If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do – Angel Season Two

Rather like Buffy itself, Angel didn’t really find itself until the closing episode of Season One. To Shanshu in LA was a powerful ride – the proto Angel family are finally truly tested, and Wolfram & Hart, simmering in the background until then, step up to cause real pain to the crew. And the emergence of a key Buffiverse figure from Angel’s past.

I say proto because the Angel ‘family’ even at this point isn’t fully formed yet. Unlike Buffy, which established its core Scoobies from the opening episodes, it takes some time for the Angel team to coalesce. (And what do we call them anyway? Angelettes?)

But then again, teamwork works slightly differently in Angel than it does in Buffy. At the relatively few points in Buffy where the Scoobies were divided – The Yoko Factor, End of Days – it’s a big deal and tends to be resolved quickly. Not so in Angel, elements of the Angelettes (I’m going to go with that) are estranged from each other right through the following three seasons. It’s not until Season Five that they are a (still debatably) tight unit, which makes sense, I guess, because it is of all the Angel seasons, the one that most resembles a Buffy one.

But we’re not even quite there yet. We’ve got the core trio of Angel, Cordelia and Wesley. Gunn has been slowly added to the mix and is a mainstay now. And here we have Lorne. Lorne, I think, is one of the great Buffiverse characters and Andy Hallett (RIP) does terrific work in bringing him to life. He becomes a chorus for the whole show – as can be seen in the very opening scene of s2, which is wonderful misdirect of ‘ooh, evil demon, oh no, wait, he’s going to sing a song’.

But it won’t be until the very end of s2, and you could argue s3, that the Angelettes are fully formed. We need Fred first. Angel’s team is not entirely analogous with the Scoobies but there are similarities. Lorne increasingly becomes the Xander figure, the one with the funniest lines used to defuse the melodrama, and Fred is very much the Willow figure – although perhaps a more fragile and damaged character than even the post s6 Willow.

Something also mentioned before is another fundamental difference between the Angel team and the Scoobies. The Scoobies belong. They are the status quo essentially, with the demons, the vampires, the forces of darkness, being the outside threat, the incursion that threatens that status quo and must be repelled. This situation is reversed in Angel. The team of Angel investigations are the misfits, the outsiders, trying to subvert and defeat the status quo of LA, as personified by Wolfram & Hart, the Hollywood establishment like Rebecca and Oliver from s1 etc.

Lorne also emphasises the other mission statement of the show – something we’ve talked about before – that ‘demon’ in the Angel world does not necessarily equate with evil. Compare that with Buffy, where it’s a lesson that’s not learned until later seasons, primarily with Clem and Anya (and it’s a lesson I’d argue that it learned from Angel). For s2 of Angel at least, Lorne’s club Caritas is a key locale and one which the gang will keep returning to.

The key theme of s2 Angel is very much the shades of grey mentioned above. It’s raised in the first episode Judgment. Angel kills a demon who turns out to be good and has to take his place. It’s a mission statement – things are no longer as black and white as they might appear in Buffy.

A second theme is introduced in the second episode, Have You Now Or Have You Ever Been – and that’s questioning just what it means to have a soul. As we’ve been arguing about Spike’s arc in Buffy, and whether having a soul doesn’t necessarily mean being a good person. Just the same as being a demon doesn’t necessarily mean being evil. Angel has a soul in this episode but he’s still not a champion. Still not a good man. We’ll see an ensouled Angel fall many times this season — when he begs Darla to take him back during the Boxer rebellion, when he lets the demon in the hotel take all the guests, when he unleashes hell on Wolfram & Hart. It puts the nobility ascribed to Angel in the context of the newly ensouled Spike in s7 of Buffy into doubt and, I think, casts Giles’s decision to throw in so quickly with Robin Wood in an ever more questionable light.

