Meanwhile, on Angel

Since I always watch Angel alongside Buffy, I watched the season three finale of Angel last night after watching the season six finale of Buffy a few days earlier (the Angel episode aired on May 20, 2002, while the Buffy episode aired on May 21, 2002). Written by series co-creator David Greenwalt, the Angel finale is a little more suspenseful than the Buffy finale, with tighter writing, though the annoying kid character is a little more annoying.

Connor is Angel's answer to Buffy's Dawn. Dawn works slightly better when the writers are giving her realistic sibling banter with Buffy but Connor's just ornery, his vague backstory involving life growing up in an ill-defined Hell dimension. Maybe the best thing about the episode is that it's the last one with the increasingly dull Cordelia.

She and Angel realise they have feelings for each other and she calls him on the phone to arrange an appointment with him at a scenic location where she can confess her love. It's funny she didn't just come straight to the hotel but, naturally, one doesn't want to have such a conversation over the phone. I thought, what a charmingly dated plot element. Yes, people used to feel it was better to conduct such matters in person. Now I think people prefer to do it via texting and online communication. Why is that more acceptable than phone conversations? I suppose it's because people now feel more like they're their true selves on the internet and via text. It leaves out all that messy biological stuff like blushing, stuttering, and the possibility of exposing unflattering or politically inconvenient instincts.

This episode also features a Pogues song when Lilah goes to meet Wesley at a bar where he's drinking alone. This was the phase when Wesley really becomes the grim hardass, following his attempt to kidnap Angel's son because he was afraid Angel would kill the child. He has a sex scene with Lilah with dialogue that feels like it came from a noir.

LILAH: Don't go making more of this than it is. I'm not one of the doey-eyed girls of Angel Investigations. Don't be thinking about me when I'm gone.

WESLEY: I wasn't thinking about you when you were here.

Angel is available on Disney+ or Hulu in various countries. I had to use my VPN to watch it on the UK's Disney+. It was on Japan's Disney+ for a while but then it was removed, though Buffy's still on.

Ballet Ghosts

Season three of Angel has a fairly decent string of episodes before Joss Whedon suddenly steps in and knocks one out of the park with "Waiting in the Wings". This 2002 episode features the characters going to a ballet that of course turns out to be haunted.

At this point, Cordelia had already begun to slip into being a boring moral paragon. Whedon, who wrote and directed the episode, reminds us we loved the character because she was also shallow and sometimes brutally blunt. Wesley, who was also morphing into a new character, a brooding lone hunter, is in this episode also believably the awkward dweeb he was back in season three of Buffy.

This is also the introduction of Summer Glau to viewers. Here playing the doomed ghost of a ballerina, the real life ballerina Glau would then become a star of Whedon's Firefly series and then of the wonderful Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In her one scene of dialogue in "Waiting in the Wings", complaining about the sorcerer who keeps her imprisoned despite not even understanding ballet, is lovely. Whedon's catty dialogue is paired nicely with a sense of genuine torment in Glau's performance.

Angel and Cordelia making out in the haunted dressing room is really sexy and the ambiguity over how much of it is the possession talking is really nice.

Angel is available on Disney+ in many countries.

Twitter Sonnet #1707

The talking wheel of cheese has turned around.
The thoughtless world has jumped the lunar train.
With larger skulls, the heads collected sound.
So noise assumed the office held for brain.
The clouds were hair before the blue was bald.
You mention time as planks of splintered wood.
For fear of piers the waves were shortly called.
Beside the bad let's scribble something good.
A summer man is made of stacking suns.
Extempore, the songs delight the deer.
Collected dots were gobs of baby ones.
A finer bread could cut in twain the beer.
Entrancing wings concealed the spotless gloves.
With foreign cards she stacks collected loves.

Vampire Baby

I'm still watching Angel and Buffy. Last night I watched the third season Angel episode, "Offspring". This is the one where Darla shows up pregnant and it's also the first episode where the idea of romance between Angel and Cordelia is introduced to be taken seriously.

