Mike's Synopsis

As Seen on TV: Cordy has visions, They hurt. For awhile they hurt really bad, but then Angel threw a steel rod through some guy's brain, and that fixed everything. Right?

So here's Cordy, and while she doesn't exactly look like she's ready for her closeup, she's nevertheless paying rapt attention to something in front of her. She's sobbing out a contrite and obviously heartfelt speech of thanks to an offscreen someone. Unconditional support is referred to, and Cordy finishes up with those three little words. Except, wait, she's not quite done--she holds up a scrub brush and says, "To all my fans, this is for you!"

Um, thanks?

We pull back, and discover that Cordelia was demonstrating her rehearsed Oscar acceptance speech for a delighted (and, it must be said, easily impressed) Fred. And I wonder where this fishhook in my mouth came from. Cordy carelessly refers to the fact that she'll never actually get to make the speech in earnest, and Fred does her shrinky thing. Turns out they, along with Gunn, are cleaning up the mess that scorched-earth demons have left by being immolated in the lobby last week. Gunn asks Fred, a little too urgently, if Wesley's back from the cleaning supplies sojourn, which he is not. Angel brings an awake and gurgling baby in for cuddles and coos, but nobody's coming near the wee one until they're properly hygenic. Cordy goes to wash up, and it's Action Wes! bursting through the door. Something's afoot.

In the bathroom, an abruptly fatigued-looking Cordelia pops a pill in her mouth. She goes out, and what she sees erases all worry lines; the other four holding candle-riddled cake and serenading her with birthday four-part aria. For a moment, Cordy looks almost girlish. She blows out the candles, and expresses dismay at the lack of appearance of Hollywood hunk in re: her wish. But there are presents, one from an abashed Angel, who also releases the infant to her grasp. As Cordy looks at the brightly colored packages, she playfully debates whether to hold onto the baby or open gifts, then, with sudden brusqueness, orders Angel to take Connor. Angel is insulted at first, but quickly realizes this is not caprice; as he takes the child, Cordy staggers under the weight of the vision, which involves a girl running from a monster of some sort. She begins to describe it, but is suddenly flung headlong into the weapons cabinet. She falls back onto the ground, eyes vacant and unresponsive.

For about ten seconds, that is. Then she gets up, dusts herself off--

--and sees her inert body on the other side of the room, being attended to by her friends.

The "D" word to end all "d" words is the first one on everybody's lips, including the newly ghostlike but still very aware Cordelia's. But to her vast relief, Angel confirms that she's still breathing. Neither he or any of the others seem to be aware of wraith-Cordy, though. She grasps at the lone straw available to her--that the guys are playing a joke--but it breaks quickly. Angel mentions the vision, and Cordelia begins reciting the hard data: a girl in a house at Oak Street, but nobody can hear her. Lorne comes down, reciting hip 40s catchphrases that Bing Crosby wouldn't be caught dead using (and the above goes double for his shirt) and a gleeful Cordelia assumes that he'll pick up on her new fantastic phantasmic presence. Wrongety wrong; Lorne breezes through Cordelia like Burt Reynolds doing a guest spot on Friends. He sees real, less interesting Cordelia, though, and rightly freaks. Meanwhile, Cordelia's hearing strange sounds, but she's distracted from that when Fred picks up a drug bottle that fell out of Cordy's pocket. It's Seltrax, a powerful painkiller. Cordy really doesn't want anyone to ask why she's got it. Lorne confirms, however, that mystic somethingorother, and not groovy pills, are responsible for Cordy's vegetative state.

The gang decides that they need to know more about what's going on with Cordy, and Gunn and Fred are sent to her apartment, over--or not over, because they can't hear her--Cordy's protests. As the huddle breaks up, Cordy bewails the fact that no one knows to help the girl in her vision. Then the voices start again. She decides to leave a message, but she can't manage to hold a pen. Sounds like every Monday morning class back in college for me.

