This week’s episode of Angel featured many story elements we haven’t seen for some time… Flashbacks. Willow doing something useful with her magic. And of course, happy endings. Also pleasingly, last week’s cliffhanger was resolved in an interesting and believable way — which also involved some cool walking along corridors in slow motion, which I’m always a sucker for.

The idea of Angelus’ personal hell — having flashbacks of Angel’s good deeds — was a very amusing and fitting one considering the many vice-versa flashbacks Angel has had to endure. The twist of also having the experience about Faith was a good one, if a bit awkwardly handled. I’m still not entirely sure how Angel could have popped up in Angelus’ head before his soul was freed into the ether. Ooooh, let’s have a go…

Souls have a slightly blurry relationship with time, and there’s some temporal overlap in any process involving their movement from one vessel to another. Yeah, I’ll buy that. Better editing could have helped this bit however. I doubt it would have spoiled Angel’s (excellent) surprise entrance.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Willow’s back in town! And being not only funnier and more useful than she’s been on Buffy for ages, but also managing to have convincing chemistry with another female character for the first time in a while. Her scenes with Fred do rather show up the ‘relationship’ she’s having with Kennedy as rather pathetically constructed. I’m still not sure if Fred really was interested in her, or just overly chatty having someone vaguely happy hanging around the Hyperion though. I’d like to think the former, but that, uh, may just be me. Speaking of chemistry, the discussion between Willow and Wesley concerning their respective darknesses was very funny.

On the less exciting side, we had Cordelia continuing to be evil. I’m surprised that Connor hasn’t complained about her taking kitchen knives to bed before. My enjoyment of Connor’s character, while bolstered by his concern for Faith, was almost destroyed by his EXTREME stupidness in falling for obviously-evil-Cordy’s stupid ‘kill Angelus’ scheme. He’d better be having words with her next episode.

Oh, and evil-Cordy’s fake voice is still lamer than lame.

Someone who deserves a mention at this point is Lorne, who hasn’t exactly been getting the big plots this season since his Vegas trip. But his bedside song to Faith was a really soft and kind moment, of the sort that we haven’t gotten enough of just recently. Good on him — perhaps he’ll end up becoming the heart of the group now that Cordy’s otherwise engaged.

Overall, an above average episode, with the first sparks of happiness all season, a very nice resolution of Wesley and Faith’s Watcher/Slayer relationship (I’m thinking spin-off…), and some excellent special effects, handling both the Angel v. Angelus fight and his re-ensoulment. Well, excellent for TV anyhow. One has to make an adjustment from The Matrix.

You know, this would be a brilliant season if Cordy wasn’t dragging it down every episode.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Monday, June 16th, 2003. 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.