him, the only non-singing muscles he regularly exercises are the ones required to take his cocktail glass to his mouth. Wes and Gunn are out fighting – and being sprung from behind – on a daily basis. One at a time? Lorne could probably get it done. But at the same time? Yeah, no.
Sweeney: We don’t actually see what happened there, so it’s probably fair to assume that Angel was involved in taking them down.
Cut to later when they have the same depressed looks that Lorne did. Angel and Fred explain that they guessed that Cordelia might share a blood link with Gina Torres in addition to the mystical one. The others aren’t too pleased with this enlightenment. Fred’s freaking out because even if they develop a synthetic version, she can’t fathom how they can defeat something so powerful. Angel says he doesn’t know, but priority #1 is his son. Wesley volunteers as tribute, adding none-too-proud that he’s kidnapped Connor before.
In the halls the tinkly orchestra does its thing as a stone-faced Wesley leads a giddy Connor (probably the most childish he’s ever looked). He doesn’t seem to do the super smell to detect his dad or Fred. Inside, he freaks out as they capture him. Wesley slices his chest open and puts blood in the wound. He stills after a bit. Fred promises that the sadness is normal, but will pass. Angel asks if Connor understands why they’re there and he only nods in response. It baffles my mind that nobody presses for further clarification from this shifty-eyed shit, but I guess he’s always so shifty-eyed that it’s hard to tell.
Connor backs out into the hallway and shouts, “They’re here! Come quick, they’re here.” End credits.
Womp. This show. We don’t do much in the way of end-of-episode thoughts on Pretty Little Liars because the show is so cracked out ridiculous that there’s not much more to say than, “Welp, that’s another episode!” That’s about how I feel about this show now. Same basic level of, “Fun-ish because I have no expectations that it’s going to be anything better than cracked out crazy.” Basically, I enjoy this show because I’ve given up on any hope that it’ll ever be a legitimately “good” show. They do some interesting things with this show, format-wise and I guess points for trying interesting stuff, but we’ve long since crossed the point of no return on hoping/expecting the execution to ever be “good.”
Lor: There just wasn’t a ton here anyways. I mean, it was probably more entertaining than a large portion of any of the Beast/Beastmaster stuff, but in general, it felt pretty shallow. Angel has never really constructed itself like a traditional show, and we see that here with the big bad showing up in episode 18 and by episode 19 the key players have already found a way to break her influence. I’m not complaining per se, but it should be noted that at this point, they are just flying through these plot points. There are so many random pieces being thrown our way and so many inconsistencies that must be forgotten or ignored in order to truly enjoy this episode.
I cannot so I did not, but it also wasn’t the worse we’ve seen.
K: At least nothing got retconned this time?
Sweeney: Little victories.
Next time: The Fang Gang hangs out in sewers as they try to figure out a way to defeat Gina Torres in Angel S04 E20 – Sacrifice.
Sweeney (all posts)
I collect elaborate false eyelashes, panda gifs, and passport stamps. Reconciling my aversion to leaving the house/wearing pants with my deep desire to explore everything is my life's great struggle. I like language; semicolons bring fantastic things to the party, like letting it last longer.
Lorraine (all posts)
I'm a 20-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
Kirsti (all posts)
I'm a grad student who's staring down the barrel of 30 and I still live with my parents because I'm super broke. My degree is in information management, which is a fancy way of saying librarianship, which is a fancy way of saying "I get to read young adult books and have it count as studying". I have an inexplicable love for 90s television, eat too much chocolate, and tweet about the random crap that happens to me on public transport more than I should.