I cannot tell you how much I don’t want to spend any time talking about ‘Happy Anniversary.’
Why did I think reviewing EVERY episode was a good idea?
I can feel the resentment for it in my gut like I’ve just eaten a rotten egg or a sandwich
with some meat that should’ve been thrown away weeks ago.
But, but, but, people keep telling me online, that cheese with that lettuce is SO delectable.
We’ve been over it: the constant fandom refrain for any episode that didn’t cook
up the way it should.
But but but, remember Xander’s banana hammock and Cordy telling fish Xander they could make
the relationship work in Go Fish?
Remember Anya and Spike commiserating over not getting to be evil anymore in Where the
Wild Things Are?
And you remember…remember Angel dancing and pretending to be the tour guide in She?
Remember that?tw Yes.
And, as much as I love all those scenes too, I never felt like they could redeem otherwise
lackluster episodes.
But, I submit to you that, ‘Happy Anniversary,’ is worse than any of those.
Because ‘Happy Anniversary’ isn’t simply lackluster.
It’s gross.
So, given at the time of this writing I am about to move across the country again, as
well as the fact that YouTube has turned off downvotes on videos, I thought I would dust
off an oldie I haven’t resorted to in nearly 4 years: The sub-10 minute episode guide.
Quick spoiler warning before we get into this one.
Aspects of Buffy Season 6 work as a simple comparison for why I think this episode is
broken.
If you haven’t seen Buffy Season 6 and don’t want any of the surprises given away, skip
this video.
Let’s get this over with The trash fire opens with Cordy and Wes cleaning
up their new offices while Lorne serenades Angel in the old one,
5:00 “And the British boy, he’s going to be playing a HUGE…well…”
You know, at some point, prophecies regarding heroic do-gooders who are constantly in-peril
start to lose some of their oomph, don’t they?
Riley: Suddenly I find myself needing to learn the plural of apocalypse.
Lorne recounts how Gene, sang ‘All-By-Myself’ and Lorne saw in Gene’s aura that no one
on earth has a future after 10 pm tomorrow (it’s a neat setup.)
Lorne supplies the call to action along with a splash of guilt that has been severely lacking
the past couple of episodes.
“That is unless you’re too busy getting lawyers killed and setting girls on fire.”
Michael Scott: “YES.
THANK you.”
Across town, we get a boring scene with boring Gene figuring out time paradoxes.
Yes, Lorne described him as boring but that doesn’t fix the fact that spending anytime
with Gene this episode is either sleep-inducing or nauseating.
His girlfriend Denise comes and says hello.
That night, as Gene leaves the demons modify Gene’s math and the next day he freezes
some bubbles of mercury in time.
He runs to celebrate with Denise and accidentally hover-Dawn’s the news that Denise is going
to break up with him.
The conversation between Denise and her friend is horrendous.
It feels like it was written by someone who watched Sex and the City and interpreted it
as a tragedy about straight white men.
Listen to the music.
“Oh my God.
You’re going to give him the sympathy bone, aren’t you?
It’s going to be dinner, sympathy bone, and adios Gene.”
Angel has some fights with the Lubbers who, in a move that feels curiously sacrilegious
to me, are wielding Buffy’s axe’y sickle’y thing from ‘Anne.’
Denise joins Gene for dinner, who gives her a look that makes me unsure if he’s going
to freeze her in time during their pity sex or eat her.
Gene turns on the time bubble, the lubbers make it expand, and it seems to me that the
second the time bubble encompasses the emitters creating the bubble, it would’ve been unstoppable
but wait I don’t care.
The way the bubble is animated to bend around the building in 3D space is actually a nice
little attention to detail.
Angel pulls the plug followed by the scene that once-and-for-all breaks the episode:
Lorne encouraging Angel to sympathize with Gene.
More on that in a minute.
And the episode ends with Team Investigations having a party to celebrate the episode being
mercifully over.
Never all bad.
Just not enough good.
Oy.
Maybe the thing that blows my mind about the episode the most is Greenwalt and Whedon are
both credited with the story and David with the teleplay.
BUT, let’s rundown the good stuff first.
There are good scenes: Lorniken’s and Angel speaking frankly in the car and the following
scene with Team Investigations, off on their first case.
The second scene is a goofy but nice ‘Clue’ reference but it feels burdened with the b-story
periodic problem of, "the other cast members need something to do this episode.”
It's so irrelevant I forgot it existed.
But the Lorne and Angel scene is great.
For all four seasons in which he appears, more Lorne is ALWAYS a good thing.
And their conversation FINALLY contains some refreshing frankness and insight into Angel’s
current arc that has felt a little painfully lacking until now.
Angel: Two hundred highly intelligent law-school graduates working fulltime driving me crazy.
Why the hell is everyone so surprised that it's working?
That’s a good line.
Easy to empathize with.
I also appreciate the episode’s attempt at weaving a complex theme.
Gene and his predicament are intended to work as a symbol for Angel.
As Angel says in the car: Angel: You want to know what my problem is?
I'm screwed.
That's my problem.
I can't win.
Winning something is a defining moment of closure.
It is an end state.
A period at the end of a sentence.
It also represents Angel’s entire approach to the idea of redemption.
I'm trying to atone for a hundred years of unthinkable evil.
News flash!
I never can!
Never going to be enough.
And because of that, he’s missing something pretty important.
“Redemption.
Darla had a shot at redemption.
They took it from her.”
I’ll talk more about all of this in the video for ‘Epiphany’ because holy Hecate
is this scene just a blink compared to the rest of the episode.
But the real problem at play is the inevitability of time.
