Shroud of Rahmon is…
It’s nice...it’s...fine. It’s good. Lets just talk about ‘The Trial.’
All right, all right, all right. Shadow of Rahmon is another lightweight entry in the
second season - a funnish, noir caper/fantasy mashup. The nature of the episode along with
the way in which it’s construction actually makes it less interesting on rewatches means
the episode feels v a little skippable to me. Which is a problem because...nested
in it is a rather significant event for Angel’s second season.
The episode opens with the ‘How We Got Here,’ trope.
“Wait...let me start earlier…”
We see events happening near or at the climax of the story, in this case Wesley being in an
interrogation room talking like an old-timey detective (which has a later magical explanation.)
Apparently Angel bites someone in this episode.
One week earlier (or whatever) Cordy has herself a new doo.Angel and Gunn are having a chat with a
contact about a big job that is going to go down. Angel gives Gunn the, ‘I’ll take it from here.’
“And what am I supposed to do? Sit home and knit?” - “I could use a sweater. Something dark.”
Angel stops by Darla’s old digs and Kate is hanging about looking for her as well.
I continue to find this version of Kate a little tedious. He
stakes the rat pack vampire and Jersey Shore’s his way back to their hideout.
Gunn likewise cons his way into the crew and there is some fun to be had as Angel
and he both try and save each other by getting the other one kicked out.
Everyone’s role in the crew starts to make sense. The demon who lifts.
The demon with no body heat. And the demon who...drills...stuff…
Anyway, Kate gets herself involved and, in fitting with her character, runs
in without backup. Cordy and Wes suss out what and where the shroud is and that the shroud makes
everyone crazy, though exactly how is...a little confusing. The Shroud starts to do its work.
Kate does her Kate thing and Angel bites her to save her, though, conveniently the present
members of team Angel only wake up just in time to see him bite her. Angel and Gunn
fight but Angel regains his composure just long enough to get the shroud outside and burn it.
And Wesley still can’t think of anything.
Kate comes in, sets him free and we see exactly why Angel did what he did.
I don’t have a ton for you in this one. An odd consequence of Angel’s Season 2 arc being so good,
might be that, since Angel has been hitting so many dingers, decent episodes like this
one feel even more bloopy. ‘Rahmon’ breaks up the flow of what might be one of the greatest
episode stretches in the entire series, from "Dear Boy" to "Redefinition.” Funny enough, I remember
having a similar sensation of arc’us interruptus in Buffy’s second season with episodes like Phases
and Killed By Death. Both shows smoothed out that experience in later seasons. Well...almost.
Anecdotally, I’ve found ‘Shroud of Rahmon’ to be a divisive episode in the fan community.
Either it makes a few fan’s favorite one-off episode lists
or I read groans at it’s mention. Your mileage is probably going to be proportional to how fun
you find the noirish magical hijinx take on the Ocean’s 11/Usual Suspects caper genre,
multiplied or divided by how fun you find David’s performance of Jay-Don, the rat pack-pire.
I think I was entertained on the first run through of the series but consider the episode pretty
skippable since. An episode doesn’t really have any obligation to be entertaining more than once
but usually the phenomena works the other way for me with the Buffyverse - our critical
examination elevating my experience of an episode, as with Guise Will Be Guise. Rahmon
is another breather episode like Guise Will Be Guise...except that it...isn’t very funny.
“Yeah we can’t get it started without LESTER. Whose Lester?’
And in any movie or show using the, 'It all went horribly wrong,' stuff (as in beginning
the episode at the ending with a cliffhanger and then flashing back) has a bizarre quirk to it
in that it generally only works fine once. Any rewatch tends to increase
diminishing returns and Rahmon’s cold open now feels slow to me instead of fun.
For some reason, I was also feeling caper fatigue when I watched it this time around,
even though I checked and was surprised to see that the only other real use of the caper so far
was in the terrific Blinddate. I suppose Rahmon is more ‘Usual Suspects’ than Blinddate’s Ocean’s 11.
“I’m the good guy. I’m the bad guy.” ‘Rahmon’ is also the hardest an episode has
noir'd since 'Are You Now...' which can be fun but ‘Rahmon’ lacks the
same sort of dramatic or thematic density of either ‘Blind Date’ or ‘Are You Now.’
And, yes, while I enjoy when the normally dour Angel pretends to be someone else
undercover (the painting tour guide in She as an example) sometimes David goes a little too broad
for me in a show like Angel. “Herb Saunders. Baltimore.”
Plus, I was never quite able to shake a grating association I had with his Jay Don.
They’re not completely avoidable in any review but I try not to traffic too heavily
in nitpicks. Generally my own are easy for me to ignore when there is a big dramatic punch or
a whole bunch of laughs but, apparently...when an episode doesn’t shake enough shiny things
in front of my face I can't seem to stop myself from getting distracted by them.
