| quote: |
Originally posted by DorothyFan1
1. Why is Angel the one who's memories Roger sees in Act 26?
2. How can it be Angel when there is no inkling prior to Act 26 that she's that important to the series? Why the sudden twist in the end for?
3. Why does Roger lie to Angel at the end of Act 26 when he claims he doesn't know who he really is?
4. If Dorothy is not a Dominus...then why was she able to power up Big O on several occassions? If we keep assuming she's not a Dominus...Big O or any other Megadeus wouldn't have bothered to even flash the announcement on the screen "Cast in the name of God, ye not guilty" at all.
5. Why does Angel create Dorothy to be Roger's "assistant" for? Why is Dorothy so necessary for Roger Smith and the whole Big O mythology?
6. If Paradigm City is a hologram...why is it always reset after 40 years?
7. Why is Dorothy standing next to Angel in the last shot of Act 26 after the Reset?
8. If we never get a Season 3 to air...why can't the Big O be revived via comic books? |
1-5. As i've argued before,
Big 0 expresses in a modernized form ancient mythology of a Neoplatonic/Gnostic nature.
Rosewater
pere is what we would think of as God. Rosewater
fils is what the Greek philosopher Porphyry termed,'the fallen spirit who wishes to be worshipped as the greatest God,' or Paul's Prince of the powers of the Air.' Either becuase of the inherently inferior nature of matter or becuase of some catastrophe in the process of creation, the world is imperfect. One of the principle
hypostases of the divine world is fallen and trapped in matter (Dororthy--this is why her memoreis are key to the exiestence and poloting of the Bigs). Another divine agent was sent down into the world to bring her back. This figure is a mediator, or , if you will, a negotiator--compare Jesus/Maria Magdalena, or, more pointedly, Simon Magus/Helena of Tyre. Angel is the demiurge--the actor from the divine world responsible for creating the material world (see Plato's
Timaeus, or Paul's comments about the law having been handed down by an angel or the world created by angels). But no one realizes that she is the god of this world beucase they are deceived by Rosewater. No one can remember anything beucase the process of divine beings (including ordinary human souls) entereing into material bodies creates a state of amneisa (drinking from the river Lethe in Greek myth, esp. Plato's
Phaedrus and Plutarch's,
On the Face in the Moon)
6. In the Jewish version of Neoplatonism (Kabbalah), the whole cosmic cycle--fall, creation, redemption, destruction--is carried out again and again endlessly--this is actually an old Stoic idea (
ekpyrosis) that was rejected by Plotinus and other Greek (and Christian) Neoplatonists (and it has precedents in ns ome of the Pre-Socratics).
7. The Stoics assumed that each iteration fo the world was exactly like all the others-- that Socrates and ALexander the Great lived exactly the same live along wiht everyone else. Jewish thought is not very clear on this point as they would have considered such specualtion blasphemous. But it seems to me that the creators of Big 0 believe that there is some variation. We can see form the glimpses of memory that the previous world was destroyed in a battle founght between hundreds or thousands of Great Gods--the one that is the subject of Big O by only two. So the next world will be the same but differnt. Thre main charactrs will be the same but their relationship will be differnt. Perhaps we can infer that in the next iteration Dorothy and Angel will begin as friends and only at some later point meet Roger. Also, I suspect that in the previous age (this would be the world Roger remembers when he has his lapse while fighting in Big O and finds out that his house and bank accounts are non existeent, but that ANgel knows him as her superior officer in the miltary--another differnt relationship) human beings were biological entities like ourselves, whereas in the main iteration of Big O everyone seems to have been a robot (atlelast Roger and the Big Ear were)--perhaps in the next world Dorothoty would be normal human being (whatever normal will be in that world) and she and Roger can have a normal relationship (or, given the conventions of magna and anime, perhaps she and Angel can be a lesbian ocuple!).
8. Since everything was revealed in the second season, why do we need a third? It would just be more of the same. But that may be sour grapes. if it was going to be made, its production would at least have been anounced by now.
I'm sure a lot of readers will reject my interpretation s nce it won't make any sense to them beucase they aren't familiar with the ancient mythological and philosophical texts on which it is built. However, when I recently watched the DVDs I noticed two details that cannot be explained in an other way.
As I've mentioned before, a key pice of symbolism in Big 0 is the Pythagorean tetrad--that is the digits 1, 2, 3, 4, which if added together make 10. Also it you make an arrangment of Dots:
*
**
***
****
it forms an equaliteral triangle
The Pythagoreas thought that this was no accident. They saw it as God's way of infomring us (at least of informing philosophers) of the secrets of creation: namely that the four elements are mixed together to make up the whole universe, etc. Aristotle went one better and figured that the stars were made of a fifth element, the Quintesence. This dominates the conception of the Great Gods (Megadei), where we have four Megadei (each of which correpsonds to an element), and then Big 0 (the zero standing for the base, 10) superiror to them all. Big Venus is the quintesence.
In any case, I noticed for the first time Vera's and Ange'ls code numebrs in the Union spy service: Aget,
12, and Agent
340.
Even more pointed is the pool game in the bar where Roger meats the Big Ear. Pool is of coruse palyed with 15 balls arranged in a triangle rack to start with. But the games palyed there are palyed with only balls--if that isn;t meant to shout out to viewers 'The Tetrad is imporatn ot the show!' I don't know what could be.