Once those two strands are introduced, they are examined in detail in the Darla arc of this season. Many of Angel’s acts are questionable – allowing the massacre of the lawyers, setting Darla and Drusilla ablaze – and as Darla comments: “That wasn’t Angel. That wasn’t Angelus either. What was that?” It’s not a question easily answered. No more than there are any pat, simplistic answers to the question of Spike’s goodness, or lack thereof.

The key episode for me is Epiphany, not just for this season, but for the entire show in general. To Shanshu had identified the need for Angel, as an immortal, to have some kind of goal to aim towards. But then it immediately begins to question that, and the danger of the ‘ends becoming the means’. Throughout the following episodes we see the implications of that. Angel is in real danger of losing his soul and not by any supernatural means.

The episode Reprise immediately preceding is also key and reinforces the ‘grey’ areas that Angel deals with. Descending in the lift to the Home Office, he’s still labouring under the belief that there’s a prize, a victory to be won. But there is no absolute evil. No Big Bad to be defeated. Evil exists in the heart of every human being alive. It can never be defeated. It can only be understood. It can only be forgiven.

It is not until Epiphany that Angel realises winning the prize is not the point. Victory is not the point. The fight itself is. It’s probably not possible to fully appreciate the eventual finale of the show without taking that point on board.

All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because, I don’t think people should suffer as they do. Because, if there’s no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

When Angel gets that, it sets the trajectory for the rest of the show. Not that it’s going to be anything like an easy ride for any of them.

As mentioned above, unlike Buffy, there is no clear-cut Big Bad in Angel, leading to a big finale. Who is the Big Bad here? Is it Darla? Is it Angel himself? Is it Wolfram & Hart? They are, of course, the most likely candidate. But then they are in every season. As Holland Manners says, they’re not something that can be defeated. They’ll always exist. Even the High Priests in Pylea are a kind of branch office of W&H.

The Darla arc of s2 is not only satisfying in its own right and helps inform Angel’s character arc (fleshed out with the flashbacks of Angelus and Darla in their hey day) but it also puts a new light on Angel’s whole relationship with Buffy. As the fake Tish Megev points out, Angel’s whole relationship with Buffy has to be looked at through his much longer one with Darla. Darla is the anti-Buffy in many ways (appropriately enough as Julie Benz was once in the frame to play Buffy). Buffy’s love for Angel is a lot more innocent than his for her, as schoolgirl first love tends to be. Angel’s real feelings for Buffy are much more complex, mixed up with how much he’s relating to her as an alternative to Darla, or perhaps even as another aspect of his atonement. Buffy reminds him of Darla but she also is to him what Darla never could be, someone who won’t reject his growing kernel of goodness, of the capacity for love. That’s not to say he doesn’t love Buffy, of course, but how often have we dated someone just because we know they remind us of an unresolved former relationship in some way?

And the question is were Darla and Angelus in love in the way Dru and Spike were. It’s emphatically stated not but I’d say it’s open to interpretation. But what is clear is that Darla has constantly misinterpreted their relationship. Even when she has a soul, she still doesn’t understand the extent of what she’s done to Angel all those years ago. She thinks it’s a gift but Angel puts her straight. “You damned me.”

Part of her antagonism to Buffy is that of the lover scorned. Even when Angel beds her again, her pride can’t accept that she can’t give Angel what Buffy had. It certainly puts another light on the schoolgirl outfit she wears in s1 of Buffy. Retrospectively there’s a whole lot more going on there than we might have first realised.

For me, the Darla arc of s2 is the richest set of episodes of either series and if it wasn’t for the Pylea mini-sequence at the end, it would stand out as my favourite season of either Buffy or Angel. It’s not quite the joyous rush of s3 of Buffy or have the emotional punch of Buffy s5, but it is the most satisfying. And of course that arc is not over. Angel’s actions with Darla are yet to have huge repercussions for the rest of the show.

All this, of course, makes it sound like that s2 of Angel is short on laughs. It really isn’t. As well as having many stand-out lines in the general run of things – Lorne and Cordelia get all the best lines but even the heavyweight glumsters like Angel and Darla have their moments. Angel might be a champion but he’s still a sucker for a Manilow ballad, for example.