Turns out Phantom Dennis had his own birthday plans; when Gunn and Fred get to the apartment, they're greeted by floating party hat, flying confetti and seemingly self-propelled noisemaker. Fred is not only unflappable but charmed; she greets Dennis with effusiveness tempered by typically endearing awkwardness. Now it's Gunn's turn to be charmed, but Fred's reaction to his blandishments is inscrutable. She and Gunn begin the hard business of telling Dennis the unpleasant news.

Cordy's futilely trying to get Wesley's attention; of course, given that Wesley's doing research, he might not be able to hear her if she was miked, let alone corporeal. He's studying the astral plane, and surmises that Cordelia might be able to hear them but not communicate with them, which she certainly finds to be a welcome piece of information. She tries to read over his shoulder, but the book's a real page-turner, and so is Wes. Okay, that one sucked.

Fred finds nothing that high school kids would be interested in raiding in Cordelia's medicine cabinet, but Gunn does in Cordelia's underwear drawer. She hisses at him to put the bra away, and Gunn uses the "searching the underwear drawer" defense, which Fred can't contest because she hasn't had an underwear drawer in five years, at which point she realizes she's discussing underwear with her co-worker and steers them back on-topic. She thinks Dennis is hiding something from them. Gunn takes the cue, telling Dennis that the information they're looking for to prevent Cordelia from experiencing the thrills of his own current state. A moment's hesitation, and a plastic bin slides out from under the bed. Gunn's detective skills are called into question, and the bin is revealed to be full of at least several months' worth of prescription bottles and medical records.

Angel is not happy. On top of being freaked at Cordy's condition, he hates the fact that the visions have been doing untold physical damage to Cordy for months at a stretch, and is hurt that she never said a word about it. Cordelia is not in the mood for a lecture, having a rather bad day herself. Lorne comes in, prepared to do his connecty thing with Cordy's mind. At this point, Cordelia is really desperate for something to work. She tries to respond to Lorne and give him the address from her vision, but after a moment he disengages from Cordelia's body and announces, "Cordelia's not in there. She's just gone."

"I'm standing right in front of you," Cordy says brokenly, hopelessness rapidly getting the best of her. She hears voices again, louder. "And I'm afraid," she whispers.

Angel entertains the notion of losing Cordy for about two seconds, and finds it far too much to bear. He stands up, with new determination, and orders Lorne to find a method of communication to the Powers that Be. Lorne, in between backing away from Angel, protests that this job is a little too big for him, and Angel demonstrates that he has no plans to use the magic word with Lorne anytime soon. Lorne is just thrilled, but he goes along with the, uh, request. Angel and Cordelia return to their vigil.

Angel in time falls asleep, and Cordelia decides to try out what she learned from Wesley's books, namely that she can enter people's bodies and possess them while they're asleep. She gets under Angel's skin easily enough, takes a marker, and begins to write the address from her vision on the wall, but weird black smokelike things suddenly appear and knock her out of Angel's body and onto the ground. As she's crying foul, Wes runs in to investigate the noise and sees a dazed Angel getting up off the floor. Angel relates that he dreamed of Cordy telling him something important. Cordy waits expectantly.

"It was weird," Angel finally concludes.

Cordy deflates. "How are you a champion? In what way are you a champion?"

Wes has studied Cordy's CAT-scans. "The news isn't good; the tests show widespread neuroelectrical deterioration." Which Cordy doesn't think sounds too bad until her and Angel simultaneously realize: "She's dying." Wes hasn't had any luck finding anything on the mystical side of things; he offers to watch Connor and Cordy while Angel rests, and it's a measure of how stunned with grief Angel is that he actually agrees. Cordy, meanwhile, is going all Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, but before she has time to progress past the first stage, wild light and shadows fill the room. She melts into the wall--not literally--as a foreboding form takes shape in front of her; a large, heavily armored skeletal-looking thing that looks like something out of the He-Man Action Figure line from hell. Surely this must be--

Oh, wait. It's Skip, the demon guard from the prison dimension Angel visited in "That Vision Thing."

"Hey," he asks. "How's it going?"

