#davis copperfield

[callmebymyname01]

Stephanie and David Copperfield

[obsessionisaperfume]

Another look at Jackson and Lydia in the opening credit sequence

I was thinking about osointricate's post about the season 2 opening credit sequence, and what the black werewolf ink means, and how much we see it in the credits.

So I went back and watched the opening credits again (oh, the hardship of watching Tyler Hoechlin bursting out of the ash, my life, it is so hard...) and I noticed something. (Well, a few things, but they'll be separate posts.  One of which is actually about the black goo.)

This shot

is the only time we see Jackson's unobscured face in the credits. And we're the only ones who get to see it, too.

It's not a coincidence that the other times we see Jackson in the opening sequence, his face is obscured by the lacrosse helmet--very few people this season have gotten a glimpse of the real Jackson, even the audience, because as the season goes on, Jackson is being controlled more and more often by Gerard. (I have more to say about that, too, later.)

In this shot, they're both sitting. Lydia seems to be nestled on a black cloud--we can see one foot clearly, but the other one is hidden by the black.  Jackson has isolated himself from Lydia; look how he's giving her his back and is turned at a slight diagonal to her, so that she can't see his face clearly. No one can see the real Jackson, not even the most important person in his world, and, from the look on his face, he either doesn't realize or won't acknowledge that Lydia is there beside him, touching him.  Holding onto him.  

Because she's his tether; she may be sitting on a cloud, but there is absolutely nothing that Jackson could be sitting on, because we see the speckled background showing directly underneath him. The only thing that appears to be keeping him from falling is Lydia; even though he's apparently rejecting her, she never lets go.  Davis straight-up showed us how Jackson's arc was going to play out.

[obsessionisaperfume]

Derek, Victoria, and the Bite

Somebody, in the last couple of weeks, did a pic post of the scene in Raving where Derek supposedly bit Victoria, showing that the angles seemed all wrong for a bite.  (I KNOW I saw it, but I can't find it, although I could have sworn I reblogged it.)

I kept thinking about that, a lot, and then I went through that fight frame by frame, and not only did Derek not bite her, he never showed fangs, and I'm pretty sure he never even popped his claws.

This is another case of Jeff Davis using sleight of hand to make us think we saw something we didn't see. Let me show you:

This is what Victoria's shoulder looked like when she staggered over to Chris after having been bitten:

In addition to the hole from the fangs, there's also a tear in the neckline of the jacket:

Now.  I went through the fight when Derek comes for Scott.  For almost all of it, Victoria  is behind  Derek.  I'd say definitely all, but the strobe makes that problematic.  But the sequence of the fight is, she sneaks up behind him, apparently stabs him (although there was no rip in the back of his shirt, nor was there any blood, WTF costuming?), shoves him over to the wall.  He's trying to get away from her and back to Scott, and eventually she shoves him so that he falls and rolls over to the table next to Scott.

During this fight, every time we can see Derek, he's completely human. We never see the fangs or claws come out.  Again, I can't say it never happened at any time because of the strobe lighting.  That lighting was the sleight of hand part; it was meant to keep the viewers off-balance and create doubt about what they were actually seeing.  But there is one frame--ONE--where we see Victoria as she's throwing Derek into that roll. I couldn't find a screencap of it anywhere, so I photographed my laptop screen. The pic is really poor quality because of that, but it's clear enough to see this:

That's Derek's shoulder or back in the bottom of the frame.

Here's a closer view of the jacket:

No rips, no holes, NO BITE.

After this shot, it cuts to Derek rolling ass-over-teakettle and fetching up next to Scott on the floor.  When he gets up, Victoria is gone, and he drags Scott out.

So unless he stopped, dropped Scott outside the door, and went after Victoria, which I find unlikely since he was trying to save Scott's life (witness his urgency with Stiles about the line of mountain ash), somebody else bit her.

I can't say with 100% certainty that Derek isn't the one who bit her, but I can be that certain that he didn't bite her in that room.  The facts that we never see him wolf out, even a little, that Scott was close to death and Derek's priority was getting him out of there and away from the wolfsbane, and that Derek may not be the bestest alpha ever, but he is not galactically stupid enough to piss off the Argents* into coming after him and his pack when he's already got a much bigger problem on his hands with the alpha pack make me 99.99% sure that some other werewolf, and not Derek, bit Victoria.

* jmtorres has a pretty persuasive argument for this here.

[obsessionisaperfume]

Lydia's immunity to the bite

(Originally posted here as a photo post.)

When her mother comes in and finds Lydia's hand all cut up and her knuckles bleeding, we see that it's her left hand.  There are cuts on the knuckles and first joints:

   She wears gloves to school to hide the wounds:

When she’s crying in the car during the lacrosse game, we see that she's wearing the same outfit, so it's the same day, and she has one bare and one gloved hand.

       And we're meant to notice the one-glove-off, other hand is fine thing, because the director made sure we had a very clear view of Lydia's hands by having her put each one up to her face separately, so that we can't miss them.

Since we already know she has only one injured hand, and we see that she's wearing a glove on only one hand and the other hand is plainly uninjured, it's natural to assume that the glove is on the injured hand, but it’s not.  The director gave us a close-up view of her mother holding the injured left hand in the morning, and a little over 12 hours later, her left hand is completely healed.  The view of her hand in the car picture shows the knuckles and first joints, where the injuries should be.

That single glove?  That was a total fakeout.  Well done, Mr. Davis.

Lydia may not have gotten the enhanced senses, but she’s clearly got advanced healing going on.  I gotta wonder what else is going on with her that we don’t know about yet.

[rachelg43-blog]

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)