But the season does still contain some of the funniest episodes of the whole series – and comfortably matching some of Buffy’s funnier episodes. Guise Will Be Guise really gives Alexis Denisof a chance to flex his comedic muscles, much needed, considering the rather dark trajectory that Wesley is about to embark upon. The Thin Dead Line too has its moments and there’s plenty of broad comedy in the Pylea sequence.

A quick shout-out to some of the performances. Big kudos to Andy Hallett, who I think is great as Lorne. And also to Julie Benz, who brings real depth to Darla, a vampire who is a key part of Buffy lore but who was rather one-notey till now.

I feel that the Angel writers don’t quite get Drusilla right, making her somehow a bit too modern and generic evil vamp rather than out-and-out loopy. But it was nice to see her play a key part in this season.

But a special shout-out, I think to Sam Anderson as Holland Manners, who I thought was the best evil face of Wolfram & Hart. As a villain, he’s rather like the Mayor. The affable older man who is in fact a complete son of a bitch. Like the Mayor, the paternal older boss is a figure we can relate to, who is not the traditional face of evil, and that makes him all the more effective. A nice moment, however, was his horror when he realised he’d, er, bit off more than he could chew and that Angel wasn’t going to save him. Over the coming years there will be a number of Holland replacements but none of them will quite have his smiling malevolence.

On the W&H team, a quick mention to Lindsey and Lilah too. Lindsey, conflicted and quixotic to the last, will be missed but I’m glad Christian Kane got the chance to do a bit of comedy on his departure with his ‘evil hand’ schtick. Stephanie Romanov as Lilah is great too – a Dynasty-esque uber-bitch but we’ll leave her until a later blog as pretty much all her greatest moments are yet to come.

Alright, let’s get the Pylea stuff over with. I have to say I don’t love it mostly because it was a frankly bizarre and unsatisfying bookend to what I consider to be one of the best run of episodes in the Buffiverse. It’s too broadly hokey for my liking, and feels a bit too much like a B-movie, or a particularly bad episode of the original Star Trek. But there’s still lots to enjoy in the Pylea episodes. Some good lines, many of them from Lorne. And then there’s Joss’s delightful little cameo. (‘Numfar, do the dance of joy.’) Plus there’s Lorne’s head in a box schtick. I can’t help but wonder if that was actually an influence on Dorium Maldovar’s beheading in s6 of Who.

The hokeyness is deliberate, of course. Part of its function is to emphasise the shades of grey of the rest of the season. It’s pointed out more than once that there’s an aspect of Pylea that appeals greatly to Angel – it’s a world of champions, of absolute good versus obvious evil. No more of the nuances of LA, of the need for epiphanies. There’s probably not a Pylean word of epiphany. The scene at the shooting of Cordelia’s commercial is pivotal. Angel gets to bask under fake sunlight, which he gets to do for real in Pylea. He misreads the situation with her director but gets to play the straightforward gallant in Pylea for Fred (‘Handsome man saved me from the monsters’ Hold onto that line. It’s going to come in useful later on.) We’ll see exactly this kind of wish fulfilment for Angel again in s4, although in a rather darker context.

But it’s not only Angel who gets to indulge in a bit of wish-fulfilment in Pylea. Cordelia gets to see her true worth realised. Here she really is Queen C. And she also gets to realise that it’s not all it’s painted to be.

And there are lessons for the others too. Gunn finds that he has to choose a side at last – something that is made concrete in s3. And we start to see the seeds of what Wesley is becoming. The leader willing to make the hard sacrifices, who realises ‘that if you try to get no one killed, you end up getting everyone killed’. We’re starting to see the first glimmer of a more badass Wesley, something which is going to become more and more pivotal throughout seasons three, four and five.

On which note, the evolution of Cordelia continues apace throughout this season. The self-obsessed prima donna of Sunnydale is increasingly tempered with compassion and empathy for the suffering of others. Not that she’s humourless, but she’s definitely more nurturing than she was. It’s interesting that at this point anyway, Cordelia is flourishing and growing as a person, as her old friends in Sunnydale are increasingly floundering in their own personal crises. Who would have seen that coming?

