Angel Season 3 - a review
Aug. 3rd, 2002 02:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thebratqueenSo I belatedly remember that I haven't done my season 3 wrap-up review of Angel yet.
I was recently asked to list some of the worst Angel episodes ever. I pulled up my list of all the episode titles from season 1 onward and wrote down the ones that, to me, were so god-awful they never should have left the gate.
I was surprised, when I was done, to see that season 3 had the most names. If you'd asked me, without counting, to guess which season it would be I would have probably said season 1, or even 2 since I tend to give season 1 a lot of leeway for all the production difficulties. 3 would not have leapt to mind.
I thought maybe this was because the episodes were fresher in my mind and therefore more painful but then I thought about it more and I realized what it was:
Contrast.
Let's discuss.
Season 3 of Angel was, flaws aside, a good season. Not a great season, but a good one. It's certainly a season which shows what this show wants to be. Season 2 hinted at it, season 3 became it.
Angel is an epic show. I believe it was Joss who said that Buffy was a soap opera and Angel was an opera. It deals in large, mythic arcs.
Season 2 tried to do this and in many ways succeeded with the beige Angel arc. It failed, however, due to production problems, forced non-crossovers with Buffy (like the Pylea arc) and the fact that in many ways they just hadn't hit their stride yet. Pound for pound I still love season 2 the best, but it's not the best example of what this show can do.
Season 3, however, is. The reason why is that season 3, more than the other two, was one entire story.
Think about it - how many episodes this season did not directly relate to the story as a whole? (By "directly relate" I mean the main plotline either furthered the overall story arc or set up elements that were necessary to the story later). Surprisingly very few:
Carpe Noctem: Nothing about the body switch in and of itself influenced later events
Provider: Of dubious need since the cash flow situation could have been taken care of with dialogue and "Dad" already covered Angel's devotion to his son
Waiting in the Wings: The main story was Cordy and Angel being possessed. Nothing about that story furthered the overall story arc. The Wes/Gunn/Fred triangle was the B story which could have happened in any episode.
Double or Nothing: The main story is Gunn's devotion to Fred. We already knew this. Angel moving past his grief was the B story and again could have been handled in any episode.
So we have four episodes which could have been totally forgotten without ever hurting the larger story arc. That leaves us with a story that took 18 episodes to tell. That's a very remarkable thing for American television.
It's also a wonderful thing in that it showed a confidence in us as viewers to follow this story. There's only so much "previously"s can do for us. For example, it's up to us to figure out the timeline and realize that the events of Offspring/Quickening/Lullaby happen one right on top of another. Ditto Waiting In the Wings/Couplet/Loyalty/Sleep Tight. The latter of which is key since it's up to us to realize that these events take place within days of each other and that when Wes finally acts in Sleep Tight it's partially because he was influenced by easily a week of very little sleep. We're not hit over the head with this. The facts are there and it's up to us to remember them.
This harkens back to the strengths of season 2, in which the beige Angel arc was also told in a similar manner, and the horror of "let them eat lawyer" only hits you in full if you remember what happened in Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been? It's also wonderful to realize that Are You Now… was hide in plain sight foreshadowing that told us all we needed to know about the season in one episode. I can't help but be a little amused by the people who posted on forums after Are You Now… whining about how boring it was and what was the point of it all - oh there was a point, and much like Buffy took a chance by having a depressed protagonist, Angel took a chance by putting out a story that left some viewers scratching their heads in the hopes that the audience would trust them, stick with it, and reap the huge rewards.
In a way it goes back to Joss's comment that he would never change the title of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" because he wasn't going to spoon feed things to the crowd. You had to get over your preconceived notions and come on in or you'd miss out entirely. Same thing with the storylines on Angel. Sit down, pay attention, watch how everything gets set up and reap huge rewards.
The huge reward for this season was, hands down, the Wesley storyline. But we'll get to that in a sec.
I want to take a moment to talk about another strength of the series which is the lack of fear that it has in changing things. Buffy, for all that it is a strong show, doesn't like change. Yes, the characters develop. Yes, there are plot twists. But the basic dynamic of the show remains the same. The Scooby Gang has always kept its core - Cordy was replaced by Anya, Angel was replaced by Spike. The only real core member of the Scoobies that was not replaced was Giles, and this was prompted by outside events in ASH's life, not because of anything germane to the plot. (Yes, Giles's leaving was explained in the plot, but that was because ASH was leaving.)
Contrast that with Angel. Season 1 ended with the office blowing up. Season 2 had Angel firing his team. Angel - the leader - then became Angel the outsider. The AI team had to reorganize themselves and Wesley emerged as the leader. More importantly Wesley stayed the leader for subsequent episodes and more importantly still he remained in charge even after Angel came back. This is a major dynamic change within the group, and dynamic changes of this nature are again unheard of on most American TV shows.
TV shows like to stick with formulas that work. Alexis was doing wonderfully playing the bumbling sidekick (admittedly to the pain of many, but that was the formula they had). Most shows would have kept Alexis as that bumbling sidekick for years (see also: Xander). To take the sidekick and make him the leader of the group - and then take the hero of the show and make him the follower - that's a major change.
Season 3 showed them changing it again. Wes went from the leader to the outsider. Angel stepped in as a vague kind of leader for the sake of making decisions but then he was snatched away by Connor. I won't delve into any spoilers so it remains to be seen how the dynamics of Angel Investigations evolve during season 4 but the point is within season 3 they changed.