Despite this very un-Reaperlike greeting, Cordy's still clinging to the Death-Hast-Come-for-Me theory. Skip obliges her with a very evil, loud, Glenn Danzig-type laugh full of reverb, then shakes it off and introduces himself. He comments on Cordy's appearance; apparently most people idealize themselves upon arriving in phantom form, and concludes, from her fairly accurate wraithic representation, that she's got a fair helping of self-assurance. By the end of this dissertation, Cordy finally finds her voice, and it's got a rather sizable amount of consternation. She demands some kind of context for her current state. Skip nods understandingly, but tells her that they have to leave AI HQ, and Cordy's really not ready to make any big changes right now. Skip tells her she doesn't belong there anymore. Cordy would really like clarification on the dead-or-not question. "Not yet," Skip answers, "but you will be, very soon." He lets that sink in long enough to be torturous, then adds, "Unless you come with me. Right now." Cordy asks him to tell the others about her vision, but he shakes his head; not allowed. Rules. And he holds out his hand.

One last strand of fear coils around Cordy's heart. "I don't want to die," she whispers.

"So don't," Skip pronounces.

Hey, did you notice that when you rearrange the letters in Skip's name and add an "e", it becomes Spike? I think this means Skip is Spike in disguise. I'll bet Tim Bruening didn't even catch that one.

The gang is standing around, looking at MRIs. Fun way to spend an afternoon. Key to reading brainscans; red means good, green means bad. Cordy's most recent scans have some serious green, and I'm not just talking about the insurance claims. Thank you, I'll be here all week. At that point Lorne walks in, looking like he just got pushed through a car wash. Suit and horns are seriously ripped. He says he can't talk about what happened, and the reason being that when he tries, he sounds like Curly running from the Frankenstein monster. Apparently, whoever he went to meet cast a spell that prevents him from forming words to describe them. Angel, exhibiting the maturity and sensitivity that comes with a two-hundred-plus-years lifespan, just wants to know if Lorne found out what he needs to know. Lorne, after a bit of snark, relents; he wrote the location down. Angel starts out before Lorne can not complete his warning.

Cordy looks around, and is somewhat perplexed to find that Skip's transported her to a brightly lit L.A. indoor shopping center. He explains that it's a construct the Powers that Be built to put her at relative ease, and from there slides far too easily into fanboy-style gushing about The Matrix, which if I were Cordy, I'd find the most frightening moment of the whole experience. He takes Cordy over to an information booth, the screen of which just happens to be showing a repeat of "Hero". Cordy gasps at seeing Doyle, and watches as he kisses her for the first and last time before going to his death. Skip characterizes this as a "big cosmic 'whoops' "; apparently Doyle giving Cordelia the visions was not in the Powers' syllabus. Cordelia takes that as an opportunity to question the appropriateness of the first word in the Powers that Be title, and Skip admits that, while the PtB can usually control and anticipate life-and-death events, love is a little outside their scope. However, it creates a problem in this instance, since demons are the only ones who can handle the power the visions hold. To illustrate, Skip calls forth Tammy, a serving-wench type from seventeenth-century England. She explains that she had the visions "for nigh on a year," and you could say that they left a very deep impression on her. Or you could say that they blew a big hole in the back of her head, which they did, and it's still there. Any inkling Cordy had to visit the food court has no doubt disappeared. Tammy gives Skip a vote of confidence, for which he curtly shoos her away. Cordy's liking her options here less and less.

Now we're flashed away to a dark pit illuminated by an open flame; Angel makes a less-than-graceful entrance, gets up, dusts himself off, and hears paired voices of both genders speaking of him rather dismissively. He's here to talk through the Conduit to the Powers; turns out that's the disembodied voices who refer to Angel as 'it'; and you thought old-money couples were snooty. Angel, as ever, avoids the path of diplomacy, but there's nothing for him to hit, so he barks instead. It gets him nowhere; his demands to remove Cordelia's visions only end up with his being flung around the room.

