FEATURE: Angel - To Shanshu in LA

Previously on Angel: During a daring raid on Wolfram & Hart with the help of Lindsey McDonald, Angel grabs a scroll for no discernible reason. Meanwhile, Lindsey had the opportunity to leave his employers alive, but instead opted for a considerable raise.

Wesley continues to work on the prophecy that Angel brought back with him from Wolfram & Hart and reveals that it is possibly fated for Angel to die. Rather than worry about it, Angel simply carries on with his usual occupation of saving people. However, the lawyers have a plan on the horizon, something called 'The Raising' and summon a big bad wormy dude to take care of Angel. When he promises to strip Angel of his connection to the Powers That Be, he really goes to town and Wesley and Cordelia's lives hang in the balance.

As finales go, To Shanshu in LA is not your typical, but then, the first season hasn't been particularly typical at any point. There's no real Big Bad to rally against, nor is there a discernible apocalypse to stop. Instead, the focus is on how Angel has now become reliant on his team, having moved from the loner that Doyle clung to in the beginning to the man concerned for his friends and willing to save them at any cost. It's also a pretty big hint towards his growing feelings for Cordelia, something that will bubble under the surface for a while yet.

That intimate focus gives the episode a stronger purpose than simply fighting a bad guy. It makes the world feel bigger, the stakes higher and the consequences more severe. David Boreanaz has to do some emotional heavy lifting here and it really works to illustrate Angel's concern for his friends. I love his final brush off to Kate, partly because it's a good measure of his determination and also because Kate has become such an irritating little role, cropping up at weird crime scenes to pseudo-moralise and look a bit peeved. She's the only weak link in this episode, but thankfully, Angel gives her a good talking to.

The character work elsewhere is lovely and neatly done too. Cordelia, so often seeing her role with Angel as a paycheck rather than a lifestyle, is suddenly subjected to the howls of pain in the city as her mind is opened up by Wormy Dude. It gives her a new sense of perspective, a much more selfless one that shifts her to see her work with Angel as both a necessity and a calling. It's a big development for her. She spent much of her time with the Scoobies resenting her role within the gang, often only helping out begrudgingly when it became clear the end of the world is at stake. Here though, she finally rises to the challenge and even starts making sandwiches.

The wider ramifications of the Shanshu prophecy add to the finale's sense of urgency. Wesley's little mistranslation of it to suggest that Angel is careening towards his death is a brief loss of meaning for Angel. He's already dead so it has no consequences for him and in this frame of mind, redemption is for little more than quenching his own guilt. However, discovering that it might lead to him becoming human again gives both the character and the show something to work towards. It's a positive, heroic endpoint. Naturally it becomes a little complicated as Angel's story to develop, but it gives the show a more concrete focus, something which will only benefit it as it moves forward.

Finally, there's that Darla reveal at the end. It's such a cool season cliffhanger that I almost wish I hadn't seen the rest of the show, just to get really excited about the first episode of the second season. Julie Benz has always been one of the Buffyverse's more memorable recurring characters and I'm looking forward to seeing her around again. Plus, it also means Drusilla will show up some point soon and that's always good for a laugh.

So we have reached the end of Angel's first season. Like the companion fourth season of Buffy, there has been quite the variation in quality, largely due to its need to establish itself as something of the same world, but also very different. Naturally, Angel couldn't go for the same kind of experimentation we see in Buffy''s fourth season, but it's something that has worked well to balance the two shows. The second season will be a little dodgy, but the show does begin to grow in confidence now that it has set out its parameters and darker, bloodier atmosphere. Poor Lindsey eh? Someone give him a hand...

Sorry.

Quote of the Week:

Wesley: Uhh... oops. I may have made a tiny mistake. The word 'shanshu' that I said meant you were going to die? Actually I think it means you're going to live.
Cordelia: Ok as tiny mistakes go, that's not one!

Let's Get Trivial: The episode title is a reference to the film To Live and Die in LA as 'shanshu' is revealed to mean 'to live and to die.'

You can read Becky's look at previous episode, Blind Date, here.

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FEATURE: Angel - The Prodigal

Previously on Angel: Wesley's working for Angel Investigations now and Angel has carved out a troublesome relationship with Kate, a detective with the LAPD who has a difficult relationship with her father. Angel's human self, Liam, had a bad one with his own father, killing his family once he became Angelus after being turned by Darla.