We also had other major dynamic changes - Caritas blew up. Lorne moved in. Angel had a baby. Fred became a part of the team. Things are far more fluid on Angel than the are on Buffy. Now granted, maybe when/if Angel hits season 5, 6, etc I'll be right here bitching about how the new character of John is merely the new Wesley and Rachel the new Cordy, but for right now nothing can be taken for granted and, according to interviews in the Angel Casebooks, that's part of the point of the show. You've got to admire them for that.
Part of the fluidity goes right back to Angel and Wesley. The big one is Angel. He's supposed to be the hero of this show. He's often the villain. And, amazingly enough, this show made him the villain while keeping his soul. Season 2 of Buffy gives us that cushion of comfort in knowing that the bad part of Angel is named Angelus and he's not the same guy. Angel the series has no qualms about calling that bullshit and pointing out to us that the evil in Angel doesn't go anywhere when the soul's there, he just has a choice whether or not to do it.
And, as Wesley pointed out in That Old Gang of Mine, when you're doing evil with a soul it's actually a lot worse.
Season 1 hinted at this. Season 2 confirmed it with the beige Angel arc. Season 3 continued this theme. Unfortunately though, this is when some of the weaknesses of the season began to come into play.
Season 2 Angel was strong not because it didn't have weak or useless episodes - it did. It was strong because it backed the strong writers. If Mere Smith wrote a stupid episode that had no point (which was invariably), Tim or David G or someone else would swoop in with the cleanup and with an episode that recalibrated your system. You knew to trust the episodes written by writers like Tim because those were the episodes that actually had long term ramifications. Mere's episodes could be - and always should be - quickly forgotten.
Season 3, however, wasn't like that. Oh it did happen occasionally - some of Mere's little brain farts were corrected in later episodes (e.g. the Host's bad advice in Fredless) - but not all the time. Case in point, the fact that nobody seemed to care that Angel tried to kill Wesley. More to the point, David Greenwalt suddenly became one of those bad writers.
Tim Minear and brilliant newcomer Jeff Bell stood out as the only two writers who seemed to remember the point of the series as it was originally stated. Moreover they were the only two writers who really committed to the idea of "no easy answers". However, sadly, their hands were tied by being trapped in a season where for some reason stupidity was king. If you watch carefully (and get your hands on the shooting scripts) you can see the boys doing their damnedest to fix things. Tim spends many episodes subtly railing against the uselessness of Fred (or trying to push her back into the insanity that was far too quickly fixed). Jeff tries to write episodes in which the characters actually remember what vampires are and, moreover, that vampires aren't the nicest of creatures. But how could they succeed in a world where the executive producer of the show - and the guy who gave Angel any life (such as it was) in the first place - is the one who has apparently forgotten everything that the show was about? Season 3 then became the sad mirror image of season 2 - the work of the good writers was erased by the bad.
They deserve credit for what they did, though. Tim worked the Darla story angle to its highest angst and drama. Jeff took the ramifications of Wesley's actions and brought them to their darkest conclusions. Jeff also, for which we should all be eternally grateful, brought a huge paradigm shift into the humor of the series and it is with season 3 that we can joyfully bid adieu to the non-comedic comedy of pratfalls and so-called "misdirections" in place of the day to day humor that could be found in things like Sahjhan's dialogue ("But clearly masculine, right?") which is far more appropriate for a noir series like Angel and, more importantly, actually funny.
But what could the boys do up against the horror that was David Greenwalt's concept for the season? And here, of course, we start to talk about Angel and Cordelia.
I've talked elsewhere about how the concept of Angel and Cordelia could have been fixed as a storyline. Let's now talk about how it could have been fixed as a story.
Marti Noxon is very fond of giving interviews lambasting the evil that is Spike and then writing episodes which actually show him as a fairly decent boyfriend. This prompts me to want to write to her and ask if she's aware that as the executive producer of the show she can actually write whatever she wants and if she wants Spike to be a bad boyfriend she can write him as such and save herself a lot of headaches.
I want to write the same to David Greenwalt with regards to the Angel and Cordelia storyline. Particularly in light of Heartthrob, which gave David G such easy jumping off points to the relationship and took absolutely none of them. Angel showed Cordy no particular interest (above and beyond what he showed Wes and Gunn) when he returned from his 3 months away, he didn't buy her any special gifts (again Wes was the leader here) and while yes, James did make a lot of comments about Cordy being special to Angel, really the "villain threatens someone Angel cares about" storyline in no way differed from the multiple times that villains wanted to do this and picked Wesley as the victim.
While I'm writing to David G, I want to copy an interview I found on the web somewhere of one of the writers - possibly David G himself - saying that they write the show backwards and add in a note of my own saying We can tell. Cut it out.
Allow me to trot out my favorite and oft-quoted bit of writing advice. "Stories aren't about ideas, they're about people." (tm Marion Zimmer Bradley). The Angel and Cordelia storyline was an idea. There were no people involved. The way that this storyline avoided being about people is so spectacular it's almost amazing. Sickening, but amazing.
Let me say for the record I'm not against romance on the show. I write Angel/Wesley. Obviously I see a place in Angel's life for some nookie. Granted I rather liked Angel as the one series I knew of that didn't feel a need to make all the characters sleep together, but if they wanted to explore the story potential of Angel being in love with someone who wasn't Buffy I was there for them. As I say, I get the concept and the interest therein. Unfortunately the writers apparently did not.
The Angel and Cordelia storyline is absolutely astounding in that it is a storyline that in no way actually involved Angel and Cordelia. Angel made some cameos I'll grant you, but beyond that the two characters most involved in this story never made an appearance.
I'm not talking about characterization - the fact that Queen C was character raped into Saint Corduffy the Light Bearer is a separate issue. I'm talking about the fact that whenever the concept of Angel and Cordy having feelings for each other came up the actual characters weren't there. As in the actors playing them never said the lines.
