A Man of Many Parts

 .

 

• REMEMBER •

  

 

 

McCOY: 

He's really not dead. 

As long as we remember him.

 

KIRK: 

'It's a far, far better thing I do 

than I have ever done before. 

...A far better resting place 

that I go to than I have ever known'.

 

CAROL: 

Is that a poem?

 

KIRK: 

No, no. 

 

Something Spock was

trying to tell me. 

 

On my birthday.

 

 

 Buffy blows up The Judge - Buffy the Vampire Slayer

 

 

WILLOW : 

Do you think he's dead?

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer : 

We can't be sure --

Pick up The Pieces and keep 'em seperate.

 

 

 

 

 ANGEL :

It's a Legend. Way before My Time. 

 

Of a demon brought forth to rid The Earth of The Plague of Humanity. 

To separate The Righteous from The Wicked... 

 

And burn The Righteous Down. 

 

They called him The Judge.

 

 

 GILES : 

The Judge? This is he?

 

 ANGEL :

Not all of him.

 

I'm still needing backstory here.

 

 GILES :

Erm... He...

He couldn't be killed, yes?

Erm... An army was sent against him. Most of them died.

But finally they were able to dismember him,

but... not kill him.

 

 ANGEL :

The pieces were scattered,

buried in every corner of The Earth.

 

 

So all these parts are being brought here?

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

By Drusilla.

The vamps outside were Spike's men.

 

 ANGEL :

She's crazy enough to do it.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

Do what? Reassemble The Judge?

 

 ANGEL :

Bring forth Armageddon.

 

CORDELIA :

Is anybody else gonna have cake?

 

We need to get this out of town.

Angel.

 

 ANGEL :

What?

 

You're the only one that can protect this thing.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

What about me?

 

You're gonna skip town for a few months?

 

 ANGEL :

I gotta get this to the remotest region possible.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

But that's not months.

 

 ANGEL :

I can catch a cargo ship to Asia...

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

You know, flying machines are safer than they used to be.

 

 ANGEL :

I can't fly. There's no sure way to guard against the daylight.

I don't like this any more than you do, Buffy.

But there's no other choice.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

When?

 

 ANGEL :

Tonight. As soon as possible.

 

BUFFY,

The Vampire Slayer :

But it's my birthday.

 

 

We are assembled here today to pay final respects to our honoured dead. 

 

And yet it should be noted that in the midst of our sorrow, this death takes place in the shadow of new life, the sunrise of a new world, a world that our beloved comrade gave his life to protect and nourish. 

 

He did not feel that sacrifice a vain or empty one... 

and we will not debate his profound wisdom at these proceedings. 

 

Of my friend, I can only say this —

Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels....

 

His was the most 

 

...Human.

 

 

SULU : 

Honours, ...hup!

 

(bagpipes play 'Amazing Grace' as the torpedo coffin is fired)

 

[Kirk's quarters]

 

KIRK: 

Come.

 

DAVID: 

I don't mean to intrude.

 

KIRK: 

No, not at all. ...I should be on the bridge.

 

DAVID: Can I talk to you for a minute?

KIRK: I've poured myself a drink. Would you like it?

DAVID: Lieutenant Saavik was right. You never have faced a death.

KIRK: No, not like this. I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I tricked my way out of death ...and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. ...I know nothing.

DAVID: You knew enough to tell Saavik that how we face death is at least as important as how we face life.

KIRK: Just words.

DAVID: But good words. That's where ideas begin. Maybe you should listen to them. I was wrong about you and I'm sorry.

KIRK: Is that what you came here to say?

 

DAVID: 

Mainly. ...And also that I'm ...proud, ...very proud ...to be your son.

 

Captain's log, stardate 8141.6. 

 

Starship Enterprise departing for Ceti Alpha Five to pick up the crew of the U.S.S. Reliant. 

All is well. 

 

And yet I can't help wondering about the friend I leave behind. 

'There are always possibilities' Spock said. 

 

And if Genesis is indeed 'Life from death', 

I must return to this place again.