Pylea sheds a little more light on Lorne too. It makes Lorne’s demon-ness as a metaphor for being gay pretty obvious – some might argue too much so, but personally I think it works.

But probably the key reason for the little Pylea excursion was to bring a little colour, a little sunshine, back into the Angel palette after a season that is almost entirely nocturnal, interior, moody and noirish. This is a problem Angel is never really going to get around – being the adventures of a vampire and his sidekicks – until season five, which manages to bring in more of the daylight and brighter colours of early Buffy.

This colour, this lightness, is probably necessary to contrast with the sucker punch of the season. When they arrive back from Pylea/Oz (I haven’t really talked about the Oz symbolism of the Pylea episodes, but feel free to discuss it below) Willow is waiting for them. And she ain’t bringing good news.

In fact, it’ll be a long time before anyone at Angel Investigations is going to have anything that you could remotely describe as good news.

OK, apologies for the length but I’m liable to wax effusive about this season. Leave your comments and thoughts below, but please leave seasons 3-5 of Angel off limits.


12 comments

  1. @JimTheFish  Excellent as ever.  And the quote you use as a title is one I use all the time, as kind of a humanist manifesto…  I’m not sure though about contrasting the Scoobies as ‘belonging’ and the Angelettes as outsiders.  The Scoobies surely were misfits in terms of high school – Buffy had been excluded from her previous school, Willow and Xander were beyond the pale as far as the Cordy Mean Girls clique were concerned, Giles, well, he was (a) old and (b) a librarian.   It’s trivial stuff perhaps in the context of LA and what outsiderness means in that world, but not as different perhaps as you are suggesting?

     

  2. @Jimthefish

    just loved the title of the Blog -as I also loved the entire epic!

    And the season itself it too, which I belatedly finished.

    Certainly, Angel tends to be man unto himself in the middle portion of the season -very deliberate, unforgiving and demanding.

    His attempt to visit the underworld -only to discover it’s right in front of his face where it’s always been -is revealing of his lack of understanding. Or perhaps a metaphor of our mis-fit -like quality. That even after 240 years, you can’t begin to fully understand or predict where life (or the undead) will take you.  As usual, it’s never what you seek, but the significance of the destination -much like the idea that it’s not the victory but the never-ending fight itself.

    I like Wesley now -a lot. This bumbling and somewhat insecure man, vapid and ill at ease is starker, stripped down and perhaps sees more clearly of life than Angel himself. This season has shown this guy can act his socks off. And so too with Darla -as you said,  ‘one notey’ in Buffy but here she’s almost comedic with Angel: “I’ve been around for 100s of years, I was good. That was perfect. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t I perfect?”

    The same questions women (even the perfect never-aging ones) ask themselves all the time. I doubt they’ll receive Angel’s dead-pan response: “If I see you again, Darla, I’ll have to kill you.”

    And yes, Christian Kane -very mysteriously evil -but likeable. What encourages us to like ’em? Are they humane in some ‘off’ way? Is it the compassion they show (like Spike showed the very strange Dru)? Or perhaps just the perfect actor for this part.

    As to Pylea? Nope. Won’t go there!

    But I do like Lorne. The Caritas Bar was a perfect foil to the harshness of big city, transient life.

    In Hush, Andy Hallet was apparently sitting in the top corner of the lecture hall in order to make the auditorium all the bigger. Him and all the production staff.

    I didn’t know he’d passed away.

    Onwards and upwards…. to S3, kindest, puro.

  3. @CathAnnabel apologies, I forgot to tag you there! Interesting point. Maybe the Scoobies were a tight unit in Buffy (sure, their lives were filled with episodes of miscommunication, frenzied learning, being a “part of” school-life mixed with patrolling and trying not to look like ‘outsiders’ in the nerdy sense) but the demon/vampire good vs evil, was more ‘us and them’ than in Angel -where, after all, Angel Inves. is run by a ‘baddie’ -reformed, but still a baddie.

