This weekend (hell, this afternoon,) I finally finished a second season of Angel DVDs in the strike-themed lapse of new television shows. This time, it's Angel's third season, the last season I saw nothing about when it was still on the air. Previously, I never got hooked on it, but I watched the second half of Season 4 so I could connect its plot to the series finale of Buffy. And of course I watched all of Season 5; Buffy was gone by then, and that was the only way to get a Joss Whedon fix.
But that means that once again I knew the major plot points, but none of the reasons how or the nature of the characters involved. This also feels like the first season of Angel where the year long plot arc went according to the creator's plan. An early actor departure derailed season 1, and the entire arc of season 2 short-circuited where guess actors were unable to play in the final episodes, bringing in some "alternate dimension" goofiness.
This time, the story revolved from episode one about the birth, growth, and adulthood of Angel's child, impossibly a human, and about another arch-nemesis from his past. The arch-nemesis is Holtz, a vampire hunter from Angel's evil days, brought back into modern times. This is a very unusual concept, especially in the Buffy universe. Instead of a season-long Big Bad villain, they brought back a Big Good; a hero suddenly faced with the fact that his greatest enemy is another good guy. So instead of inducing new personalities, goals, and at least some moments to offer sympathy for an evil out to conquer the world/universe/etc., we see the good guy sink into his own flaws, deceit, and justifications.
Meanwhile, we see Angel's own transformations. If the first season was about turning a brooding anti-hero into someone forced into dealing with friends and people again, and the second was seeing him at his lowest and struggle to return to the position of hero, this season was about seeing him deal with a complication almost all humans must endure. It's the opposite of last season, as he slowly reaches his emotional peak, and then it drops him down again. Angel first has to deal with his returning, pregnant, semi-evil ex-girlfriend, and then a needy and healthy human baby. This creates all the problems of single fatherhood, coupled with the less typical handicaps of his vampire nature and the violent enemies he accrued, but it also shows the joys being a father, finally showing a form of love from Angel outside of the romantic or semi-platonic.
But babies are boring, so of course the plot fixed that soon enough. After his child is abducted to a hell dimension, Angel's darkness returns and becomes personal. That was temporary, but soon the child, Angel, came back as a teenager. Now we see the path of fatherhood at another stage, and again Angel reaches his peaks and valleys, ending in one hell of a valley. His nemesis, despite dying, finally got his revenge through Angel's own son, leaving Angel in an uncertain fate at the end of the season.
This season also had one more element to it: the long game. I can't speak much until I finally finish the next season, but I will say that there are hints of a much larger plot, beyond even one season. Well, it's possible that the major plot of next season is just being ad-libbed from hereon and they just tossed in some plot points from first season, but regardless there were other advanced plots beyond Angel's. The first is that of long-term secondary heroine Cordellia, who went from a human with occasional prophetic visions to a half-demon with the same visions to an ascended higher being, off to a fate as uncertain as Angel's. And Wesley, the last major character left from season 1, was torn between loyalty to his allies and fear that Angel would one day endanger his child and the attacks by Holtz would hurt his friends. He elected to betray Angel by abducting his child, on the hopeful condition that this would save the child's life and keep Holtz at bay. Instead, the child was sent to a hell dimension, Holtz attacked anyway, Wesley was almost killed, and Angel and the rest of the regulars hate him for his traitorous actions. This brings Wesley even further down the darker but more pragmatic path.
These arcs were handled competently, but others were less successful. Fred, a minor character introduced last season, became a regular this season, but she hadn't yet developed much of a personality. She's cute, spunky, smart, awkward with a tendency to ramble or obsess about science, and both Wesley and Gunn, another Angel regular, had the hots for her. But she didn't really develop as a person beyond this point, nor did she do much to become competent with the normal series violence. And many single-plot episodes felt like they needed at least one revision. An early episode where Gunn's old friends revealed a darker side was one example, as was a very strange episode about a demon who somehow owned Gunn's soul. (Gunn had a lot of weird development arcs, actually.) Often, they were resolved too quickly, aiming for a clever subversion of a normal trope but without actually explaining how that subversion makes sense within the universe of the series.
So the entire season got, say, a B+ or A-. I liked it better than last season, due to its much better story arc and moral complexity, but it still never reached the archetypal appeal of Buffy. Maybe that's unsurprising; after all, I have been a high-schooler and an awkward oddball trying to live a normal life, but I never was a centuries old superhuman or a fallen being struggle for redemption. Nor was I a resident of a large city, for that matter. But while I never was a father, either, I at least understand the theme of family it means. Who knows if that will become a part of my life as well?
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