Think about it. Go back. Look at all the episodes that dealt with the Angel and Cordy relationship. Who says the two of them are in love? Other people. This is an entire relationship established via tertiary characters. If we assume Heartthrob to be foreshadowing then James gets the honor of kicking us off. He tells us Cordy is important to Angel. Fred picks up the ball in Offspring by rabbiting on about kye-rumption. Angel gets a cameo appearance in that same episode when he looks at Cordy strangely and stammers about being a "man… pire" but he quickly vanishes again in lieu of the Darla plotline.
Fast forward to Waiting In The Wings when ghosts tell us the two have feelings for each other. Lorne also cashes a check and fulfills his role as a plot device by bringing up kye-rumption again. Angel again gets some cameos when Groo comes back and he (Angel) again gets to do the "looking wistfully at Cordy" thing but once again that's pretty much the extent of it (beyond the stammering). Groo himself also lends a helpful hand by trying to give Cordy a few memos about which demon she's actually got feelings for.
The culmination of this is Tomorrow, in which a vision of Cordy informs Cordy that she loves Angel. Not herself, but a representation of herself. This is staggering. I'm actually sitting here somewhat impressed at how they managed to do this. They had an entire plotline about two characters which in no way involved them. And somehow did not see this as a bad thing. To call the Angel and Cordy romance a naked emperor is to likewise call your attention to the fact that things fall when you drop them. It is phenomenal how they managed to fuck this up.
But, in light of how it was written, not totally surprising. They wrote it backwards. You can't do that. When you do that you've stopped making your story about people, you've made it about an idea. The Angel and Cordy storyline was an idea. Angel and Cordy then had to be manipulated into place for this idea. Manipulating your characters into places they don't want to go is bad writing and in season 3 it shows.
Contrast this with Wesley and Lilah. To all reports everyone was surprised at how much chemistry the two characters had together. Rumors abound about how this will be handled for season 4 and again I will avoid even the hint of spoilers, but we don't have to go as far as season 4 to see the difference. What storyline did the audience actually respond to? The only people who liked the Angel and Cordy storyline were the diehard Angel/Cordy shippers who were sold on that idea already. Everybody liked the Wesley storyline. Even those who didn't, per se, like Wes liked how the story turned out. Wesley's relationship with Lilah was organic. Angel's relationship with Cordy was forced.
This brings us to the strongest story, IMO, of the season. And again I've got to draw comparisons with Buffy. "Buffy and Spike" and "Willow and magic addiction" was shoved down our throats as parallel. If we didn't get it Marti Noxon was more than happy to come to our house personally and smack us with the anvil. However, in no way were they actually parallel on the screen. They were parallel because we were told so. Like Angel and Cordy, this is not good writing.
Wesley, on the other hand, lucked out.
Someone created a LJ icon with a picture of Wes and the caption "Angel 2.0". They are very correct. Wesley is paralleling Angel in a big, yet subtle, way. Couplet draws the majority of the lines for us but beyond that it's again left to us to see. As with Are You Now… we either get it, or we don't.
The beauty of the "dark Wes" is not only in the way that it is again organic to Wes's character, but also because it provides the perfect accompaniment to Angel's story. Angel shows us that a vampire with a soul is not necessarily a good vampire. Wesley's storyline shows us that a human with a soul isn't without evil.
Yes, granted, none of Wes's actions with Connor were evil as such. He wasn't trying to kill the child or sell him into slavery, he was trying to save him. However his liaison with Lilah seems to hint that Wes is heading down a dark path, and it's wonderfully appropriate that Wes, as the new Angel, has teamed up with Lilah, the show's canonically evil version of Cordelia.
It's also wonderfully fitting how well Wesley has hung himself with his convictions. Canonically he was the character who most believed in Angel's soul. Even until the end he argued for it, and Angel's goodness. How appropriate, then, that not only would Wesley's soul not prevent him from falling into the darkness, but that he would be the one calmly reminded that "It's Angel" right before the-vampire-with-a-soul-who's-better-now tries to kill Wesley with a pillow. Wesley gave so much to fight by Angel's side - we've seen him turn his back on the Council and we've seen how his family doesn't seem overly thrilled about his new career. We can only imagine the kind of betrayal he feels when, just like in the fable, the snake turns around and bites him because it is a snake, and what else do you expect from it?
We can only hope that the depths of this are followed up in season 4, and not conveniently forgotten as Angel's attack on Wesley was by the rest of the Angel Investigations gang.
What can we say about the gang? The topic of Cordelia suggests itself, but it's also one that everyone would like to forget. Wherefore art thou, Cordelia? And I do mean that in the correct usage of "wherefore" as in "why are we calling this character Cordelia when she so obviously is not?"
Offspring was the greatest attack on Cordy's character, and it was sadly written by David G who claims to like her. Jeff Bell and Tim tried to save her but with this being the bizzarro season where the bad overcame the good, they couldn't do much.
It's been reported that Charisma didn't like the writing for her character this season and if that's true I can't blame her. How can you enjoy showing up for work when the formerly strong character (strong in personality, that is) that you played is completely sublimated for storylines about the main character gibbering at you? True they took a leap forward by having Cordelia finally learn how to fight (a fact which, notably, started in Billy which was written by - you guessed it - Jeff and Tim) but they took leaps back when Cordy was character raped into someone who was sympathetic to Darla of all people, and then alternatively either an idiot or a saint or both. Post-Billy the only story of any note with Cordy was Birthday which, for all that it was horribly written, at least cast Cordelia in an interesting light (no pun intended). Beyond that her role was to stand there, look pretty and occasionally glow in the dark. Even Cordelia's role in Angel Investigations was co-opted by Fred who miraculously was able to take over computer duties in spite of being in Pylea for five years. Who wouldn't hate it to find out that their character's big role for the day was to bring Fred coffee (as actually happened onscreen)?