    And it was either @Pedant or @JimTheFish who pointed out that Giles, even, didn’t particularly trust Angel by the end of S3 -too much pain from the loss of Jenny I suppose.

    In Buffy, Cordelia eventually became a Scoobie but she has a stylish life -a car, an expense account and now, in LA she has no friends, no social life and no new dresses! Although for someone on a budget she sure changes her hair a lot… But with hardly any spangly gowns, she’s definitely an outsider now 🙂

    It’s one of my peeves about Buffy -no matter what, SMG wears some new sparkly number every single episode -usually three outfits! And even those ‘dolly’ purses. In high school. Small thing, but it irks. In Angel -one sees Cordy wearing the same ‘old’ things – someone in the wardrobe dept has  sense. So, now I’ve spent two paragraphs on wardrobe. Errk.

    Strike that. What was I on about? Outsiders. I think the Scoobies were slayers; fighting a Big Bad and in that sense they’re the ‘in’ crowd whilst the slime demons are always awful (excepting Clem, of course: wouldn’t you want to take him home, watch video boxed sets, eat popcorn?) but  in LA, the Big Bad can be the detective’s depression and attempted suicide, the realisation that Hell is on earth and karaoke demons are pretty much the good guys!

    Then again, the Mayor’s office in S3 was the Big Bad -and yet human (pretty much) but W and H (all humans, but totally evil and horrible) are also the Big Bad. So, maybe the outsider/insider hypothesis doesn’t hold murky demon-drowning water after all?

    Must eat choc-chip cookies and muse. Or I could watch S4 G of Thrones -it is awful! All this “you know what I’m gonna do to your mother, little girl and then to you, little girl?” And such A-Grade actors wherever you look -there’s that bloke from Torchwood! And Aiden Gillen…and on and on….Will it ever, ever end?

  4. @purofilion

    Andy Hallett died not long after his time on Angel of a heart condition, making him the second tragically young death from the show after Glenn Quinn.

    Yes, Wesley is getting interesting. He’s easily one of my favourite characters in the whole Buffiverse and has to my mind one of the most interesting character arcs. And the best is yet to come with him. The Wesley of s2 is still a slightly matured version of the bumbling oaf we saw in Buffy but you probably won’t be able to say that about him in another year’s time. And Alexis Densiof really does fine work in the series — to the point where he was seriously considered to play Bond in Casino Royale.

    It’s also worth checking out Denisof playing Benedick to Amy ‘Fred’ Acker’s Beatrice in Joss’s version of Much Ado About Nothing of a couple of years back. Low budget, 12-day-shoot which also has a wealth of other familiar faces in it — including Tom Lenk and Nathan Fillion. Definitely worth a rental.

    On Christian Kane. He is great. But Stephanie Romanov really steps up to the plate and is excellently evil next season. Again, it’s interesting in Angel that evil really doesn’t mean ‘no soul’. Just look at how many of the villains in the show are humans, how many of the ‘heroes’ are demonic. And look how this is set to continue next year and the next. Darla is a good case in point. Returns with a soul. Loses it when she’s vamped by Dru. But it’s never so easy as saying ‘Darla is evil’. Whereas you could definitely have said that of her in s1 of Buffy.

    @cathannabel & @purofilion

    RE. Belonging. It’s true that the Scoobies are misfits in High School etc but they are still part of the community. For instance, they may be the uncool bunch compared to the Cordettes, but not so beyond the pale that Cordy won’t date Xander, despite the friction it might cause.

    Look at when the vampires attack the high school in Prophecy Girl. Willow says: “This was our world and they took it away and made it theirs. And they had fun’. The Scoobies are about defending ‘their’ world from the vampires etc, no matter how insecure their place in the pecking order of that world.

