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:: ANGEL SEASON TWO - OVERVIEW ::

With season two of Angel out on DVD, Ed Gross sat down with co-executive producer Tim Minear to take a retrospective look at Angel's second yaer and examine the series episode by episode.

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ALTHOUGH PRETTY STRONG RIGHT FROM the outset, Angel went through its own set of growing pains, but towards the end of the first year - and a string of episodes like "Eternity", "Five By Five", "Sanctuary", "Blind Date" and "To Shanshu In LA" - it had proven itself pretty near the equal of Buffy. At the same time, it established a momentum that created anticipation for year two.

"The thing that really worked for me in year two was Angel's descent into darkness," says co-executive producer Tim Minear. "It's always the most interesting thing to me personally. I know to some people it gets tedious. When he closed the doors on the lawyers and then fired everybody, I think that was pretty riveting."

The summer hiatus was filled with internet rumours about the forthcoming year; about characters, storylines and so on, but the creative staff of both Buffy and Angel have steadfastly stood behind Joss Whedon's edict that the audience be kept in the dark as long as possible. Cyberspace, of course, has made such secrecy difficult, to say the least.

"I find the spoilers mostly annoying when they're true," says Minear. "Here's my feeling: people who are heavily into the internet and who are into the shows and want to be spoiled, will search out that stuff. There's another just as committed group of fans who are involved with the internet who avoid spoilers. There's a certain netiquette about marking spoilers, so people can be surprised if they want to be. I'm sure that most of the audience isn't logging on to Ain't It Cool News and being spoiled. But there are some things that are annoying because we work hard on trying to keep the show interesting and exciting and surprising. My biggest gripe in year two was that the WB, on their website, spoiled my last episode by showing the Host's head on a platter in their photo gallery of upcoming episodes.

"Stuff was being spoiled on Angel, and clearly it must have been coming through somebody on our crew," he continues, "because I know that episode two, the '50s episode, was spoiled on websites before I'd even written the script. It was spoiled via an outline that I had only given to production so that they could start to prep. So it hadn't gone to the network, it hadn't gone to the studio, it had only gone to the crew. I also know that there were certain elements in that early outline that did not end up in the script, but ended up on the internet, which is how I know it was that version of the outline that got spoiled. We circulated a memo that said, 'Please don't do this. When we find out who did, they will be fired.' But stuff still leaks."

Season two kicked off with "Judgement", in which one of Cordelia's visions leads Angel to kill a demon that was actually protecting an innocent woman and her unborn child. Now Angel has to step in and protect them himself. While effective, the episode didn't seem to hold on to the momentum that had been established at the end of year one.

"First episodes back are always difficult," says Minear. "I think it's more or less a mission statement. It also happened in year three, especially because we were moving to a new night. But you want an audience to start the show off fresh and get what the show is. I think it had all of the elements that were required. It introduced everybody again and it demonstrated that this is an action show with really, in many ways, a traditional action hero lead, what his relationship was to the people around him. It also dropped some hints as to the coming, continuing story. I thought it worked. I liked that Angel screwed up. We also felt that ending the first season with 'Pinocchio's going be a real boy some day' [a prophecy told that Angel was destined to become human], we had to complicate that, which is really the idea behind that episode in terms of the series. Once it's been prophesised that everything is going to work out, it sort of takes the tension out of the story that you're telling. So what Angel learned in that episode is that it was not about the prophecy, it's not about the end of the tunnel, it's about the tunnel and the journey through it. Nothing is assured, which is another thing we kept trying to hit in the stories we told over the year. Something that appears to be good news, could turn out to be terrible news. Something that appeared to be bad news, could be something good.

"For me," he elaborates "it was the first time I got to direct anything in a long time. I know I was not the director of that episode by any stretch of the imagination, however we do a thing called second unit where certain things may be dropped off the schedule for time and sometimes things have to be reshot. So Joss and David had me shoot the second unit stuff of that episode, which was a nice way for me to get my feet wet before I directed full episodes."

"Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?" moves back to the 1950s as we meet Angel, who finds himself interacting with the denizens of a hotel who are unwittingly giving a demon the sustenance it needs to survive. In the present, Angel goes back to the hotel to destroy the demon once and for all, and ends up buying the building.

