Fox

Angel: Season Two (a spinoff from the wildly popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer) follows the continuing adventures of Angel (David Boreanz), the vampire who searches for redemption while battling otherworldly demons and spirits on behalf of man. Angel and his team of modern day Ghostbusters find ways to track down trouble before it gets out of control, giving each episode an action-packed and imaginative flair, with numerous long-term story arcs running throughout the season. The overall theme of the en...ire season seems to be the character’s journey from relative good to a dark, lonely, near-resignation to evil, all played aptly by the brooding Boreanz. I wish I could tell our readers more, but I have a severe handicap when it comes to capturing the essence of the series that has made it (and its progenitor) so popular.

The problem is that before receiving my copy for review, I had absolutely NO contact with anything even remotely related to this show. Not only had I avoided watching Angel, I never watched a single segment of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (though I did see the movie). This left me in a difficult position, as the show presumes prior knowledge of the backstory, and seems to rely on the viewer’s presumably previously forged emotional attachments. I don’t know if the previous season explains why Wesley, the staff nerd, is with Angel Investigations, but I am pretty sure that it wasn’t just to be the show’s dry witted foil to the bubbly, at times overly-Valley Cordelia. The way everyone reacts to the idea of Darla being around certainly points to some sort of encounter in Season One, but we only see her as part of Angel’s distant past here. I’m not sure what the conflict is in Angel, or why he wants to be human, because I have no idea who the character is to this point. I’m not asking the writers of shows like this to cater every year to the uninitiated, but for some reason, this show felt a lot more difficult to get into from the start of Season Two than something like NYPD Blue, or the inimitable (at least for the first six years) X Files. On its own, Angel: Season Two is a reasonably well written, very imaginative and occasionally thrilling product (though sometimes it takes the “kitsch” a little too far), but without Season One to build on, this one feels an awful lot like a big inside joke. Since I’ve never been a vampire lore enthusiast, Angel: Season Two just wasn’t my thing.