To talk about Fred is to talk about nothing. Her character was given no personality. There was hope for her when season 3 started and she was still shy and insane, but then Fredless miraculously healed her and she turned into nothing but a plot device. Deus ex Fred took care of everything that the story needed in order to make it into the final credits and who gave a damn if that tossed the poor girl all over the place and provided her with no actual characterization?
Much like the Angel and Cordy storyline they tried to trick us into believing it by having tertiary characters insist on how wonderful she was, but again much like Angel and Cordy the lengths to which they went bordered on the absurd. Gunn thought it was great that Fred shook Dennis's head? Lorne, a man who makes his career by telling the future, liked Fred's rampant win-one-for-the-Gipperism in a speech entitled "screw destiny"? Holtz of all people admires Fred's ability to fight? (More absurdly, he claims her willingness to die is why she survived a vampire attack when in fact she'd have been just as alive if she'd kept running and gone home - something Holtz of all people would have noticed.)
Fred also suffered for the fact that nobody could write her and fewer still could direct her. Tim Minear had some luck in a scene or two but everyone else failed. Just as Spike was written as more or less sympathetic depending on who turned in the script that day, Fred was written as more or less insane, more or less necessary to the group and, more importantly, more or less her age. A girl who by all rights should be older than Cordelia was written and directed as anywhere between 8 and 12, a fact which made it hard to understand why not one but two men were salivating over her - a fact even harder to understand when you remember that by all guesstimates Wes is nearly a decade older than she is.
Alexis did his best to sell his third of the love triangle but, as with Charisma and Cordy, you can only do so much with what you're given. Wes found time to develop a crush on a girl who was babblingly insane and locked in her room? That's either a sign of Wes's ability to see the hidden goodness in people or a sign that Wes is a lot creepier than we gave him credit for. It's also a sign of how, as with Angel and Cordy, the Wes/Fred concept was one written backwards. The writers wanted Wes feeling hurt because of a love triangle and, more immediately, emotionally kicked in the crotch by beating up the girl he had feelings for. It sort of, kind of worked in Billy, but it fell through after the fact. The dark Wes storyline did not depend on his feelings for Fred and should have been left alone. Tacking on Fred only confused the issue and quite frankly weakened it.
Gunn this season definitely gave us all a lesson in "be careful what you wish for". We wanted more Gunn. Well, we got him. We now need to sit down and write him an apology. Like Fred, Gunn's character was all over the place. The "true" Gunn showed up in episodes like That Old Gang of Mine and Forgiving, but beyond that he was a plot device. It's not the "opposites attract" nature of his relationship with Fred that's so troublesome. It's that it's never explained to the viewers what, exactly, Gunn sees in Fred. Yes, he does occasionally say that she's cool, but for the most part the only time he pays her compliments is when she's eating. We've had an entire season and the only thing we can say is that Gunn likes that Fred eats. So Gunn either secretly has a food fetish, or Gunn's character has been thrown out the window and replaced by the writers' apparent need to defend Amy Acker's weight.
All of this comes back to the biggest lesson of the season which is: SHOW DON'T TELL. If you want to have Fred be a big eater then show her eating. If you want Angel and Cordy to be in love then show them being in love with each other. This is television. It's a visual medium. Stop writing episodes as though they're for the benefit of the radio audience. We're smart enough to stick with you for the stuff you don't hit us over the head with - trust us on the rest.
Which brings me back to why I think this season, for me, had the most "bad" episodes. It wasn't that proportionately there were more, it was that pound for pound there was more of a contrast. The episodes that were good this season were really good. Billy, Quickening, Lullaby, Loyalty, Forgiving - amazingly good television. Things like Heartthrob, That Vision Thing, That Old Gang of Mine, Carpe Noctem, etc - very nice in staying the course. Better, in fact, than the shotty up and down quality of season 2, esp. considering how very few season 3 eps were filler.
But the episodes which were bad - Fredless, Offspring, Birthday, Provider, Waiting in the Wings, Double or Nothing, Tomorrow - were really bad, and bad in a way that was both easily fixable and totally nonsensical. They stood out in sharp contrast to the episodes that managed to keep the story going and show the characters that we came here to see.
I put the majority of the blame for the badness of season 3 right at the feet of David G. His episodes and story ideas sunk this season like a stone. The Angel/Cordy plotline, in particular, did fatal damage. The destruction of Cordy's character and her inability to have a plotline that did not involve Angel being in love with her shot this season in the leg. The other, stronger plotlines of Wesley and Connor did their best but couldn't go far with Angel/Cordy dragging them down.
David G is leaving and making no bones about the fact that he's doing so because Fox fucked him over. Given the fact that the writers of this show are known to do things just to piss off the network I can't help but wonder if David G deliberately hurt the show as a way to get revenge - or at least as a sign that he found it hard to care as much when he was working for a production company that obviously didn't like him (the kerfuffle over Buffy undoubtedly being his first clue that both Fox and the WB could give a shit about Mutant Enemy).
Either way I hope the fresh blood next year improves thing. David G called Angel the "little show that could" and I have to agree with that assessment. The show has such potential to be amazing television - even better than the show that spawned it - but every year something gets it down. It'd be nice if season 4 is the thing which helped Angel - no pun intended - get out of the water.
