The Fades 1x04

This episode was so good I didn't even post about it for a week and a half because I was so intimidated. Plus I started descending into the joy/awfulness of Bedlam. So it's not super fresh in my head now, but it was really great and made me feel bad for ever doubting The Fades in the slightest.

Paul got magically brought back to life but it didn't annoy me, which seemed like it would be impossible until it actually happened. He was a Fade for most of the episode. He hung out with the Joe Dempsie ex-Fade (who is now an immortal human) and learned about how badly Angelics have treated Fades in the past. Just when the viewer was hoping Paul would stay as a Fade and start fighting Neil and the other Angelics, Paul brought himself back to life BECAUSE HE LOVES DANIEL KALUUYA SO MUCH. Then he threw up butterflies.

I have to admit that if I magically brought myself back to life, those would probably be the circumstances. The butterflies helped a lot.

In The Vampire Diaries, which is crammed full of annoying resurrections, I think what makes the resurrections most annoying is that they are so obviously driven by the importance of the person who died. If a recurring character gets bitten by a werewolf, she dies. If the star of the show gets bitten by a werewolf, they find a way to keep him from dying. The major human characters wear rings that cause them to come back to life if a supernatural creature kills them--well, okay--but what happens when one of the characters gets shot by a human with a gun? Don't worry, a girl who has been doing magic for less than a year is able to bring him back to life. For some reason none of the other humans who died on the show got to be brought back to life, but oh well. They weren't main characters.

I think The Fades avoided this kind of bad writing by having Paul bring himself back to life. It had already been established that Paul is the most powerful Angelic ever, so there's no need to explain why Angelics have never brought anyone back to life before--no one as strong as Paul had ever tried it.

Notes:

The awkward previouslies were actually cool this time, because in the middle of narrating them Mac almost started crying about Paul's death. He also sounded like he was crushing on Paul so hard. I appreciate that this show is about a friendship but I can't help wishing there could be a horror-quirkfest show about gay kids.

Sarah's husband decided that he doesn't like knowing her ghost is following him around, and he told her to go away. Everyone obvs found out he didn't really kill any of those people. Sarah didn't annoy me in this episode. PLUS, at the end she told Neil that it was time for her to eat some dead bodies and become powerful. She told Neil that this was so she could be a Fade on the Angelics' side or something, but I bet she was just tricking him.

I guess the main important thing I learned about Fades was that they can't just not touch people--they find it unbearably painful to do so. The special guns that Angelics fire at Fades have little pieces of blood and skin in them. The Joe Dempsie ex-Fade started having the power to touch humans when he was lying on the bathroom floor while his wife was committing suicide. He loved her too much to move away from her dripping blood, and he grew new skin in the places where the blood had hurt him. This is quite beautiful and even Christian, and really messes with the evil/zombie implications of the Fades eating people.

The Joe Dempsie ex-Fade is perfect, as I think I said before. He eats chocolate, moves his head around like a raptor, and throws up black liquid every so often. Paul trusted him so he killed a bunch of Angelics and he saved Natalie (the best character!!!) and turned her into a human by the same process that he was turned into one. Josh's comments about her in 1x05 were "oh my gosh, dribble" so I guess that she is going to be hot?

Neil was a dick. I'm not going to try to actually summarize this episode since I watched it so long ago (and am super tired) but Neil was such a dick that even some of the other Angelics were mad at him. For example! Mac kept saying it was his fault Paul had died, and Paul's Fade kept telling Neil to say that it wasn't, but Neil was just like, "Yeah, it sounds like it was your fault, great job ruining the last hope of humanity."

Hate Neil! Anyone who upsets Daniel Kaluuya should be erased with the giant eraser from Are You Afraid of the Dark. You should have seen Daniel Kaluuya by the way. He was just...I don't even know how many times I wrote "Daniel Kaluuya is a perfect human being" in my notes while watching the episode. He was so fucking good when Paul was dead. They did a good job portraying the stereotypical geeky comic relief character actually being sad, without losing his character traits.