David Hine's review of "Lullaby" -- The Darla & Angel Discussion Board

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 09:37:11 11/26/01 Mon
Author: Blue
Subject: David Hine's review of "Lullaby"

ANGEL
"Lullaby," by Tim Minear

review by David Hines
rating: *1/2

Consider the ball officially dropped.

Tim Minear has not had a clunker since the first season's "Hero," which went to impressive lengths to ensure that the audience realized that Nazis were bad. He is long overdue. "Lullabye" is worth the wait.

The episode opens where we left things last week. Angel has run to the hotel. The rest of our heroes are waiting for him in the alley behind the hotel, and they're getting anxious: Darla is in the back seat of Angel's
car, and her water has just broken. What's keeping Angel? As it happens, he's run into an old acquaintance -- Holtz, who has Angel clapped in irons
in very short order. Though Angel escapes via a grenade (with a timely assist by an unintentional distraction by Lilah) in a fashion reminiscent of Spike's escape from Glory's chains on last season's BUFFY, the problems aren't over. Darla makes a break for it. Angel tracks her down, and learns that she's having a serious crisis of conscience -- as in, she has one, at least in regard to this baby. Which, she's terrified to say, she loves.

While Lilah pursues the translation of the relevant scrolls of prophecy, and Holtz is brought up to speed on the whole Angel-has-a-soul-thing, our heroes have problems of their own: Darla needs a new hideaway. Her delivery is turning out to be a ghastly failure -- it would necessitate a Caesarian, were she human; but given the mystical forces protecting the pregnancy, there's no certainty that a Caesarian would work. (Though I've got to say that there's no reason our heroes shouldn't try it if they want to save the baby's life -- if they don't, the botched labor suggests the
baby would die anyway, and it's not as if the surgery would result in anything more than a temporary inconvenience for Darla, even if it were performed by amateurs, under unsterile conditions, with a chainsaw.)
Sanctuary is needed, and Caritas, restored to a new-and-improved violence-free state (with an assist from Gunn, who serves as a calibration device), fits the bill. Unfortunately, though the Host has taken care to
eliminate any possibility of demon and human violence inside the club, he missed the loophole that allows malefactors to stand outside and toss explosives in... a loophole of which Holtz takes full advantage. So much
for Lorne's new decor.

Darla gives birth in the alley, after a fashion: she stakes herself, leaving her child in a pile of her ashes. Angel and company -- their lives spared (for the moment) by Holtz -- make off into the night with Angel's son, and on Holtz's promise of vengeance to come, we fade to black.

There are good things about "Lullabye." The actors perform their parts well, considering what they were given. The bit with Holtz's daughter is nicely merciless, especially in concept. Minear's direction of his own
script is admirable, and well up to his usual par. His script itself is not. There are a lot of things awful about "Lullabye." The writing is most of them.

The premise has some problems. Mark Twain put it well: "the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone;
or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable." The way this works out for
speculative fiction, which has miracles as its stock in trade, is that miracles must be kept to a minimum: use miracles, impossibilities, or radical suppositions about the nature of the universe to establish the rules of the world you want to tell stories in -- but the story that
follows should result from the logical consequences of those rules, and not from additional miracles helping it along at every stage.

The Darla pregnancy arc, particularly in "Lullabye," does not play out that way. For the story to get underway requires a miracle according to the rules of the Mutant Enemy universe as it has been established: Darla,
a corpse incapable of conceiving, has sex with Angel, a corpse incapable of conceiving, and becomes pregnant. ANGEL is a fantasy series, so I'll give the Mutant Enemies that much. But they want me to swallow another miracle: this baby is protected, and Darla can't get rid of it, no matter how hard she tries. Chancier, but okay ('cause hey, she'd whack it
otherwise). And another: in the couple of days before the baby is about to pop, it somehow starts influencing Darla's emotions to the point that she starts loving it. And another: at *just that time,* the pregnancy, by
another miracle, fails.

