Angel: Destiny

"Try staking your mother when she's coming on to you!"

"Wow, that explains a lot...!

Well, this is certainly an arc episode; before we even get the titles Spike received a parcel that goes flash and suddenly returns him to corporeality. Enter eating, drinking, shagging Harmony and, as foreshadowed a couple of episodes ago, a sudden ambiguity over exactly who the Shanshu prophecy nw applies to.

This causes a certain amount of problems with reality in order to create some kind of external threat, and this is solved suddenly at the end by some deus ex machina from the Senior Partners. But that’s ok; none of that is the real focus. It’s the effect on both Angel and Spike on realising that the Shanshu prophecy could now apply to either of them, and the fact that Spike defeats Angel at the end on Sirk’s  Little wild goose chase; he wants it more. And, along with all the flashbacks from 1880 with the two of them, Dru, and the awkward absence of Darla, this is a kind of culmination of a very long running struggle between the two of them, and something which I suspect may go on to define the season.

Other characters are there too, of course, although Wes is on leave. Gunn is increasingly confident and motivated, and Angel instinctively puts him in charge when he nips off to Death Valley. Lorne as a character is now starting to seem worryingly underserved this season. And the White Room is gone, along with the link to the Senior Partners.

The ending is fantastic, though- after spending much of the episode trying to convince everyone that “I’m not the bad guy”, she returns home to reveal that she’s personally behind the wild goose chase and she has a partner. Lindsey...