Angel has invaded L'Abri. It began when Mark and Terri brought home copies of Season 1 and 2, found for only $15 at Walmart. We watched a couple episodes with them and it triggered Michelle and I to retrieve our Angel season 1 from storage so we could watch again. By the time we finished season 1 Mark was done with the first disk of season 2, so we began it and passed on our season 1 to Clarke and Julia.
Angel is a great show. Very thoughtful and at the same time very funny. The characters, who range from a vampire cursed with a soul that fills him with remorse for his past evils, to a once shallow rich girl who fled her small town when her parents lost everything, to an accident prone "rogue demon hunter" who failed his father and the council that trained him, and a street fighting vampire hunter whose mistakes led to his sister's death, all struggle to redeem themselves by doing what's right, here defined as "helping the helpless", no matter the personal cost. The conflict between the characters is great, as is the uber-enemy, Wolfram and Hart, a powerful law firm allied with Hell.
Even more drama arises from the fact that our heroes, so obviously flawed, sometimes let their weaknesses get the better of them. And more, the lawyers at the secretive Wolfram and Hart, experience doubt as new revelations of the companied evil become clear to them and they must decide if they want to move up the food chain or try and escape.
Angel is a "grown-up" spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The acting is strong, the scripts are superb and Angel as a character offers much more variety than Buffy. While Buffy is about a normal girl struggling to accept super-responsibility in the present, Angel is about trying to atone for past mistakes. While the Buffy writers make her struggles easy to identify with, I think it is even easier to identity with Angel, because responsibility has not been thrust upon him - he has chosen it in response to his remorse and regret. And since Angel is over two hundred years old we can be taken to story lines anywhere in the world during that time frame, which I kind of like. In both series, I am more interested in the supporting cast, the "normal" people who join the supernatural mission, daily risking their lives to help others come free of the darkness.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Angel
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
We're watching it with my brother-in-law at this times as well. Angels kicks ass.
Logan
really does. the fourth season is insane. we watched the whole thing through the first year of our marriage, and it gave us a lot to talk about. wish some of the characters had world views other that joss whedon's as it would make for more interesting stories, but he does that in all his series.
it was fun to do halloween by watching a couple of episodes: "are you now or have you ever been" (season 2), and "life of the party" (season 5, angel's only halloween-themed episode).
i'd ask you your favourite episodes, but really can't until you've watched seasons 3 and 5. :D
Hi Elly,
I've seen all the Angel episodes. We're rewatching them and we only own seasons 1 & 5. "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?" is one of my favorites. For pure fun factor it's hard to beat the muppet episode. There are a lot of great episodes in the series. Angel forgiving Faith is one. I can't recall if the one with Spike's back story is in Angel or Buffy - but it's a favorite. James Marsters brought such vitality to Spike; he played him in a way, with love, that was impossible according to the show's own mythology. One of the writers, David Fury, ultimately explained that to make sense of Spike he had to understand that when he was turned, he never completely died. There was still a bit of William left. I loved going back and seeing who he was before and how the barest element of himself survived.
Post a Comment