 

 

[Enterprise bridge]

 

McCOY: 

He's really not dead. 

As long as we remember him.

 

KIRK: 

'It's a far, far better thing I do 

than I have ever done before. 

...A far better resting place 

that I go to than I have ever known'.

 

CAROL: 

Is that a poem?

 

KIRK: 

No, no. 

 

Something Spock was trying to tell me. 

On my birthday.

 

McCOY: 

You okay, Jim? 

How do you feel?

 

KIRK: 

Young. I feel young.

 

(the torpedo coffin lays in a clearing in the new, verdant forest on the Genesis planet)

 

Spock's Voice :

 

Space — The Final Frontier.

 

These, are the continuing voyages of the Starship ‘Enterprise'.

 

Her ongoing mission, to explore strange new worlds…

to seek out new life-forms and new civilisations...

 

To boldly go

Where no man has gone

Before --

Signature Gestures

“I’d become fascinated by the power and the existence of the Evil-Has-Won narrative and resolved to explore it further in a major DC universe crossover event. I was asked to complete what Dan DiDio was now calling his Crisis trilogy with a wrap-up book to be called Final Crisis. 

Dan wanted to use this series as a showcase for Kirby’s New Gods characters, and if I was excited by the idea of having to improvise on that theme, I was even more overjoyed to know that I had access to Darkseid himself, the ultimate supertyrant with his Anti-Life Equation. 

As far as I was concerned, the Anti-Life Equation was being rammed down my gullet every day in the papers and on TV, and I was sick of it; sick of being told the world was dying, and it was all because I’d forgot to turn off the bathroom light; sick of Fina(ncia)l Crisis, the War, and the teenage suicide bombers willing to die for the promise of a cheesy afterlife that sounded like a night out with the lap dance girls at Spearmint Rhino.

  With J. G. Jones and later Doug Mahnke on art, we set about dramatizing the breakdown of the rational enlightenment story of progress and development as it succumbed to a horror tale of failure, guilt, and submission to blind authority.

   

  I brushed up on the cheerful literature of apocalypse and doomsday, refamiliarizing myself with the various revelations, Ragnaroks, and myths of the end times to construct a thoroughly modern Armageddon in which half the human race was possessed by an evil god who announced his arrival in the form of Anti-Life Equation e-mails and small acts of Cruelty that grow to consume The World. 

What would it look like if a comic-book universe died, and what could it tell us about what we were doing to ourselves?

  The “final crisis,” as I saw it for a paper universe like DC’s, would be the terminal war between is and isn’t, between the story and the blank page. 

What would happen if the void of the page took issue with the quality of material imposed upon it and decided to fight back by spontaneously generating a living concept capable of devouring narrative itself? 

A nihilistic cosmic vampire whose only dream was to drain the multiverse dry of story material, then lie bloated beneath a dead sun, dying.

  I tried to show the DC universe breaking down into signature gestures, last-gasp strategies that were tried and tested but would this time fail, until finally even the characterizations would fade and the plot become rambling, meaningless, disconnected. Although I lost my nerve a little, I must confess, and it never became disconnected enough.

  This, I was trying to say, is what happens when you let bad stories eat good ones. This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all your dreams to nightmares.

  In the end, there was nothing left but darkness and the first superhero, Superman, with a crude wishing machine, the deus ex machina itself, and a single wish powered by the last of his own life force.

  He wished for a happy ending, of course.

  Final Crisis was a bestseller, but it divided the Internet crowd like Alexander’s sword. One outraged reader even confidently predicted that I would, someday soon, be brought to account for the “evil” I had done. For a comics fan scorned, it seemed, the measure of evil lay not in genocide or child abuse but in continuity details deliberately overlooked by self-important writers, of plot points insufficiently telegraphed, and themes made opaque or ambiguous.

  If only one-tenth of the righteous, sputtering wrath of these anonymous zealots could be mustered against the horrors of bigotry or poverty, we might find ourselves overnight in a finer world.

  That’ll catch on.