"That episode worked great for me," says Minear. "That was the first time ever that somebody made an episode of something I'd written that looked just like the thing in my head. Initially we knew we wanted to do an origin story for the hotel, and the initial thought was it would be a '40s episode. It was Joss who said that it should be set in the '50s, because I had already been toying with this idea of a paranoia demon. And the' 50s duh! Paranoia!

"It's full of everything that I love. It's got references to practically every movie I love, to James Elroy, to LA Confidential,Vertigo, Hitchcock. Some people sort of ragged on me about those references, saying they were so reverential, but nothing got in the way of the story. The fact that I named a character Judy didn't necessarily have people say, 'Oh, Vertigo.' But it was an exciting episode to make. I thought Herb Davis, our cinematographer, did a beautiful job of photographing it. It really looks like a movie and Dave Semel, who directed, really got the spirit of what I intended in the script, which was a dream-like quality. His camera's always moving; there are very long, extended takes with no dialogue."

Minear also loved the actor playing the demon: "I thought the actor was outstanding. It was his choice to do this sort of Southern fried accent. He really had a personality, and wasn't just, 'I'm a guy in a mask."'

The new headquarters for Team Angel began being discussed when the writers sat down to consider the new season. Joined by the Buffy writers, they began throwing around ideas. The goal was simple: a cool place for Angel to end up after the explosion of the season one finale that destroyed his office.

"We blew up that set because it was incredibly difficult to shoot in," says Minear. "It was very small and confined and ugly. So we wanted something that was big, that had some scope to it, that was different. Actually it was Rebecca Kirshner, a writer on Buffy, who suggested an abandoned old Hollywood hotel and that just clicked with us. At the end of that episode, Wesley says, 'You know better than anyone that this is a house of evil,' and Angel says, 'Not anymore,' because he's exorcised the demon from this place. I think the hotel represents Angel himself. If you take the scene at the end of the episode and apply the conversation that Wesley is having with Angel, I think the metaphor is pretty clear. This is a place that has seen the worse side of demonic influence as well as the worse side of human action, and Angel is saying that that has changed. So the hotel represents him, and the idea of coming into a place that was once a house of evil and making it a force for good, is a metaphor for Angel on the show. And also just a really cool place to shoot."

"First Impressions" focuses on a Cordelia/Gunn dynamic as a frightening vision she has about him leads her to stick close to him. Gunn, of course, isn't necessarily enthusiastic about the company. Additionally, Angel begins having erotic dreams involving Darla.

"I recently watched that again, and I think it works really well," reckons Minear. "Of course the big reveal at the end is that they're not just dreams; she's really sitting on top of him. I also love all the Gunn/Cordelia interaction."

In "Untouched" Angel comes to the aid of a woman endowed with telekinetic abilities, who is being manipulated by Wolfram & Hart. At the same time, he continues to experience a number of erotic dreams involving Darla, the woman who turned him into a vampire and who has been brought back to life by Wolfram & Hart.

"I remember when we were breaking the story," Minear reflects, "Meredith Smith, who wrote the episode, actually came up with the idea that Bethany would throw her father out the window and stop him right before he hit the ground. That was a defining moment in the breaking of that story, which made everybody realise what it was supposed to be. Joss came up with the idea that all those windows would shatter because of her mind."

"Dear Boy" continues the Darla-heavy dreams, and the audience is brought back in time to Angel's first encounter with Drusilla, the woman he would torture before turning into a vampire. Later, when Angel claims to have seen Darla walking the streets, the rest of his team start to think that he's losing his mind.

"The big David Greenwalt epic 'Return Of Darla To The Waking World Of Angel'," laughs Minear. "There's a moment in that episode, during the flashback, where Drusilla's cowering in the convent and Darla is saying, 'I thought you were going to kill her.' Angel says, 'No, I decided to make her one of us,' Darla says, 'She's insane,' and Angel responds, 'Yeah, eternal torment. Am I learning?' There's a look on Darla's face that says, 'This guy's much worse than I am right now.' That's the whole point of that. He's the student up until that point, and after that he overtakes the teacher and becomes something that even she can't quite grasp, which I think is interesting."

Angel seeks some emotional peace with a supposed mystical swami, and while he's away Wesley assumes his identity to protect a young woman from threatening forces in "Guise Will Be Guise". The swami turns out to be false, a plant placed by Wolfram & Hart. The episode also features the introduction of Virginia, the character that would become Wesley's sometimes girlfriend.

