Trust Excercises!

It is notable how easily Alastor musically capitulates in "Don't You Forget." He has a single verse of resistance, but it ends in a plea rather than a challenge - the least you could do is fix my staff.

After that, he goes along with the song, willingly following Rosie's lead in the dance and completing her lyrics. His only further push-back comes when Rosie says "The coop can't be flown" and he answers, "At least not yet." But even this push-back is acknowledgment: Rosie's current control is total, and the only hope for Alastor lies in the future.

By the end of the song, Rosie has got Alastor fully singing her tune. The final line of the song is even a shared one.

In every way -- visually, lyrically, and musically -- Alastor concedes that Rosie is the one in control.

Now let's take the Reprise. Facially, the two share similarities beyond just the refrain lyrics. Like Rosie, Vox uses the imagery of puppet strings to make his point and dips Alastor in a dance.

But the similarities only underscore the contrasts in how Alastor responds to the proposition that the singer is in control of him. While Alastor responds to Rosie with "At least not yet," he answers Vox, "You ain't won yet." Where Alastor's response to Rosie was a concession, he concedes nothing to Vox. In fact, in that same verse he attempts to flip the refrain back on him: "Don't you forget, you ain't won yet."

This is the start of a comeback verse. But it is a comeback verse that never finishes. Instead, Vox responds with a laugh, a spoken line, and a melodic switch up. He abandons the melody of Don't You Forget for Once We Get Up There (with a final reference to Stayed Gone).

On first listen, this shift sounds triumphant: Vox gets the last word and does so with flare. But Vox's literal change of tune is a defeat parading as a victory.

The musical switch-up is a veiled admission that Vox cannot win within the melodic or lyrical bounds of "Don't You Forget." (And perhaps that's unsurprising. Lyrically, "Don't you forget" is a fraught foundation for Vox. His past with Alastor has more in it to hurt him than help him.) So he switches out of a duet into a solo melody. Vox has given up on trying to convince and has resorted instead to a show of dominance.

Fittingly, we see this reflected in his actions, as Vox inflicts the first actual violence on Alastor we have seen from him since Alastor's capture, electrifying Alastor into a silence that allows Vox to complete the song unhindered. Vox cannot extract Alastor's capitulation through persuasion so he resorts to physical intimidation.

Vox's revisiting of "Once We Get Up There" also has interesting implications for his psychology at this point. Alastor's refrain before the Reprise and during it is that Vox is still too dependent on others. It's a repeated dare to Vox to act on his own without the other Vees.

At the start of the Reprise, Vox rejects Alastor's premise: he emphasizes that he's got a "team."

But actions speak louder than words. By the end of the song, Vox is singing "Once We Get Up There" as a solo number. This suggests that at a subconscious level, Alastor's needling has gotten to him. He has turned a "We" song into an "I" song.