 

You Don't Agree, But You Don't Refuse - I Know You.

We put The Police there. Right? 

We put them there. And we don’t want to go there, 

because we are smart people; we are cool people. 

We don’t want to go and hit anyone. 

We don’t want to go and enforce The Law – 

Because we don’t really believe in it. 

But we know some poor bastard has to enforce it.

Why do we hate those guys when we put them there?

Why do we hate ourselves for creating this society?

Why are so many people in America obsessed 

with Marilyn Manson; corpses; dead people; 

misery; John Wayne Gacy… 

John Wayne Gacy’s a fucking prick. 

Y’know, he killed a few people 

and did some shitty paintings. 

What’s that? Why should we be engaged with that? 

And yet that has become.. 

what, “Apocalypse Culture“?

Where do we go from there, that isn’t that? 

Where do we go that isn’t playing with our own shite?

The Answer… back to 

The Individual.

Oh, you look so tired 
Mouth slack and wide 
Ill-housed and ill-advised 
Your face is as mean 
As your life has been --

Crash into my arms,
I want you.
You don't agree,
But you don't refuse —
I know you.

Trudging slowly over wet sand

Back to The Bench where 

Your Clothes were stolen

This is The Coastal Town
That they forgot to close 

Down, Armageddon,

Come Armageddon!
Come, Armageddon! Come!

“Babylon?
 
The myth of Tuamat and Marduk, the Enuma Elish... extraordinary.
Absolutely extraordinary.
 
There are archetypal forms... to become as gods... 
The Bacchanal. Apotheosis. It's almost.... It's almost as if... As if the act itself...

The act of violence... Some trigger in the brain. is if it were...

Oh dear God.
Dear God, what is this Aethyr I am come upon?
What spirits are these, labouring in what heavenly light?

No... 
No, this is dazzle, but not yet divinity. Nor are these heathen wraiths about me spirits, lacking even that vitality.

What, then?
Am I, like Saint John The Divine, vouchsafed a glimpse of those last times?
Are these the days my death shall spare me?

It would seem we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos...
Morose, barbaric children playing joylessly with their unfathomable toys.
Where comes this dullness in your eyes? How has your century numbed you so?

Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder?

Your days were born in blood and fires, whereof in you I may not see the meanest spark!
Your past is pain and iron!
Know Yourselves!

With all your shimmering numbers and your lights, think not to be inured to history. It's black root succours you. It is INSIDE you.
Are you asleep to it, that cannot feel it's breath upon your neck, nor see what soaks it's cuffs?

See me! Wake up and look upon me! I am come amongst you. I am with you always!

You are the sum of all preceeding you, yet you seem indifferent to yourselves.
A culture grown disinterested, even in it's own abysmal wounds.
Your women all but show their sexes, and yet this display elicits not a flicker of response. 
Your own flesh is made meaningless to you.

How would I seem to you? Some antique fiend or penny dreadful horror, yet you frighten me!
You have not souls. With you I am alone.

Alone in an Olympus. Though accomplished in the sciences, your slightest mechanisms are beyond my grasp. 

They HUMBLE me, yet touch you not at all.

This disaffection. This is Armageddon. Ah, Mary, how times levelled us. We are made equal, both mere curios of our vanished epoch in this lustless world.

This World, wherein comparison I am made ignorant, while you....
you are made virtuous.

Do you understand how I loved you? You'd have all been dead in a year or two from liver failure or childbirth. Dead. Forgotten.

I have saved you. Do you understand that? I have made you safe from time and we are wed in legend, inextricable within eternity.

Know that I am...
uh...”

— Jack The Ripper

“Business!" cried The Ghost, 

wringing its hands again.

  
"Mankind was My Business.  
The Common Welfare 

was My Business; Charity, Mercy, 

Forbearance, and Benevolence, 

were, all, My Business.  

The Dealings of My Trade were 

but a drop of water in 

the comprehensive ocean 

of My Business!"

“I think what we should do is walk away from the crap of the 20th century, and start thinking about what we’ve been experiencing.

