Watching yesterday's episode of Dollhouse, "Belonging", I kept thinking:

- the actors are great but Enver is fabulous. How cute Victor is!!!!
- where's Tahmoh? Do handlers get a day off when their dolls don't have any engagement?
- if Joss Whedon is not God, he is really an unconscious Catholic! Well, sort of.

Because now we know that, no matter how paradise-like the place may look and how painful the engagement may turn, the dollhouse is neither Heaven nor Hell, it's just a Purgatory. Yes, after the palimpsest on Chaucer's tales, now the show plays on Dante's territory. Once and again, it's all about the journey.

( Belonging )

I have been pondering the ending scene again and the Starbuck mystery and here are some musing/rant/thoughts that came to me while reading stuff on battlestar_blog  and commenting on an entry over there.

( Spoilers for the finale of Battlestar Galactica )

Buffy was supposed to want normal...but liked a monster in her man.

Spike was anything but normal, because he just didn't fit in the norm, no matter how much he wanted to belong. Being an anomaly, as David Fury put it during Ats season 5, was his destiny. William looked like a freak among his Victorian peers and even sounded like a freak through his poetry.Vamp!William wasn't better. Angelus, Dru and probably Darla (and above all William himself!) tried to make the young vampire fit in his new life but he kept behaving in an abnormal way...seeking Slayers when he should have tried to avoid them. The Spike we met in season 2 wasn't a normal vampire, he obvioulsy stood out and Buffy's instinct recognized the anomaly, making the most of it.

From season 4 to season 6, we got a chipped Spike that couldn't fit anywhere. He could no longer be a vampire, but he was still a freak to the human beings. He could never have been one of the Scoobies.

And of course choosing to get his soul back was quite a freak thing to do. Once again souled Spike didn't seem to fit the norm, a norm that had been set by Angel. The Scoobies weren't that suprise btw...Why? Because by then they were used to Spike's oddity.

 

In Autumn 2004 I read a friend's thesis before the viva voce in Lyon, helping her to correct a few things. Her thesis was about exorcism in Middle Ages, a topic I didn't master but that was close enough to my special field, medieval inquisition.

I do miss the academic work.

Just found an essay I wrote then, about alienation and possession in the Buffyverse.

I've been on a low-Internet diet this week. Too much work, too little time...and to be honest I kind of suffered from an indigestion of all things Internet. It happens.

So instead I actually worked and in the evenings I started reading the new Mankell's crime novel I had bought. As I'm downloading Lost, I think it's time for a meme.

Nicked from both mary5958 and alwaysjbj.

I found this through whedonesque so you may have seen it already. It's from HERE

Here are some funny entries:

I'm doing it again because I screwed up with the colours and the lj-cut is driving me mad!

After reading rahirah 's entry I went to dig in my archives and found that essay on William/Spike I wrote for the Buffy Cross and Stake Spoiler Board...Some people from my flist may already know it (so sorry to bother you with old rambling of mine), but many don't. So here's my thoughts on Sweet William.

First off here is a background…which is quite normal concerning William but there is more…Once upon a time, I got involved in an email "war" (ok I may have started it actually….) with/against some friends, about William, during summer 2002, so I gathered here some stuff from that “debate”. Rosalind, Hansel, Emma, ARN and AnInstant from the C&S were the other protagonists in the conflit mostly based on my favourite episode, Fool For Love, and on the William/Cecily scene. We actually fought over the line "They are not like you and I" and what it meant about William. Basically it was a friendly war on grammar and interpretation!

My "Ode to William" was nothing but a summary of my points...Here I've just added some stuff about the season 5 of Ats to my old post.



( Remembering William )

I watched  Battlestar Galactica 2x 19, kinda anti-climatic after Downloaded, but it was to expect and now there's one week to wait until the finale...By the way does anyone remember how Baltar called Six on Caprica before the attack in the miniseries?  I'm pretty sure we heard her name then but I can't recall it. 

Secret/hidden names is an old plot device in literature and of course it was used in the Jossverse, obviously in Ats with the Jasmine arc and  a bit more subtly in BTVS with Anne and with Dawn and the Key arc, which was foreshadowed in Buffy's dream in Restless but also, according to me, in Willow's deam when Tara and Willow wondered about the kitty and her name, a name she hadn't told them yet!

Weeks ago I read a thriller by John Katzenbach, The Analyst, that besides being a good mystery novel, made me remember AT LAST a fairy tale from my childhood I'd been trying to recall for months. I think I even asked syderia about it once, although in such a confusing way that she couldn't help me. 

The Analyst  is about Dr. Frederick Starks , a psychoanalyst who receives an anonymous letter one day from a villain who calls himself Rumplestiltskin. Starks is given  30 days in which to guess the villain's identity. If he can’t guess it, Rumplestiltskin will begin killing off people close to Dr. Starks, and he’ll keep killing, unless Starks kills himself. 

The  fairytale was written down by the Grimm Brothers. Because I'm lazy, here's a summary from Wikipedia:

In order to make himself appear more important, a miller lied to the king that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king called for the girl, shut her in a tower room with straw and a spinning wheel, and demanded that she spin the straw into gold by morning or be executed. She had given up all hope, when a dwarf (or mannikin) appeared in the room and spun straw into gold for her in return for her necklace; then again the following night for her ring. But on the third night, with nothing left, the strange creature spun straw into gold for a promise that the girl's first-born child would become his.

The greedy king was so impressed that he married the miller's beautiful daughter, but when their first child was born, the dwarf returned to claim his payment: "Now give me what you promised". The queen was frightened and offered him all the wealth she had if she could keep the child. The dwarf refused but finally agreed to give up his claim to the child if the queen could guess his name in three days. At first she failed, but before the second night, her messenger overheard the dwarf hopping about his fire and singing:

"Today I bake, tomorrow brew,

The next I'll have the young Queen's child.

Ha! glad am I that no one knew

That Rumpelstiltskin I am styled."

In case you wonder to where I was leading you...I wrote this whole entry just to justify post something I nicked from beanbeans, a meme about what your name means !

Find there

( My Result )

Get your mind out off the gutter! I'm simply avoiding the papers I should have marked during the holidays so I decided to do what nobody asked me to...Answer the fandom meme for BTVS and Ats, since it's actually the only fandom I know and belong to (I watch other shows but I don't know the fandoms).

 

( BTVS )

 

( Ats ) What would be your answers?

I don't know Ats as much as I know BTVS, I don't think it's half as good most of time, and I only own the DVDs of season 5, but now here's 

( My least favourite Ats list )

Instead of watching BTVS season 3, re-watched Why We Fight from Ats season 5. I remember that fans weren't very into it at the time. But I liked it despite the fact Spike sounded like a stupid brat during the flashbacks and I think it's an underrated episode.

( Angel's boys )