Reviews: The Best Vampires are Socially Awkward Vampires

Though the writer's strike has deprived me of my favorite shows, or at least polished versions of them, it has had an upside. With it going on, my time to watch DVDs of shows I missed before increased, and anticipating this, I made sure to accumulate enough television to last me for months at and around Christmas. I'm like a squirrel of pop culture entertainment, storing little laser-etched discs for my long hibernation instead of nuts.

The main show I've been watching is Angel, starting with season 2, thus continuing my lovely and totally non-linear exploration of Joss Whedon's work. We'll get to Mr. Whedon in detail in a later inspiration post, but I found it strange how I watched his work. I only watched Buffy sporadically at first, watching maybe two or three episodes a season while slowly learning about the actual fate of the characters. So I see one good episode, and in the meantime I learn that this character is dead, and that one is now gay, and so on. This continued until I finally watched it regularly in order around season 6, which is terrible timing, I know.

Angel was no different. I started watching consistently late season 4, well aware of the general fate of earlier characters up to that point. It strange that, despite this odd route through his work, Joss Whedon remains one of my favorite writers. Nonetheless, it makes for an interesting experience when I watched the season 2 episodes for the first time, well aware of the fates of the characters. And, since this WAS a Joss Whedon show, knowing that they were all doomed.

First of all, let me admit something right now; I'm much more of a Buffy fan than an Angel fan. I could relate more to the characters, since I never was a centuries old vampire doomed to live a life of repentance or a resident of L.A., but I have been socially awkward in high school. I also liked the seasonal themes, with their usual big bad villains thwarted upon season's end, more than the eternal adversary of Wolfram and Hart. I guess Buffy just had a more consistent theme for me.

Nonetheless, there is a lot to like about Angel. My favorite elements are when they take the usual "badass" elements of the heroes and subvert them. Angel himself is a great example of this. He's physically extremely competent and oozes style, but his years of isolation and brooding make him react as expected when forced to engage in real, human interaction. It makes him stuttering and awkward, which never fails to be funny. The same is true whenever his image is called into question in any way; he tries to make a joke, he gets ignored, or someone just laughs off his self-imposed identity as a tragic figure. Early on, the character Wesley has a similar experience. The difference is that Wesley imagines himself as a similar tragic badass, but he lacks even the capacity to perform that well. So the two characters are reflections of each other; one is only confident in the image he maintains of himself, and the other is least successful and confident when he tries to force himself into the same image.

But this is still season 1 material. Season 2 sees the identities of both characters crumble, as one's image falls apart due to the return of a lost love and the other has the role of leader thrust upon him, ironically making him more into the tragic hero just as he tries to escape his earlier identity. A similar experience comes to the third male lead, who is forced to reassess his own role as a champion for the least fortunate as his work with the group makes him distant to old friends, and the final main character watches her own identity as a bubbly socialite crumble, her new duty taking a toll on her time and her mentality.

It's a lot to work with, and unfortunately this season doesn't always succeed with it. For one thing, it's forced to endure multiple cast changes and other obstacles to the story as written, and as a result we see major characters drift into the background and new plots get inserted with little connection to the last. The four part season finale was particularly jarring; it transported the entire cast to a new dimension entirely, and while it was often amusing, it didn't really conclude the themes of the season. So in many ways it was about the journey more than the meaning. Between the season's beginning and ending, Angel went from the leader of the team to a subordinate after venturing into dark territory one time too many, setting the stage for things to come more than actually resolving things.

There were positive changes as well, though, the most important being the introduction of a fifth main character, the demon bartender Lorne. For most of the season, he serves as little but a humorous source of exposition and thematic underpinnings. His ability to read the souls of others (but only when they're singing, leading to a running gag of watching people who really shouldn't sing do exactly that,) gave plots momentum and characters motivations, but in the end, the expansion of his character was arguably the only positive to come out of the finale.

So what can I learn from this sort of season? For starters, one of the greatest curses of most game designers is that they almost never have control over their own projects. The lead designer, publishers, and test groups might have priority in determining the game's story and identity, and it's up to the designer to take these changes in stride and keep the story coherent and the themes recognizable. Television is no different; if a major character's actor has to leave the show, it is up to the writers to explain why and alter the story to fit this. It also introduces a dichotomy you rarely see in video games; the heroic character and the personality that doesn't quite match up. Usually, a character that is a badass in gameplay is a badass in all aspects of life, but it doesn't have to be this way. Lara Croft could reveal a dorky side not seen when raiding tombs, or Mario could admit to some hidden angst, though actually his brother Luigi has lately become a perfect example of this. It won't change gameplay much, but it makes the character more three dimensional and identifiable; always a welcome thing in the sea of uninspired protagonists we must sometimes endure in this industry.