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menomegirlSaving another Bronze reply here, but any and all comments on the subject are welcome.
*snerk* I knew that quick post was gonna get one back, exactly the response I thought I'd get, too. *weg* Yes, Lindsey telling Eve that Angel would play him fair is an assessment of Angel's character, but Lindsey just *saying* that is an indication of the direction his character had taken. Toward the latter part of S5, he said several things about Angel that were strange for a man who supposedly hated Angel so much, things he didn't think during season 2, much less say aloud like that.
I recently told ShadowQuest that you cannot just listen to just the dialog itself. To get the full impact of a story, you have to watch the actors, hear the inflection and tone of voice used in the delivery of the lines they are speaking. You have to watch their facial expressions because many times, that's more important than the words being spoken and you have to pay attention to the body language of everyone in a scene as well, because that can speak volumes all on its own. This is true for both Btvs and Ats, for every character really but it's crucial for characters whose motives are not as well-defined as others, such as Lorne, Lindsey or Spike.
And with all due respect to Joss Whedon and Jeffery Bell and the brilliance of the Power Play and Not Fade Away scripts, all the nuance of those episodes cannot be realized unless you do all of that. It doesn't matter what they were discussing while they were writing the scripts or what their intentions were in the words they wrote. It's an actor's job to bring those words to life, to breathe meaning into them, so what matters is how the final product all comes together.
In Lindsey's case, for the most part, we are left with many unanswered questions as to his motives and what his words and actions really mean. So we are left to draw our own conclusions as to what they were/are, especially in these two episodes (yet keeping in mind Lindsey's entire history). He's ambiguous, he always has been. He's done evil, yet he's done good. There's bad blood between Angel and Lindsey, with good reason on both their parts...
But.
This is a man who didn't give a crumbled cookie crumb about what the Senior Partners' plan for Angel was during season two. This is someone who was manipulated by Holland Manners and knew it, didn't much care for it and became so dissatisfied with his job that it left him feeling dirty. This is someone who Darla toyed with like a cat toys with a mouse, to the point where his own potential death didn't faze him. This is someone who was damaged by Angel, yet walked away from Wolfram and Hart of his own volition, saving Lilah's life by doing so.
He left LA and it's a pretty safe bet he got those tattoos not long after that. Then he went in search of other means to protect himself. He mastered the art of swordplay, and learned magic, gained the abilities of telekinesis and transmutation, gained strength that was comparable to that of a demon or slayer because the one thing about him that's held true is Lindsey's sense of self-preservation. Heh. That never changed.
Then he comes back and his motives for doing so are left in the grey area where his character always was. It's a given that he probably saw red the minute he found out Angel was now CEO of W & H and you must also consider this:the time frame between the end of season 4 and the start of season 5 was a matter of only a few weeks. That means Lindsey made a plan and went about executing it very quickly and it was a damn good plan, at that.
But IMNHO, I don't think it had a darn thing to do with the Senior Partners. It was about Angel, period. Lindsey was openly comtemptious of them even when speaking to Eve and more to the point, he even said, "So the question becomes whose house are we in?"...it's little things like that I'm talking about that show things with Lindsey are not as clear-cut as they could have been.
When he's being questioned in Power Play and Wesley postulates that Lindsey tried to kill Angel to get into the Circle, the look Lindsey gives him speaks louder than the words that follow, which is neither affirmation nor denial, just a statement of fact. He does not say that's what happened but that expression alone is all the "No" I needed to hear.
The same sort of thing showed in NFA, in his scenes with Angel, Eve and Lorne. Lindsey's words cannot be taken at face value because of Christian's performance. The same is true for both Angel and Lorne. There's a lot of room for interpretation in each and every episode of season five, but perhaps moreso for the last two than any other.
One of the very last things he said was, "You don't think a man can change?". I think we watched them all change and not for the better...except just perhaps Lindsey.
/long winding ramble.
xxxxxxxxxx
*snerk* I knew that quick post was gonna get one back, exactly the response I thought I'd get, too. *weg* Yes, Lindsey telling Eve that Angel would play him fair is an assessment of Angel's character, but Lindsey just *saying* that is an indication of the direction his character had taken. Toward the latter part of S5, he said several things about Angel that were strange for a man who supposedly hated Angel so much, things he didn't think during season 2, much less say aloud like that.
