The Thin Dead Line is an interesting exercise in thematic structure here at the end of the
four-episode grey Angel arc. In a similar fashion to Are You Now or Have You Ever,
the episode uses some fun metaphorical connections that made it heavy with
opportunities for social and cultural commentary. Unlike Are You Now though,
any perspective Dead Line might’ve had negates itself by the end of the episode,
making all of its volatile subject matter feel like little more than a backdrop for some
team drama, Night of the Living dead style shenanigans, and a classic Angel backspin kick.
BUT…I guess I LIKE all of those things so…you know.
“I’d still if you’d still.”
Angel returns to the Hyperion after Happy Anniversary’ing with Lorne, and the emptiness of
his current predicament is starting to get to him. Michael Palin/Fish Called Wanda: “…Good.”
He hits up Merle for more info on Wolfram and Hart happenings,
and Merle probes Angel’s self-inflicted wound.
“How is old Wesley?" Team Investigations are bemoaning
not having business when in walks a mother and her daughter with an eye on the back of her head.
Across town, two kids are chased to Anne’s shelter by something late at night. After Anne
breaks the curfew rules and lets them, we see the bad they're afraid of is a police officer.
Anne brings the recent string of police terror to Team Investigations and Gunn
comes to the shelter to listen to their stories. He decides the best thing to
do is to go for a walk with a camcorder to see if they can induce the same behavior.
Outside, Angel is attacked by a cop and he backspin kicks the cops head off.
“TOP THAT.”
And uhhh…unless the zombie cop’s head was barely attached for various and sundry zombie-related
reasons, it seems to me that there would be no appreciable difference in the force required
to kick a zombie head off vs kicking an actual human being's head off. Sooo...I
guess Angel’s lucky that was actually a zombie?
Angel checks with Kate and it turns out the headless cop in question died six months before.
Cordy and Wes go to the shelter to assist Gunn
and Jackson slips in on their heels to terrorize some of the sheltered.
Wes gets shot trying to help out. The zombi-cops kill his ambulance driver
and Gunn races everyone to the shelter. I'm not...entirely sure why Gunn drives
injured Wes to the shelter rather than a hospital...or another precinct...or to his
well-armed Lost Boys...or anywhere else. A minute after arriving, the EMT still alive
says they needed to go to the hospital. The real answer is, of course, so that
we can have a Night of the Living Dead-style standoff - as good a reason as any I guess.
The police commander aims his zombie precinct at the shelter.
Team Investigations minus one holds off the Zops and Angel
saves the shelter by attacking the captain who zombified his dead men,
to begin with. Angel goes to visit Kate so that the episode can do some absurd fence-straddling.
And just in case we might have some hope that Angel has turned a corner because he spent an
evening with Lorne and helped the shelter, the episode adds an extra scene to show us that no,
he’s still a smirky mean jerk. At least we get some solid Cordy ‘tude out of it though.
“You walked away. Do us a favor and just stay away.”
The Thin Dead Line is entertaining enough. Insofar as Buffyverse zombie episodes go,
it probably feels the most similar to the horror material it’s aping. The last stand
at the shelter, a staple of the sub-genre, is pretty tense. Some of the cinematography
is nicely atmospheric, with an, ‘it’s scarier not to show the shark,’ approach. A handful of
touches evoke 80s grindhouse horror films that used to scare the pants off me as a kid. Angel
the Series’ makeup design is always pretty stellar and that eyeball thing is awesome.
Given the supernatural take on the bad cop motif, I love that the episode’s writer,
Shawn Ryan, after one more writing credit with ‘Belonging,’ went on to create the TV series,
‘The Chicago Code,’ ‘SWAT,’ and, most famously in the bad cop genre, ‘The Shield.’
There’s a nice focus on Team Investigations in this one, for the most part,
sidelining smirky petulant back-spin-kicky Top That Angel to being b-story muscle. The harsh
education of Wesley Wyndam Price continues. As much as I wasn’t a fan, I’m sometimes not
sure of how I feel about the go-to way of evolving bumbly naive Buffy-Watcher Wesley…
…being the show enacting acts of penetrating acts of violence against
him. It feels a little like kicking a puppy.
