Some writers on Angel have a more distinctive style than others. The vast majority, perhaps naturally, seem to attempt to emulate Joss Whedon’s style. In any given season, perhaps half the stories feel like such attempts — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But out of the general gloom and irritation of last season came two writers who had very strong individuality. One is Ben Endlund, of The Tick fame. The other is Steven DeKnight, who came from writing some pretty average Buffy stories and found his niche in the more dark, action-based and crazy plotlines on the superior sister-series. And, his girlfriend, apparently. Some people have all the luck.

DeKnight’s best episode (both writing and directing) last year was probably Inside Out — an essentially exposition based episode which explained to us all the horrible things that had happened to Cordelia, and why. While it’s almost certain that these reasons weren’t worth enduring episode after episode of evil-Cordy and stupid-Connor, I found it impressive at the time that the episode had actually managed to be kind of cool, with some really impressive action as well. This time round, DeKnight’s story is in the middle of a bunch of impressive episodes, and without the dead weight of lame plot devices hanging it down, it’s fantastic.

Shells is the continuation of Joss Whedon’s A Hole in the World, and differs noticeably from that story. While Whedon’s episode had his trademark mix of lightness and weight, made up of personal moments and beautiful set-pieces, DeKnight’s story feels like a comic book on TV. There’s a distinctly upped action quota, lots of intense close-ups… and, ok, a few kinda dull speeches. But hey! I watched the whole of Buffy‘s season seven — I can take a few lame speeches. The worst offender is Spike, and in truth it feels like he’s reading one of Buffy’s old scripts from that very season. “There’s a fight coming Angel, and things’ll get bad, and rough, and we writers can’t be bothered actually foreshadowing so I’m just gonna come right out and say it.”

In short — a trademark fast-paced episode, with unfortunate but rare lameness.

Oh, and Fred’s not coming back. No really, they were very insistent, there’ll be none of this ‘coming back’ malarkey. Notice how they said it many times, with much authority? These are people who know how they can be burned by fan speculation and incorrect expectations.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Monday, July 5th, 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.