Parting Gifts is a David Fury episode, his second in the series after the dark and humorless
Lonely Heart.
After the painful emotional note of Doyle's departure in the previous episode, Parting
Gifts feels like a sliver of light and a major step towards the show finding its ultimate
identity.
The episode opens with Angel bargaining with the oracles to bring Doyle back.
They refuse.
In the light of day, a rather hapless looking demon is being pursued by some kind of motorcycle
riding badass.
Who is this helmeted crusader?
He has the bearing of a sexy rogue.
Cordy and Angel are still feeling the silence of Doyle's loss.
At this point in the series I was thinking to myself the show had THREE leads.
Three of them.
And now one of them is gone.
I was feeling the silence of it as well.
Especially on my first run as at the time, I hadn't really grown to love Cordy yet
and Angel still hadn't cast off his wooden facade from Buffy.
The demon from earlier finds his way to Angel investigations and asks for his help.
Barney is an empath demon being hunted by our previous motorcycled crusader.
Barney shares the legend of the hunter on his tail as we get some quick badass cuts
to the man in question.
At a commercial audition Cordelia nearly collapses under the weight of a writhing headache before
having a vision.
Realizing what has happened, when she gets back to the office she dives on Angel.
"I thought our kiss meant something and instead he used that moment to pass it on
to me."
Angel heads to Barney's apartment looking for the man on his trail.
The hunter gets behind him and steals the initiative.
He steps into the light and is reve..oh it's Wesley
Wesley reveals he's actually on the trail of one of Barney's friends.
They kill the demon and Angel brings Wesley back to the office.
Wesley explains he's now a rogue demon hunter
"What's a rogue demon?"
With his watcher background pins down the demon in question and Angel, as a part of
his grief over Doyle, proclaims that he now works alone.
As he goes after the demon chasing Barney, Cordy tries to sketch out the demon from her
vision and explains to Barney she inherited Doyle's visions.
Barney turns on her .
Cordy wakes up at an auction for exotic demon items and finds her eyes are now on the block.
After a bidding war, Cordy's eyes are won by a lawyer from Wolfram and Hart.
As her eyes are about to be extracted, in come Wesley and Angel.
Wesley frees Cordy, kills Barney and Angel makes eggs.
This is definitely my favorite episode of Angel so far, and is a huge step towards becoming
Angel the show that I really love.
Though I have a few quibbles.
I have to admit, I find the ambiguity behind how exactly the visions work a little annoying.
Doyle was imparted the visions by the Powers, presumably without him having to makeout with
one of them.
Passing them through Cordy via kiss makes for some great comedy in this episode, but
it's never explained why she then can't pass them on to anyone else the same way and
yet (this is a spoiler for later in the series but not a big one) the visions are shown again
later in the show to pass by kiss.
But then we see in the auction near the end of the episode that the visions can be forcibly
removed by taking her eyes out?
Sure we can head-canon up a justification for it but ultimately it feels a bit like
the visions just work in a way that is convenient for the writer's.
It feels to me cheap and a little hollow.
Ultimately I think the deus ex mahina's that drive a lot of Angel's lore end up
working together to make something pretty interesting philosophical points, and we'll
get into that, but some of the details feel just sloppy at times.
Which is frustrating because when the writing is good, it's really really good.
As with the scene in which Barney uses his empathic abilities to attack Cordelia, while
at the same time providing her a wonderfully effective bit of character development.
"Terrible actress?
How could you know?"
- "Because you know.
Your entire being is whispering it to me right now."
The scene both reveals to us a depth and insecurity in Cordy we haven't had many glimpses of,
as well as sets up her willingness to carry the visions.
To some degree it echoes the same beat from Room with a View but is to me feels much more
chilly and effective, devoid of Room's camp.
And Cordy as a carrier for the noble visions is a wonderful setup, as she is, perhaps,
the one person less suited for such a noble mission (at THIS point) than Doyle was.
Speaking of, I realize that Doyle was a treasure for many people but I think Wesley was such
a smart addition to the cast.
There were a number of ways that the show could have gone wrong after Doyle's departure,
including if the writers had tried to move the show along with just Cordy and Angel,
or if a new character had come along we the audience had never met before, obviously earmarked
to be the new third, after we were still grieving Doyle's death, bringing on inevitable comparisons.
But Wesley already has a history with these characters and feels right at home.
Angel's dismissive annoyance is clearly justified by the Faith debacle in Buffy season
3.
And Cordy's kissing him to try and get rid of the visions evokes their brief train wreck
of a kiss from the library.
His character also already fits in well with the shows ideas about redemption.
"We all got things to atone for."
"I'm a fraud.
I had two slayers in my care.
One turned evil.
The other is a renegage."
Interesting to note that as much of a buffoon as Wesley seems to be it's significant to
note that Barney is ACTUALLY afraid of him.
It's a subtle but important detail suggesting that Wesley is much better at his job then
his social awkwardness would indicate, and perhaps there is more to explore in his character
beyond him just being comic relief.
Wesley has power but has been shaped by something unseen into a devastatingly insecure man.
His could be an interesting journey.
Though I'm not a fan in these early episodes of when Wesley being Wesley degrades into
slapstick.
It reminds me a bit of the writer's mishandling Cordy a bit in Buffy Season 2, when it seemed
like they couldn't decide if she was shallow or just vapid.
Shallow gives an opportunity for growth.
Vapid does not.
Either way, I really do enjoy this episode.
THIS feels like Angel.
Angel with Doyle, whaile great, was just a different show.
And while the growing pains are FAR from over yet, Parting Gifts does a lot to settle the
dust and gather the instruments that will go on to make the music of the show I love.
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