Something that, on the surface of it makes Gene, his own impending loss, and his study
of time control seem like a rich opportunity for character study.
Lorne: "The wheel keeps turning.
You can't stop it.
Sometimes things get worse, sometimes they get better."
Gene: "I want the wheel to stop.”
Set phasers on revolting The issue is in the execution.
Gene’s character is an incredibly tired treatment of ‘life-as-a-nerd’ that would
be all-too-familiar to anyone who lived through 80s and 90s pop culture.
Commonly, the quote/unquote “nerds” were targets of abuse in fantasy underdog tales,
the very fact of which meant the story would treat even their terrible actions as romantic,
comedic, heroic, or cute.
Whacky hijinx.
Towards the end of ‘16 Candles,’ the hot jocky popular guy puts his drunk and passed-out
girlfriend, Caroline in the car next to Anthony Michael Hall (listed in the film’s credits
as ‘The Geek,’) convinces her that Anthony is him, and tells Anthony to have fun.
Which, after breaking the fourth wall and smiling at the camera, he does.
In ‘Revenge of the Nerds,’ Betty finds the nerdy protagonist Lewis in a Darth Vader
mask and thinks he is her boyfriend.
A misunderstanding Lewis doesn’t bother to clear up before she starts having sex with
him.
When it comes to actual reality, every individual gets to decide if they were violated and both
of these scenes lean on that with a “Yeah, but…” defense.
As in, “Yeah but, Anthony Michael Hall asks Caroline in the next scene if she had fun
and she says she thinks she did.
Caroline was cool with it.”
Or, “Yeah but, when Lewis reveals himself to Betty she asks if all nerds have moves
like that.
Betty was into it.”
There’s a very specific reason why “Yeah, buts…” don’t actually apply that we’ll
get into in a minute.
In ‘Happy Anniversary,’ Gene is being sold to us as a similar pitiable romantic
nerd.
Even Lorne (who is nice to EVERYONE,) compares Gene to beige.
Gene’s first few lines of dialogue are about the romantic nature of space and time.
9:50 “Entanglement” The music when he hears that Denise is planning
on breaking up with him via some pity sex tells us watching that Gene is the one to
feel sorry for.
And the episode’s, “Yeah, but…,” comes in the form of Denise having no impression
or understanding of what Gene tried to do to her and just calmly going through the breakup
she came to the apartment already planning.
“Gene…we need to talk.”
See?
She never even noticed.
So you know…no harm, no foul?
I couldn’t help but think of Buffy Season 6 while watching ‘Happy Anniversary’ this
time through, which explores the same tired old nerdy underdog trope but with PROFOUNDLY
different results.
In Season 6, two nerds we’ve met previously in Jonathan and Warren, along with Tucker’s
brother team up to form The Trio.
Among their various plots during the season, including a freeze ray, time looping, bank
robbery, and invisibility gun, they invent a mind-control device that will turn women
into their “willing” sex slaves.
The three of them go to a bar, pick out a girl named Katrina, bring her home, and argue
over who is going to have the first “turn” with her.
As they do, Katrina wakes up.
Katrina: Well, this is not some fantasy, it's not a game, you freaks!
It's rape!
Consent is defined as permission for something to happen or agreement to do something.
However, one of the important keys to the concept as it relates to sexual intercouse
is that both partners need to retain the freedom to revoke their consent at any point.
And the second Denise is frozen in a time bubble with Gene literally inside of her,
she no longer can do that and this became a rape scene.
Denise consented to having Gene inside her for pity sex, not for all eternity.
Caroline couldn’t consent and Betty was deceived and didn’t know what she was consenting
to.
And the reason justifiable “Yeah, buts…” don’t exist for this kind of thing is because
Betty, Caroline, and Denise are all fictional characters.
This was written, which means that the victim never actually decideds anything - a writer
diddoes.
And the writer decidedis deciding that these victims are okay with something that is, under
no circumstances, okay.
The fact that each of these scenes includes a follow-up where a fictional character constructed
to be taken advantage of says they’re cool-with-this, doesn’t actually make what happened to them
any less reprehensible.
Is the monster okay?
The clearest indication that this script doesn’t really understand what happened to Denise
is that Denise just disappears and the episode ends with ANGEL being prodded by LORNE to
console GENE.
GENE.
It’s MIND-boggling.
Sure, Gene is intended to be a symbolic aspect of something Angel is dealing with currently.
40:16 The guy is a disaster at love.
Nearly destroyed the world.
I can relate.
But that's a structure that the show has already used a number of times.
Rachel and Lenny from ‘In the Dark’ were symbols for Buffy and Angel-uh-us.
Ronald, Melissa’s stalker from ‘I Fall to Pieces’ worked as a reminder of the terrorizing
Angelus did to Buffy.
But neither of those episodes ended with Angel taking the abuser to a bar and telling them
to just.
Be.
Better, man.
And Denise is NOWHERE to be found in Gene’s statements about what happened:
Gene: I want the wheel to stop.
Which probably explains the whole time in a box disaster.
I can't tell you how sorry I am about that.
Gene: I want the wheel to stop.
Which probably explains the whole time in a box disaster.
I can't tell you how sorry I am about that.
“Yeah, hey guys, SORRY...I wasn’t trying to cause a time-pocalypse or anything.
THAT would’ve been…bad.
I was only…trying to…deny…my girlfriend Denise her freedom and future while freezing
her in pity sex with me for all eternity.
That’s all.
SORRY.
That’s my bad, guys.
Sorry.”
Barf.
That’s it.
And that’s all.