"Jane Espenson wrote that episode, and I wrote the swami scenes. She had a very short timetable to write that episode, so I took those scenes from her and Joss' edict to me was, 'Make it about something.' When Joss saw the final cut of the episode, he thought parts could be funnier. If you're watching the episode, you'll notice some of the dialogue is not happening on camera. There's stuff being said when the camera is on another character, and that's stuff Joss went through and added.

"During that episode David Boreanaz needed some time off, which is why it was Angel-light," he adds. "We were always going to do the story with Wesley, but you want to put it into a place where, scheduling-wise, it works for you and it worked there. But we were afraid that since Angel was out of so much of the A story, that we would feel like we were losing Angel out of the episode. Joss wanted to make sure that the swami scenes weren't just funny cutaways, but that it felt like it had some weight to it. So the idea of Angel's inner demon and the struggle and all that stuff, and how do people see you and are you what people perceive you to be, worked thematically, I thought, with everything that was going on " , with Wesley."

"Darla" serves as a major flashback episode exploring the mutual pasts of Darla and Angel, and how they intersect with Drusilla, Spike and The Master. In the present, Angel does everything he can to free Darla from Wolfram & Hart, believing that she can still be saved, particularly after discovering that she was restored as a human rather than a vampire.

Minear served as both writer and director. "I told Joss that I felt it was time to revisit the Darla story in a big way; that now that we knew she was human, what did that mean? He felt that that was right and I felt that we needed to see her as a human before she was vamped and get some of her backstory. He thought that was all well and good only that very night they were going to do the same thing with Spike on Buffy! Then I said, 'Wait a minute, why should we be afraid of that? We should do both. Those stories would naturally intersect at some point. We could actually make it a two-hour story. And it was Joss' idea that we could see scenes happen on Angel that we had already seen on Buffy, but shown from a different point of view.

"Keeping track of everything was incredibly easy. Doug Petrie and I basically sat down with a whiteboard and sketched out a timeline, starting with Darla: this is when she was turned; this was when she met Angel; this was when she took him to the Master; then they met Drusilla and then Spike. We had those years worked out, so that by the time we got to that we knew there were certain places where all four of those characters would intersect. It all culminates in China. Shooting those sequences was the funnest night of my life. It's like, 'Let me direct an episode. Can I have a hundred rioting peasants and a town on fire, 'cause that would be fun?' The crew did a great job, I thought."

On the twist of Darla being human, Minear remembers, "That was actually something we came up with between seasons. I remember we were having lunch - it was David Greenwalt, Marti Noxon, me and Joss Whedon - and somebody suggested, 'What if they brought her back as human?' And Joss immediately liked that idea. It gave you a place to go. Some of the fans didn't care for the Darla arc and complained that it was Darla all year and was boring. I disagree, and in fact in almost every episode she appeared, something new happened. There was the big reveal, 'Oh, she's human,' then there was the big reveal, 'Oh, she's dying,' and then, of course, Drusilla walked in and now she's a vampire again. So Darla - not a static character for us last year."

In season two, Angel goes down a much darker path, and you get the impression that his tasting of a bit of Kate's blood in this episode played a role in that journey. "That was certainly the idea, without hitting it over tIle head too much. You plant those things in there and you hope that it adds to the texture without having a big scene where everybody sits down and discusses it.

"Angel literally puts his life and soul on the line when he attempts to give the dying Darla another shot at life by participating in a series of deadly otherworldly tests. Unfortunately, Darla has already been given her second chance (by Wolfram & Hart!). In the end, Darla accepts the fact that she's dying and is willing to accept Angel being with her until it's over. Then Lindsey appears on the scene, using a stun gun on Angel while Drusilla enters the room and bites Darla.

Minear co-wrote this one with Doug Petrie. "The easiest thing for me to write in that episode was the 'Shempire' scene, where Darla is in the bar trying to pick up the geeky vampire. It probably took me as long to write that scene as it did for me to type it. It was just incredibly easy. We actually had a lot of trouble cutting that episode because we didn't feel that in the trial portion the demon who gets cut in half was very scary. But Mark Westmore, who cut that show, did a great job using all the best bits. Then, of course, when Drusilla walks in at the end, it's pretty startling. In fact, we went back and reshot her entrance. We felt that in the original footage we shot it was too wide. That very close, slow motion shot, which was her first appearing into frame, was actually a retake.