It's all about the daddy issues in this episode as the title suggests, opening with a scene back in 18th century Ireland between pre-vampire Angel - Liam - and his father before cutting ahead to our current Angel battling a demon. There's an encounter with Kate and her father, it all gets a little awkward and the vampire slinks off to try and work out what the demon is doing. It turns out it's a largely peaceful demon and Angel needs to find out why it attacked the train when it's usually the demon equivalent of a kitten. As he digs deeper, it turns out that Kate's father might be involved somewhere along the line, dealing demonic drugs disguised as auto parts.

This episode should probably come with an advanced "David Boreanaz does his Irish accent again" warning, but it's interesting to delve back into the past we hear about much more than we see (probably due to aforementioned accent). The episode pulls off the clever move of combining the Buffy episode Becoming flashbacks and new ones that expand upon those stories, namely the slaughter of Angel's family at his own hand. It's a grisly reminder of everything our hero has to atone for and where it all began, as well as how he got his nickname; his sister believes him to be a returning angel. It also brings back Darla, which is always a good thing (and who becomes increasingly important as the series goes on).

For both Kate and Angel, their respective relationships helped shape who they are as people/vampires; for Kate, she became a cop in order to try and win the respect that was denied to her by Trevor after her mother died. For Angel, it's about defying his father in death as he did in life, destroying what he loves. Weaving them together makes the themes of the episode thuddingly transparent and with all the subtly of a brick through a window, but daddy issues are never really an understated thing to deal with. 

It doesn't help that Kate is still such a non-character, originally introduced as an unknowing human element in LA and as a potential love interest for Angel. That didn't really work out so she got her daddy issues back story. But that's all there really is to her character at this point; resentment towards Angel and her father. The episode advances her acceptance of the supernatural side of the city, but without that audience connection to her, it's tough to really care. She keeps wandering into situations she doesn't really understand, waiting for Angel to come and get her out of it. She may be able to kick ass, but it's hard to feel for a character that feels a far cry from the energy and subversion of the Buffyverse women we're used to.

As such, it's one of those episodes where the B plot tends to be a little more fun. Cordelia's decided to fit a security system in the offices to guard them against demons entering the property whenever they feel like it. Wesley and Angel aren't fussed, but eventually Cordelia gets it in place... just in time for a demon attack. How it warns them? It lets them know which door has been opened. As the fight ensues around the office, Cordelia looks despairingly on as invading demons are announced with "The left door is ajar" and Angel defenestrating one to the narration of "The window is open." It may just be one scene, but it's a moment of much needed levity in a grimdark episode.

You know it's probably not going to be the best episode when Angel gets his Irish accent on, but The Prodigal is serviceable enough for what it wants to do. If it hadn't been for Cordelia's security woes, I might not have been so forgiving of it though. It's just a bit dull.

Quote of the Week:

Angel: No, this is strictly recon. I need to know exactly what we're dealing with before we make any moves.
Wesley: Right you are! A deliberate, cautious approach would be the most sensible plan. Fools rush in.
Cordelia: No, he wants you to stay here.

Inventive Kill: Kate bags another vampire by shooting him in the shoulder to distract him and staking him before he realises she knows what she's doing.

LA Who's Who: The barmaid who points out Liam to Darla would be one Christina Hendricks, marking her first appearance in the Whedonverse before going on to become our infamous Mrs Reynolds in Firefly. 

- Becky 

You can read Becky's look at previous episode, I've Got You Under My Skin, here.

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FEATURE: Angel - I've Got You Under My Skin

Previously on Angel: Angel Investigations now consists of the Dark Avenger himself, Wesley and Cordelia, but the ghost (not literal ghost) of Doyle hangs over the three of them. 

After Cordelia has a vision of a suburban home and a young boy, Angel and Wesley head over to the address just in time for Angel to save the boy, Ryan, from being run over by a car. Wesley does a little investigating whilst Angel is with the family and discovers the luminescent bodily excretions (yum) of an Ethros demon, which is possessing one of the family. The gang spring into action, discovering that it's Ryan who is possessed, not the father as initially suspected. They decide an exorcism is the only way to go. However, as events take their course, it turns out that the demon might not be the biggest foe they have to face this week.

