'Angel,' when it's good to be bad

'Angel,' when it's
good to be bad

Do-gooder vamp is best with some devil in him

By Dan Jewel

    First, a brief history lesson.
    In the beginning, there was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” And “Buffy” begat “Angel,” which begat many assumptions that a spinoff about a morose do-gooder vampire would last about a week.
     Instead, over the past three seasons “Angel” has moved away from its offspring-of-a-better-show origins to become a success on the WB in its own right.
    The original premise: Angel (David Boreanaz), formerly the evil bloodsucker Angelus, was given a soul via a Gypsy curse, leaving him desperate to atone for his past sins and eager to save the world, one week at a time.
   Under certain circumstances—if Angel knows pure happiness, for example--the curse will lift, turning our hero back to evil form.
    In other words, there were two Angels, one pure good, one pure bad.
    It took about a year for the creators of “Angel,” “Buffy” wunderkind Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt, to realize there could be a much more interesting middle ground. Having a soul and a conscience doesn’t necessarily make Angel a saint. It makes him human (except for the fangs and eternal life and all that).
    So in the second season, pushed too far by various acts of villainy, his black-and-white sense of morality took a beating. For a long stretch of the season, Angel was bent on vengeance, a vampire no longer tortured by guilt but by fury. We watched as he allowed people to die before his eyes—evil people, granted, but people, not demons.
     It was a daring direction for the show to take, and it worked perfectly. For a stretch it was every bit as good as “Buffy.”
     But just as there were two Angels (the character), there are two “Angels” (the show). Rather than allow the main character to remain too tough for viewers to like, the writers had him snap out of his vengeance mode, realize the error of his ways, and become his old, noble, dull self.
     Meanwhile, the whole season was practically ruined by a pointless story arc that took the characters to a parallel universe; it felt as though the writers had mistakenly wrapped up all the good stuff a month early and had to slap something together for the last few weeks.
    Last season, things got dark again.
   Trusted friend Wesley (Alexis Denisof), believing a false prophesy that Angel was going to murder his newborn son, kidnapped the child, who was then taken off to a hell dimension.
     A few weeks later, the son, Connor, returned to our world fully grown and convinced that Angel was his enemy. In the season finale, he locked Angel in a box and sent him to spend eternity trapped at the bottom of the sea.
    If there’s ever been a reason for Angel to feel a tad miffed, this is it. But in the fourth season premiere, airing this Sunday at 9 p.m. (on a new night, following “Charmed” rather than “7th Heaven,” a much better match), Angel’s back. This isn’t giving away any surprises, considering that the ads pronounce, “Daddy’s back from the bottom of the sea—and he isn’t very happy.”
    Maybe not, but he seems pretty well-adjusted, actually, and awfully forgiving.
     Since Angel’s under water for the bulk of the episode and Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) is off in the clouds somewhere (she was made a glowing goddess of some sort in last season’s finale—uh, don’t ask), we’re forced to endure the endlessly insipid romance between Gunn (J. August Richards) and Fred (Amy Acker).
    The show deserves a bit of credit for portraying a comfortable interracial romance, but only a bit. They spent most of last year cooing at each other like love-struck eighth-graders.
   In Sunday’s premiere, they’ve assumed the parental role to Connor (Vincent Kartheiser)—who appears to be about their age, which means this doesn’t work at all.
     Still, we get some incredibly irritating dialogue, seemingly out of a “7th Heaven” episode: “Like I care what you think,” Connor yells at Gunn. “He’s just testing you,” Fred explains.
    They’re testing the viewers, in any case.
    Fred is one of the show’s largest problems, full of shrill mannerisms that are no doubt meant to be endearing but fail utterly.
    On the other hand, Wesley, once merely a source of cheap comic relief, has become one of the more complex, unpredictable characters. Exiled by the group, he’s now literally sleeping with the enemy.
    Speaking of which, as opposed to “Buffy,” the true villains on “Angel” are human, and they’re endlessly fascinating—viciously evil, but always full of surprises.
     The behind-the-scenes machinations at Wolfram & Hart, the L.A. law firm bent on world domination, have always been an entertaining sideshow, but they’re becoming a main event, and they’re the best part of the new season premiere.
     It’s far too early to tell where this fourth season’s headed, but there is one worrisome sign. “We live as though the world were as it should be,” says Angel at one point, “to show what it can be.”
      That’s the good Angel talking, and the good Angel too often means a bad “Angel.”

Dan Jewel is a senior editor at Biography Magazine in New York.


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