The episode came out in 2001, which enabled a demon in the episode to refer to it as "the first year of the last century." It was written by David Greenwalt, one of the better writers on the show, though I don't really like the way Darla's pregnancy is handled.

First it's used to swing the pendulum of Angel and Cordelia's increasing affection. Suddenly, evidence that Angel has been sleeping around shows up and everyone (except Fred) adopts a superior attitude to that cad Angel. This would just be cheesy if the viewer doesn't remember that Darla had been systematically breaking Angel down with the intent of getting him to sleep with her, appearing in what he thought were his dreams, and when he finally did sleep with her it was when he thought he'd lost everything. It's weird to have him treated as some kind of horndog for it. Cordelia has multiple lines that are variations of just, "Men!"

It is kind of satisfying when Darla tries to kill Cordelia after Cordelia had been stupid enough to dote on her like she was some innocent random pregnant woman. But everyone, including Cordelia, should have been smarter than that, so it's just kind of odd.

Fred is really fun in the episode, though, babbling about demoniac etymologies and interpreting Latin. In 2001, you could have a character who's supposed to be intensely shy who wears micro-miniskirts and sundresses all the time. My head canon is just that she had Cordelia pick out all her clothes and she'd spent too long in a cave wearing rags to know what was really appropriate anymore. It's L.A., and these clothes really aren't so far fetched.

Angel is available on Disney+ in most countries and presumably Hulu in the US.

No Angel Angel

Body switch episodes can be hit or miss but I like "Carpe Noctem", a third season episode of Angel, despite the fact that its body switching isn't exploited as well as it might have been. I like it more for how cosy it is with the show's normal set-up at this point.

Angel gets his body swapped with an old man called Marcus. Marcus has done this multiple times--switching bodies with younger, or apparently younger, men to live a brief, wildly hedonistic life outside his retirement home. He parties so hard, and uses such dangerous magic, the young men are turned into empty puddles of skin.

The two actors don't make any effort to imitate each other, probably for lack of time. Rance Howard, the Marcus body, has slower speech than David Boreanaz regardless of which spirit inhabits him. Boreanaz plays Marcus as a quick witted, sleazy guy. Little time is spent with Angel in Marcus' body, which seems a shame because it might have been interesting to see Angel deal more with the realities of human aging.

But I love Marcus wreaking havoc in Angel's life. His shallowness is amusingly horrible as he has an awkward conversation with Wesley, whom he thinks is attracted to him, before shamelessly exploiting Fred's crush on Angel. At the same time, all of this provides a way for the show to reintroduce us to the familiar characters and establish a sense of the routine in the hotel. Which I really love.

Amy Acker as Fred really shines in this episode, first with her adorable crush on Angel and then when she's absolutely devastated after witnessing him boning Lilah on Wesley's desk.

Angel is available on Hulu and Amazon Prime in the U.S. and Disney+ in other countries.

A Night for Blood

I was in the mood for vampires last night so I watched an episode of Angel, "That Old Gang of Mine". I wasn't satisfied so I also watched Carl Dreyer's 1932 film Vampyr again.

I guess "That Old Gang of Mine" isn't much about vampires, really. According to the Wikipedia article, writer Tim Minear considers it his weakest script. I would say it's an instance of a Buffy show leaning on one of the more weakly established pillars of its worldbuilding. The drama is about Gunn's new conflict with his old gang who are indiscriminately killing demons, whether they're the kind who eat babies or who generally just chill out in the sewer drinking Big Gulps. I always hate it when some fictional species are made just basically human so they can be used as a metaphor for bigotry or civil rights. Disney is currently making the same mistake with droids in the Star Wars franchise. It's the kind of thing that makes you think these people don't understand why demons and droids are so cool.

Anyway, Vampyr's always a dreamy delight. You have to ease yourself into a Carl Dreyer film, let the atmosphere, created largely by pacing, soak into your bloodstream. I love how the protagonists of Vampyr almost seem like living dolls. Rena Mandel as Gisele calling out her sister's name, standing in a stiff dress, wide-eyed with a plaintive voice, is almost like a lamb alone on a hill bleating for its mother.

