Putting together some thoughts on 'A Hole in the World' (also new icon)

[butterfly]

So, while I was at work today, I let my subconscious work on all the pieces that we were handed on the last Angel and I'm starting to think about how it all fits together.

I've mentioned five things: Illyria (barbarians according to the Greeks), Eve and Lindsey's song (people gonna pray and crawl), astronauts and cavemen with fire (of course the cavemen win), destiny (can you ever escape it?), and karma kicking everyone in the ass.

karra mentioned Feigenbaum's Bifurcation of Chaos Theory. And yes, that would be the bunny Master of Chaos that Fred was mentioning.

From here:
Another pioneer of the new science was Mitchell Feigenbaum. His work, in the late 1970s, was so revolutionary that several of his first manuscripts were rejected for publication because they were so novel they were considered irreverent (Gleick, 1987). He discovered order in disorder. He looked deeply into turbulence, the home of strange attractors, and saw universality. He developed a method to measure turbulence and found a structure embedded in nonlinear systems. According to Gleick (1987), a mathematical proof of his ideas was presented in 1979 by Oscar E. Lawford III.

Feigenbaum showed that period doubling is the normal way that order breaks down into chaos. He calculated universal numbers which represent ratios in the scale of transition points that occur during the process of period doubling. These ratios are now called Feigenbaum numbers. Gleick (1987) mentions that Richard J. Cohen, and his medical colleagues at MIT, found that period doubling is associated with the onset of a heart attack. This finding brought chaos science into the domain of medical science.

By the mid 1970s, the movement toward chaos as a science was well underway, and in 1977, the first conference on chaos theory was held in Italy. Perhaps the most startling finding to come out of this new scientific theory is that order exists within chaos. In fact, order comes from chaotic conditions.

Order in chaos - that's what we're seeing this season. Angel changed the universe, created a 'butterfly effect' and yet there is an order to the universe that will happen regardless. All he did was show another path to the same problem - because he didn't find a solution last time, he just reset the problem and put in a slightly different number, one where Connor was not his son.

Now, I'm not spoiled, but all these things seem to be connected to me. Illyria's very name inspires thoughts of chaos and disorder - of fantasy. Eve returns, mentions Lindsey. Eve, who is the only person apart from Angel to have confirmed knowledge of Angel's son's existence (though I'd bet if Eve knows then Lindsey knows). Fred was an astronaut that hid in caves.

Destiny - what does it mean? Lorne said that he wouldn't look forward to having Eve's future, yet we know that a person doesn't always walk the path they're foretold (Angel went off his path in S2, started onto Jasmine's path).

Wolfram and Hart had to restock its entire staff. That's why we got Harmony. Why we have Knox and Eve - both people who seem to be hiding things from the Senior Partners. It was a rush job - they had to overwhelm Angel with their preparedness. And in their rush, they got people who, while evil, were not their kind of evil. Lindsey wants to break the system and Knox wanted to bring back something that was older and presumably stronger than the system. Evil turns on itself. Feeds on itself. The Old Ones were probably able to be pushed back because they'd spent so long fighting each other that they were unable to unite against the new order - against us - the Greeks, the astronauts, the humans.

Oh, and I called Knox being the key in the season twist.

Comments

[soundingsea.livejournal.com]

Ahh. I've wondered a lot about the whole re-stocking of the employee pool after the zombification. This makes sense - that it was rushed and that's how we got the wildcards we did.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

It's what makes the most sense to me. That or the SP are in on it (though I'd doubt that, since I don't think Illyria is really their type of demon).