[Edited to add a link to the second part of the review which discusses the Wesley story arc in response to eternaltimtams comments]
I was recently asked to list some of the worst Angel episodes ever. I pulled up my list of all the episode titles from season 1 onward and wrote down the ones that, to me, were so god-awful they never should have left the gate.
I was surprised, when I was done, to see that season 3 had the most names. If you'd asked me, without counting, to guess which season it would be I would have probably said season 1, or even 2 since I tend to give season 1 a lot of leeway for all the production difficulties. 3 would not have leapt to mind.
I thought maybe this was because the episodes were fresher in my mind and therefore more painful but then I thought about it more and I realized what it was:
Contrast.
Let's discuss.
Season 3 of Angel was, flaws aside, a good season. Not a great season, but a good one. It's certainly a season which shows what this show wants to be. Season 2 hinted at it, season 3 became it.
Angel is an epic show. I believe it was Joss who said that Buffy was a soap opera and Angel was an opera. It deals in large, mythic arcs.
Season 2 tried to do this and in many ways succeeded with the beige Angel arc. It failed, however, due to production problems, forced non-crossovers with Buffy (like the Pylea arc) and the fact that in many ways they just hadn't hit their stride yet. Pound for pound I still love season 2 the best, but it's not the best example of what this show can do.
Season 3, however, is. The reason why is that season 3, more than the other two, was one entire story.
Think about it - how many episodes this season did not directly relate to the story as a whole? (By "directly relate" I mean the main plotline either furthered the overall story arc or set up elements that were necessary to the story later). Surprisingly very few:
Carpe Noctem: Nothing about the body switch in and of itself influenced later events
Provider: Of dubious need since the cash flow situation could have been taken care of with dialogue and "Dad" already covered Angel's devotion to his son
Waiting in the Wings: The main story was Cordy and Angel being possessed. Nothing about that story furthered the overall story arc. The Wes/Gunn/Fred triangle was the B story which could have happened in any episode.
Double or Nothing: The main story is Gunn's devotion to Fred. We already knew this. Angel moving past his grief was the B story and again could have been handled in any episode.
So we have four episodes which could have been totally forgotten without ever hurting the larger story arc. That leaves us with a story that took 18 episodes to tell. That's a very remarkable thing for American television.
It's also a wonderful thing in that it showed a confidence in us as viewers to follow this story. There's only so much "previously"s can do for us. For example, it's up to us to figure out the timeline and realize that the events of Offspring/Quickening/Lullaby happen one right on top of another. Ditto Waiting In the Wings/Couplet/Loyalty/Sleep Tight. The latter of which is key since it's up to us to realize that these events take place within days of each other and that when Wes finally acts in Sleep Tight it's partially because he was influenced by easily a week of very little sleep. We're not hit over the head with this. The facts are there and it's up to us to remember them.
This harkens back to the strengths of season 2, in which the beige Angel arc was also told in a similar manner, and the horror of "let them eat lawyer" only hits you in full if you remember what happened in Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been? It's also wonderful to realize that Are You Now… was hide in plain sight foreshadowing that told us all we needed to know about the season in one episode. I can't help but be a little amused by the people who posted on forums after Are You Now… whining about how boring it was and what was the point of it all - oh there was a point, and much like Buffy took a chance by having a depressed protagonist, Angel took a chance by putting out a story that left some viewers scratching their heads in the hopes that the audience would trust them, stick with it, and reap the huge rewards.
In a way it goes back to Joss's comment that he would never change the title of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" because he wasn't going to spoon feed things to the crowd. You had to get over your preconceived notions and come on in or you'd miss out entirely. Same thing with the storylines on Angel. Sit down, pay attention, watch how everything gets set up and reap huge rewards.
The huge reward for this season was, hands down, the Wesley storyline. But we'll get to that in a sec.
I want to take a moment to talk about another strength of the series which is the lack of fear that it has in changing things. Buffy, for all that it is a strong show, doesn't like change. Yes, the characters develop. Yes, there are plot twists. But the basic dynamic of the show remains the same. The Scooby Gang has always kept its core - Cordy was replaced by Anya, Angel was replaced by Spike. The only real core member of the Scoobies that was not replaced was Giles, and this was prompted by outside events in ASH's life, not because of anything germane to the plot. (Yes, Giles's leaving was explained in the plot, but that was because ASH was leaving.)
Contrast that with Angel. Season 1 ended with the office blowing up. Season 2 had Angel firing his team. Angel - the leader - then became Angel the outsider. The AI team had to reorganize themselves and Wesley emerged as the leader. More importantly Wesley stayed the leader for subsequent episodes and more importantly still he remained in charge even after Angel came back. This is a major dynamic change within the group, and dynamic changes of this nature are again unheard of on most American TV shows.
TV shows like to stick with formulas that work. Alexis was doing wonderfully playing the bumbling sidekick (admittedly to the pain of many, but that was the formula they had). Most shows would have kept Alexis as that bumbling sidekick for years (see also: Xander). To take the sidekick and make him the leader of the group - and then take the hero of the show and make him the follower - that's a major change.
Season 3 showed them changing it again. Wes went from the leader to the outsider. Angel stepped in as a vague kind of leader for the sake of making decisions but then he was snatched away by Connor. I won't delve into any spoilers so it remains to be seen how the dynamics of Angel Investigations evolve during season 4 but the point is within season 3 they changed.
We also had other major dynamic changes - Caritas blew up. Lorne moved in. Angel had a baby. Fred became a part of the team. Things are far more fluid on Angel than the are on Buffy. Now granted, maybe when/if Angel hits season 5, 6, etc I'll be right here bitching about how the new character of John is merely the new Wesley and Rachel the new Cordy, but for right now nothing can be taken for granted and, according to interviews in the Angel Casebooks, that's part of the point of the show. You've got to admire them for that.