Sybille Schmitz, as her sister, Leone, tends to be the one in the posters. It's unsurprising given how effectively maniacal she looks.

Vampyr is available on The Criterion Channel and Angel is available on Disney+ or Hulu, depending on your country.

Grand Vampire Hotel

Now that I've finished with The Defenders, I've gone back to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. I've just started season six of Buffy and season three of Angel. Buffy's a little better at this point but I still feel sentimental about that hotel on Angel.

Last night I watched the second episode of Angel season three, "That Vision-Thing", in which Cordelia's visions have started to manifest with physical wounds. Charisma Carpenter's hair has started to grow back from the unflattering short haircut she'd apparently gotten in the middle of a scene back in season two.

Meanwhile, Fred (Amy Acker) is in this episode taking on a more prominent role, still recovering from the trauma of living in another dimension. She's just barely willing to come out of her hotel room, compulsively hiding under desks whenever she can. But still Angel (David Boreanaz) asks her to "take Cordelia home" when he notices Cordelia isn't feeling well. There are lots of continuity problems in this episode. It also begins the subplot of Wolfram and Hart trying to take down Angel with building code violations for the hotel. Gunn (J. August Richards) encounters a crew unexpectedly fumigating the hotel in one scene but then we never see them again nor get an explanation as to how Gunn dealt with them.

There's also the subplot about Darla (Julie Benz) being pregnant with Angel's child, a subplot I never liked, before or after the kid is actually born. It's amazing how much I overlook on this show to still enjoy it.

Angel is available on Disney+ in Australia.

Angel Alone

The writing in Angel season two isn't always the strongest. I'm about halfway through and though there've been some strong stand-out episodes, like "Guise Will Be Guise" (one of the best of the whole series, I now think) and "Blood Money", the season suffers from some bad overall arc ideas. After Angel leaves a bunch of Wolfram and Hart attorneys to the mercy of Darla and Drusilla, his staff are all horrified. So he fires them so he can be unfettered by their scruples. This leads to a situation that lasts for several episodes in which Angel and the Angel Investigations teams work separately. The trouble is, I don't buy anyone's motives for this. I don't think Gunn, in particular, would be bothered by Wolfram and Hart's people being eaten. Certainly not season one Cordelia, though, sadly, season two is where the ever delightfully mercenary valley girl became tiresomely righteous, around the same time Charisma Carpenter apparently got breast implants and an unflattering short haircut. It's only Wesley I can see being plausibly aghast, but I couldn't see it being a deal breaker even for him. Angel's decision to fire the three of them makes no sense, too, because it's not like they were really standing in his way before. And it's likely he needed only wait until another screenwriter was at hand for them to come around to his opinion, anyway.

But I liked the past two episodes I just watched, "Blood Money" and "Happy Anniversary". Both feel exceptionally comic book-ish--"Blood Money" feels like Batman and "Happy Anniversary" feels like Tales from the Crypt.

I like how the character played by Julia Lee, first introduced as Chantarelle on Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2, is re-introduced. Although she and Angel had met on Buffy, neither recognises the other, and that's actually plausible. They both look different, especially Anne, and I don't think they heard each other's names back then. A lesser show would've had an awkward line of dialogue where she mentioned knowing Buffy and the two characters would fill each other in. Instead, we get something much more realistic and strange--two characters whose paths previously crossed who have no idea they've crossed a second time. That's like the legitimate strangeness of human existence.

"Happy Anniversary" is the first to feature the Host as a full on guest star and he drops some fairly insightful lines that Andy Hallett's ever delightful, melodious delivery makes sound profound. The main plot about a physicist whose invention stops time feels very much like the kind of cruel moral tale you'd see in the original Tales from the Crypt comics, except the ending isn't so grim. The way he overhears his girlfriend planning to break up with him after giving him a "sympathy bone" on their anniversary feels so oddly relation-drama for Angel it makes me wonder if this is actually something from one of the writers' (as it happens, show creators David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon) personal lives. Hopefully neither one would have endangered the world to freeze time mid-coitus.

Angel is available on Disney+ in Australia and Amazon Prime in the US.

