Angel: Lonely Hearts   Rewatch 
July 30, 2015 8:54 AM - Season 1, Episode 2 - Subscribe

Angel meets Det. Kate Lockley of the LAPD as they both hunt a serial killer. Kate thinks it's Angel, but of course it's a demon.

This episode was a replacement for Corrupt by David "Fists of" Fury, which introduced Kate as a crack-addicted undercover vice officer. The network rejected the script as too dark, and Fury rewrote it into this episode.
posted by Etrigan (9 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I remember this episode feeling so... Law and Order. They were definitely still figuring out what kind of show they wanted to be.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:17 PM on July 30, 2015


I liked Kate as a character. Too bad Elisabeth Rohm really did go to Law and Order, so they couldn't develop her past a certain point.

Not too much to say about this one. Still easing into things. Cordelia's adamant belief that as an actress she can read the human spirit is pretty entertaining. Doyle has some cruder versions of Xander-type comments about women and sex, but because everyone in this show is portrayed as an adult and not a teen (it's really, really easy to forget Cordelia is just out of high school, partially because Charisma Carpenter was almost 30 at the start of the show) it's even more off-putting.

Things That Date This Show: "How'd you pick up computer skills?" Angel and Cordelia, in awe of Doyle's fast typing.
posted by ilana at 9:40 AM on July 31, 2015


it's really, really easy to forget Cordelia is just out of high school, partially because Charisma Carpenter was almost 30 at the start of the show

Yeah, they seemed to drop the whole subject of her age real quick. Lovely as she was, Carpenter looked every day of almost 30, if not a little older. Again, she was gorgeous and I'm not knocking her... but I do think Carpenter's aging affected the way Cordelia was written. They wrote her as a somewhat ditzy young woman who was finding her way in life, but she definitely didn't come across as a straight-out-of-high school kid. She was a lot sharper and more worldly than you'd expect a spoiled 18-year-old rich girl to be.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:04 AM on August 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think (both at the time and now upon rewatch) that she looked convincingly teenaged in Buffy, but yeah, her apparent age and her actual age synched up almost immediately in Angel. I wonder how much of it was the makeup people just deciding "Fuck it, we don't need to make her a teenager anymore."
posted by Etrigan at 5:26 AM on August 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


After watching the rest of the Kate arch, who she is in this episode really doesn't seem to fit at all. I don't think we really hear more about her repeatedly going to that bar, or much about her romantic struggles in general after this.
posted by likeatoaster at 10:46 AM on August 6, 2015


After watching the rest of the Kate arch, who she is in this episode really doesn't seem to fit at all.

I hope that the next time Joss Whedon deigns to do a TV series, they let him do like half a season of episodes that they immediately burn, just so he can shake out all his early-first-season character missteps and low-effort monster-of-the-week stuff.
posted by Etrigan at 11:21 AM on August 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


You may be on to something. He did well with the one and only season of Firefly, and the first season of Buffy is fun even if it doesn't live up to what the show came to be. But Angel starts off sloggy, Dollhouse is sometimes amazingly awkward and I never made it to episode two of that ANGELS OF SHIELD thing. It does seem like he needs to fumble around for a good while before he figures out what he's doing.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:04 PM on August 6, 2015


Agents, not Angels of Shield. Times like this, I wish the edit window was 33 minutes long.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:39 PM on August 6, 2015


But Angel starts off sloggy...

I have two major complaints about the start of Angel:

1 -- The characters were all over the place, because no one was quite sure what the show was going to be. When you look at the main cast list, you notice that everyone was either from Buffy or had a "tryout" season (Gunn in S1, Fred in S2, Lorne in S2-3). Hence my "shakedown" wish. But it was also partially due to:

2 -- They were clearly trying to separate themselves from Buffy (more demonic-looking vamps, darker tone) at the same time that Buffy was more or less trying to separate itself from Buffy (college vs. high school, adult responsibilities). So they had this winning formula, but no one was using it. Both shows eventually found their way back to good formulae of Buffy-but-not-quite, but it definitely took some shaking.
posted by Etrigan at 5:54 AM on August 7, 2015


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