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Great episode.
Me? Watched my father die on Wednesday. Burying him on Sunday. -
Oh also, because I like puzzling at things hypothetical and on which I really don't know all that much, I really am further impressed by Jack's prowess. Where Caz isn't just pretending to be an engineer, but is actually brilliant, Jack isn't just hanging out on the water keeping a lazy eye open for shiny things.
A pistol in a small island nation that made firearms illegal ages ago is pretty nifty* find, but not hard if police armouries are basically abandoned thanks to apocalypse. However, a silencer?! Not to say they're unheard of, but would have to be *rare* not to mention, kept well in secret by their owners. Just doesn't seem like the thing folks who are permitted by law to be armed would be further allowed to have. So. Very nicely done there.
*nifty, describing the skill involved in finding it, not meant to modify "now you can kill people!" -
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CommentAuthormister hex
- CommentTimeJul 17th 2009
@ johnplatt - aw, man. Sorry to hear that. Dude. I'd hug you or something but it's the Internet.
Really. I'm sorry. I wish I could say/do more. -
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@Fan
That was Connor who said "Your name's Alice..." Not KK ;) -
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CommentAuthormister hex
- CommentTimeJul 17th 2009 edited
@ razrangel - you'd be surprised at what people have that they keep secret. Jack got rope when they needed rope. Knew where he might find it or at least where to start looking. And I imagine that's his personal silencer. Be a useful thing to have, alone on the boat, being able to pick people off silently. Plus, bullets would be a scarce commodity, one would think. Yet the gun was fully loaded.I think Mark was a Soldier. And that a lot of what they have, in the way of defenses, was down to him or was his idea. So, him having his own little Praetorian Guard seemed perfectly reasonable to him and was abhorrent to the rest of them. So Kait gets to play Batman and nobody minds. Arkady's a goddamn lunatic and nobody cares, they even think it's cute. KK's a slutty security risk, Karl puts tinfoil on his head, Connor writes happy things in his little fucking book, Miki's got her metaphorical thumb in the goddamn metaphorical dike, Sirkka messed up Jack so bad with her mind games and sex games that he stays on his fucking boat all the time. Kirk and Caz? They're at least doing something useful. Luke's a prick, sure but who are you all (the FA's) to judge him? Or to judge Mark, for that matter? Sanctimonious little fuckers.
Betting we see Mark soon. Now THAT'LL be a cliff-hanger! -
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Holy Fuck! Warren, this story is getting better and better. I still have a hard time believing this is all for free...
As for me, waiting on a call from the local mental health department. I've been having some nasty bouts of depression since my grandma died this past February. It's gotten to the point of frightening my roommates. Not what I want to be doing and they don't deserve a second of it. In fact, my roommates (I have 3 and I swear they have to be the best people I've ever known) are a big part of the reason I'm not depressed all the fucking time. Don't know what I'd do without them and I really don't want to find out right now. So I sit and wait for a phone call. I've been waiting for 3 weeks now and still nothing. Time to start calling them instead, I think.
sorry for rambling on but you did ask how I was... -
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CommentAuthordoclivingston
- CommentTimeJul 17th 2009 edited
I'm a little surprised to see people chime in about how sanctimonious or self-righteous the FAs act, as I don't think it would even occur to me as a possible reading without others mentioning it. Funny how differently people can read things. For me it's always been that most of the FAs are genuinely heartfelt in their desire to do good, and get passionate and upset when they see anyone, especially one of their own, do bad. Yeah they all share guilt for whatever that Big Bad Thing was that tipped the world into the apocalypse or whatever, but that doesn't translate into hypocrisy for me, it just means motivation to make an honest try at doing better. I somewhat get the other reading, I can see where it comes from, but Idunno... I just can't get behind that interpretation of these characters.
Which isn't at all a criticism of that view. Just saying, it always surprises me. Quite possibly an indicator that I myself am a sanctimonious prick... Nahhhh. -
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- CommentAuthorKen Kreisel
- CommentTimeJul 17th 2009
Finally he gets castrated, I'd prefer the chainsaw but a bullets fine. Nice subtle gun positioning too. -
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CommentAuthorDoctor_Six
- CommentTimeJul 18th 2009
@Hex
Like it -
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Luke made a promise to this guy, remember? There is NO way kurt will succeed in shooting him. Luke's the clever one, right? KK's off scouting, and as luke said, Arkady's the only one 'who might be able to knock him down.' I'll guess she's gonna be the one to save Kurt. If Kurt gets saved. I get the feeling Luke isn't passed out or as helpless as he looks. And how could any of them think chains would even keep him from scratching his balls?
It would be an opportune moment to reveal the final freakangel as well...
God I love this series -
I'm having a time out until I can learn some manners.@VertigoJones - Wonderful simile. Made me laugh. Very scatological.
@Paul Duffield - Thanks for the interesting reply; I suspected that as Alice grew from a periphery to a central character she became nicer to look at, and I'm glad you've confirmed this and I wasn't just imagining things. I guess johnjones' 'as within so without' theory carries a lot of weight - I can't help seeing Luke's unattractive sneering leer whenever he's being excessively bastardly, whereas otherwise he's arguably the most handsome FA guy.
