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?

Angel: Expecting

"I learned men are evil… no, wait, I knew that."

Boo! Weren't expecting this, were you? Neither was I, to be honest. This blog is still more or less on semi-hiatus until after the first week of August but I find myself with an unexpected free evening. What could be more appropriate than to watch and review an episode of Angel called Expecting?

About ten minutes in, I was all ready to hate this episode. Cordelia has sex with someone she hasn't known for long, and whoosh! She's pregnant the next morning. At first glance, this appears tiresomely puritanical in its message, especially with Cordelia's pre-existing issues (emphasised here) with thinking that she's being punished. But that's not what this is about. For one thing, Cordelia makes it clear that "everything was safe", a line which could only be there to signal that none of this is her fault; she took precautions. What it is about, I think, is arrogant, entitled men who think it's fine to get someone up the duff and then bugger off, leaving her with all the consequences. It's fitting that it should be Cordelia who knocks the errant father, personified as a demon, into a million pieces.

Oh, and if that wasn't enough to prevent this from being the Pope's favourite episode of Angel, the whole plot is essentially about procuring an abortion.

It's well executed, too, much as there were a couple of clichés that made me smile. Wilson is sweet, considerate, self-aware- he must be evil, right? And the sex montage, showing us lots of short scenes of kissing, bedclothes, the Sun rising and essentially chaste stuff fading into one another, is really a bit too much of a cliché to be done without irony.

Great episode, though. I loved the fight early on, seen only through shadows on the wall, and Dennis looking after Cordelia- aaaah! Oh, and the bartender in the club- isn't he the janitor from Scrubs?

I love the continuing subtle developments in Wesley's character. (He's still not an "official" member of the team, although he seems to do an awful lot of unpaid work!) He's still as much of a klutz as ever (love the axe scene- Alexis Denisof is great at physical comedy), but also extremely brave, much braver than he was in Buffy. His rapport with Angel is developing nicely, too; the two of them are beginning to make a highly amusing double act.

But most interesting is how this episode highlights the way Cordelia's character has developed- beneath the surface she's both much, much tougher and much, much wiser. Fittingly, the final scene consists of her running rings around the two boys. But that last line shows how much she appreciates them. Again, aaaah!

There. Don't expect updates all that regularly until a week into August, although I'll make sure I keep up with the BBC's "Hollow Crown" Shakespeare adaptations, at least. There may be a blog entry on Friday, too. Fingers crossed…