Comments | starryniteshade: Commentary: TD1.17 Life of Reilly

starryniteshade

Commentary: TD1.17 Life of Reilly

Oct 23, 2008 18:29

It’s taken sometime to get back to TD1 commentaries. Yes, commentaries. I have been calling them reviews, but they’re reviews….just my comments as related to the story of the episode.

The Life of Reilly Commentary

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Comments 16

masqthephlsphr October 23 2008, 23:59:20 UTC

Indeed it’s a lot; and no matter how well Vail’s team did the job, the result is not going to be a rich personality, but a cartoon character.This is so true, and I don't think the writers gave it sufficient thought (so what else is new). Even if Vail "borrowed" memories of a real person's actual life so he'd have 18 years (9,460,800 minutes) worth of memories (including sleep and dreams), they still had to fit those memories to the Reillys' life and circumstances. I fudged this a bit by giving the Reillys a real son whose memories were passed onto Connor, but even then, that son was screwed up and so not all his memories were usable in giving Connor a memory of a happy childhood ( ... )

starryniteshade October 24 2008, 00:57:37 UTC

you captured the essence of that theme well here

thanks.

And now we'll get the behind the scenes stuff, if you can remember that. do we need a spell to help you out?

masqthephlsphr October 24 2008, 01:18:37 UTC

I very well might, considering I posted it three years ago! But let me think it through a bit.

masqthephlsphr October 24 2008, 01:28:59 UTC

One thing I did in season 2 was write another flashback to that summer after Connor was transplanted to the Reillys' house but didn't have his memories back yet. I implied in that flashback that Connor was starting to feel detached from his own "memories" (the false ones, the only ones he had), because they didn't reflect his own personality; they didn't feel like "him". That is another aspect of the "cartoonishness" of the memories. Only with his real memories can he be a truly authentic person.

Thread 10

masqthephlsphr November 2 2008, 14:42:36 UTC

One of my mission statements in taking on The Destroyer was to get rid of the Damned Memory Wipe. For Connor fans--REAL Connor fans, anyway, it was like character death. Even after Connor's original memories were returned, he still wasn't the character we had grown attached to. He was so "well-adjusted" and unconnected to his past, he might as well have been a pod-person. And Angel's friends needed to be shown dealing with the return of their own corrected memories as well. Of course, Wesley was dead and Fred was Illyria, so really that job fell to Gunn ( ... )

masqthephlsphr November 2 2008, 15:16:50 UTC

Treating the memory wipe as a form of mystical psychotherapy allowed me to get around the biggest argument in support of the memory wipe by fans--that Connor was "so screwed up" he could not have gone on as the character he was in season 4. I didn't really believe that; I don't think ME did a convincing job of showing him getting that far gone. Nevertheless, it was canon in a tell-don't-show kind of way, so I had to deal with it. And I dealt with it by not getting rid of the memory wipe completely. At the end of "Real", the second of this two-part episode, Connor is in an odd limbo of having forgotten many of his new, artificial memories without forgetting them completely ( ... )

starryniteshade November 4 2008, 13:55:30 UTC

It was interesting to see how you've changed (mellowed?) with this as TD1 went by. It's good to see that after putting life into the Reilly's you didn't eliminate their characters. That would have been repeating ME's choice.

masqthephlsphr November 4 2008, 15:25:41 UTC

I didn't eliminate them, but they are pretty much out of the picture now in Season 2.

Thread 6