The resolution? Darla sacrifices her unlife for the life of the child. This action is not the result of a meaningful character choice: the pregnancy, a miracle threatened by a problem that exists only because of another miracle, is resolved by Darla's love -- yet another miracle. The characters are absolutely irrelevant: they're just being jerked around by the universe. Darla's pregnancy is doing its own thing. All the
characters are doing is running around.

Perhaps nothing can point this up as something that I suddenly realized in the middle of typing this review: if Angel had, rather than sparing Darla, staked her at the end of "Offspring," *it would not have made a damn bit
of difference.*

Darla's sacrifice is unsatisfying for character, as well as story, reasons. For one thing, it is a lousy exit, and undercuts the character. I adore Darla, but she's not somebody to root for. Darla's dying in a selfless act is an ending that the character does not deserve. She dies in a manner that does not befit Darla, for a reason that she herself acknowledges is externally imposed and not true to her. Darla's sudden, out-of-nowhere loving of the baby serves only two purposes for her
character: so that Darla, who does not deserve a noble exit, can get one; and so that Darla, who ordinarily would not be given to tearful scenes, can get one. Frankly, I expect this kind of crap from Marti Noxon. I do
not expect it from Tim Minear. What's next for Mutant Enemy? Suggesting that Buffy should get together with Spike? ... oh, wait.

Darla's selfless death is one morally questionable aspect of the storyline, in my view; there is another, and it has to do with Angel. Consider: sleeping with Darla (not to mention sparing her life) was the last thing Angel should have done. It was a hideously stupid and
irresponsible thing to do (albeit understandable -- after all, since I'm not going to have an opportunity to say it after this episode: "mmmmmmmm, Darla"). Angel compounded that irresponsibility by trying to forget that
unpleasant truth. What does he get out of it? A son. A *human* son, no less. And now, Darla even withdraws herself from the equation, conveniently and gracefully. And the mortal enemy in a position to kill Angel spares his life, and lets him escape with his son.

In "Reprise," Angel did something painfully stupid, irresponsible and wrong; in "Lullaby," he comes out of it *rewarded.*

Maybe it's just me, but somehow I think that's the last kind of reinforcement Angel needs.

And speaking, once again, of that ending: immediately after Darla's demise, Holtz arrives on the scene, holding a crossbow that he's pointing at Angel, Fred, and kid. This viewer was expecting (and hoping for) some horrible, emotionally searing cliffhanger -- frankly, I was expecting Holtz to kill the baby. Instead, Holtz lets Angel et al. go. The demon who brought him forward in time 200 years to kill Angel objects to this; Holtz isn't supposed to show mercy. And Holtz looks menacingly into camera and says, "I won't."

...I'm sorry, am I supposed to be scared?

Holtz is, to put it kindly, on his way to becoming a joke -- that is, if he isn't one already. "I'll get around to it" is not an attitude that makes for a compelling villain. He's beginning to remind me of The Master, on the first season of BUFFY, who lost much of his credibility as
a villain over the course of the season because he kept losing. Villains need victories, even limited ones, or it becomes very hard to take them seriously. I like Holtz as a concept and character, and I like the actor; but the character's actions really need to justify his rep.

To sum up: I detested "Lullabye." It is very nearly the single worst episode of the series since the execrable "She" (it doesn't quite beat out "Happy Anniversary"). But unlike either of those episodes, "Lullaby" is a major installment of an arc storyline, and that compounds its faults. "She" and "" sucked on their own. "Lullaby" sucks as part of a whole, and drags an entire storyline down with it. The sheer staggering nature of the problems is remarkable, ranging as it does from character writing, to storytelling. Worst of all, the characters are, unusually for Minear, fairly stupid (my favorite: Wesley and crew inexplicably get *out* of the
car to fight Holtz's demon lackeys, bizarrely forgetting -- as Darla does not -- that they're behind the wheel of a two-ton weapon). I sincerely hope the show heads in a better direction from here.

--
David Hines

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

I don't agree with that review... -- redactor, 17:43:31 11/26/01 Mon
Re: wth?!?! -- ~Amanda, 19:23:21 11/26/01 Mon