I've Got You Under My Skin marks another move into the darker territory that previous episode She explored, the whole episode defined by a deeply ominous quality from the moment of Cordelia's vision. It's probably the most full tilt that the series has so far gone into horror and the possession aspect of the story allows it liberally reference one of the pinnacles of the genre in The Exorcist. There are little nods, like Cordelia's fear that everything was about to get really vomity, to the wider themes of the episode; family and the traumas that they both suffer and inflict. 

For Angel, it's means of working through his grief surrounding Doyle and his empathy for Mr Anderson, the family patriarch, trying to desperately keep their family together despite the odd occurrences and violence that follows them around. There are the first hints towards Wesley's troubled relationship with his father through a brief line he has about fathers terrorising their children and it's something the demon uses against him during the exorcism. And it establishes that Wesley is prepared to kill Angel if he needs to, something which the vampire acknowledges is a good thing. Hey, we've all seen what he gets like.

The great twist in the episode, of course, is that the demon isn't the one everyone should be worrying about, but Ryan himself (a Whedon addition, reportedly). It's a really clever feint, especially the reveal that the demon was trying to get Ryan to kill himself in order to save those around him. When a soulsucking demon wants someone dead, they're probably not very nice. And so it proves when Ryan attempts to set fire to his sister whilst his parents are locked in their room. All of the work that his father had done to try and keep Ryan safe, protect him from the horrendous acts that have been committed, is undone by virtue of the demon escaping and Ryan being allowed to cut free.

It gives the episode a bleak message; some people simply can't be saved. Just as with Doyle, who willingly sacrificed himself and could never have been saved by Angel, Ryan isn't to be redeemed here. That's where the horror comes from in this episode. Although the score is wonderfully ominous and the atmosphere created by director RD Price and Jeannine Renshaw's script is fantastic, it's the simple, horrifying thought of powerlessness that defines the episode. 

I've Got You Under My Skin should feel like another filler episode and indeed starts off that way, but the marriage between the episode's plot and themes is perhaps one of the best so far and a real statement of darker intent. Ryan may have been taken into custody to get the help that's needed, but there feels like no real resolution simply because the bad guy here is just a little boy, not someone Angel can sink an axe into. Angel was always advertised as grimmer than its Sunnydale-based relative, but it gets fun when the show fully embraces that.

Quote of the Week:

Angel: [Cordelia's] making brownies.
Wesley: Oh is that what I smell? I thought I tracked something in...

- Becky

You can read Becky's look at previous episode, She, here.

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FEATURE: Angel - Somnambulist

Previously on Angel: Angel is still haunted by the crimes he committed in his alter-ego state as the infamous vampire, Angelus. Wesley is now residing in LA after he was fired from the Watcher's Council and wishes to help out with Angel Investigations.

Angel's having nightmares about draining victims in LA and carving a Christian cross into their left cheek. It turns out that there just happens to be a serial killer doing the exact same thing and Kate is on the case. On his return to the office, Wesley notices the connection between the serial killer's modus operandi and that of the seventeenth century Angelus. Angel's spotted it too and upon realising that Angel is somehow committing the crimes in his sleep, they realise that it's the work of a vampire he sired back in the day, keen to relive their life of murderous crime together. With Kate on the case too, it's not long before she discovers the truth about Angel.

I feel like there needs to be some kind of health warning in any episodes where Angelus' Irish accent is deployed. Doubly so for this episode when Jeremy Renner is acting English. It's not quite on the Keanu Reeves in Dracula end of the Bad Accent spectrum, or indeed Angelus', but it's thankfully brief at its most potent and weirdly Transatlantic for the rest of the episode. He's a decent guest star, but nothing memorable, mainly because he's playing a caricature of Angelus, rather than a character of his own, which is kind of the point. I also like that he had no idea about Angel's curse, which suggests he was a pet project of Angelus' outside of the central crew of Darla, Drusilla and the Master, suffering an inferiority complex forever as a result.

After Parting Gifts, this episode becomes a reaffirmation of the show's structure. There's no mention of Doyle and the focus moves away from the team and back in on Angel himself. It's a key episode in terms of his relationship with Kate, transforming their relationship entirely now that she knows the truth. That's the big plot development here, but the episode suffers from treading over old ground too much in order to move the show on from the fairly big change that resulted from Doyle's death.