My feeling about the 20th century, and about World War II and about Auschwitz and all of that stuff is that we HAD to go through it. We HAD to do it. That was Humanity’s Dark Night of The Soul, and it will never, ever happen again. 
But it HAD to happen.

Every single nightmare image, every image of hell that we have in our minds happened. 

Everything you can think of; people were flayed, brutalised, gassed, tortured, cut into pieces, turned into pigs – everything you can imagine happened. The world was a wasteland. There were cities completely annihilated. We went through it.

WHY did we do that?

Stanislav Grof has a conception of the ‘perinatal matrices', which was one of the big influences on the film The Matrix. 

You might recognise some of this. He says that things that happen to us around birth are really profound, and they have all kinds of weird effects. They effect society, they effect the self; they effect everything. They have reverberations.

And he claims that there are several states, that he calls “Basic Perinatal Matrices”.

The first state is oceanic bliss – which we’re all familiar with, I’m sure. Oceanic fuckin’ bliss, mate. And that is the state of the baby in the womb, untouched – everything is provided for; everthing is there; everything you need will turn up out of the blue.

Basic Perinatal Matrix 2 is a different thing. It’s when the womb starts to turn a little toxic, and begins to suggest we’re about to be expelled. And, y’know, we don’t remember this stuff – what happened? What was the feeling of that fetus in there who suddenly thinks: “My entire universe has been overturned and I’m about to be shit out”? 

Does he know where he’s going? “What the fuck’s this? Y’know, I was happy there. It was cool; I was getting everything I wanted.”

And so on into BPM 4 – which is kind of a release from tension; which is the birth process.

So I’m beginning to think.. as a society – and returning to the idea of ontogeny as history.. phylogeny, or whatever the fuck the word is.. what we’re looking at now is humanity’s process through Grofian matrices.

And what we went through is actually a Stanislav Grof Basic Perinatal Matrix 3 experience.

Every image that he talks about: death camps, control, the idea of people.. babies trapped in tubes.. you’ll recognise all this from The Matrix, as I said.

Oil, mechanisms, machines that hate us; destructive technology.. it all happened.

What if this little baby that is The Universe; this little larvae that’s approaching culmination, has had to go through these stages? Because everything does. 

If you want to get rid of War, 

How Do You Get Rid of War? 

You inoculate yourself against War by having 

The Worst Fuckin’ War 

You’ve Ever Had in Your Life. 

And everything after that’s just an aftershock. 

We’ve done nothing worse than what we did in those few years. Humanity’s never come close to anything like it. We’ve tried; there’s been a few lunatics who’ve tried. But nothing on that scale.

So what if we choose to imagine that Humanity has passed through that stage?

We’ve reached the 21st century, 

and we’re now approaching Basic Perinatal Matrix 4.

Which is: Victory after War. 
Which is: The Struggle is Over. 
Which is: We’re All Here; What Do We Do Next?

There was no apocalypse; there was no Christ. 

There was no rapture. There is nothing. 

All this stuff is shit.

There is only Us. And we’ve still got another thousand years, and maybe another thousand beyond that, and maybe another twenty thousand beyond that.

What are we gonna do?
Who Are We?

Are we gonna stick to these personalities; these bounded, territorial things?

Are we gonna expand ourselves; 

make ourselves bigger? 

So that if you happen to like.. [say] ‘world music’ and I don’t, I can tap into your love of ‘world music’, and experience it – and it means something.
So all I’m suggesting here is that we all take up magic. 
Because basically it works.”