Part of the fluidity goes right back to Angel and Wesley. The big one is Angel. He's supposed to be the hero of this show. He's often the villain. And, amazingly enough, this show made him the villain while keeping his soul. Season 2 of Buffy gives us that cushion of comfort in knowing that the bad part of Angel is named Angelus and he's not the same guy. Angel the series has no qualms about calling that bullshit and pointing out to us that the evil in Angel doesn't go anywhere when the soul's there, he just has a choice whether or not to do it.
And, as Wesley pointed out in That Old Gang of Mine, when you're doing evil with a soul it's actually a lot worse.
Season 1 hinted at this. Season 2 confirmed it with the beige Angel arc. Season 3 continued this theme. Unfortunately though, this is when some of the weaknesses of the season began to come into play.
Season 2 Angel was strong not because it didn't have weak or useless episodes - it did. It was strong because it backed the strong writers. If Mere Smith wrote a stupid episode that had no point (which was invariably), Tim or David G or someone else would swoop in with the cleanup and with an episode that recalibrated your system. You knew to trust the episodes written by writers like Tim because those were the episodes that actually had long term ramifications. Mere's episodes could be - and always should be - quickly forgotten.
Season 3, however, wasn't like that. Oh it did happen occasionally - some of Mere's little brain farts were corrected in later episodes (e.g. the Host's bad advice in Fredless) - but not all the time. Case in point, the fact that nobody seemed to care that Angel tried to kill Wesley. More to the point, David Greenwalt suddenly became one of those bad writers.
Tim Minear and brilliant newcomer Jeff Bell stood out as the only two writers who seemed to remember the point of the series as it was originally stated. Moreover they were the only two writers who really committed to the idea of "no easy answers". However, sadly, their hands were tied by being trapped in a season where for some reason stupidity was king. If you watch carefully (and get your hands on the shooting scripts) you can see the boys doing their damnedest to fix things. Tim spends many episodes subtly railing against the uselessness of Fred (or trying to push her back into the insanity that was far too quickly fixed). Jeff tries to write episodes in which the characters actually remember what vampires are and, moreover, that vampires aren't the nicest of creatures. But how could they succeed in a world where the executive producer of the show - and the guy who gave Angel any life (such as it was) in the first place - is the one who has apparently forgotten everything that the show was about? Season 3 then became the sad mirror image of season 2 - the work of the good writers was erased by the bad.
They deserve credit for what they did, though. Tim worked the Darla story angle to its highest angst and drama. Jeff took the ramifications of Wesley's actions and brought them to their darkest conclusions. Jeff also, for which we should all be eternally grateful, brought a huge paradigm shift into the humor of the series and it is with season 3 that we can joyfully bid adieu to the non-comedic comedy of pratfalls and so-called "misdirections" in place of the day to day humor that could be found in things like Sahjhan's dialogue ("But clearly masculine, right?") which is far more appropriate for a noir series like Angel and, more importantly, actually funny.
But what could the boys do up against the horror that was David Greenwalt's concept for the season? And here, of course, we start to talk about Angel and Cordelia.
I've talked elsewhere about how the concept of Angel and Cordelia could have been fixed as a storyline. Let's now talk about how it could have been fixed as a story.
Marti Noxon is very fond of giving interviews lambasting the evil that is Spike and then writing episodes which actually show him as a fairly decent boyfriend. This prompts me to want to write to her and ask if she's aware that as the executive producer of the show she can actually write whatever she wants and if she wants Spike to be a bad boyfriend she can write him as such and save herself a lot of headaches.
I want to write the same to David Greenwalt with regards to the Angel and Cordelia storyline. Particularly in light of Heartthrob, which gave David G such easy jumping off points to the relationship and took absolutely none of them. Angel showed Cordy no particular interest (above and beyond what he showed Wes and Gunn) when he returned from his 3 months away, he didn't buy her any special gifts (again Wes was the leader here) and while yes, James did make a lot of comments about Cordy being special to Angel, really the "villain threatens someone Angel cares about" storyline in no way differed from the multiple times that villains wanted to do this and picked Wesley as the victim.
While I'm writing to David G, I want to copy an interview I found on the web somewhere of one of the writers - possibly David G himself - saying that they write the show backwards and add in a note of my own saying We can tell. Cut it out.
Allow me to trot out my favorite and oft-quoted bit of writing advice. "Stories aren't about ideas, they're about people." (tm Marion Zimmer Bradley). The Angel and Cordelia storyline was an idea. There were no people involved. The way that this storyline avoided being about people is so spectacular it's almost amazing. Sickening, but amazing.
Let me say for the record I'm not against romance on the show. I write Angel/Wesley. Obviously I see a place in Angel's life for some nookie. Granted I rather liked Angel as the one series I knew of that didn't feel a need to make all the characters sleep together, but if they wanted to explore the story potential of Angel being in love with someone who wasn't Buffy I was there for them. As I say, I get the concept and the interest therein. Unfortunately the writers apparently did not.
The Angel and Cordelia storyline is absolutely astounding in that it is a storyline that in no way actually involved Angel and Cordelia. Angel made some cameos I'll grant you, but beyond that the two characters most involved in this story never made an appearance.
I'm not talking about characterization - the fact that Queen C was character raped into Saint Corduffy the Light Bearer is a separate issue. I'm talking about the fact that whenever the concept of Angel and Cordy having feelings for each other came up the actual characters weren't there. As in the actors playing them never said the lines.