There have been a lot of references to Angelus throughout this series and in Angel's appearance on sister show Buffy in Amends when everyone keeps asking if he's evil again. There's a nice reminder of it here, not in the flashbacks, but in Kate's profile of the serial killer, overlaid with Angel wandering through LA trying to figure out how to stop Penn. Angelus is something he has to live with and something that becomes increasingly important to his fight across the five seasons of his own show.  But it's the same message we've had again and again throughout the season. 

It's here where the first season shows the cracks in its quality, never really having any thematic resonance beyond that. Even the idea that fuelled a couple of the early episodes, that the monsters of LA were the equivalent to the torment of being an adult, is a retread of the Buffy formula that quickly gets forgotten over the course of the episode. The Shanshu Prophecy is, of course, on the horizon and Wolfram & Hart are lurking in the background, but this is still a show searching for its own identity and not quite succeeding just yet.

Quote of the Week:

Wesley: No sign of any vampire attack... [gets grabbed by Penn] Which is maybe because he's here and has me by the throat. 

Inventive Kill: Kate bags her first vamp, stabbing a huge piece of wood through Angel, missing his heart but impaling Penn's. 

LA Who's Who: I can't not put Jeremy Renner in this little section. Since his brief appearance in Angel, he's gone on to an Oscar nomination, appearing as an Avenger and saying douchey sexist things to the press. So, that's nice. He also goes on to appear alongside Elizabeth Rohm (Kate) in American Hustle, playing husband and wife.

- Becky

You can read Becky's look at previous episode, Parting Gifts, here.

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FEATURE: Angel - Sense and Sensitivity

Previously on Angel: Angel met Detective Kate Lockley on a routine investigation about a weird chest-sucking demon thing; she naturally assumed he's a serial killer, but hey, he saved her life and now they're pals who help each other out.

Kate's currently trying to track down a mobster wanted for murder, Little Tony Papazian and enlists Angel's help in tracking him down. Thanks to Doyle's networks, Angel gets the job done, leaving Kate to arrest Papazian. She gets a little too aggressive with him during the interview and a lawyer, Mercer, from Wolfram & Hart succeeds in getting the entire precinct to take part in sensitivity training. However, after the training, everyone gets a little too sensitive; Kate breaks down and confesses her daddy issues to her father at his retirement party in front of a bunch of cops, which promptly results in everyone breaking down as a result of their own sensitivity training. Angel and the gang get involved and try to resolve the situation before Little Tony can get to Kate.

There's a fun conceit at the heart of this episode, one which feels a lot like the Buffy episode Band Candy, when Sunnydale's adult population were cursed with returning to their teenage personalities. Here, the sensitivity training and magic talking stick allows the LAPD to get in touch with their inner feelings whilst reducing them to a bunch of emotive wrecks. It never works quite as well as its Buffy counterpart though because apart from Angel and, at a push, Kate, we don't know the personalities involved as well as we did Giles, Joyce or Snyder. The comedy derived from seeing them regress from the people we knew and therefore operated on a much deeper level than anything Sense and Sensitivity can achieve.

It doesn't help that we, as an audience, are still getting to know Kate; we know she's pretty ruthless and efficient at her job. She's one for a dry sense of humour and might be attracted to Angel. What this episode does is allow us to get under her skin whilst the narrative fills in a lot of her background fairly swiftly. Her daddy issues are ridiculously cliched, but the performance of Rohm makes up for it, resisting the easy route of breaking down hysterically at her father and instead opting for a more measured approach that escalates as she revealed how craply he had treated her. The episode's boldest move is to not have this resolved at the end.

It's easy to imagine that in Buffy, a similar situation would have ended with her father attempting a reconciliation at the end, or at least acknowledging his behaviour. For Angel, it's much more fitting to have the ending that is given; he simply shows up to scold her for making a fool of herself, ignoring anything she said and outwardly stating he's going to pretend it never happened. Angel observes this scene from a quiet corner along with the audience and it feels as if we're witnessing a personal snapshot. The moment is a quietly heartbreaking one and affirms that, in Angel's world, some things just aren't meant to be fixed and this is a relationship that won't ever be mended.