Clothes of the Vampire

I more and more strongly suspect Joss Whedon had the crew watch Vertigo at the start of Angel season two. After an episode in which Darla pretends to be a random human to make Angel look crazy comes "Guise will be Guise" by Jane Espenson. From the clever title onward, this episode builds wonderfully on some of Vertigo's themes, including deceptive appearances, a virtuous instinct inevitably being entangled with baser instinct, and a supernatural ruse.

In this case, it's Wesley (Alexis Denisof) who pretends to be a vampire when Angel (David Boreanaz) is out of town. It's his presentation as a dark defender, a role he's initially forced to take in order to protect Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), that attracts the woman he's hired to escort, Virginia (Brigid Brannagh).

A character who's introduced on her bed, everything in juvenile pastels, emphasising a sexual innocence that proves in the end to be another significant illusion. Meanwhile, Angel is off getting advice from someone he thinks is a powerful psychic (Art LaFleur).

I love how the episode cuts between the Angel plot and the Wesley plot, having each play off each other. When the psychic calls Angel on his habit of wearing dark clothes and commenting on how he chooses to portray himself, the scene cuts to Wesley talking tough wearing Angel's overcoat. The psychic says Angel does have a reflection, it's what we see in the impressions other people have of him.

And in another brilliant move, the psychic turns out to be fake, forcing Angel and the rest of us to evaluate his insights on their own terms.

It's amazing to think Espenson used to be one of my least favourite Buffyverse writers, now I think she's one of my favourites.

Angel is available on Amazon Prime and Disney+ in many countries.

Twitter Sonnet #1469

A second stage resembled carts and cabs.
With careful sticks the wooden house expands.
Complete the box inserting proper tabs.
A boss denies the words that push demands.
The cheapest printer still can cycle ink.
A noodle cake awaits the thirsty foot.
We chased a phantom down below the sink.
A changing movie ran beneath the soot.
Collected hours summon scrolls of text.
A helpful thought was turned to tuck the wing.
A turtle left the island sore perplexed.
The early kettle's well prepared to sing.
A spiral system closed the distant space.
A distant science builds a dreamy ace.

The Beaming Dead

2000 was the year Spike turned pink on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The same year, Kate turned pink on Angel.

I guess pale was out of fashion in the Buffyverse, for vampires as well as humans.

The Kate screenshot comes from "Dear Boy", an episode of Angel in which Darla, the vampire who turned Angel originally, newly resurrected as a human, poses as an ordinary human to make Angel's friends think he's crazy. I suspect it continues the influence of Vertigo seen more directly a few episodes earlier in "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been". Vertigo references always make me happy (and aren't going out of style since WandaVision ended with one). But I also like the Darla plot in Angel season two for how it starts to bridge the gap between Angel and Angelus, his evil self. It can seem like kind of a cheat, the ideal of souls on the two series. Why should Angel feel guilty now for things he did when he was essentially possessed by a demon? 2000 was the year lines started to blur a little.

On Buffy as well. This was the year Spike realised he was lusting for Buffy. Or the year he realised he was in love with her, depending on how you interpret it. What does it mean for him to love without a soul? It certainly seemed like his relationship with Drusilla was more than lust all along.

I kind of like that the shows never really explored their implicit Christian rulebook. We never find out why crosses hurt vampires. We never find out exactly what having a soul means. The ambiguity tortures the characters in a pretty credible way.

Vampires Turn Up

I'm still watching Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, now into season two of one and five of the other. The two shows deepen their fantasy cost of living in California--On Buffy, Xander is easily able to get a huge, beautiful apartment using himself as a reference in "The Replacement" while Angel just appropriates a 68 room hotel on Angel in "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been".

Just two episodes earlier, Angel had expressed concern for Gunn's current living situation and Gunn had told him a property owner was allowing his crew to stay there in exchange for keeping the area safe from vampires. Meanwhile, a whole hotel with working utilities just falls into Angel's hands. I know there's a small arc about Wolfram and Hart buying the building under Angel's nose but that elaborate bit of lampshading kind of highlighted the issue more than alleviated it.