Skip, taking Cordelia to another part of the mall, is now asking her about, of all things, her acting career. Cordelia shrugs away the question, but Skip brings them to another set of TVs. They're all showing the pilot episode; trust the PtB to have multi-region players. Cordelia smiles fondly as she watches an uncomfortable-as-a-forked-snake Angel try to make small talk with her three-years-past self, and barely hears Skip as he makes the case that Angel's re-entry into Cordy's life has been something other than a boon from heaven. Skip goes on to illustrate a possible alternative outcome for that night, complete with football diagrams; Cordy could have easily, instead of running into Angel, been recruited by a talent scout (perhaps the same one who was definitely not hitting on Angel in the pilot?). "Inside every living thing, there is a connection to the Powers that Be," Skip explains. "Call it instinct, intuition--deep down, we all know our purpose in this world." Remember that line, kids; it'll be important later. He states that Cordy was destined not to receive the visions from Doyle, but to be granted the mega-superstardom she'd once sought with such fervor. The Powers, apparently, can not so much turn back time as overwrite it (which either does or doesn't explain what they did in I Will Remember You). Cordy would be granted a perfectly normal life, with "no monsters, no visions, no dying. Well, not for a long time, anyway."

"But no Angel," Cordy points out.

Skip's face becomes stern, and he informs her that the only result that will come from her going back to her current state is vegetation and rapid death. Cordy counters that there's no way Angel can know how to save the girl in her vision, and, it's implied, in any others, if she dies. Grim and frustrated, Skip ushers her into another room, or rather, through a wall. They find themselves in the Conduit's pit, where Angel is showing that he's got some serious posturing endurance. Shouting at the diffident voices, he calls Cordelia "a rich girl from Sunnydale who likes to play superhero." Cordelia closes down drastically at hearing her most trusted friend cast her in the image that she probably fears appearing as most, and demands Skip remove them. As he does so, Angel's sturm und drang slips, revealing panic underneath; he pleads nakedly for Cordelia's life, and the Conduit notes the fear impassively. "I'm more afraid of her dying than she is," Angel admits. "What is that?"

Back at the metaphysical mall, Cordelia's made her choice. Skip assents, and she closes her eyes. As she does, an announcer begins to describe her in rather glowing terms. We now see she's much better (and less) dressed, and standing on a soundstage, in front of a wildly applauding studio audience. She beams.

What follows next defies description, and has to be beheld to be believed. It's the theme sequence from Cordy's hit TV show, "Cordy!" kicked off by a rousing white-girl "1,2,3,4!" from the It Woman herself. We see Cordy toy with cute guys, fail miserably at being a maid, do cartwheels, make dresses, wear a various assortment of hats,

Mike's Review

Continuity: Cordelia is now part demon, and no longer suffers pain as a result of the visions. What else that might mean is to be discovered. But she can float!

Relationships: Angel and Cordelia each demonstrate their increasing dependence on each other, including Cordy's first ever kiss of Angel. But it was alternate-universe Angel, and had more of a utilitarian function than your average kiss, so it's not necessarily an indication of anything. And there's just the tiniest bit of sparkage between Gunn and Fred.

Characters: This is Cordelia's big moment, something we've been building to for at least two and a half years (if not five) and she comes through with flying colors. The old, mall-browsing girl of yesteryear is long ago and far away; she here completes her transformation into a warrior for good on the same level as Angel and Buffy herself; perhaps not so much with the power or accomplishment, but as far as will and strength of character, she's right up there.

What strikes more than her devotion to Angel and her farewell to her dreams of fortune and fame is her unwavering focus on the visions and the people behind them. I don't think even she's realized how much of an absolute this has become for her. Above all else, she sees her function in the world as being able to help people who are suffering.

Which is all well and good, but there's a flipside of this to consider. It's worth noting that whenever the threat that she might lose the visions or otherwise be deprived of her role as the Powers' messenger, Cordy freaks. And what we come to see is that when everybody else gets distracted, it will be Cordelia who remains absolutely focused on the mission above all else. It's very telling that what makes Cordy choose to give up the visions initially is Angel's speech about how she's still just "a rich girl from Sunnydale," Somewhere, deep down, she still sees herself that way, and the visions are the one concrete thing that she can point to to prove she's something more, a source of outside validation that appears to mean more to her than the respect and attention of her friends and the people she helps. Whatever support she gets from Angel et al., it doesn't seem to mean half as much as being handpicked by powers beyond human understanding. This can only serve to cause trouble down the road.

