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.

Angel: Sense and Sensitivity

"Oh, she thinks you're insensitive and, not to bring up the irony but, heh, consider the source…"

It's becoming a bit of a pattern with Angel; a good episode, which I like, which nevertheless highlights a couple of problems with the series so far. The episodes are far too "story of the week" and lacking in continuity from episode to episode. There's nothing wrong with having episodes being essentially standalone, but there have to be some elements, however subtle, that carry on from episode to episode, or you just end up with a big fat reset button and not a lot of character development. Also, I don't like the increasing focus on the "police procedural" style, partly because it encourages this very tendency. Much as I can see the attraction of the character of Kate, having her as a semi-regular is pushing the show more into this sort of format. Yes, I get that the show uses the supernatural as metaphors for life in the big city, in much the same way as Buffy does with the experience of growing up, but the show needs a bigger cast and more continuing elements. Fortunately, with the increased foregrounding of Wolfram and Hart, we seem to be getting the beginnings of that. And now they're very much aware of Angel's presence in LA.

All that said, though, this episode is very good indeed. It deals very cleverly with its very Southern Californian theme of therapy, psychobabble, obsession with "issues" and the absurdity thereof. There's a nice parallel between the early scenes, where Cordelia criticises Angel for being repressed and insensitive, and the rather hilarious later scenes, where she wishes he would be rather more repressed and insensitive. The second half of the episode, which shows us the consequences of a police department getting too far in touch with its feelings, is enormous fun. The episode takes a clear stance against this sort of thing, and I, being British, naturally approve. A certain amount of repression is needed so that people can function, and too much unnecessary obsessing over personal "issues" makes people retreat from the world into the self, with chaotic consequences for society.

One of the more illustrative scenes, perhaps, is the policeman refusing to help Doyle and insisting that the station is closed. It's tempting to see a political subtext here, that there's a link between all these hippyish notions of "letting it all hang out" that arose in the '60s and the right-wing individualism that has so dominated politics in the decades since. People in the 1950s may have been more buttoned-up, but they were solidly behind the welfare state and paid their high taxes without much blubbing. There's a political price to be paid for people getting too much in touch with their feelings.

Having said all that, though, there is such a thing as being too repressed, and Kate's father is there to remind us of that. We need to be wary of an overreliance on quacks and trendy psychobabble, but there's still a balance to be struck.