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For a season of television that's primarily impressive for how grim it is, Angel season five has a surprising number of fun episodes, really the best comedic episodes of the series. A January 14th 2004 episode called "Harm's Way" uses the short version of the character Harmony's name for a pun, one of several episodes to do so. It must have been a surprise to everyone that Harm turned out to be one of the most consistently funny characters in the Buffyverse.



Played by Mercedes McNab, Harmony first appeared as a background character, one of Cordelia's snooty high school friends in the first seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By season five of Angel, she gets to be the unapologetically shallow character that Cordelia used to be. She fits right in with the new premise of Angel's crew running an evil law firm when she takes the role of Angel's secretary. In "Harm's Way", we see how her job entails fetching Angel's mug of pig's blood and handling the catering for a meeting between two demon clans, resulting in the untimely appearance of a camel. The episode uses a dovetailing of premises to present the audience with something that challenges their complacency in accepting plot formulae. In the standard language of television, we would be compelled to sympathise with Harmony, and we do, in her attempts to please the implacable Angel, complaining at one point that she works extra hard because she doesn't have a soul. And that's the catch. She doesn't have a soul so compliance with the new policy that forbids killing people for pleasure or sustenance doesn't come naturally to her.

Just like with Spike in the middle seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, some of the best stuff in both series comes from when it plays around with its hazy mythology around what defines a character with a soul compared to one without one. This issue is also explored with Spike, now a part of Angel's cast, when he resumes an exploitative, casual sex relationship with Harmony even though he now has a soul.

What the heck is a soul anyway? I'm sure someone will figure it out one of these days.

Tuesday was my last day at one of the junior high schools where I've been working over the past year. I was surprised by the very kind expressions of farewells. One of the second year English teachers I worked with gave me this bouquet of artificial flowers:



She was one of the most hard-working and resilient teachers I've worked with. Another teacher gave me some kind of bread snack, sort of like bruschetta but frosted with a cherry flavoured substance. It was really good. He was one of the most sensible of the younger teachers I've worked with, as was a young woman who also teaches English to first year students. I worked with several impressive teachers.

It's an amazing school, a big one, with a surprising number of non-sports related clubs. It has an art club, a literature club, a handmaking club, a drama club, a brass band, and an English club. Of course I got to know the English club members and I was always impressed by their energy. I also generally hung out in the art club and occasionally in the brass band and drama club. I was continually astonished by the high level of work coming from the art club and I think the drama club has members who'll become skilled filmmakers. I wish I'd had more time for the literature and handmaking clubs. I spent a lot of time talking with a pair of sisters in brass band, the elder of whom was particularly keen on practicing English and was always a delight to speak with.

This was the first school where I spent some time observing classes of other subjects, primarily to see how differently other subjects are taught in Japan and gauge student attitudes toward them generally. I was surprised how often the Japanese language teachers were friendly and interested in talking about English. There was also a really impressive third year social studies teacher whose ability to remember information related to her subject enabled her to display some engaging extemporisation.

The school principal took me to dinner at a really amazing izakaya. It was easily the best food I've had in this town and I've had a lot of good food here. I ate so much sashimi, quail eggs, fried squid, and Japanese style fried chicken. The meal concluded with some incredible green tea over rice. This is normally considered the poor bachelor's easy meal but this restaurant turned it into a culinary masterpiece with a pitted umeboshi on top that combined with the rest for a perfectly balanced set of flavours.

It was a fitting experience to cap off a memorable year at a memorable school.

The parents of a murder victim and the parents of the killer meet for a discussion in 2021's Mass. It's an effective little chamber piece.

The victim and killer were high school students and the incident was a school shooting in which several people were killed, including the killer, who shot himself. It's an all too common scenario in the U.S. these days. The film stars Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton as the victim's parents, Jay and Gail, while Reed Birney and Ann Dowd player the killer's parents, Richard and Linda. I wonder if that's a Twin Peaks reference. Richard and Linda were the two mysterious names on the note Cooper finds in the last episode of Twin Peaks.

The dialogue goes as you might expect. There's a sense of horrible futility while at the same time there's the unstoppable compulsion to do something. Details of the killing and the killer's motives remain superficial, mostly the focus is on the grief and anguish of the two sets of parents. It's not Bergman but it's not bad.

The film was written and directed by Fran Kranz, an actor, best known for his role as Topher on Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Mass is available on Amazon Prime.