Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/04/underwater-casket-turns-ou.html
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Speaking of underwater caskets… This brought up a memory that I’m not sure is correct now. Wasn’t there an episode of the Buffy spin off show Angel, where he gets put into an underwater crypt? 
@Nightflyer, you’re a Buffy fan… am I misremembering?
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Yes! You are correct. Angel was locked in a watertight casket underwater for a year. He came out pretty feral, not unlike how he was after spending hundreds of years in a hell dimension when Buffy had to kill him to save the world. The casket was a great story line because it took the rules of the world to a logical extreme. I like writing that says “okay, we’ve established rule X, so Y would happen”. If vampires are immortal, then you can lock one in a box underwater indefinitely, right? So what would happen?
Walking Dead is also really good at this game of “building an internally consistent set of rules for the world, then probing the implications of that”. My favorite kind of show. 
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That’s right! Thanks for the reminder. It’s been a few years since I’ve watched it.
Yeah, I like that about Walking Dead, too. I’m really interested to see the new show, which seems like it’s set a while after the original shows. I’ve never seen Fear the Walking Dead, though? Worth checking out?
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Pavayne is subject to a similar fate.
But that’s well after season 3’s cliffhanger, season 4’s opener. I remember thinking that Angel’s fate was horrible, and that this feeling of terror built on established buffyverse lore. I first saw Angel on DVD, well after the broadcast run, (and after seeing all of buffy) so my memory may be different.
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who would build a floating dock out of concrete?
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but some say that the harbors were a waste of resources.
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I found the writing less consistent with what was arguably the central question of the series, "Are vampires and other demons INHERENTLY evil? There were episodes and characters that called that into question like Clem, but there were also “monster of the week” episodes that took “Monsters are evil” as a given. There was careful backstory for why Angel wasn’t evil, but spike was as evil or not evil as a particular episode demanded, just as 'Zander was as brave or cowardly as an episode or joke demanded.
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I have not seen Fear The Walking Dead yet. It’s on my to-do list, though it seems like the reviews aren’t great, and apparently it’s more “horror” leaning (as opposed to WD’s more “survivalist/adventure” bent). That’s been enough to make me procrastinate on watching it. Although after slogging my way through 160 hours of CW’s Arrow, maybe I can watch anything. Look, it’s full of beautiful people that I wanna look at, okay? Pandemics make us do strange things.
Also- there’s a new WD show? I was not aware!
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I think that’s a fair critique, yah. My feeling was that overall, the progression was from “monsters are 100% evil” in the beginning, to increasingly gray at the end. It’s not a very consistent slope, though. This was certainly the “hit you over the head with it” theme of the The Initiative season (probably my least favorite, to be honest). Buffy was constantly put in the position of defending the monsters, but she alone seemed to know who the good ones are and who the bad ones are. I guess that was her hero property, in a sense. She was never wrong about who was worth staking and who was worth giving infinite extra chances.
And, well, Clem is just goddamn delightful. I’m okay with breaking rules for comedy relief like that.
Yep!
World Beyond is the subtitle…
There is supposed to be a Rick Grimes movie coming out soon, too, but there isn’t a trailer or anything out for it yet. I’m guessing they’re behind on filming due to Covid…
Well, my goodness. I am very excited about that now. Thank you for sharing!
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This is getting even further Off Topic, but…When they started getting morally grey, i was expecting an arc where they came to the realization that the Watcher’s Council was a bunch of evil ethnic cleansing assholes and they had to be taken out. Now that would have been interesting. And I loved the way the UC Sunnydale eousides showed how the group dynamcs changed in college, and Willow really came into her own. And we all love Clem, but he wasn’t the first “monster” played less evil for laughs. The guy selling the books of the Ascension comes to mind. “Excellent condition, except for some minor foxing…”
Torchwood did a similar thing to Captain Jack Harkness, who became immortal courtesy of Rose Tyler during her brief apotheosis (although he could be killed, he would come back to life shortly afterwards): he got buried alive in Roman Cardiff, suffocating and resurrecting countless times before the Torchwood team dug him up again in the present day.
If I remember correctly, Word of God was that vampires and demons were inherently amoral, rather than evil: without souls, they lacked a conscience. Of course, in most cases this was a distinction without a difference, but it does perhaps explain why there were degrees of evil among vampires: they were still essentially who they used to be, but with all moral restraint removed. So Spike was basically a romantic, and Angel, well … IIRC, there’s a line in one of the Angel episodes (can’t remember which) where Angel is telling Cordelia about his memories of his time as a soulless murderous vampire, and Cordelia is commiserating with him about what a burden that must be, and he says something to the effect of “You don’t understand. Those are good memories.”
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I got kind of a kick out of a floating casket described as a local legend. Although hopefully that doesn’t happen often in Maryland.
The underwater casket trope pops up (so to speak) lots of places. The recent Netflix series movie The Old Guard is about a team of good-guy immortals. There is reference to a friend of one of the team who was put in an iron casket and dumped in the sea 500 years earlier. The final episode endingseems to set up a sequel involving that character.
Spoiler warning:
edit: corrected as per @Mindysan33’s reply.
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Shocked by The Old Guard’s Ending? Here’s a Breakdown of That Final Twist
Why would we be shocked by that, it was telegraphed from miles away
The coffin thing actually annoyed me a bit because it showed the movie wasn’t really thinking through the implications of its central premise. In reality an iron object like that, if thrown into the open ocean, would rust through in probably less than a century, probably a lot more quickly considering it was also being punched from the inside from time to time. She could have been out after as little as ten years and thus should have been around for a lot longer than she was. This is emblematic of the movie having no real conception of actual deep time. It hasn’t thought through what it would mean for someone to be thousands of years old, how one’s mindset, one’s values would be changed. In reality, if we accept the central premise, the characters — at least the ones older than a few hundred years — would probably be either almost feral, or completely unconcerned with worldly affairs. They certainly wouldn’t form a team of super mercenaries. I think Highlander, especially the TV show, which had a bit more time to explore these issues, actually did this a lot better. You meet a lot of immortals there and almost none of them are what one would call “good guys”. Even the main characters have had long stretches of doing evil things and quite a lot of the antagonists have gone completely insane..
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Or, after centuries of maturing, they would form a strong ethical philosophy and a sense of responsibility for the childlike mortals they hope to guide to peace. Or they would just get bored and feel like kicking some ass.
If we accept vampires and zombies, why not accept the premise of this show?
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That’s the thing, I accept the premise, I just disagree with what the implications of the central premise would be. I don’t think the movie was bad, it’s just not doing quite what I personally would have wanted it to do in terms of extrapolation. And I’m not saying Highlander is any better in that regard. If we took that franchise’s central premise to its logical conclusions, immortals would always be battling with high explosives rather than swords. A rocket propelled grenade or a high caliber sniper rifle removes a head with much less danger to the user than a sword does.
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True, but that’s against “The Rules.” Plenty of evil Immortals tried to cheat, of course, but eventually they were always taken out by one of the Good* Guys. Most Immortals tended to follow the Rules. Besides, swordfights are quieter and tend to attract less attention from mortals than explosives and gunshots (in theory. The Quickenings should have been pretty noticeable.)
*For varying degrees of Good, I suppose. Methos always considered himself more practical than “good,” and liked guns, but usually wound up doing the impractical-but-heroic thing for his friends’ sakes (complaining about it the whole time.)
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