The Man Comes Around

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder. One of the four beasts saying, "Come and see." And I saw, and behold a white horse

There's a man going 'round taking names

And he decides who to free and who to blame

Everybody won't be treated all the same

There'll be a golden ladder reaching down

When the man comes around

The hairs on your arm will stand up

At the terror in each sip and in each sup

Will you partake of that last offered cup

Or disappear into the potter's ground

When the man comes around

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singing

Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum

Voices calling, voices crying

Some are born and some are dying

It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree

The virgins are all trimming their wicks

The whirlwind is in the thorn tree

It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

 

Till Armageddon no salaam, no shalom

Then the father hen will call his chickens home

The wise men will bow down before the throne

And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns

When the man comes around

Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still

Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still

Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still

Listen to the words long written down

When the man comes around

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singing

Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum

Voices calling, voices crying

Some are born and some are dying

It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree

The virgins are all trimming their wicks

The whirlwind is in the thorn tree

It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

In measured hundredweight and penny pound

When the man comes around 

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts. And I looked, and behold, a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him

AXIS MUNDI : Heading Rapidly South

They •always• get started. 

They happen everywhere there's People. 

Mondas, Telos, Earth, Planet 14, Marinus. 

Like Sewage and Smartphones and Donald Trump —some things are just Inevitable. 

People get the Cybermen wrong. 

There's no evil plan, no evil genius. 

Just parallel evolution : 

(People + Technology) — Humanity = 

The Internet = Cyberspace = Cybermen. 

Always read The Comments.... 

Because one day, They'll be An Army. 

The Architect: 

The function of The One is now to return to the Source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the prime program. After which, you will be required to select from the Matrix 23 individuals – 16 female, 7 male – to rebuild Zion. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash, killing everyone connected to the Matrix, which, coupled with the extermination of Zion, will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race.

Neo:

You won’t let it happen. 

You can’t. 

You need human beings to survive.

The Architect :

There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.

And it comes to one great statement, which for me is a key statement of the understanding of myth and symbols. He says. “I saw myself on The Central Mountain of The World, the highest place. And I had a vision, because I was seeing in a sacred manner, of the world.” And the sacred central mountain was Harney Peak in South Dakota. 

And then he says, 

“But the central mountain is everywhere.”

 That is a real mythological realization.

BILL MOYERS: 

Why?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

It distinguishes between the local cult image, Harney Peak, and its connotation, the center of the world. 

The center of the world is the hub of the universe, axis mundi, do you know, the central point, the pole star around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, stillness is eternity, realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal not moment, but forever -is the sense of life. Realizing how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity, and the experience of the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience is the mythological experience, and he had it. So is the central mountain of the world Jerusalem, Rome, Banaras. Lhasa, Mexico City, you know? Mexico City, Jerusalem, is symbolic of a spiritual principle as the center of the world.

BILL MOYERS: 

So this little Indian was saying, there is a shining point where all lines intersect?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That’s exactly what he said.

BILL MOYERS: 

He was saying God has no circumference.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

God is an intelligible sphere, let’s say a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. And the center, Bill, is right where you’re sitting, and the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery.

“I’d become fascinated by the power and the existence of the evil-has-won narrative and resolved to explore it further in a major DC universe crossover event. I was asked to complete what Dan DiDio was now calling his Crisis trilogy with a wrap-up book to be called Final Crisis. 

Dan wanted to use this series as a showcase for Kirby’s New Gods characters, and if I was excited by the idea of having to improvise on that theme, I was even more overjoyed to know that I had access to Darkseid himself, the ultimate supertyrant with his Anti-Life Equation. 

As far as I was concerned, the Anti-Life Equation was being rammed down my gullet every day in the papers and on TV, and I was sick of it; sick of being told the world was dying, and it was all because I’d forgot to turn off the bathroom light; sick of Fina(ncia)l Crisis, the War, and the teenage suicide bombers willing to die for the promise of a cheesy afterlife that sounded like a night out with the lap dance girls at Spearmint Rhino. 

With J. G. Jones and later Doug Mahnke on art, we set about dramatizing the breakdown of the rational enlightenment story of progress and development as it succumbed to a horror tale of failure, guilt, and submission to blind authority. 

I brushed up on the cheerful literature of apocalypse and doomsday, refamiliarizing myself with the various revelations, Ragnaroks, and myths of the end times to construct a thoroughly modern Armageddon in which half the human race was possessed by an evil god who announced his arrival in the form of Anti-Life Equation e-mails and small acts of cruelty that grow to consume the world. 