I recently told ShadowQuest that you cannot just listen to just the dialog itself. To get the full impact of a story, you have to watch the actors, hear the inflection and tone of voice used in the delivery of the lines they are speaking. You have to watch their facial expressions because many times, that's more important than the words being spoken and you have to pay attention to the body language of everyone in a scene as well, because that can speak volumes all on its own. This is true for both Btvs and Ats, for every character really but it's crucial for characters whose motives are not as well-defined as others, such as Lorne, Lindsey or Spike.
And with all due respect to Joss Whedon and Jeffery Bell and the brilliance of the Power Play and Not Fade Away scripts, all the nuance of those episodes cannot be realized unless you do all of that. It doesn't matter what they were discussing while they were writing the scripts or what their intentions were in the words they wrote. It's an actor's job to bring those words to life, to breathe meaning into them, so what matters is how the final product all comes together.
In Lindsey's case, for the most part, we are left with many unanswered questions as to his motives and what his words and actions really mean. So we are left to draw our own conclusions as to what they were/are, especially in these two episodes (yet keeping in mind Lindsey's entire history). He's ambiguous, he always has been. He's done evil, yet he's done good. There's bad blood between Angel and Lindsey, with good reason on both their parts...
But.
This is a man who didn't give a crumbled cookie crumb about what the Senior Partners' plan for Angel was during season two. This is someone who was manipulated by Holland Manners and knew it, didn't much care for it and became so dissatisfied with his job that it left him feeling dirty. This is someone who Darla toyed with like a cat toys with a mouse, to the point where his own potential death didn't faze him. This is someone who was damaged by Angel, yet walked away from Wolfram and Hart of his own volition, saving Lilah's life by doing so.
He left LA and it's a pretty safe bet he got those tattoos not long after that. Then he went in search of other means to protect himself. He mastered the art of swordplay, and learned magic, gained the abilities of telekinesis and transmutation, gained strength that was comparable to that of a demon or slayer because the one thing about him that's held true is Lindsey's sense of self-preservation. Heh. That never changed.
Then he comes back and his motives for doing so are left in the grey area where his character always was. It's a given that he probably saw red the minute he found out Angel was now CEO of W & H and you must also consider this:the time frame between the end of season 4 and the start of season 5 was a matter of only a few weeks. That means Lindsey made a plan and went about executing it very quickly and it was a damn good plan, at that.
But IMNHO, I don't think it had a darn thing to do with the Senior Partners. It was about Angel, period. Lindsey was openly comtemptious of them even when speaking to Eve and more to the point, he even said, "So the question becomes whose house are we in?"...it's little things like that I'm talking about that show things with Lindsey are not as clear-cut as they could have been.
When he's being questioned in Power Play and Wesley postulates that Lindsey tried to kill Angel to get into the Circle, the look Lindsey gives him speaks louder than the words that follow, which is neither affirmation nor denial, just a statement of fact. He does not say that's what happened but that expression alone is all the "No" I needed to hear.
The same sort of thing showed in NFA, in his scenes with Angel, Eve and Lorne. Lindsey's words cannot be taken at face value because of Christian's performance. The same is true for both Angel and Lorne. There's a lot of room for interpretation in each and every episode of season five, but perhaps moreso for the last two than any other.
One of the very last things he said was, "You don't think a man can change?". I think we watched them all change and not for the better...except just perhaps Lindsey.
/long winding ramble.
xxxxxxxxxx
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Date: 2007-04-08 09:16 pm (UTC)Yes, we do fight about this. Often. I'm slowly winning him over as I'm far more stubborn.
Word.
Date: 2007-04-08 11:06 pm (UTC)The show ended just as things were starting to get good; not just with Lindsey (although I do believe they had bigger and better plans for him) but Wes and Illyria, Connor and Angel, Lorne, Spike...sigh...
Thank God for fanfic, and for people like you who share some of the same feelings I have, and like to write nifty essays about them.
M