Angel: The Prodigal

"Since she tried to kill me, it's been different…"

Oooh boy. This season has generally had a strong "monster of the week" feel. Excessively so, much as the individual episodes have often been good. But this episode, for once, is arc, arc, arc. We have a hint that there are things afoot which don't involve reset buttons.

We see Kate's continuing struggle to accept who Angel is, and to grasp that there are such things as vampires and demons, completely shattering the world view that underpins all her values; what use is a cop against such things? How can she possibly protect the public? There's a rapprochement, of sorts, in the middle of the episode, but she ends the episode still feeling as she did at the start, but with added grief. Will she and Angel ever reconcile? Still, the concept of demons on PCP (with added eye of newt!) is pretty damn brilliant, as is the fact that Angel can't prevent Lockley Snr's death because he hasn't been invited in although, interestingly, he's able to enter from the moment of the owner's death. Of course, I'm still watching this show like a hawk for the inevitable moment when Anger enters a property and shouldn't be able to…..

But this episode is mainly about fathers. Kate, in the present, sees her father sin, and suffer death as a consequence, leaving so many things unsaid between them. This is strongly paralleled with scenes between Liam, in 1753, and his own father, a similarly difficult-to-please figure.

But there's a third father, intriguingly: Darla. It was she who "sired" Angel: note the masculinity of the verb, which neatly implies that she is his father as well as his lover. That seems more than a little disgustingly incestuous, yes, and no, it wasn't a sentence I was particularly expecting to be writing this morning.

It's a bit strange, though, to bring back a character, even in flashback, after so long. We haven't seen Darla since the early episodes of Buffy Season One, after all. Casual or first time viewers won't even remember her. I certainly didn't, on my first marathon trek through the Buffyverse.

We learn a few more things about Liam, most notably his year of birth (1727; he turns 23 in 2000), and the circumstances of his awakening as a vampire and his first kill. A possible source of the nickname Angel is even rather awkwardly crowbarred in.

Things end on a rather unresolved not, in terms of Kate and Angel's relationship but also in a wider sense. But I think Kate is wrong to doubt Angel's humanity; his body may be all vampire, but that's not who he is.