Has it ever occurred to anyone that the reality Skip showed Cordy in Birthday may have been the "real" reality? The one that was supposed to have occurred?
I'll explain what i mean. We know that much of what has happened to Cordelia this last few years has been down to manipulations by Jasmine. She needed Cordy to give birth to her new physical form and so Jasmine arranged for her and the others to all play their parts in the process.
The point where these manipulations began has never been made clear. For all we know Jasmine has arranged everything from Darla being sired to Cordy herself being born. It is certainly possible that she had been planning this for centuries. She has existed from the dawn of time after all.
However lets assume that it doesn't go back quite as far as that and that Jasmine only started using Team Angel fairly recently, say since Angel moved to L.A. for the sake of a starting point. This could easily have been the time when Jasmine noticed Angel and realised she could use him to arrange her rebirth into the world.
So at that point she knew that she needed a "mother", somebody that could be easily convinced to become a part of Angel's life. Then what happens? The Powers send Angel on his first mission that just happens to include him going to a party where an old friend is also present. This must have seemed like a gift to Jasmine. Immediately she steps in to make certain that Cordy and Angel cross paths at the party.
This is the point where destiny changes for the first time i believe and it is Skip who pointed that out to me. We already knew that Jasmine had manipulated things but now we know where from, at least in Cordy's case.
In Birthday Skip tells Cordy that she is living the wrong life, that her Destiny was to be the star she had always dreamed of being, not a demon hunter. This he shows her by bringing up an image of the party from City of. He demonstrates how, instead of bumping into Angel that night, she was meant to have met the guy who would have made her television career explode and turned her into a star. It was Jasmine's first manipulation of Cordy's life that altered this and changed the destiny she was meant for.
Now of course we all know that Skip was working for Jasmine, even at this point, and that this was all a further manipulation in order to get Cordy to realise that she HAD to keep the visions and therefore accept that demonic alterations to herself to survive them were needed (or more truthfully that demonic alterations that would make her the perfect vessel for Jasmine to use were needed).
That doesn't change the fact that this could all still have been true though. In fact it just makes it more likely as Jasmine would know better than anyone what Cordelia had really been destined for before she altered things. The alternate reality that we saw in Birthday wasn't just some fabrication that Skip made up, it was the life that Cordelia and the others would have lived if Jasmine hadn't interfered.
So question is, given what we saw, do you think that Jasmine actually did Team Angel a favour in using them. Is the life that they ended up with any worse than the lives they would have lived if she had left them alone?
I'll explain what i mean. We know that much of what has happened to Cordelia this last few years has been down to manipulations by Jasmine. She needed Cordy to give birth to her new physical form and so Jasmine arranged for her and the others to all play their parts in the process.
The point where these manipulations began has never been made clear. For all we know Jasmine has arranged everything from Darla being sired to Cordy herself being born. It is certainly possible that she had been planning this for centuries. She has existed from the dawn of time after all.
However lets assume that it doesn't go back quite as far as that and that Jasmine only started using Team Angel fairly recently, say since Angel moved to L.A. for the sake of a starting point. This could easily have been the time when Jasmine noticed Angel and realised she could use him to arrange her rebirth into the world.
So at that point she knew that she needed a "mother", somebody that could be easily convinced to become a part of Angel's life. Then what happens? The Powers send Angel on his first mission that just happens to include him going to a party where an old friend is also present. This must have seemed like a gift to Jasmine. Immediately she steps in to make certain that Cordy and Angel cross paths at the party.
This is the point where destiny changes for the first time i believe and it is Skip who pointed that out to me. We already knew that Jasmine had manipulated things but now we know where from, at least in Cordy's case.
In Birthday Skip tells Cordy that she is living the wrong life, that her Destiny was to be the star she had always dreamed of being, not a demon hunter. This he shows her by bringing up an image of the party from City of. He demonstrates how, instead of bumping into Angel that night, she was meant to have met the guy who would have made her television career explode and turned her into a star. It was Jasmine's first manipulation of Cordy's life that altered this and changed the destiny she was meant for.
Now of course we all know that Skip was working for Jasmine, even at this point, and that this was all a further manipulation in order to get Cordy to realise that she HAD to keep the visions and therefore accept that demonic alterations to herself to survive them were needed (or more truthfully that demonic alterations that would make her the perfect vessel for Jasmine to use were needed).
That doesn't change the fact that this could all still have been true though. In fact it just makes it more likely as Jasmine would know better than anyone what Cordelia had really been destined for before she altered things. The alternate reality that we saw in Birthday wasn't just some fabrication that Skip made up, it was the life that Cordelia and the others would have lived if Jasmine hadn't interfered.
So question is, given what we saw, do you think that Jasmine actually did Team Angel a favour in using them. Is the life that they ended up with any worse than the lives they would have lived if she had left them alone?