I see I'm not the only one who finds huge hoop earrings a bit of a caustic eyesore! Each to his own...
On an unrelated literary point, I've been seeing a great many parallels between Freakangels and the short story 'It's A Good Life', written by Jerome Bixby and published in 1953. The antagonist, Anthony - a boy possessing almost God-like unlimited power, including the power to read minds - is described as having 'a bright, wet, purple gaze.' His village, Peaksville, exists in much the same mysteriously unspecified limbo-like state as Warren's England:
'Peaksville was just someplace. Someplace away from the world. It was wherever it had been since that day three years ago when Anthony had crept from her womb and old Doc Bates--God rest him--had screamed and dropped him and tried to kill him, and Anthony had whined and done the thing. He had taken the village someplace. Or had destroyed the world and left only the village, nobody knew which.'
The story is public domain and can he found online <a href="http://www.lucifera-shadow.com/inanna_cornfield.html">here</a>.
It's a strangely beautiful story that almost defies genre classification. Yes, it's science fiction, and yes within that genre it's sort of a cozy catastrophe, but to me it also conveys an underlying sense of foreboding and Gothicism; a character study of evil that reveals uncomfortable truths about the human tendency towards amorality.
I got my degree in English Literature yesterday, so now I feel fully qualified to speak like that.
<img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_845SE1GFZhM/SmG0gMgg_vI/AAAAAAAABYM/yv0aKJkpF9k/s400/degree.jpg" alt="Absolutely not a hat waving cliche." /> -
If I recall correctly, what made that story creepy was that it was told from the point of view of the parents/adults; who knew (had been shown) that the child had these powers; and who knew that the child would take their face off if they (literally) even thought about complaining: so the parents all had to self-censor (hence the title).
The main thing that FA has in common with that story is the feeling of isolation, of there being a boundary to their little world: Whitechapel firstly, and the rest of England beyond that (cue Evey in _V for Vendetta_, clutching her toy elephant and being told that Africa doesn't exist anymore); plus the fact that *historically* that separation from the rest of the world was caused by the FAs.
Thankfully the FAs are adults rather than toddlers, otherwise this might just be some kind of horror movie.
Description of a horror movie:There was one movie long ago that I didn't watch (it was too scary): they went to a planet where dreams came true. Then someone had a nightmare, and the steps leading up to the spaceship begin to bend under the weight of a slow, massive, invisible monster walking up them into the spaceship. -
'It's A Good Life'
Those of you now inexplicably picturing Luke as a young Billy Mumy are remembering a Twilight Zone marathon; those of you who suddenly flashed to a cartoon house or a road full of flowers are remembering the movie. And those of you that immediately thought "Hey, wasn't that an episode of The Simpsons?" -- well, there's no help for you. Get off my lawn. -
@Datsun - Yes, that must have been it. Thank you.
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Hm, the Abu Ghraib thing last time got me thinking, how do (relatively current) current-events references fit into FA? There's no actual date in episode 1 that started with "6 years ago" but Abu Ghraib was 2004-2006 or so. (I really should know when, I suppose, but I wasn't taking notes, and never actually noted the specific date).
I guess it could be kind of a sliding scale, the world ends in a constantly changing "tomorrow" one day from now, which would let them know references without expecting London to have airpads for flying cars. :/
'Course, when we DO all get flying cars the entire thing goes out the window! Aha! -
so i am an unhappy , happy freakangel lover i cant wait to see next weeks epi. i swear this whole craveing freakangles every week is going to drive me up a wall but im loveing and cant stop reading it
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CommentAuthormister hex
- CommentTimeJul 18th 2009
@ Smoo - Yes, I noticed that, too. But Saddam had Abu Ghraib running when he was in power, too. Case could be made and all. Then again. This could be twenty-nineteen, twenty-twentyfive, for all we know. -
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CommentAuthorPatrickBrown
- CommentTimeJul 18th 2009
One thing that's just occurred to me. What if there has to be twelve of them? Kill Luke, and the package doesn't work anymore? -
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CommentAuthorPurple Wyrm
- CommentTimeJul 18th 2009
@Smoo - If you want to get really obsessive about the dating you can make some assumptions based on the street scenes Paul has based on Google Streetview - notably the skip bin that appears in the background of page 1, frame 1, episode 54.
This skip bin is visible in the Streetview shot, seemingly associated with the demolition/renovation of the adjacent house. Logically (for a fairly deranged definition of 'logic') this means that the end of the world must have happened while the house was still being renovated. The Google camera cars went through the UK in summer 2008, so we can reasonably assume that the apocalypse occurred no later than December 2008 - January 2009. From here we can calculate that the current year in FreakAngels is 2015 and the FAs themselves were born in 1992 (where do I pick up my Doctorate?).
I call this the Skip-Bin hypothesis - both because of the primary piece of evidence and the fact that it clearly belongs at the bottom of one ;) -