Oh for fuckin' squee.


I miss episodes of Angel like this. I mean, welcome home, Gunn! You were clearly on your way back, but with this episode, I declare you our boy again.

While I disagree with the amount of time it took to break up the Bermuda Triangle, I think the purpose of this episode was to reintroduce Gunn in a way that made the audience care about him and reground where he fits as a character and a member of the group.

It also rather emphasized the emotional immaturity of Fred, something that I think that was completely glossed over in the writers' complete hatred or indifference to Fred in S3. Let's consider this. Fred was a supergenius child, if AA interviews and the relative youth of the character mean anything (Fred at the very least should be 29 by now. I would guess that she's about 25), Fred was very very young in college and her first year of graduate school. I'm a young graduate student at 24. If Fred was 19 or 20 and a first year physics grad, she was an emotional retard. She didn't know anything but her portals. Maybe she was crushing on her first man. From her reaction to Willow, I think it's clear that before Fred went to Pylea, she didn't have time to examine her sexuality. And then she went to a hell dimension and went mad for five years. She had to focus on survival.

Then she came back and found herself in the center of a very flattering love triangle. No matter how either Wesley or Gunn acted (like jackasses), I have to admit that you'd have to be blind or asexual not to be flattered and aroused by having two smoking hot men wanting you. And when Fred chooses Gunn...it's a question of two things. On the one hand, Fred has the canniest, most sophisticated survival instincts of anyone on Angel, and I am pretty sure her rejection of Wes is about realizing that he's not safe, he is dark. Meanwhile, Gunn is a little more open, he likes taking her for pancakes, they probably both remember being 12 or 13 and hating Vanilla Ice and watching Wonder Years. And Gunn is hotter than a hot thing. And he likes her. And he buys her flowers. In short, it's easy to see why Fred thinks she's totally in love with Gunn, and can we really blame Gunn for enjoying the bright sunny "first love" of Fred? She really is a remarkable woman for surviving Pylea, she's amazingly bright, and she's quick to adapt to the hell of AI.

Now unfortunately for Gunn, Fred is also extremely manipulative, and extremely shallow when it comes to love. I'm not blaming her for this. Fred is emotionally about sixteen when it comes to love, due to obvious factors. Who blames a sixteen year old girl for being bad with love? Add in her tendency to be a moral binarist, and Gunn/Fred was doomed, especially when you add in Fred's ongoing fascination with Wesley which she continues to lie about. But her comment in "Release" about wanting it to be simple is very telling, as is her three week bounce between possible partners. One week she wants Gunn, the next week she's got an overt girlcrush on Willow, and this week she's back to crushing on Wes? I think it's fair to say that Fred hasn't ever been in love and that she doesn't understand.

And that brings us to Wesley and Lilah. Fred thinks everyone's opinion on Lilah should be easy: Lilah's evil. Wesley was only fucking her because Wesley was very very hurt and emotionally sick because of what happened to Connor and because they abandoned him. Probably Fred is just naive enough to think Lilah put some sort of evil woman sex whammy on Wes and it's not really his fault that he stayed with the sketchy ho. And that when Wesley realized the evil woman was using him, he dumped her like a good boy, and hated her for using him.

It obviously blows Fred's mind that this wasn't the case, and that just maybe, Wesley loved Lilah. And clearly, Wesley had a long drive to Stockton to consider exactly how he felt about Lilah. And I'm not quite sure what he's concluded. My romantic side says, "she was the One!" but I would guess it's more along the lines of what I've said in my fic/rants about what Lilah did for Wesley. She taught him a great deal about using all that internal power of his to get the job done and not feeling guilty for it. And Wesley was an apt pupil; he did very badly by Lilah and didn't say sorry...because she understood/would have understood the job had to be done. I think between Lilah and Faith, Wesley has finally accepted his ruthless side as a necessary part of himself, and I'm not sure if Willow helped him understand that he's not necessarily the Prince of Darkness and that he has a job to do at Angel Investigations. The last part, I know he believes.

So back to Gunn. squee. I think the message is, Gunn is his own man, too. And rather than Wesley finding his own path, it's maybe Gunn who needs to back away from the psychodrama that is Angel Investigations. I think it's bad for him, and I don't think AI appreciates Gunn enough, not because they don't realize Gunn is smart, but because Gunn's smarts are a skill duplicated by the others and that maybe he doesn't have a place there as part of the family. Also, I don't think Gunn thrives in the turgid, soap-opera world that Angel creates. And this doesn't make Gunn shallow. It makes Gunn not melancholic. And frankly, he'll be better off if he's in environments more like Gwen's. Gunn would be a pretty swank secret agent, a la Alias, and I hope Greenwalt is speaking true and the new format of AI allows for more of that, more of Gunn shining and behaving like this and having fun macking with his girl Gwen.

I have more, but maybe tomorrow. I think my brain's exploded.