"Back at this lunch I had with Marti, Joss and David we came up with the idea that she was going to be human." he continues. "The moment that I mentioned that idea, Joss immediately came up with that scene. He said, 'Later in the season, Drusilla will walk in and revamp her in front of Angel.' We knew that was going to happen!"

"Reunion" has Angel desperately trying to locate Darla's body before her vampire resurrection can take place so that he can stake her, but Drusilla interferes, allowing the final transformation to occur. From there, Dru and Darla go on a killing spree. Angel, blaming himself for what's happened to Darla, seems to go off the deep end, allowing the ladies to snack on a bunch of Wolfram & Hart lawyers and then firing his staff.

"This was a breakfast meeting and not lunch," Minear notes. "It was Joss, David Greenwalt and me, and we were trying to figure out what would happen in episode ten. Joss asked, 'Can he just fire everybody? Can he just lock the lawyers in a room with some vampires, let them chow down and then fire everybody?' We said, 'Yes, he really can.' It didn't surprise me, because he's Joss and he always comes up with cool ideas."

One question about that episode is why Darla is so strong that she seems to have no trouble kicking Angel's ass. "I think it's because she's feral," he replies, "and he does have two vampires fighting him. I believe if it had just been Darla waking up there, he would have been successful. However, the fact that Drusilla is coming after him with a shovel isn't helping things. And then the moment when he's really caught off guard is when she goes from vamp face back to human face and says his name. That stops him for a second, which allows Drusilla to attack him from behind. "

Surprisingly, there was no concern within the writing staff over Angel's indifference to the Wolfram & Hart lawyers being slaughtered. "We never hesitated," he concurs. "He doesn't kill those people. He certainly is complicit and aids what happens to them by not only shutting the doors, but locking them. What's cool about Angel is that we can do that. Sometimes there are two different things at work in terms of whether or not he should take certain steps. Your character might do a certain thing, but the actor playing him may want to protect that image. David doesn't do that to us. He happens to be the kind of actor who's game for anything. He'll allow himself to look goofy; he'll allow himself to be beaten; he'll allow himself to do dark and heroic things; and I think for David it's more interesting to go to those places."

"Redefinition" has Angel training himself physically and mentally for the battle to the death he's expecting to have with Drusilla and Darla. At the same time, Cordelia, Wesley and Gunn are trying to cope with being fired, and decide to carry on the good fight without Angel.

"I think the coolness of this episode is the fact that Angel doesn't actually speak throughout the entire show," Minear points out. "There's a voiceover, but he never actually speaks to another person in the episode. And his lighting of the ladies on fire is very cool. It takes us to a place we've never gone, as Darla tells us at the end when she says, 'Who was that?'"

In "Blood Money", Angel seems to be his old self as he apparently comes to the aid of a woman running a teen shelter, but in reality he's only using her to get closer to Wolfram & Hart. At the same time, the law firm has hired a demon - apparently an old enemy of Angel's - to battle him to the death.

"There were some things I liked about the episode, like the Western motif and the stand-off at the ending," says Minear, "but I just thought that it was kind of a jumble and that it didn't really fulfill the promise of what happened when he went dark. It's like, 'I'm gonna screw you out of some money, but not really.' It was just kind of weird. I also think what that episode proves is that he remains Angel no matter what. He's more beige than dark, not unlike the '50s episode before he had a mission statement. There's a part of him that wants to do good, but he's just been so beaten down that he's more morally ambiguous than he is dark at that point."

The universe itself is threatened in "Happy Anniversaty", when Angel and the Host attempt to stop a physicist from freezing time so that he and his soon to be ex-girlfriend will be together for all eternity. It's an episode Minear admits he truly enjoys: "What I liked about it was getting the Host out of the bar. Basically a buddy movie with Angel and the Host, and I think it's really interesting that those two characters, whenever you put them together, are an intriguing pair. They're so different, but I think that Andy and David really complement each other when they're on screen together. I think Andy Hallett has been a bit of a breakout for us. This was the first thing he'd ever done, and when Joss came up with the idea of this character, he based it on Andy who's a friend of his. They've known each other forever. Andy was basically working as an assistant on some level to Joss and Joss funneled a lot of Andy's personality into that character. When it came time to casting, he asked David Greenwalt if there would be any objection for Andy to come in and read for the part. But Joss didn't want to make the tinal decision, because he didn't want there to be any kind of nepotism at all. David [Greenwalt] had the final say and Andy was the best guy who came in to read for that. I just think he's grown a lot as an actor."