Think about it. Go back. Look at all the episodes that dealt with the Angel and Cordy relationship. Who says the two of them are in love? Other people. This is an entire relationship established via tertiary characters. If we assume Heartthrob to be foreshadowing then James gets the honor of kicking us off. He tells us Cordy is important to Angel. Fred picks up the ball in Offspring by rabbiting on about kye-rumption. Angel gets a cameo appearance in that same episode when he looks at Cordy strangely and stammers about being a "man… pire" but he quickly vanishes again in lieu of the Darla plotline.
Fast forward to Waiting In The Wings when ghosts tell us the two have feelings for each other. Lorne also cashes a check and fulfills his role as a plot device by bringing up kye-rumption again. Angel again gets some cameos when Groo comes back and he (Angel) again gets to do the "looking wistfully at Cordy" thing but once again that's pretty much the extent of it (beyond the stammering). Groo himself also lends a helpful hand by trying to give Cordy a few memos about which demon she's actually got feelings for.
The culmination of this is Tomorrow, in which a vision of Cordy informs Cordy that she loves Angel. Not herself, but a representation of herself. This is staggering. I'm actually sitting here somewhat impressed at how they managed to do this. They had an entire plotline about two characters which in no way involved them. And somehow did not see this as a bad thing. To call the Angel and Cordy romance a naked emperor is to likewise call your attention to the fact that things fall when you drop them. It is phenomenal how they managed to fuck this up.
But, in light of how it was written, not totally surprising. They wrote it backwards. You can't do that. When you do that you've stopped making your story about people, you've made it about an idea. The Angel and Cordy storyline was an idea. Angel and Cordy then had to be manipulated into place for this idea. Manipulating your characters into places they don't want to go is bad writing and in season 3 it shows.
Contrast this with Wesley and Lilah. To all reports everyone was surprised at how much chemistry the two characters had together. Rumors abound about how this will be handled for season 4 and again I will avoid even the hint of spoilers, but we don't have to go as far as season 4 to see the difference. What storyline did the audience actually respond to? The only people who liked the Angel and Cordy storyline were the diehard Angel/Cordy shippers who were sold on that idea already. Everybody liked the Wesley storyline. Even those who didn't, per se, like Wes liked how the story turned out. Wesley's relationship with Lilah was organic. Angel's relationship with Cordy was forced.
This brings us to the strongest story, IMO, of the season. And again I've got to draw comparisons with Buffy. "Buffy and Spike" and "Willow and magic addiction" was shoved down our throats as parallel. If we didn't get it Marti Noxon was more than happy to come to our house personally and smack us with the anvil. However, in no way were they actually parallel on the screen. They were parallel because we were told so. Like Angel and Cordy, this is not good writing.
Wesley, on the other hand, lucked out.
Someone created a LJ icon with a picture of Wes and the caption "Angel 2.0". They are very correct. Wesley is paralleling Angel in a big, yet subtle, way. Couplet draws the majority of the lines for us but beyond that it's again left to us to see. As with Are You Now… we either get it, or we don't.
The beauty of the "dark Wes" is not only in the way that it is again organic to Wes's character, but also because it provides the perfect accompaniment to Angel's story. Angel shows us that a vampire with a soul is not necessarily a good vampire. Wesley's storyline shows us that a human with a soul isn't without evil.
Yes, granted, none of Wes's actions with Connor were evil as such. He wasn't trying to kill the child or sell him into slavery, he was trying to save him. However his liaison with Lilah seems to hint that Wes is heading down a dark path, and it's wonderfully appropriate that Wes, as the new Angel, has teamed up with Lilah, the show's canonically evil version of Cordelia.
It's also wonderfully fitting how well Wesley has hung himself with his convictions. Canonically he was the character who most believed in Angel's soul. Even until the end he argued for it, and Angel's goodness. How appropriate, then, that not only would Wesley's soul not prevent him from falling into the darkness, but that he would be the one calmly reminded that "It's Angel" right before the-vampire-with-a-soul-who's-better-now tries to kill Wesley with a pillow. Wesley gave so much to fight by Angel's side - we've seen him turn his back on the Council and we've seen how his family doesn't seem overly thrilled about his new career. We can only imagine the kind of betrayal he feels when, just like in the fable, the snake turns around and bites him because it is a snake, and what else do you expect from it?
We can only hope that the depths of this are followed up in season 4, and not conveniently forgotten as Angel's attack on Wesley was by the rest of the Angel Investigations gang.
What can we say about the gang? The topic of Cordelia suggests itself, but it's also one that everyone would like to forget. Wherefore art thou, Cordelia? And I do mean that in the correct usage of "wherefore" as in "why are we calling this character Cordelia when she so obviously is not?"
Offspring was the greatest attack on Cordy's character, and it was sadly written by David G who claims to like her. Jeff Bell and Tim tried to save her but with this being the bizzarro season where the bad overcame the good, they couldn't do much.
It's been reported that Charisma didn't like the writing for her character this season and if that's true I can't blame her. How can you enjoy showing up for work when the formerly strong character (strong in personality, that is) that you played is completely sublimated for storylines about the main character gibbering at you? True they took a leap forward by having Cordelia finally learn how to fight (a fact which, notably, started in Billy which was written by - you guessed it - Jeff and Tim) but they took leaps back when Cordy was character raped into someone who was sympathetic to Darla of all people, and then alternatively either an idiot or a saint or both. Post-Billy the only story of any note with Cordy was Birthday which, for all that it was horribly written, at least cast Cordelia in an interesting light (no pun intended). Beyond that her role was to stand there, look pretty and occasionally glow in the dark. Even Cordelia's role in Angel Investigations was co-opted by Fred who miraculously was able to take over computer duties in spite of being in Pylea for five years. Who wouldn't hate it to find out that their character's big role for the day was to bring Fred coffee (as actually happened onscreen)?
