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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Buffy's guilt-ridden vampire squeeze lives by night in L.A. Also: "My So-Called Life" meets "The X-Files" in WB's new teen drama "Roswell"
Oct 4, 1999 | "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" spent years establishing that Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Angel (David Boreanaz) were star-crossed soul mates, so the idea of Boreanaz's brooding, tongue-tied slab of vampire beefcake skulking around in his own spinoff, sans his One True Love, sounded pretty, well, scary. Angel without Buffy -- isn't that kind of like the wax without the flame? But "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon has pulled off one of the best surprises of the season. Not only does "Angel" make sense as an extension of the "Buffy" mythology, it makes Angel seem more alive than he's been in about, oh, 240 years.
Whedon and co-executive producer David Greenwalt have astutely placed Angel at the intersection of the two genres in which his wounded, night-crawling loner mystique makes the most sense -- film noir and the superhero graphic-novel. In a Raymond Chandler vision of Los Angeles, where bloodsuckers prey on fallen angels' dreams of stardom, Angel takes to the night streets like a vampire Batman; he joylessly saves humans from the clutches of vamps -- they have them in L.A., too -- and kills his own kind with a bitter, self-annihilating relish. He's a damaged protector.
When last seen in the 1999 "Buffy" season finale, Angel had helped Buffy defeat the demon mayor and his flesh-eating minions (long story) and was gallantly bidding her adieu. Angel, you should know, is under a Gypsy curse levied on him a century ago for his viciousness; he was given a soul and a conscience -- real occupational hazards for an immortal killing machine -- and is able to feel guilt and compassion. Angel can no longer kill to feed (he lives on drippings from the butcher shop and the occasional stolen bag of plasma). But the real drag is the curse's stipulation that the moment he experiences "perfect happiness" (i.e., sex with his true love), he'll lose his soul and revert to his beastlike ways. The last time that happened, after he deflowered Buffy, it was no fun for anyone, believe me. His soul restored by a healing spell, Angel left Sunnydale to spare Buffy the pain of pining after a celibate 200-plus-year-old dude who can't even go to the beach. She deserves better.
So Angel is now in L.A. -- yeah, yeah, the City of Angels -- trying half-heartedly to forget. When Tuesday's pilot episode opens, he's drunk on a barstool babbling about his beloved Slayer: "She has this hair." (Even when he's wasted, Angel isn't much of a poet.) His monastic routine in L.A. is pretty grim. He lives in a sub-sub-basement apartment, rising at night to put on his game face and pick fights with bad vamps. Although clearly aroused by the blood trickling from a rescued damsel's forehead, Angel restrains himself, hissing through his fangs for her to get lost. Angel is neither quite monster nor quite human. Cut off from daylight and humanity, he's a lonesome Dark Knight, picking at his emotional scabs down in his Batcave, with a fridge full of pig's blood and maybe a few old issues of Maxim under the sofa. Swell way to spend eternity, huh?
One night, though, Angel is visited by Doyle (Glenn Quinn), a wisecracking, Irish, half-human, half-pin-cushion-faced something else who delivers a proposition from "The Powers That Be." Angel will gets the chance to atone for his murderous past (and maybe even lift the curse) if he agrees to perform a few vampire mitzvahs -- he must find troubled humans and save them from harm. But there's a catch. He has to "reach out" to these people and "show 'em there's love and hope left in the world."