"The Thin Dead Line" pits Angel and co against a legion of dead police officers who are being resurrected as zombies.

"Thematically," Minear muses, "you've got these zombie cops who are maybe working on the side of the law. At the end of the episode Kate says that crime has gone down in this neighbourhood and now the evil's been stopped, things are going to get bad again. It's a comment about fascism; how the trains run on time and the streets are clean, but there's a dark underbelly to all of that. The whole thing is a metaphor for Angel's state of mind, because what happens to Angel in the course of this season is he gets to a point where he doesn't stop fighting, he fights harder. But he's not fighting for any reason anymore, he's just going through the motions like a zombie."

One thing the season arc did was establish Cordelia, Wesley and Gunn as a force on their own, separate and apart from Angel. "Glad you think that way," says Minear, "but I still have some problems with it. I don't think we service Gunn enough, but I hope to rectify that. I think I need to understand why it is he's decided to hang with these two people. I think there's more to explore. With all of them. That was one criticism we got from internet fans: as we got into the beige Angel arc, they felt that the supporting characters were being ignored a little. Which I think is not untrue. However I believe we rectified a lot of that by the end of the year."

In "Reprise" Angel sees an opportunity to destroy Wolfram & Hart by taking on a demon from the company's "home office". What he doesn't expect, however, is that the "home office" - which he thinks will be Hell - is, in fact, (in a very Kafka-esque twist} Earth. Devastated, Angel falls into the arms of Darla and takes her sexually, the implication being that this will suck away his soul and result in the return of Angelus.

"A tricky episode," elaborates Minear. "I remember when we were shooting 'Blood Money' Joss came down to the set and I was there supervising. We were talking about what episode 15 would be. I had an idea that since Angel slept with Buffy and it turned him evil, and since he was dark in this point of the series and we wanted to bring him back into some of the light, maybe if he slept with Darla it would turn him good. So it was the opposite of Buffy. The idea was that it would echo [the Buffy episode] 'Surprise' - hence the name 'Reprise'. 'Reprise' would basically end the same way that 'Surprise' did. When he woke up it would echo 'Innocence' [the following episode of Buffy] except that he would have turned good instead of evil.

"I guess there are different ways to interpret the elevator ride [to Hell], but I will interpret it the way I intended it, which is that Angel knows that a Senior Partner will be arriving for this meeting. He has a few pieces of information and he is assuming, since one of the pieces of information is the term 'Home Office,' that the Senior Partner will be coming from the home office. In fact that is not what is happening. The Senior Partner is coming to the home office. What we discover when the elevator ends up where it started is that this world is the source of all their power. So the very thing that Angel is trying to save is also the thing he has to fight. Which descends very much into esoterica and existential despair, but that's a place I like to go with the show. The idea here was to sink everybody as deep as I could get them, hence that montage at the end. Everybody has had something taken away from them. And Angel, in an act of despair, turns to Darla and does her."

The aftermath of sleeping with Darla rapidly becomes apparent in "Epiphany", in which, instead of becoming Angelus, Angel is put back on the right track, recognising his purpose in this world. It starts with trying to get his former employees to trust him again, proceeds to his kicking Lindsey's ass and culminates in his saving Kate's life, restoring her faith in the process.

"We always knew 'Epiphany' would be a lighter episode," says Minear. "When it goes that dark, you can't really sustain that tone."

"Epiphany" aired on the same night as Buffy's "The Body", which dealt with the aftermath of Joyce Summers' death. Joss Whedon had apparently told the staff that Angel had to be lighter to counterbalance the grimness of Buffy. "We knew that he would be coming out of his despair in 'Epiphany' and we knew that 'The Body' was airing that night, so it seemed like a good fit. However, I believe this is what should have happened on Angel no matter what. The fact that it was paired with 'The Body' was a happy pairing, but I know that we've been accused of forcing the show in a certain direction in order to complement Buffy. That really hasn't happened. Certainly not to the degree that people might think. You do want them to complement each other, and I also know that some people don't watch both shows, because they can't take two hours of it.

