Xavier: Renegade Angel

[TheHafk]

Every month or so, I come back to this episode. I don't know why, I just do. I love this show, but this episode in particular has had a strange effect on me.

It's wonderful and terrible. It's smart and stupid. It's boring and exciting. It's everything. It's as Xavier would call it, a total mind-blinder.

The worst part is, I have no good explanation as to why I love this episode. I've tried to look more into it, but I've found nothing. This show is on a whole different level, and this episode solidifies that fact.

[DrakeIsGod]

Wow! I have that exact same feeling! I watch this episode a lot for a reason I can't quite explain. To me this episode is one of the best.

[spejic]

I think the difference between this episode and other episodes is the difference between a conversation and a lecture. Xavier never talks with anyone, he always talks at them. He has certainty in his own views (even in "Going Normal" - he is still forceful in his vision of normailty) and all his words are an explaination of, a support of, or an exposition of those views. His talk with himself starts the same way, with rote insults. But eventually we see a break down - he stutters one of the put-downs, then he opens up about his horrowing episode interviewing for the hot dog vendor job, and finally he is willing to share his penii with himself. He is then able to make an agreement with him to have a contest. And that is where the conversation really starts. Each musical phrase, each visual aspect is built upon the one before, but it goes off in unpredictable ways until they meld together in one beautiful, free-flowing object. That is the result of freedom of thought. At the beginning of the episode his hidebound thinking was going to make him kill himself, but by the end he was fighting for his life life life.

In fact, you can tell that this episode is supposed to be taken differently because where other episodes have the echoing "Life Life Life", this episode has the echoing "Death Death Death" (in fact, it has it twice).  Isn't that mind-blowingly convincing? Good. With your mind blown you'll believe all that shuck and jive I dished out. But at least I got to use the phrase "shuck and jive". And that is why I wrote everything above. I've been waiting for years to find a place to say "shuck and jive".

I think I'll dial 518 555-0170 to see what I get. Hopefully I will end up talking to spejic so I can tell him what a jive fool he is. And how he should shuck...s I came close to saying something rude.

[Remoat]

This episode also immediately follows "Godrilla," which concludes with Xavier's demise and a subsequent appearance of a gravesite populated with piles of renegade angel corpses.  That event could be taken as a representation of Xavier's doomed lifelong spirit quest or whatever, which then gives way to the blowdown episode's focus on a death death death that we never see occur.  No one dies in this episode, which is pretty rare for this program.  I don't know what kind of conclusions to draw from that stuff, but your description induced me into that observation of life following death.

The shakashuri blowdown has pretty colors.

[Quofff]

and @remoat. You are good, both of you. I have watched this episode several times and never noticed death death death.

I always thought the numbers on Xavier's wrist and his reaction to them referenced the tattoos stamped on some WW2 concentration camp victims, meaning that Xavier is a "survivor" of some rending trauma (parents' deaths? there was also, as remoat mentioned, a mass grave full of Xaviers in Godrilla...), which lends itself to the maybe obvious interpretation that this episode (and season) is about the necessity of Xavier to confront and forgive (or kill) himself over what he's done/endured, and all this new age-y questing hullabaloo is a self-imposed distraction from the inevitabilty of the conversation he must have with himself. I don't think this is an uncommon thing for people to do, either, to become obsessed with finding meaning or to retreat into magical thinking over events that seem horribly unfair.

Why, though, at the end, does Xavier's father seem to blame us, the viewer, for his death? And why does he have a third eye, too?

[Quofff]

I guess it's also interesting that just as playing the Shakashuri in the pilot episode restored sanity to the town, Xavier's sanity (if you could call it that) is restored through his Shakashuri here, as well. But the town quickly became undone and Xavier was back to his pointless, destructive ramblings in season two. Perhaps it would have been better if he had killed himself?

[spejic]

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Quofff wrote:

I always thought the numbers on Xavier's wrist and his reaction to them referenced the tattoos stamped on some WW2 concentration camp victims

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That was the obvious reading, and you always have to be careful of obvious readings in Xavier. If you re-arrange the spacing, you really do get (518) 555-0170 as the number, and that is obviously a phone number with the Hollywood fake 555 in there. The number does have some connection to who Xavier is (because when he called the number he got himself), but as to what it actually represents - a concentration camp number, a science experiment identification, a reminder he wrote on himself when he ran out of post-it notes and since forgot - probably can't be determined and may not be important anyway.

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Quofff wrote:

Why, though, at the end, does Xavier's father seem to blame us, the viewer, for his death? And why does he have a third eye, too?

