Angel - Life of the Party
Feb. 11th, 2004 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lathanyI enjoyed this one, particularly the second half. The similarity to Something Blue was notable, but didn't ruin my enjoyment of the episode (compare with Spin the Bottle vs Tabula Rasa). It was also my second favourite Halloween episode (after Halloween) and the "biggest party of the year" idea was a good one. It was satisfying to see Lorne get centre stage after the last few episodes. Plus the bit where the slave ran away was a nice touch. Finally, I liked the fact that the party was said to have gone better than those in previous years...
...which takes me onto the continuity issues. Now, I agree that removing Connor probably rewrites a bit of history, but the team are still in Wolfram and Hart - right ? So they must still have had most of The Beast / Jasmine stuff to have (not) saved the world from - right ? So... how come there are Wolfram and Hart employees around who have seen previous Halloween dos (eg. Knox and the two Lorne speaks to) ? Weren't they all killed by the Beast ? And why do they still talk about all the employees being "evil" ? All that singing in Conviction was supposed to remove the worst of them and leave those tending more towards selfish (or, in D&D terms "neutral").
But, having got those continuity moans out of my system, I still think it was a good episode.
...which takes me onto the continuity issues. Now, I agree that removing Connor probably rewrites a bit of history, but the team are still in Wolfram and Hart - right ? So they must still have had most of The Beast / Jasmine stuff to have (not) saved the world from - right ? So... how come there are Wolfram and Hart employees around who have seen previous Halloween dos (eg. Knox and the two Lorne speaks to) ? Weren't they all killed by the Beast ? And why do they still talk about all the employees being "evil" ? All that singing in Conviction was supposed to remove the worst of them and leave those tending more towards selfish (or, in D&D terms "neutral").
But, having got those continuity moans out of my system, I still think it was a good episode.
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Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 04:12 am (UTC)The problem here is that TSR never knew what they were trying to do with the alignment system, and had the moral philosophy credentials of an educationally subnormal yak. Hence different versions of D&D had different meanings for the alignments, the alignment set never spanned all possible (or indeed all likely) characters, and any given alignment set was rarely consistent.
Hence all this stuff should at least be qualified by version. D&D1-chaotic might be the most selfish of the 6 possible "trends", but it doesn't necessarily follow that the same is true of AD&D2-chaotic. In AD&D 2nd, for example, a Lawful Evil character serves his group but promotes its ends to the exclusion of the interests of all possible other groups, so is ultimately far more selfish than a Chaotic Good character who has little concern for avoiding anti-social behaviour, but is strongly sympathetic to the interests of other individuals.
If I were going to try to make any sense of the irredeemable, I'd say that "selfish-unselfish" is a characterisation of the chaotic-lawful axis by the lawful. A chaotic might characterise it as "progressive-reactionary" and a neutral as "individualist-conformist" or perhaps "libertarian-authoritarian".