To talk about Fred is to talk about nothing. Her character was given no personality. There was hope for her when season 3 started and she was still shy and insane, but then Fredless miraculously healed her and she turned into nothing but a plot device. Deus ex Fred took care of everything that the story needed in order to make it into the final credits and who gave a damn if that tossed the poor girl all over the place and provided her with no actual characterization?
Much like the Angel and Cordy storyline they tried to trick us into believing it by having tertiary characters insist on how wonderful she was, but again much like Angel and Cordy the lengths to which they went bordered on the absurd. Gunn thought it was great that Fred shook Dennis's head? Lorne, a man who makes his career by telling the future, liked Fred's rampant win-one-for-the-Gipperism in a speech entitled "screw destiny"? Holtz of all people admires Fred's ability to fight? (More absurdly, he claims her willingness to die is why she survived a vampire attack when in fact she'd have been just as alive if she'd kept running and gone home - something Holtz of all people would have noticed.)
Fred also suffered for the fact that nobody could write her and fewer still could direct her. Tim Minear had some luck in a scene or two but everyone else failed. Just as Spike was written as more or less sympathetic depending on who turned in the script that day, Fred was written as more or less insane, more or less necessary to the group and, more importantly, more or less her age. A girl who by all rights should be older than Cordelia was written and directed as anywhere between 8 and 12, a fact which made it hard to understand why not one but two men were salivating over her - a fact even harder to understand when you remember that by all guesstimates Wes is nearly a decade older than she is.
Alexis did his best to sell his third of the love triangle but, as with Charisma and Cordy, you can only do so much with what you're given. Wes found time to develop a crush on a girl who was babblingly insane and locked in her room? That's either a sign of Wes's ability to see the hidden goodness in people or a sign that Wes is a lot creepier than we gave him credit for. It's also a sign of how, as with Angel and Cordy, the Wes/Fred concept was one written backwards. The writers wanted Wes feeling hurt because of a love triangle and, more immediately, emotionally kicked in the crotch by beating up the girl he had feelings for. It sort of, kind of worked in Billy, but it fell through after the fact. The dark Wes storyline did not depend on his feelings for Fred and should have been left alone. Tacking on Fred only confused the issue and quite frankly weakened it.
Gunn this season definitely gave us all a lesson in "be careful what you wish for". We wanted more Gunn. Well, we got him. We now need to sit down and write him an apology. Like Fred, Gunn's character was all over the place. The "true" Gunn showed up in episodes like That Old Gang of Mine and Forgiving, but beyond that he was a plot device. It's not the "opposites attract" nature of his relationship with Fred that's so troublesome. It's that it's never explained to the viewers what, exactly, Gunn sees in Fred. Yes, he does occasionally say that she's cool, but for the most part the only time he pays her compliments is when she's eating. We've had an entire season and the only thing we can say is that Gunn likes that Fred eats. So Gunn either secretly has a food fetish, or Gunn's character has been thrown out the window and replaced by the writers' apparent need to defend Amy Acker's weight.
All of this comes back to the biggest lesson of the season which is: SHOW DON'T TELL. If you want to have Fred be a big eater then show her eating. If you want Angel and Cordy to be in love then show them being in love with each other. This is television. It's a visual medium. Stop writing episodes as though they're for the benefit of the radio audience. We're smart enough to stick with you for the stuff you don't hit us over the head with - trust us on the rest.
Which brings me back to why I think this season, for me, had the most "bad" episodes. It wasn't that proportionately there were more, it was that pound for pound there was more of a contrast. The episodes that were good this season were really good. Billy, Quickening, Lullaby, Loyalty, Forgiving - amazingly good television. Things like Heartthrob, That Vision Thing, That Old Gang of Mine, Carpe Noctem, etc - very nice in staying the course. Better, in fact, than the shotty up and down quality of season 2, esp. considering how very few season 3 eps were filler.
But the episodes which were bad - Fredless, Offspring, Birthday, Provider, Waiting in the Wings, Double or Nothing, Tomorrow - were really bad, and bad in a way that was both easily fixable and totally nonsensical. They stood out in sharp contrast to the episodes that managed to keep the story going and show the characters that we came here to see.
I put the majority of the blame for the badness of season 3 right at the feet of David G. His episodes and story ideas sunk this season like a stone. The Angel/Cordy plotline, in particular, did fatal damage. The destruction of Cordy's character and her inability to have a plotline that did not involve Angel being in love with her shot this season in the leg. The other, stronger plotlines of Wesley and Connor did their best but couldn't go far with Angel/Cordy dragging them down.
David G is leaving and making no bones about the fact that he's doing so because Fox fucked him over. Given the fact that the writers of this show are known to do things just to piss off the network I can't help but wonder if David G deliberately hurt the show as a way to get revenge - or at least as a sign that he found it hard to care as much when he was working for a production company that obviously didn't like him (the kerfuffle over Buffy undoubtedly being his first clue that both Fox and the WB could give a shit about Mutant Enemy).
Either way I hope the fresh blood next year improves thing. David G called Angel the "little show that could" and I have to agree with that assessment. The show has such potential to be amazing television - even better than the show that spawned it - but every year something gets it down. It'd be nice if season 4 is the thing which helped Angel - no pun intended - get out of the water.
[Edited to add a link to the second part of the review which discusses the Wesley story arc in response to eternaltimtams comments]