But the member of the trio that gets the most focus is Mr. Charles Gunn.
Thin Dead Line sets up while will be one of the driving thrusts for his arc in the series:
the constant push and pull between his old life and identity with the
lost boys vs his work and sense of other-dom with team Angel.
I like the connection that Gunn and Anne knew each other before Angel came to LA.
It heightens the sense of an interconnected Buffyverse in a nice way. We’ve seen in
previous episodes that Gunn is known and networked within his community and the conversations between
Anne and Gunn work well enough, given at this point, they are robust and developed
characters. The conversations with the rest of the shelter denizens are a different story.
I realized watching this time that a number of episodes dealing with Gunn’s life
outside of Team Investigations remind me a bit of Initiative-centric scenes from Buffy Season 4.
Authenticity is a challenging thing to quantify. I am not in the military, couldn’t tell you the
first thing about how to strip a rifle or what proper etiquette is for missions. However,
I watch Season 4 of Buffy and experience a constant sense that every military scene was
written and directed by people who don’t know either, instead, trading mostly on tropes and
cliches they were familiar with. There is a constant undercurrent of falseness.
Authenticity is a bit like cgi in that it is commonly considered at its best when it
is seamless and invisible. But I can live with a dated special effect when it is in
the service of good storytelling. It takes me three seconds to let go of the awkwardness of
CGI snake mayor and to just enjoy the epicness of Buffy’s third season finale
because the season and characters earned my emotional investment.
The green screen compositing in Fear, Itself might be achingly obvious but
I couldn’t care less because the brilliant reveal of Gacknar the
fear demon being an inch tall is just too delightful to not enjoy.
“Who’s a little fear demon?”
Likewise, the use of tropes and cliche are not inherently bad, depending on how they’re used
in the story. In fact, the Buffyverse is founded on them. Buffy herself is a subversion of a dumb
blonde horror movie cliche. The Scoobies are built from tropes. The nerd. The geek. The mean
girl. The emo crush. The bad boy. But the show then took all those tired and familiar starting
points and developed something interesting from them. That never quite came to fruition with the
clunky initiative, and it rarely tends to when revisiting Gunn’s life pre-Team-Investigations.
Most of the dialogue in the shelter just feels assembled from cliches and stereotypes intended to
do little more than provide a backdrop for scenes that get our heroes from event A to event B.
But I think the reason ‘Thin Dead Line’ feels more frustrating to me than Initiative episodes
is that its story is seasoned with volatile social issues that are deeply relevant to
this day. I do appreciate the handful of nods the episode gives to issues of
discrimination and privilege. As in, when Anne doesn’t realize why Gunn’s
plan to walk around town at night with his friends will incite the police to harass.
“Cause we’ll be the only ones walking while black.
Or Gunn’s knowing response after Wesley says of the cop shooting him:
“He had no right.” “I know, man.”
The episode’s title is also a reference to the "thin blue line,” a term referring to the
blue-wearing American police as the line keeping the country from descending into violent chaos.
It is an idea Erroll Morris used ironically for the name of his 1988 documentary
about a man who was wrongly framed for murdering a police officer.
All well and good. The problem is in the episode’s use of two things:
Jackson and Kate. First of all, early Angel sometimes has this…knee-jerk
tendency to reach for what feels like unsubtle and unnecessary levels of top-shelf darkness, perhaps
out of a desire to readily distinguish itself from Buffy as the more ‘adult’ contemporary. As in,
say, nazi racial purity demons, holocaust imagery, or pedophiliac torture vampires.
Jackson is bad guy shorthand from the same school of thought. In his first two scenes,
he is immediately established as both a rapist and a murderer. Which is FINE in and of itself. The
problem is that Jackson ends up being used as one of the explanations in the story for why racism
and systemic discrimination by the police exists. And in order to make that a little less obnoxious,
the script, from a very white writer's room, has Gunn deliver the observation.
“Cause they’re a bunch of racist pigs.” “Well, there’s that. Then there are
people like you. A thug with a gun. Keeping the cycle going.”
Both Jackson and Kate feel like inclusions made for the purposes of not offending
anyone but Kate’s contribution is the most hilariously stupid when she shares with
Angel the crime statistics from the zombie cop neighborhood…before it got zombie cop’d.
"Crime reports from that precinct. - Up until three months ago there was a
m*rder every two weeks, a rape every two days, a robbery every hour and a half.
And that's what we just gave back to the people of that community."
Soooooo…is Kate coming out as pro-zombie cops?
And, through metaphor, pro-extreme police brutality? Whatever it is,
the net-result of the episode’s equivocating and playing all sides of its included social issues
is that it has nothing actually to say about any of them. There is no perspective on any of this.
Crime is bad.
Poverty is bad. Racism is bad.
Police brutality is bad. Zombie cops are bad.
“Is there something we can do?” “No there isn’t.”
“Sorry, Leslie. DAMN.”
By never picking a lane or a focus, all of this is just once again back-drop material,
albeit a little more intricate, for what the episode is ACTUALLY doing:
making a fun metaphorical comparison to Angel’s current arc. It’s a story about police,
intended protectors of the innocent, now undead and enforcing the war they
considered justified through violent and brutal means. Sound familiar?
“Someone has to fight the war.” “Police are just terrorizing them.”
The episode climaxes with the police commander trapping people in the
shelter and letting his minions kill all of them…because….you know…there are
probably MOSTLY baddies inside. Innocent people may be among them but, you know…
Angel: Somehow, I just can’t seem to care.
For the record, that is the episode making what Angel did in the wine cellar clear. If you believe
that Angel locking the doors on the Wolfram and Hart lawyers and their family members was fine,
I’m assuming you’re in the pro-zombie cops camp this episode then and Cordy, Wes, Gunn,
and Anne are all just in the wrong place wrong time? After all, JACKSON IS IN THERE.
I do like the structure. As with tossing the blood money on the table in front of Anne,
Angel telling Kate that he would always make the decision to erase the thin dead line,
despite its direct reflections of his own actions, is evidence of his character arc actually arc’ing.
Angel: I can live with that.
It’s just boy did we have to endure some muddy and bad-tasting theme-soup-stupid
to get there. And it ends up feeling like a missed opportunity because the zombie genre
itself has roots in racial commentary. George Romero’s classic, Night of the Living Dead,
is about a black man named Ben in a house full of white people, being the only one to survive the
night of a zombie apocalypse before he is shot the next morning by a white sheriff. Romero has
said he didn’t intend for the film to be racial commentary but, be that as it may, it’s there.
Still, at a bare minimum, I think the only thing any episode of either show owes us,
the audience, is an entertaining 40 minutes and Thin Dead Line is that.
There is an element to these videos that is, in part, reactionary. I never
did a complete critical rewatch of Angel and Buffy before I started this series,
and I don’t do a lot of outlining in advance for the season arcs - instead writing the
essays as we hit each episode. And while that means that I do some course-correcting along
the way for ideas I threw out in videos past, the nice part is that I get to be surprised.
And while the four-episode run that starts with Redefinition and ends with The Thin Dead Line
still feels like hitting a giant pause (or, at least, slo-mo) button on the super-compelling
bits of this season arc that I love, I’ve still had more fun on this run-through of it than I
thought I was going to. Redefintion was silly nonsense but at least it’s HOT silly nonsense
“Sploosh.”
Blood Money’s cowboy-demon-caper made for some entertaining ideas.
Happy Anniversary is a single-episode series low-point for me but at least
we get some prolonged Lorne. And the Thin Dead Line is…somewhere in the middle. A bit
dry and burdened by some of Angel’s dated issues, but entertaining enough. Certainly,
this run of four is a lot more fun for me than the dreary trilogy is in Buffy Season 5. But,
without a doubt, my favorite thing about Thin Dead Line…is that Reprise is next.