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In New Age beliefs, the third eye on the forehead represents enlightenment, the ability to see into the self truly. Maybe this has something to do with Xavier's penii - he sees into himself, but only into the baser, more surface parts and is not enlightened. The very beginning of the episode has Xavier saying how stupid it is to look into the self, because he has more important things to do, so that kind of fits together. Anyway it might be an indication that what the father cloud is saying is significant because it comes from an enlightened being. Or it might mean the opposite.

The entire ending thing is a little problematic. The whole show is about removing belief systems that limit us, but there are problems with freedom as well and the scene with the announcers point it out - they make the contest so free that it is meaningless. Is father cloud saying that the choice (no matter how meaningless) is with us? Or is he, like you said, blaming us,for choices we've already made? The announcers say that the winner will get a show, but he already had gotten a show and we've just finished watching the first 10 episodes. And we chose to watch.

[LordyLordy4040]

This episode is the source for the BULK of my snappy cumbags.

[Quofff]

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spejic wrote:

That was the obvious reading, and you always have to be careful of obvious readings in Xavier. If you re-arrange the spacing, you really do get (518) 555-0170 as the number, and that is obviously a phone number with the Hollywood fake 555 in there. The number does have some connection to who Xavier is (because when he called the number he got himself), but as to what it actually represents - a concentration camp number, a science experiment identification, a reminder he wrote on himself when he ran out of post-it notes and since forgot - probably can't be determined and may not be important anyway.

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I didn't mean to imply that Xavier was literally a concentration camp survivor (like the hicks in the boxcar seemed to have assumed), just that the numbers were, as you said, a kind of emblem for something important about himself that he may have been trying to forget or cover up. It is a key to making a meaningful connection with himself, cleverly explicated in the next scene in the form of a phone call. Xavier's first instinct was to kill himself after learning that he was responsible for his father's death. But being so close to his own death caused him to cut past his ridiculous seeker persona and identify something real about himself and his past.  It didn't have to be -- he could continue living if he made an attempt to reconcile his past actions, which he hasn't shown must genuine interest in doing all season. Look at his little notebook in the beginning of the episode. He's uncovered nothing we haven't known since the pilot.  Also, this is the obvious reading, but some of the first things he says to himself are "You sound like the physical manifestation of some loser's inner demons" and "You sound like some total chode's inability to confront the reality of his past actions." Too obvious and clean to take at 100% face value but I think there's some truth there.

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spejic wrote:

In New Age beliefs, the third eye on the forehead represents enlightenment, the ability to see into the self truly. Maybe this has something to do with Xavier's penii - he sees into himself, but only into the baser, more surface parts and is not enlightened. The very beginning of the episode has Xavier saying how stupid it is to look into the self, because he has more important things to do, so that kind of fits together. Anyway it might be an indication that what the father cloud is saying is significant because it comes from an enlightened being. Or it might mean the opposite.

The entire ending thing is a little problematic. The whole show is about removing belief systems that limit us, but there are problems with freedom as well and the scene with the announcers point it out - they make the contest so free that it is meaningless. Is father cloud saying that the choice (no matter how meaningless) is with us? Or is he, like you said, blaming us,for choices we've already made? The announcers say that the winner will get a show, but he already had gotten a show and we've just finished watching the first 10 episodes. And we chose to watch.

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I buy all of this and think that "or it might mean the opposite" can be applied to a lot of the analysis of this show, which is remarkable. This show is fascinating in how thoughtful and relentlessly inscrutable it is.

I'm also reluctant to post the screenshot below because I don't think the actual numbers on his arm are anything of consequence but they're different in the DVD version as compared to the broadcast version. I imagine the change was made for legal reasons. Just interesting to note, is all!

http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/6817/xavnum.gif

[Remoat]

I'm tempted to dial the original number, but I fear I'll find a deppelganger on the other end.

[spejic]

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Quofff wrote:

Also, this is the obvious reading, but some of the first things he says to himself are "You sound like the physical manifestation of some loser's inner demons" and "You sound like some total chode's inability to confront the reality of his past actions." Too obvious and clean to take at 100% face value but I think there's some truth there.

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I take everything he said to himself on face value. It was the one time he was honest with himself.

And that's important. If you are dishonest with yourself, it leads to disaster. But if you are honest with yourself, it leads to total catastrophe.

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Quofff wrote:
I'm also reluctant to post the screenshot below because I don't think the actual numbers on his arm are anything of consequence but they're different in the DVD version as compared to the broadcast version. I imagine the change was made for legal reasons. Just interesting to note, is all!

http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/6817/xavnum.gif

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That's a very interesting trivial thing. The recording on my computer is from the last time it was shown on TV, so the switch was before the DVD.