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Angel - Season TwoRating:
Release Date: 02 September, 2003 Retail Price: $59.98 OUR Price: $44.99 You SAVE: $14.99! Cast: |
Angel - Season Two Reviews
yeah
There isn't a single season of Angel I don't love. Can't say the same for Buffy...
I don't have a favorite season of Angel, but what I love about this one is Angel's obession with killing everyone at Wolfram&Heart. The gray area he touches, were he's not Angel and he's not Angelus is amazing.
Plus I always loved Drucilla and she's back. The story behind the original group with Dru, Spike, Angelus, and Darla is great.
I would recomend this series over Buffy any day. Buy it!
As Darla said it was neither Angel nor Angelus in Season 2
Season Two was when both Angel and "Angel" lost its way. On the one hand you can clearly define this episode in terms of the character of the Host (Andy Hallett), who first pops up in "Judgment" as the host of Caritas, a karaoke joint that serves as a safe haven for demons. The next thing we know Angel (David Boreanaz) is singing, for lack of a better word, "Mandy." At the end of the year we learn that the Host is actually Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan, shortened to the convenience and conventions of this dimension as "Lorne," and Angel Investigations ends up "Over the Rainbow" is Pylea, where things are totally "Through the Looking Glass," and they learn that "There's No Place Like Plrtz Glrb." This is all fun enough, but in between we have Angel letting Darla (Julie Benz) and Drusilla (Juliet Landau) snack on the lawyers of Wolfram & Hart ("Reunion") and then lights the two fem fatale vamps on fire ("Redefinition"). In between, Angel fires everybody at Angel Investigations.
One of the things we have come to expect from a series created (or co-created) by Joss Whedon is the ability to play both light and dark. We have also come to expect a story-arc for the first half of the season that combines in some interesting way with the second half story-arc. What that means here is that Angel spends the first half of the second season destroying everything he has built because of Darla, and the second half trying to put it back together again after an initial period where he does not especially want to. For me the problem is that while the previous season ended with the revelation that Wolfram & Hart had brought back Darla, it also revealed the correct translation of the word "shanshu" was "to live" rather than "to die." Once the vampire with a soul fulfills his destiny, he (read Angel at this point) will become human as his reward. Angel allowed, "That'd be nice." How we got from that Angel to the one smoking a cigarette so he could flick it into a pool of gasoline to torch Darla and Drusilla is what makes the first half of the season interesting. As Darla correctly observes, the creature who did this was neither Angel nor Angelus.
Even if we do not agree with the dark place to which Angel goes in this second season, Whedon and series co-creator David Greenwalt justify the transformation. The series was fortunate in bringing back the character of Darla because over the next two seasons Julie Benz was going to turn in the best performance by a recurring guest star on either "Angel" (or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") culminating in the show's best moment when Connor is born in the third season. The mind games that Darla plays with Angel, aided and abetted by the Wolfram & Hart tag team of Lindsey McDonald (Christian Kane) and Lila Morgan (Stephanie Romanov), provides adequate motivation, especially when Angel fails to save Darla and she is turned back into a vampire by Drusilla.
For me the problem is getting from that dark place to Angel basking in the sunlight of Pylea, made possible because it takes six episodes for Angel to see the light ("Epiphany"). It seems to me that should have been the big finale for the show's second season given how dark it was getting, but instead we get the comic adventures of the gang in a demon dimension. True, we get the sight of Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) as queen, the addition of Amy Acker as Fred, and the season ends with Alyson Hannigan showing up as Willow to tell Angel by just the look on her face that something has happened to Buffy. But given Angel's dark descent the reversal at the end is rather disquieting (and certainly unique in the dozen "BtVS"/"Angel" finales).
The best episodes in Season Two usually have to do with the Darla plot line, with Drala setting Kate Lockley (Elisabeth Rohm) after Angel in "Dear Boy," Angel facing "The Trial" to try and save Darla (who sings "Ill Wind" at Caritas), and Darla and Dru on the town in "Reunion." I also like Lindsey's swan song in "Dead End," thanks to his "evil hand," and especially since Christian Kane sing at Caritas. The two best comedy episodes of the season are "Guise Will be Guise," where Wesley (Alexis Denisov) is mistaken for Angel by a beautiful client, Virginia Bryce (Brigid Brannagh) and tries to play the role the hilt, and then "Disharmony," where Harmony (Mercedes McNab) the vampire shows up on the doorstep of Cordelia and decides to try and go straight (unlike Willow, who has a very funny phone call from Cory). But there really is nothing funnier than the Dance of Shame that Lorne's mother insists upon when her offspring returns home to Pylea (because Lorne's severed head talking was not a surprise).
On balance and from the perspective of looking back on the five season of the show, I think Season 2 was the weakest year of "Angel." That being said, this is a pretty good low point. If they had explored the character who was neither Angel nor Angelus for the rest of the season and really wallowd in the dark stuff I would have rated the season higher because as "Angel" proved the following year it was when things got really bad that the show got really good. Getting away from the flashbacks always being about the Angelus years to an earlier time in Angel's quest for atonement in "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?" was a good move and taking advantage of Wolfram & Hart in "Blood Money" were solid stand alone episodes. In the end, the worst thing I can saw about "Angel, Season 2" is that the first half was better than the second half. That might seem a minor complaint, but not with a Joss Whedon show.
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