What would it look like if a comic-book universe died, and what could it tell us about what we were doing to ourselves? 

The “final crisis,” as I saw it for a paper universe like DC’s, would be the terminal war between is and isn’t, between the story and the blank page. 

What would happen if the void of the page took issue with the quality of material imposed upon it and decided to fight back by spontaneously generating a living concept capable of devouring narrative itself? 

A nihilistic cosmic vampire whose only dream was to drain the multiverse dry of story material, then lie bloated beneath a dead sun, dying. 

I tried to show the DC universe breaking down into signature gestures, last-gasp strategies that were tried and tested but would this time fail, until finally even the characterizations would fade and the plot become rambling, meaningless, disconnected. 

Although I lost my nerve a little, I must confess, and it never became disconnected enough. 

This, I was trying to say, is what happens when you let bad stories eat good ones. This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all your dreams to nightmares. In the end, there was nothing left but darkness and the first superhero, Superman, with a crude wishing machine, the deus ex machina itself, and a single wish powered by the last of his own life force. 

He wished for a happy ending, of course. 

Final Crisis was a bestseller, but it divided the Internet crowd like Alexander’s sword. One outraged reader even confidently predicted that I would, someday soon, be brought to account for the “evil” I had done. For a comics fan scorned, it seemed, the measure of evil lay not in genocide or child abuse but in continuity details deliberately overlooked by self-important writers, of plot points insufficiently telegraphed, and themes made opaque or ambiguous. 

If only one-tenth of the righteous, sputtering wrath of these anonymous zealots could be mustered against the horrors of bigotry or poverty, we might find ourselves overnight in a finer world. 

That’ll catch on.”

Sponsor Love

RIKER: 

I'm sure Captain Picard would have something meaningful and inspirational to say right now. 

To tell you The Truth, I wish he were here, because I'd like to hear it too. 

I know how difficult this transition has been for all of you. 

I can take over for him, but I could never replace Captain Picard.

Nor would I ever try. 

Whatever the outcome, I'm sure our efforts in the coming battle will justify His Faith In All of Us. 

Dismissed.

[Ready room]

RIKER: (to the empty chair) 

What Would YOU Do?

(doorbell) 

RIKER: 

Come.

GUINAN: 

May I speak to you, Captain?

RIKER: 

Actually, Guinan, I —

GUINAN: 

You know, Picard and I used to talk every now and again, whenever one of us needed to. 

I guess I'm just used to having The Captain's ear. 

(She sits in Picard's chair) 

RIKER: 

What's on your mind?

GUINAN: 

I've heard a lot of people talking down in Ten Forward. 

They expect to be dead in the next day or so. 

They Trust You. 

They like you. 

But they don't believe anyone can Save Them.

RIKER: 

I'm not sure anyone can.

GUINAN: When A Man is convinced he's going to die Tomorrow, he'll probably find a way to make it happen. 

The Only One Who Can Turn is Around is YOU. 

RIKER: I'll do The Best I Can.

GUINAN: 

You're going have to do something you don't WANT to do. 

You HAVE to let go of Picard.

RIKER: 

Maybe you haven't heard. 

I tried to kill him yesterday.

GUINAN: 

You tried to kill Whatever That Is on The Borg ship — Not Picard. 

Picard is still Here with us in This Room. 

If he had died, it would be EASY. 

But he didn't. 

They took him from us a piece at a time. 

Did he ever tell you why we're so close?

RIKER: 

No.

GUINAN: 

Well, then let me just say that —

Our Relationship is 

Beyond Friendship, 

Beyond Family. 

And I WILL let him go. 

And you must do the same. 

There can only be one Captain.

RIKER: 

It's not that simple. 

This was his crew. 

He wrote The Book on this ship. 

GUINAN: 

And The Borg know everything he knows. 

It's time to throw that book away. 

You MUST let him go, Riker. 

It's the only way to beat him. The only way to Save Him. And THAT — 

Is Now Your Chair. 

Captain. 

