Angel: Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been

"It's all just blood…!"

This splendid episode from Tim Minear is just a story of the week, sort of, with no allusions to Wolfram and Hart or any great degree of arciness. I suspect it tells us an awful lot about the season's upcoming themes, though. Plus it gives our heroes a swanky new base.

It's the 1950s. The first thing we see after the opening titles is a news report about the House of Un-American activities. Seconds later we see a black family being told by the hotel manager that there are no vacancies, although there definitely are. This sets the tone; prejudice and paranoia are this episode's social evils, complete with a metaphorical demon (with an accent from vaguely south of the Mason-Dixon line) to represent them. Guests at the hotel call each other "pansy" and "red". Angel gets lynched for being a bit odd. It's a strong cocktail of prejudice, although I'm slightly uncomfortable with the implicit assumption that all this sort of prejudice is safely in the past. It isn't, not be a long shot.

The episode focuses mainly on Judy, a mixed-race lady who's "passed" for white for most of her life but has been found out, sacked, and dumped by her fiancé, leading her to steal a load of money and ruin her life forever; she effectively does spend the rest of her life in prison, burdened by guilt. It's arresting to be reminded of how 1952 is not that long ago. Silly prejudices had- and have- the power to destroy people arbitrarily and waste their lives.

Interestingly, the Angel of 1952 starts out fairly indifferent to the evils around him. He gets slowly dragged into helping Judy, but after she betrays him (not her fault) he washes his hands of the whole affair, something which shames him up to the present day. So… we have an Angel who retains his soul but loses his ability to care about people through loneliness and isolation. Foreshadowing, do you reckon?

Back in the present day, not much happens aside from a neat little structural trick in which Cordy and Wesley get to narrate events from a vantage point fifty years later. We also establish a slight bit of friction between Wesley and Gunn, who appears for the first time without reference to his dependents.

That's two episodes, and two excellent scripts. Can Angel keep this up?