So, the Shroud’s power has been exacerbated by the glass breaking but it is so powerful it started
affecting everyone BEFORE the case was opened? Specifically on the guard who WORKS at the museum.
How is this thing a thing...and at a museum for muggles?
If the shroud is THIS powerful even in its case
why hasn’t total bedlam already ensued at the museum?
Also I don’t really understand the way the Shroud’s power works
and that does have some implications for the theme of the episode.
29:00 “I’m not the bad guy. I’m the GOOD guy. Wait no I’m the bad guy.”
GET it?!? Because Angelusisez?
So, with some of our Usual Suspects it seems like the shroud gives a big jolt to their ID.
Which works well then with our understanding of vampires being ID
monsters and the Shroud giving everyone vampire yellow eyes. Angel and Gunn get territorial and
want to go it alone. The human guard gets greedy. The demons get violent. This would also work as an
explanation for why Angel is able to resist the Shroud’s power enough to save Kate at the end:
He’s been learning to resist the yellow-eyed ID monster inside him for years.
Buuut…a single episode of shoplifting aside, Wes and Cordy mostly just seem to be acting drunk.
28:00 “We should stick together.”
“My teeth are so...big…”
Speaking of Kate, there is some other good stuff to this episode beyond it’s hijinx. Angel saving
her here informally puts an end to the incessant Kate-naningans that started after ‘The Prodigal.’
To say her character began Season one as tropey can hardly be considered a
criticism in the Buffyverse, which was assembled almost entirely from
familiar ones innovated on them from there. I always thought there were a number of
interesting directions the show could’ve gone with her, including after her father’s death.
But one of the least interesting and most difficult to pull off strikes me
as making her a constantly adversarial lone wolf agitator to our main ensemble.
Yes. I get the father-pain. I understand her motivation and why she does what she
does. But that doesn’t make her a fun or captivating character.
There are a few problems. The first is that the core cast will always get the lion’s share of
screen time. We the audience spend all of our time on THEIR struggles. Identify with THEIR
motivations and THEIR arcs. Without dedicating an equal amount of screentime to her off on her own,
think all the conversations between Faith and the Mayor, eventually Kate just began to feel
tedious. Yes, I get her background and beef but in
For that reason, there are passing similarities to Angel’s arc and maybe Kate was intended to
act as a reflection of that but Angel turning to Angelus in Buffy Season 2 isn’t the same because
we spent lots of time with Angelus, Spike, and Dru, the turn was a case of magical intervention,
not one that constantly reflected Angelus’ character, and Angelus was a super villain
You wanna know what the worst part was? You wanna know how I got these scars.
At some point Kate ceased to be a character for awhile and
began acting solely as a source of conflict for plots ala the Joyce effect. Or worse…
“You’re a girl.”
She served the story but the story rarely served her.
Though her arc over the coming handful of episodes now mercifully redirects a bit.
Cordy’s diatribe in the middle of the episode about
sacrificing women always makes me want to stand up and cheer.
Even if her hair in this one is...I mean…
...I mean it’s nice. Actually, according to the DVD commentary,
this whole thing was an inside joke. Charisma was begging the producers to
let her cut her hair because it was too heavy and bulky. They did, and the first result was,
as she describes it, a bit of a disaster that they work on for the next season and a half.
I also think the name of the episode is cute. I wasn’t able to confirm that this was where the
title came from but follow my logic: The Shroud of Turin, is a length of linen cloth bearing
the negative image of a man. Some claim the image depicts Jesus and the fabric is the burial shroud
in which he was wrapped after crucifixion. So, you might say it’s the Shroud of Jesus.
Or....Shroud of Hay-sooos? From there we get the Shroud of Ramon.
It seems like the Shrouds history confirms the play on words.
“This is known to have occurred twice in history, once in 1803 in the Mexican
city of El Encanto, causing it's entire population to go insane.”
Annnnd...that’s really all I’ve got on this one. The rest feels either a little
thematically repetitious of things we’ve already seen (Gunn and Angel running into trouble when
they’re off on their own. Kate running in with no backup) or conflicts that don’t
really go anyplace like Gunn and Angel’s specific personal conflict over who gets to be the leader.
I mean, Angel drank human blood. From a living person. For the first time in
this series. That’s a pretty big deal. But, unlike other
incredibly significant arc or character details nested in tonal departure episodes…
...the nature of Rahmon as an episode kind of undermines the gravitas of the event for me.
This SHOULD feel incredibly significant. Instead, at the end of the episode when Cordy and Wes are
worrying about Angel drinking human blood I just want to say, “Turn those frowns upside downs you
two. This is no biggie. The last time Angel drank human blood all that happened was he cut
ties with everyone who loves and supported him, to go off and fight evil alone and the way he sees
fi....OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH