Gabriel just unleashed the Amphora of darkness against
Vega. This is a bad thing, going by the inky clouds and ominously dying
flowers.
In Claire’s command room everything goes berserk, people
fight, people shoot each other – and repeatedly themselves and there are
explosions everywhere. Only major characters are immune due to powerful amounts
of plot armour. Claire, Alex, Noma and Michael
Though Claire does hear a baby cry and goes to find her
hallucination kid because while menfolk go berserk, women see babies. Of course
they do. She has an idyllic hallucination of her, her baby, Alex (hah, bye
Gates, you’re forgotten).
Michael helpfully expositions what the cloud does – it
makes you hallucinate (brings out the darkness inside you) so you will harm yourself
or others. It also kills flowers. I rather think it could just kill people like
it does plants and be a lot neater, this whole hallucination thing is just a
nasty little extra sadism. Angels are resistant and Alex is just special.
Actually Michael thinks he’s so pure he just has no darkness inside him. He’s
the last pure heart
Really?!
The whole of Vega is in chaos while they look for the
amphora to shut it up again – something only an angel can do. Except unlike the
super special one they’re only resistant, not immune and Nora is already
starting to see dark hallucination-ness. Because even though she has shown epic
self-sacrifice, she is still not the purest of them all. She doesn’t tell Alex
she’s hallucinating but does convince him they need to split up – or say she
does but Alex follows her anyway.
And Michael starts his own hallucinations (Nora killing
Alex) because even an archangel succumbs before pure Alex.
Meanwhile David is being led to his execution, begging
all the way to the noose. Only for a stay of execution to be granted at the
last minute. Baaaaad idea. There’s only one person who can match David and
that’s Arika. But he’s been rescued by… an angel possessed version of himself?
Ok more black cloud hallucinations I assume. Anyway, Most-evil-David wants to
make Evil-David admit he’s a monster (he has a very convincing argument).
Arika has her own hallucination dream of her switching
places with Rose the 8 Ball back when she and Claire brought down David. It’s a
really good reflection of what Arika did to Rose, almost exactly - using a
picture of her mother and cruelly attacking her through her mother’s mental
illness.
William Wheele’s hallucination has him chained up in a
dungeon with Gabriel with a very very interesting hair-do. He tries to convince
his hallucination that he’s better than the man who once worshipped Gabriel and
he’s the chosen one. Even his hallucinations mock him. He gets hallucination 8
Ball Claire who also mocks him and the abuse he suffered while she sexually assaults
him. Next step is hallucination Alex to beat him up and demand William
acknowledge him as the real chosen One.
Back to Alex and the angels we have an ongoing three way
confrontation between Alex trying to talk sense into the angels, them fighting and
Michael having multiple meltdowns. Noma tries to clong to the amphora since it
shows her having her wings back – she can’t bring herself to give them up
again, she painfully tells him how she needs them to go home. Unfortunately she
doesn’t really have wings and is threatening to jump from a high place. He
manages to convince her but then they have to seal with raging Michael. Luckily
it turns out the Chosen One can also close the amphora because of shiny
specialness. The Amphora dissolves to dust in his hands and he hugs Noma as she
cries over her wings
The other characters all lose their darkness seconds
before the hallucinations drive them to suicide. Arika and David are both free
in the aftermath of the chaos. Claire may is injured severely, perhaps fatally.
William is even more determined to cause carnage.
Gabriel is ready for his next attack,
Can we address this “last pure heart” bullshit? Because
what has Alex done that has been that noble? Has he done one thing, just one
thing, that should inspire me to think how good and pure and amazing he is?
Gates has. Noma has. We can even argue for Michael. Where is the evidence of
Alex’s purity? He’s largely being characterised as stomping around and pouting.
If you’re going to set up your protagonist as the uber pure special saviour of
humanity then they really need to have that reflected in their character, not
just have Michael tell us all that this is so, honest.
And why would the amphora “protect itself”? That makes no
sense. It’s a weapon designed to be used by angels. It can only be closed by
angels. The only ones turning it off are those who control it and, we assume,
have every right to shut it down – which would have to happen at some point or
it would still be open and spewing darkness from the last time it was used.
Having it spawn guardians to stop the angels closing it would be like forcing a
tank driver to wrestle someone every time he wanted to shut down his tank or a
soldier having to win a fist fight to engage the safety on his gun
I’m not sure of the whole concept of this episode – a lot
of it feels convoluted and stretched to add an extra episode. As mentioned
above I think there’s a lot of convoluted elements in making the amphora work
the way it did which doesn’t make a huge lot of sense as a weapon. I think some
of the scenes – Claire’s twee – were annoying (leader of the city with dreams
of reforming it, but her ideal hallucination is this very domestic scene) and
Alex, the purest of them all, outright annoyed me. But Arika’s brutal scene
confronting her crimes from the other side was grossly stark and I think made
us go back and analyse an old scene in a way we didn’t before because Rose was
an 8 Ball and therefore not considered – by the characters or the audience – as
a character who could be victimised. Similarly David’s moral twisting all falls
apart when confronted by his angelic self – he points at 8 balls and calls them
monsters without ever accepting responsibility for his own brutal actions.
Ultimately both of these scenes, coupled with more we’ve seen from New Delphi,
bring a new lens as well on the 8 Balls which we’ve generally seen as rampaging
beasts. With these new lens the show has actually done a really good job of
presenting them as a more human opponent which, in turn, demands the whole show
be scene slightly differently. It helps as well that the quality of the acting
truly hit the mark in displaying broken, despairing people.
But it really didn’t have to come with the demonising of
Arika’s mother – she was, ultimately, a story tool used to represent Arika’s
fear rather than any kind of actual person.
I also liked Noma’s hallucination because it was a final
acknowledgement of the monumental loss she suffered in giving up her wings, in
giving up Heaven and any hope of going home. This sacrifice has been far too
glossed over.