I might take a cheap shot at the show's internal logic but, the truth is, that hotel is a big part of why I love Angel. It is a fantasy, but that's not a bad thing. I'd love to live in my own hotel. Few people not named Howard Hughes ever know that luxury. But I think this hotel ties into my love of stories about groups of people trapped in large haunted houses. Which reminds me, of the three boxes of my old books my grandmother sent me before she died, I found my copy of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski that Caitlin gave me. Maybe I should read it again.

Currently I'm rereading Interview with the Vampire, though. The old paperback I bought in high school, the first copy of the book I ever read, was also in one of those boxes. It's funny, I bought a nicer hardback copy a few years ago but I think I ended up selling it. I find myself marvelling at what things manage to stick around in my life.

I started reading Interview with the Vampire again after my grandmother died because I think it's one of the great books about death. Unlike the rest of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, something about Interview really captures a consciousness of death. A few days ago, I was watching Carl Dreyer's Vampyr on The Criterion Channel and it was only then it struck me how, between that, Angel, and Interview with the Vampire, I seem to be circling a lot of vampire fiction lately. I really don't know why. I sought out Vampyr because I wanted something soothing.

I talked to one of the students in art club a couple weeks ago about a manga she's reading called Vampire and Rose, a series about which I can find little information on the internet--a google search turns up a couple different series with a similar title but only a few images of the one my student was reading. I wonder if it's any good.

Twitter Sonnet #1465

The ladles wait for soup surpassing pea.
American, the ties were dollars less.
The train derailed to catch some time for tea.
Barbarian, the hordes would fain profess.
The missing tracks reduced the disk to grammes.
The loyal horse advanced on flame and frost.
An icy sabre cut the winter dams.
A heavy tender spread at dire cost.
An extra thirty minutes bought the bread.
With harm we relish nothing less than time.
Replenish pencils, stubs adorn the head.
Extract the lemon, leaving only lime.
The extra rooms were magic gratis fruit.
A streaming service dripped a lotus root.

Faith in Four and One

Season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was juggling quite a few ongoing plots yet still had room for great standalone episodes like "Hush" and "Superstar". Season four had Buffy's new boyfriend, Riley, the U.S. military demon hunting unit called The Initiative, former demon Anya's development as a human and Xander's love interest, a neutered Spike's evolving position among the Scooby Gang, the end of Willow's relationship with Oz and the beginning of her relationship with Tara, and the return of Faith. Plus a few bits about Giles' midlife crisis. It all flows together remarkably well, everything feels organic. And the first season of Angel was running at the same time and the plots of both shows were seamlessly interwoven, particularly when it comes to Faith.

Actually, I felt the conclusion of Faith's story, which season four Buffy and season one Angel essentially present, would have been better dragged out a bit longer. Her character was by far the most interesting thing about season three but when she wakes up from her coma more than halfway through season four there are a lot more irons in the fire. But "Who Are You?", written and directed by Joss Whedon, turns out to be one of the all time great body-swapping episodes for how perfectly it advanced Faith's story. It forces Faith to realise that if she could hit the reset button on all her bad deeds, and be seen as a good Slayer again, she'd actually like her life a whole lot better. Eliza Dushku shows she's better at playing Buffy than Sarah Michelle Gellar is at playing Faith but Gellar still manages to show some subtlety as she digests the fact that someone like Riley (Marc Blucas) is capable of having true affection for someone else, something Faith had lost, well, faith in.

Except she'd seemed to have a genuine, mutually affectionate relationship with the deceased mayor. That's a story that could have been fleshed out further, and maybe it was in the comics. It would be interesting to see her, after her reformation, face the one loving relationship she had during the period when she felt the mission of the Scooby Gang was a lie predicated on what she considered to be the false idea that the lives of strangers were worth saving. Her point of view on this isn't reversed until she goes to rescue the hostages in "What Are You?" It's so credible. I've known people who compulsively purge things and people out of their lives and I wonder sometimes if something could make them see that they tend to throw a few babies out with the bathwater. It might also be a good story for people to-day who are routinely taught by an electronic world that they don't need a long attention span. So often people don't understand their own hearts.