Angel, from first to last, demonstrates his utter dependence on Cordelia. For a guy who is all secretive and lone-wolf-ish, he has absolutely no problem making his need for Cordy blatant to the world, so much does he depend on her. From the moment she collapses onward, he steadily builds up a head of unreasoning, furious panic. It's not hard to see why; Cordy's gone from a mild annoyance to his most trusted friend and confidant. The reason that they fit so well together is that they've both grown, sure, but more to the point, they've grown around each other, like two trees whose branches arrange themselves in relation to each other. Cordy's taught Angel to be more social and human, and Angel's taught her, well, how to become a real person, basically. As others have noted, she's the one person in the world he can completely be himself with. As much as Buffy accepted him for what he was, she was never fully able to bring herself to accept that there was a killer inside the man she cared for, who might very well need killing someday. Cordy, relentless pragmatist that she is, has always taken this as a given, and also cares enough for Angel that she wouldn't put him through the torture of taking more lives, despite the personal cost to her. However, as badly scared as Angel is, one of these days Lorne's going to tell him to stick it if he doesn't start using the magic word.

Wes doesn't have much to do but look concerned, but Gunn and Fred get in a few cute moments, and there's a hint of chemistry between the two. And we get Phantom Dennis, yay!

Skip is a hell of a triumph for actor and makeup, I'll say that much. I've never seen a demon face look more human, more expressive. And he continues to exhibit the easygoing charm that made him a favorite in Billy. He's a really great character, isn't he? I sure hope we see more of him.

Best moments: Fred getting all flustered as she realizes she's talking to the guy she's crushing on working with about her underwear-wearing habits.

Skip's entrance. He's a very workmanlike spirit guide. Must be union.

Skip geeking out over The Matrix. The device of having a demon break pretension by reffing pop culture can be overdone, but here it worked perfectly, and was very natural for the character.

Charisma's delivery of Doyle's name. Shock, loss and regret all in one little word.

The title sequence. As I said, the scary thing was how plausible it all was. It's almost like what TV would have done with Cordelia if she was real.

Nevin's entire scene. One of the commendable things Angel does is give minor characters like this as much attention as the major ones. It's one of the things that make you feel like you're in a big city, where you do see freaky things on the street every day.

I don't know if I entirely buy Angel being driven as around the bend as he was by the visions, but David was wonderfully creepy at being completely gone.

The kiss. I don't care if it was alt-univ, it was great.

Angel and Cordy's hug when she woke up. Aw.

Questions and comments: If the visions have been getting steadily more damaging, Cordy's done a hell of a job hiding it. We haven't seen a hint of anything untoward since That Vision Thing. Misdirection is all well and good, but a little hint to prepare us would have been nice.

So if Angel was all crazy flaked, how did Gunn come to join the crew? Although presumably Angel had still been semi-sane at that point, as it wouldn't have been long after he received the visions that they met up. But of course Fred's still stuck in Pylea in Cordyworld because Cordy never went through the portal.

Given the method of how Doyle passed the visions on to Cordelia, several, er, imaginative souls came up with a similar scenario re: Angel receiving them. There's probably even a few eyewitness accounts out there if you look hard enough.

I'm not even getting into the whole thing of did Cordy's day as a star really happen or not, how did she know that girl was saved, etc. Time paradoxes get me right in the sinuses. It's a TV show; work it out yourselves.

Some people felt Cordy should have been far more her old bitchy self as Famous!Cordy than she was. I took it as a sign that Real!Cordy was right underneath, guiding her actions, despite her not having memory of her former self, which is consistent with what the ep showed us.

Scruffy and unshaven is a good look for Wes, don't you think? I wonder if we'll get to see more of that.

Rating: 4 out of 5. The plot's a little gauzelike, but the end results are hard to complain about, and solid acting and character stuff all around, particularly by Charisma, plus lots of funny stuff. What more do you need?