I've already spoken about the comedy of the central conceit and how it doesn't land so much for the police characters, but to end on a more positive note, let's talk about how amusing Angel is when he's being all sensitive and cuddly. David Boreanaz lands his lines so brilliantly, especially the moment where he confesses that he feels Cordy and Doyle judge him when he vamps out. Charisma Carpenter is the perfect foil as Cordelia gets more exasperated and less sensitive towards her boss as she goes on. As I said before, it works much better here because we know the characters' personalities so well and the awkward hug that Angel proffers to his colleagues makes the rest of the episode truly worth it. And obviously the Hawaiian shirt, hat and Baltimore accent at the beginning is just brilliant.

I still can't quite decide whether or not I like this episode. Admittedly, a large part of that has to do with it being Kate-centric and the show is still unsure of what to do with her, though the episode works hard to get more of a character background in place, as cliched as that might be. Yet it's probably all worth it for the chance to see Angel go full warm and fuzzy on us.

Quote of the Week:

Angel: You know, Antony, you could be a rainbow and not a [punches Little Tony] "pain" bow.

- Becky

You can read Becky's look at previous episode, Rm W/A Vu, here.

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FEATURE: Angel - Lonely Heart

Previously on Angel: The vamp with a soul has taken up residence in LA and is now working with a half-demon called Doyle who has premonitions and Cordelia Chase who gave herself a job after finding out what Angel is up to. They're now an investigation agency designed to take on those people in need of help from the forces of darkness.

Whilst trying to get Angel to put in a good word for him with Cordelia, Doyle has a vision of one of those 'terminally stuck in the 80s' places and the gang race off to see what might be happening there. Angel meets Kate Lockley over the course of his not-so-subtle attempts to investigate the place in an awkward meet-cute in which he states that he's a vetinarian. After a dead body turns up, the gang realise they're dealing with some kind of symbiotic demon, jumping from host to host and killing people in the process. A coincidence at a crime scene reveals Kate to be a police detective who immediately jumps to the conclusion that Angel is the serial killer.

The episode mines a lot of its humour from the fish out of water stuff that Angel, Cordelia and Doyle suffer from respectively. Angel in particular once again demonstrates that talking to people really isn't his thing and his conversation with Kate is a little too earnest to register high on the laugh scale. In fact,  too earnest is a good way to describe the episode as a whole in its treatment of loneliness. Rather than subtly underlaying the theme within the story, it's hammered home again and again that these people are lonely and it gives serial killers/demons the chance to prey on those people.

Given that this is a major theme of City Of too, not to mention Buffy's alienation in her own series at the moment, it all feels a bit repetitive (especially when watching them in close proximity). I also spent a lot of this episode thinking of the terrible Torchwood episode where they did something similar with an alien and Gwen got all hyper-sexed and made out with everyone. At least Lonely Heart is better than that. For one thing, the actual demon is a pretty grim spectacle and suitably penetrative for its sex-based shenanigans, giving the episode a nasty body horror element that works well. I do find it amusing that the demon loses all game after he gets the crap kicked out of him.

Lonely Heart also pushes more towards the noir end of the genre spectrum as the investigative side of Angel comes to the fore with the use of Doyle's vision as the kick-off point. There a couple of genre calling cards in there; the loneliness of the big city, Kate as the dame in the bar, Angel as the lone wolf investigator. You also get the twist at the end where Kate think it's the barman that has done it all along, a neat non-supernatural wrap-up for her. 

But again, the whole episode feels like it's trying too hard at all times and as a result, it never quite sparks into life. It brings us the Kate and Angel relationship which will be an important one as the series progresses though she doesn't know he's a vampire as of yet. However, Lonely Heart doesn't really advance us much further than reminding us everyone gets lonely in the big city and we all kinda knew that anyway. It seems somewhat fitting that the episode ends as it began.

Quote of the Week:

Angel: I know you guys have been working hard, couped up inside a lot and to show my appreciation, I was thinking; the night being young and all, that the three of us could... or should.. you know, maybe... go out? You know... for fun.

Cordelia: Or we can go home.

Doyle: And you can sit in the dark alone.

Angel: ... God yes. Thank you.

Let's Get Trivial: Originally, this episode was a whole lot darker and you can check out the full details (including prostitutes and drug addiction) right here - Thank you to Jonathan Cardwell (@Jonny_C85) for sharing this morbid alternate Angel reality with us! 

- Becky

You can read Becky's look at City Of here.

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