Faith's story really ends in the season one episode of Angel called "Sanctuary" when Angel (David Boreanaz) decides to take her in to rehabilitate her. But the episode becomes much more about the relationship between Angel and Buffy as they pull different aspects of their own experience to argue about why Faith is or isn't worth saving. We get some good stuff about Faith struggling with the weight of her crimes, the seeming impossibility of atoning for what she's done. It's a story that could have been drawn out much longer.

In the middle of all the Faith drama, Buffy also gives us "New Moon Rising", a tour de force episode written by Marti Noxon. Oz (Seth Green) returns to town, apparently having cured his lycanthropy, and his arrival simultaneously makes Riley confront his and the Initiative's bigotry regarding demons and also makes Willow (Alyson Hannigan) realise the nature of her affection for Tara (Amber Benson).

My friend Brian thinks Willow was in fact bisexual and this episode works much better if you assume she is. We as an audience at this point genuinely like both Oz and Tara and Willow in a relationship with either one is an appealing prospect. Sometimes I find Willow/Tara a little too gooey, there's something a little too sweet about all their stuttering and chagrin. I really don't like how the recaps constantly repeat Tara's "I am, you know--yours" line. But Amber Benson's vulnerability in this episode is great as she politely extricates herself from the Scooby meeting when Oz shows up. You can see she clearly thinks she's succeeded in being discreet when in reality it's practically like she's told everyone, "I can't be here if Willow is into someone else."

It kind of makes most of the other characters' slowness to perceive the Willow/Tara relationship a bit implausible, particularly Buffy's. But on the whole, I find the plotline more interesting than I did the last time I watched through the show.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are available on Amazon Prime.

Angel and the Alien Refugee Women

I'm still watching Buffy and Angel but haven't felt like blogging about them. I feel like my entries so far are mostly repeating things I said last time I watched through the shows ten years ago. But last night I watched "She", a first season episode of Angel guest starring Bai Ling, and I don't think I'd ever appreciated this episode so much before. Mainly I think it's that I never understood what Bai Ling was saying before, now I find her perfectly intelligible. I think living in Japan and teaching English has sharpened my ear.

And Bai Ling is so good in this episode. She's really sexy and she delivers a truly good performance despite the fact that I suspect she learned her lines phonetically. I particularly like the scene where she's explaining her past to Angel (David Boreanaz) and there's a questioning tone in her voice as she gives him the name of her family.

The episode's plot reminds me of Mad Max: Fury Road quite a bit. Bai Ling is a skilled fighter leading a group of women away from a patriarchal culture that would enslave them. Jheira, Bai Ling's character, definitely reminds me of Furiosa.

Of course, Fury Road didn't have a female circumcision allegory, though the chastity belts functioned in somewhat the same way. I'm not a big fan of allegory but watching Bai Ling breathily explain to Angel that she basically has a big clitoris on the back of her neck that glows when she's aroused is pretty hot.

She seems like a character who was destined to return to the show but she never did. I wonder why. It's kind of a shame this is the only thing I've seen with Bai Ling in which she has a substantial role. I remember hearing her on Howard Stern years ago, she seems to be a little kooky but a lot of fun. Looking at her filmography, I don't see any movies or shows I especially long to see. Maybe Dumplings.

Twitter Sonnet #1452

The busy yak declined the evening meal.
A troubled space permits a shaky car.
The master name controls the platter deal.
To eat a million tongues replace the star.
Distinctive beards reveal the row of men.
As whiskey travelled east it found a throat.
A signal sent was like a ghostly fin.
The net contracts across the gentle boat.
Appearance blankets scores of rowing tars.
In ev'ry boat there hid a train of thought.
Awareness follows loss of normal stars.
The velvet surface shields a fav'rite spot.
Returning ribbons count the days to last.
The watchful soul ascends the fateful mast.