"I can give you an example of something I did have to adjust because of Joss' brilliant, Emmy-ignored 'The Body'," he adds. "In 'Epiphany', when we were going to show Kate puking her guts out. I had to lose that from the episode because Buffy was puking on Buffy that night. Joss felt, and rightly so, that it was way too much puking for two hours."

Most amusing was Darla's outrage over Angel not becoming evil after they've slept together, and announcing that they're going to do it again and again until he does. "I stole a couple of lines from 'Innocence'," says Minear. "When Buffy says to Angel, 'Was I not good?', I had Darla say the same thing to Angel. On Buffy your heart is getting torn out, but on Angel it's more or less comedy where she's upset he didn't turn evil and is fearful she's not very good in bed. Most people knew it was bullshit, that he wouldn't lose his soul because he was with Darla. Sex can turn him evil, if it's perfect happiness. It doesn't mean it will. Basically he can have sex with people he doesn't like. I just think it's funny that we're almost saying, 'Sex with someone you love can only lead to pain. Sex with someone you don't really like can actually turn out to be good for you.'"

The battle between Angel and Lindsey is particularly brutal; fans, predictably, loved it. "It's the most violent thing we've ever done," laughs Minear. "David Greenwalt wanted me to tone it down a little bit. He left it up to me, but he said, 'I feel like this is too violent.' I felt it wasn't and he was like, 'Okay.' It's so funny, we didn't get a note from the network about that. The note I did get was about the end of 'Reprise' when Angel drops the ring and says, 'Do you want this?' and Darla grabs for it. We filmed an extra slap which had to be cut. It's all about context, because he's about to take her and it does start to look a little bit like rape. The funny thing is, they didn't give me a note on his throwing her through the doors. He throws her through the doors and she lands on her hands and elbows on a pile of broken glass. They didn't give me a note on that, but the little face slap they insisted on cutting. Then with the Lindsey/Angel thing I didn't get a note at all, and that was incredibly violent.

"Christian Kane was doing all his own stuff in that scene. He was really into it. The fun thing is that Christian for a year and a half complained about the suits and ties. Hates them, doesn't want to wear them and I have to be very explicit and say, 'He's got his tie on in this scene, it's very important because later he's going to pull off his tie and it's going to mean something. Therefore he needs to have his tie on.'"

In "Disharmony" Cordy's old friend Harmony shows up in LA. Humorously, Cordelia thinks she's a lesbian but then discovers that she's a vampire. She tries to redeem her, but that proves impossible as Harmony nearly betrays the group to a vampire cult.

"The ever-wonderful David Fury wrote that episode, and I love Mercedes McNab, who plays Harmony," says Minear. "That was one of the few episodes where we did get to do the 'metaphor', which is 'my old high school friend shows up in town and we've both changed.' And she happens to have changed into a vampire. I thought Charisma was hysterical in that episode."

But why does Cordelia resist the temptation to put a bolt through Harmony's heart? "That's an interesting question," muses Minear. "I think it's important for Cordelia to be put in a situation where she ends up doing the same thing Angel did with Darla, because she needs to forgive him and this kind of puts them on the same moral level to some extent. And also, I've seen people express both love and hate for the ending where he buys her clothes and she does her little happy clothes dance. It's absolutely adorable, but some people feel that it cheapens the emotion and cheapens Cordelia, because it's almost like she's a clothes whore. The thing that they're missing is he gave away her clothes. This was something he did without thinking about her feelings. It's not just that she got some cool stuff at the end, it's that he was trying to make amends for something he did by trying to repair a specific injury he had caused her. I think it worked great. I think the key to that episode is when Cordelia says to him at the beginning, 'We work together, we're not friends.' Because that, in a sense, is what the next few episodes are about. The clothes are a big step because they represent a personal gesture."

In "Dead End" Cordelia has a vision of a man stabbing his own eye, which leads to Angel and Lindsey teaming up because Lindsey's recently transplanted hand is acting oddly. The investigation leads to a Wolfram & Hart organ bank in which body parts are being taken from the living.

"The end of Lindsey," says Minear. "At least for that season. Whenever you put Angel and Lindsey together, it's interesting, and the idea of them working together certainly sparked everybody's imagination. The idea that Angel had had this epiphany and was more easy going would infuriate Lindsey all the more, which just made it so much fun. They really have a great chemistry. I thought Christian's evil hand speech was great. What I love is you expect the story to be about, 'I can't control my evil hand,' and that's not at all what it turns out to be. If you see a thing that looks like an old cliche, hopefully we're going to put a spin on it."

