Tom: Welcome to our Angel reviews for season five. Say hello, Andy.

Andy: Hello Andy. I’m not an Angelholic, but it’s a darn sight better than Buffy.

The new direction of this season is highlighted from the very beginning, as an archetypal ‘Angel saves the girl’ moment is concluded with publicity photos, chauffers and indemnity waivers. A flabbergasted Angel is lost for words, and all the characters seem unsure if the move to Wolfram & Hart is going to work. As, indeed, are we.

I’m not. I know things are going to go wrong, without spoilers. The episode continues with the Angel Team recapping what happened to them after last season’s cliff hanger. What it fails to explain is what everyone remembers of last season given the memory wipe about Connor. Hopefully this will be cleared up later this season and not become a confusing grey area like we’ve seen on Buffy these past seasons. I’m worried about such problems given that last season was almost one big episode. The writers will probably selectively remember events of last season. Too convenient for my liking. The memory wipe has left the group friendly again, presumably so Wolfram and Hart can tear them apart later on. Eve feels like she will get on my nerves soon. Too self absorbed for a bad guy, as she surely will be. I pray she’ll have a sensible plan and not something hole ridden.

These memory issues are a problem. Wesley has paradoxical stubble if he’s not actually gone through all his Connor-related traumas. On a wider level, I’m interested to see how they’ll be playing this Wolfram and Hart thing. Will we have many court cases? Will we always have irritating characters like Fries that our heroes have to put up with? While I enjoyed a lot of this episode, these two elements weren’t my favourites. Fries is possibly the least interesting and amusing character ever seen in a Whedon-penned episode, unless you count Caleb. And Eve is trying my nerves also — I hate characters who say everything as if it’s in inverted commas.

On the upside, it does look like the good guys have some kind of plan. I was worried that they’d just sit there in their law firm and wait for things to go wrong. It should be a lot greyer fight against evil this year. Buffy was always very black and white, good and evil. I presume the plot for this episode is a typical tricky problem that will be encountered this season. The solutions will not simply be a matter of finding out the weak point of the monster, they’ll require some compromise. They may end up fighting more humans, as demons are usually definitely evil and can be killed without consequence. (Although not always, e.g. Lorne and Doyle) They can’t kill all their evil clients as Eve pointed out, but they should be able to stop a lot of bad guys. The amount of good they do I think is measured in the number of bad guys stopped, not how many they didn’t stop. As for the rest of the episode, some funny dialogue and unfortunately, Spike.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Wednesday, April 14th, 2004. It concerns such pressing issues as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.