Sensitive Demons

For being created by a man famous for his liberalism, the stories on Angel and Buffy could have some episodes with pretty conservative ideas at their core. A pair of season one Angel episodes show this well--"Sense & Sensitivity" and "The Bachelor Party". The former is an episode that amusingly pokes fun at workplace sensitivity training (an idea that's certainly become more conservative) and the latter questions the idea of blindly accepting the cultural traditions of a foreign community. They're both good episodes but "The Bachelor Party", written by Tracey Stern, is an exceptionally well structured piece of television.

I always liked Doyle (Glenn Quinn) and was disappointed he only lasted nine episodes before being killed off. Joss Whedon took a lot of the blame for that but now we know it was due to Quinn's personal issues. In any case, he's intensely charming in this episode intended to explore his character.

If the idea going in was to have the drama centre around the possibility of Doyle finally getting with his crush, Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), the mission was thoroughly accomplished, believingly and entertainingly bringing the characters within a hairs breadth of a date only to have it snatched way just as believably and even more entertainingly.

Doyle barely survives protecting Cordelia from a vampire attack after she's had a disappointing date with a stock broker. After Doyle's heroics, Cordelia seriously starts to contemplate Doyle's potential as a boyfriend and is on the point of asking him out . . . when in walks Doyle's wife (Kristin Dattilo).

She wants Doyle to sign divorce papers so she can marry Richard, played by Carlos Jacott, one of the few actors to appear on Buffy, Angel, and Firefly ("Anne", "The Bachelor Party", and "Serenity"), always playing different characters but always playing a guy who starts out seeming friendly and then turns out to be a villain. In this case it turns out his family are demons whose culture demands Richard devour the brains of his fiancee's previous husband.

The humour is so wonderfully deadpan at the bachelor party itself. When Angel (David Boreanaz) directly condemns the practice, one of the demons calls him racist without a trace of irony in his line delivery. All of the actors play it absolutely straight which of course makes it so much funnier.

Doyle thought that his wife had left him because he was a demon until he finds out she was getting ready to marry another demon. This also works as a nice bit of introspection for his character.

Angel is available on Amazon Prime and on Disney+ in many countries.

Ghostly Roommates

Cordelia changes apartments in an entertaining episode of Angel written by Jane Espenson, "Rm w/a Vu". The episode ends with the introduction of her phantom roommate, Dennis, whose presence is sadly lacking after season one.

One of the best things about this episode is that Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) is fully Buffy era, spoiled brat Cordelia in it. After being chased out of her apartment by cockroaches and brown water, she beats on Angel's (David Boreanaz) door until he comes out of the shower to let her in.

You wait for Cordelia to acknowledge dragging Angel out of the shower as she piles her belongings in his arms, spewing complaints, and presuming her right to stay with him. You wait, but it never comes, she even ends the scene by demanding use of the shower. That's the Cordy I know and love.

Meanwhile, Doyle (Glenn Quinn) is dodging demonic loan sharks, a subplot that merges with the ghost plot in an amusing way in the climax. He also finds the haunted apartment for Cordelia after she tries apartment hunting herself.

There is one throwaway line where Angel asks how she can afford this place but everyone hustles past it. Just like how Buffy can afford a sprawling two storey house working in fast food, the economic logistics never add up on Angel. Which is partly why I can enjoy the fantasy of Angel having a hotel entirely to himself later on--I love that damned hotel. If the show had aired to-day, when L.A.'s homeless crisis is even more pronounced, it would have seemed too crass for a "Helper of the Helpless" to hoard a bunch of perfectly good living spaces. So it's best not to think too deeply about money in the Buffyverse.

Angel is available on Amazon Prime and, in many countries, on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1448

Aggressive humans shoot banana guns.
The arching brow betrays the skinny dream.
A burger waits between concealing buns.
The waiter fled and lost a burning team.
The error waits with flowers wreathed around.
A team of four defines a stack of pies.
A shelf of books could not describe a sound.
The tracks would curl in heat for lousy ties.
The hollow wall contains a bullet shell.
Tomatoes grew despite the rain of leaves.
In green and red we paint the rusted bell.
The haunter's sword is dull yet swiftly cleaves.
The meals arrived in flats exceeding small.
A deal contrived decides a building's tall.