(Riker sits) 

[Rocket hates People as such, and has developed the abrasive personality to match — but, glancing over, he sees that The God of Thunder evidently really is not up to The Fight that’s coming yet, realises that The Tree isn’t going to be the one to do it....]

Rocket Raccoon :

*sigh*

Okay — Time to Be The Captain....

The Raccon sashays over and prepares to deliver an impromptu Pep Talk to encourage a God.

THOR: 

I can't do this. I can't do this. I shouldn't be here. 

I shouldn't have come.This was a bad idea.

ROCKET: 

Come here. 

[Standing in front of him]

THOR: 

No, no, no. I think I'm having...

I'm having a panic attack. 

I shouldn't be here...this is...this is a bad-

ROCKET : 

Come here. Right here.

[Rocket slaps Thor, HARD -- ]

ROCKET : 

You think you're the only one who lost people?! 

What do you think we're doing here? 

I lost The Only Family I ever had. 

Quill, Groot, Drax, The Chick with The Antenna, all gone. 

Now, I get you miss your Mom. 

But She's GONE. Really Gone. 

And there are Plenty of People, 

who are only kinda gone. 

But you can help them. 

So is it too much to ask that you brush the crumbs outta ya beard, 

make schmoopy talk to Pretty Pants, 

and when she's not lookin', 

suck out the Infinity Stone 

and help me get My Family back?

THOR: 

Okay.

ROCKET : 

Are you crying?

THOR: 

No...Yes!

ROCKET : 

Get it together! You can Do This. 

You can Do This. All right?

THOR: 

Yes, I can.

ROCKET: 

Good.

THOR: 

I can do this. I can do it —

I can't do this.

[Thor runs away]

Good.

It'll make this easier.

Make what easier? 

Where's Cordelia? 

Upstairs asleep.

She still feels weak.

Make what easier? 

We're gonna bring Angelus in alive.

No, we're not.

Thought you said capturing him wasn't an option.

Changed my mind.

Change it back.

We get rid of Angelus, then what? We still have a Beast we don't know how to kill.

We know it's working for something much worse, but we don't know what it is.

We're caught in the middle of a maelstrom and we can't get out without Our Champion.

We're gonna Save Angel.

And I know exactly who we need to help us do it.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

They told me my lawyer was here to see me.

You my lawyer now, Wes? 

Hello, Faith.

How are you? 

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Still Alive.

Never thought I'd live to see YOU paying me a visit.

A lot's happened.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Whatever it is suits you.

I mean, you're looking.... good.

You know what's going on in L.

L.A. ?

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Seen the news, sure.

Never-Ending Night, Rain of Fire —

Team Angel must really have their hands full.

You don't know the half of it.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

But you're here to fill in the blanks for me.

Why? 

We need you.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Well, I hate to wet the paper for you, Wes but I'm kind of unavailable right now.

Maybe you wanna check back in a few decades when my parole comes up.

You need to know 

It's Armageddon-Time again — I dig.

Last thing you need is me in The Mix.

Besides, Angel will come shining through in the end like he always does.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Angel's Gone, Faith.

Angelus is Back.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Step away from the glass.

[CAR ALARM GOES OFF]

You okay? - Five-by-five.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer : 

A kid, Angel's got a kid.

WESLEY: 

Connor.

A teenage kid, born last year.

I told you, he grew up in a hell dimension.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Right.

And, what, Cordelia spent her last summer as? 

A divine being.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Uh-huh.

Can I just ask, what the hell are you people doing? 

Leading complicated lives, obviously.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Unleashing Angelus to help you stop this demon who put the lights out.

That's just - 

The Beast.

The demon who put out the lights, called The Beast.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

Gas to the flame, that's all I'm saying.

I wouldn't worry about the police coming after you.

Not yet.

With everything that's happening an escaped convict won't register on their radar.

FAITH, The Vampire Slayer :

I'm not gonna kill him, Wesley.

Angelus.

Angel's the only one in my life who's never given up on me.

There's no way —

I know —

That's why it had to be you.

I'm just wondering if you're up to it.