The episode seems to bring Lindsey's character arc to a close, though Minear notes that it's possible we'll see the character's return, though not in the capacity of a W&H lawyer. " Actually, he's a perfect fit for the show, because here's this morally ambiguous guy who is seeking his own kind of redemption. So he fits right into the universe."

In "Belonging" a vicious demon comes into our dimension and wreaks havoc, but in stopping it Cordelia ends up transported to another dimension which is actually the Host's home.

"When we were breaking that story, I wasn't all that interested because there wasn't a strong A story," Minear offers. "Really the A story is that this thing comes through a portal and we have to kill it. And, of course, we meet the Host's cousin, which was pretty interesting. But when I saw the episode all put together, I liked it a lot. I thought all of the little character vignettes were great. I think what we were trying to do in those last few episodes of the season was service characters that kind of didn't get serviced through all of the Darla angst. We wanted to make sure that we could bring this group back together in some form. So, 'Belonging' is really a mission statement for what the extended coda of the season is going to be, which is Pylea. If you look at 'Belonging', all of the little stories are tucked in there. For instance, Cordelia is called princess by the director of the commercial, but Angel says he treats her like a slave. So all those little things are in there for, each character. I think the first image of 'Belonging' is everyone sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant and , Angel's not among them, until we realise we're looking in a mirror. He doesn't feel like he belongs with this group, and of course his reflection's going to play a big role in the forthcoming episodes."

The episode opens with Cordelia shooting a very sexy-looking commercial, which has resonance within the storyline itself. "It's tricky," he says, "because we're making a statement, but at the same time we could be accused of exploiting her the same way. But the idea was always that she is being belittled and exploited here, but in another place she's being revered and put on a throne, and yet being exploited at the same time. It's sort of a double comment on how society views women. However, I will say in our defence that in two years and 44 episodes of this show, Charisma Carpenter, the most beautiful woman who has walked the face of the Earth, has not been exploited. If anything, we've exploited the boys more than the girls."

Season two wraps up with a three-part visit to the Host's dimension, Pylea, where Cordelia becomes queen; where Angel can live in sunlight and see his reflection; where they encounter Fred (Amy Acker) for the first time; and where everybody is literally fighting for their lives. The episodes involved are "Over The Rainbow", "Through The Looking Glass" and "There's No Place Like Plrtz Glrb" each decidedly lighter than much of the season.

"We knew we wanted to do Pylea," explains Minear, "and the question was whether or not we could afford to. It was incredibly expensive to do. Think of all the demon make-ups, first of all. Shooting on location; creating a place to shoot it; creating a castle; all this stuff was expensive. We actually ended up going to this little Mexican village that's not a real village. It's sort of a backlot thing out in the boondocks where film companies shoot sometimes. If you look closely, you may notice that Pylea is also China from episode seven. It's the exact same village, but redressed. So that was a lot of location shooting and a lot of day shooting, which we don't normally do.

"I thought it was all great, but fans were divided," he notes. "They were saying things like, 'Where's Darla? Where's the angst? What's going on?' We brought in Darla, and instead of him staking her and saving everybody and they go off for pancakes and eggs together at the end of the season, Darla was demoralised and just went away. I think that people weren't sure what to make of that. It didn't seem like a resolution to them, and in fact it was not, as they would discover in season three. What people have to remember is that the season was about Angel, not about Darla. If you look at Pylea and what we did there, it's sort of a metaphor writ large for what all our characters have been through this season.

"Cordelia used to be popular, but then she had her money and prestige ripped from her. Here she gets to be elevated back to the position of a princess. What does that mean? She's grown beyond that. Wesley, of course, always wanted to be a leader and always failed miserably. Then he became a leader and really became a leader. Gunn ended up leaving his people behind and feeling responsible for the death of some of them. What he learns in Pylea is if you try not getting anybody killed, you'll end up getting everybody killed. So everybody's story is sort of put in that fantasy land. And, of course, there's Fred."

