Monday, December 05, 2022

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.

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