    Compare this with Angel, which has many scenes of Angel and co having to break into the sanctuaries of the LA establishment in order to confront the evil that comfortably exists there. The obvious example is the many, many times Angel busts into Wolfram & Hart, but look at the first episode too. First Angel breaks into Russell Winters’s home to save Cordelia, then walks into his corporate HQ to take him out. That’s a statement of intent for the whole show. And it’s similar to Angel forcing his way into access to the Senior Partners in the elevator scene.

    Angel and the Angelettes are not on a defensive action, protecting and preserving their institutions — school, college, home, work. They’re the invaders, taking the fight into the institutions of evil. They live an ad hoc, improvisatory life, running a pseudo-detective agency from an old hotel. They don’t belong anywhere. At least until s5 when they SPOILERS REDACTED SPOILERS REDACTED.

    But it’s a fair point that that is the nature of LA anyway. It’s a far more complex place than Sunnydale. As Lorne says, “No one belongs here. That’s why I fit right in.’

     

     

  5. @JimTheFish – good points, well made.

    Also seconding the recommendation for Much Ado – it was a joy to watch.  Joss even made some of the broader comedic bits work, which can be excruciating.  And Denisov and Acker were brilliant.

  6. @cathannabel — yes, they’re not my favourite screen Beatrice and Benedick — that honour goes to Damian Lewis and Sarah Parrish, closely followed by Ken & Em — but they still have a quite nice Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn vibe to them. And I thought Nathan Fillion’s all-too-brief turn as Dogberry was great too.

  7. @JimTheFish thank you for that! -it looks fab. I’m sure it never aired in Bris (no surprise). Must rent  -but just for me I think, and Wes! -Wes with his normal accent, and looking rather handsome?

    Now, I then made the mistake of watching Fillion on some talk show discussing his new electric car and doing “much ado”, where he said “You think it’s English. I speak English. No. No”, I mean come on, it’s Shakespeare; he’s an actor & it’s not rocket surgery!

    I imagine this the pressure of super-powered acting dumb-downed to talk show watchers. Shame.

    But I’ve not see Castle either -he’s a novelist who solves crimes by day? Or night? Jeepers.

  8. @purofilion — Castle is kind of meh and pretty ordinary really. But Fillion can be great. He’s terrific in Firefly though and can really turn from comedy to being the cool action hero on a dime. He’s also a very funny guy, so he was probably being all ironical on the chat show though. But having said that, he’s not exactly going to be the world’s greatest Shakespearean and probably only really gets away with Dogberry because it’s such a small part.

  9. @JimTheFish finally having convinced the Boy to watch the rest of S2 Angel  -and adoring it, he’s also wanting to get back into a re-watch of Buffy.

    I did love Lorne (Hallet) in Pylea and whilst the whole thing was a bit ‘weird’ the Boy loved it simply because of the deadpan humour Angel has and Lorne’s fantastic acting -his singing presumably, to avoid being killed by the Pyleans.

    Not bad really, and I suppose your were right, it took David out of the darkness for a bit -is Whedon Lorne’s mother?? Or his he the one doing the dance at the back. I thought it was Mrs Lorne -but I could be wrong.

  10. @purofilion — it’s Joss as Numfar, doing the dance of joy in the background…

    RE. Pylea. It occurred to me when I was writing the blog that the amount I did on the Pylean episodes means that they can’t easily be discounted. They are kind of key in contextualising the rest of the show — maybe a decent analogy might be is that they are kind of the Angel equivalent to the mirror universe episodes. Plus in s3 and s4, the concepts of dimensions and portals and what have you are going to be quite key so maybe it was felt we should be getting used to them.

    It’s also interesting to note that unlike Buffy, Angel does step outside of the confines of LA quite often whereas Buffy never had an episode that ventured beyond Sunnydale.

    But it’s also worth nothing that we never venture back to Pylea again, although certain elements from the Pylean eps are going to play a significant part in s3. And if for nothing else, the Pylean Quartet did bring Fred into the picture. And for that I for one am eternally grateful. Sigh. Amy Acker….

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