Playing up the laughs was something Minear pushed as far as he could in "Through The Looking Glass". "But once it gets really funny," he smiles, "you can really knock everybody on their ass. Angel in a foetal position is never a bad thing. It was so much fun directing the episode. For me, everything was clicking. David was very funny. His playing the vanity and really liking everybody calling him a hero and telling the story to the kids - I thought that was great and I thought his chemistry with Fred was great. She was adorable. And Charisma was over the top, Carole Lombard funny. And I loved Wesley and Gunn together. I thought it all worked, which sounds terrible to say from the writer/director."

He describes "No Place Like Plrtz Glrb" as "the big resolution ", followed by the moment when the gang gets back to the hotel to find Willow there, waiting to tell Angel that Buffy has died. "And setting up the non-crossover for next year," he laughs. "I thought the episode really worked. Andy Hallett was great as a disembodied head. I think some of the real cool stuff in that episode was the Wesley moments: 'You're not running this, I am.' I just thought he was cool, grown-up and a badass, which was a nice place to take that character. And then there was Angel confronting the physical manifestation of his darker self, which is something he'll have to deal with again in the future, even if it's not in a starkly metaphorical way. I think the important point to take away is that he is embarrassed by the ugly thing he feels he really is, which is why he doesn't want his friends to see him that way. I think that had a lot to do with why he fired them."

So, what of the future?

"I think there's certainly no guarantee of what the dynamic is going to be between these people," Minear postulates regarding the current season. "They are no longer what they were at the beginning of the season, this well-oiled machine with Angel as its captain. Now Wesley is at least the nominal head and they have things to talk about. They haven't resolved a lot of their issues. Certainly Angel lied to Cordelia's face about Darla, and that's sort of left unresolved. It's there. There's a lot of emotional issues that need to be addressed. And I think that the expectation is cool fights, with a little bit of sex." SFX
 

Quelques spoilers saison 3 pour la suite. Arrivée d'un nouveau membre dans l'équipe d'Angel Investigations et arrivée d'un nouvel adversaire...

:: NIGHT OF THE LIVING FRED! ::

Tim Minear explains why Fred has been added to the mix in season three...

* * * * * * * *

"We love Fred," says Angel co-executive producer Tim Minear. "First of all, we love Amy Acker. Second, we felt that we needed another colour for the show, and that was a character that Joss had been considering before we'd ever written an episode for her. He was actually reading actors for the part when Amy came in. He saw her and immediately saw the star potential there, and I totally agreed.

"Here's what Fred brings to the mix - and this is just my opinion, I'm not speaking for anybody else, besides the fact that Amy is wonderful in a scene, tears your heart out and is gut funny, there is a scene in 'Through The Looking Glass' where she's with Angel and she's very worried about Cordelia. Anel says, 'Oh, no, they made her a princess.' She just stops and says, 'When I got there, they never did that... That's good for her.' Then we cut to Cordelia on that throne, going, 'Maybe I should just leave.' Back to back gut funny performances from our two actresses. The fact that we can have two funny women on the show is a good thing.

"I think the thing Fred brings to the party is this: Angel doesn't owe her an apology. She is somebody with whom he has a clean slate. I think it's important to have somebody in his life to whom he does not owe an apology; that he hasn't hurt. I'm not saying he won't hurt her at some point, but I think that that's an important element for the show. The other thing I think she brings to the show is the science, so she can be valuable in that respect. Also, it's not a bad thing to have another female character for all of them to play off of. It's a no-brainer, frankly." SFX

:: HOLTZ, WHO GOES THERE? ::

Where have we seen season three's big bad before?

* * * * * * * *

Viewers first met Holtz in a flashback within the season two episode "The Trial" in which Angelus and Darla make their way to a barn to escape the vampire hunter who is seeking vengeance for the fact that the duo murdered his family, including an infant. At one point, Angelus refers to Holtz as not being human, which begs the question wether or not the writers knew they were bringing the character into the present, or if this was an accidental red herring.

"We knew," says Angel co-executive producer Tim Minear. "Sometimes we go back and say, 'Hey, why don't we explore that?' but in this case, it was definitely a plant. The Holtz character is an intersting Big Bad, because he's a very righteous man. It's not only that he believes in what he's doing, but he's right. Angel did terrible things. Angel murdered his entire family. This is a guy who has a legitimate beef, and he's not going around killing innocent people. Ted Bundy reforms - so what? He still killed all those people. Hitler reforms - so what? He's still guilty. So it creates an interesting dilemma. This is a character who believes he's on a quest from God, and in fact he may be." SFX

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