I certainly have my biases
and I try and acknowledge them to you each time I manage to
force one of them up from the waters of my subconscious.
I think it’s an important part of our continuing conversation.
Episodes I do or do not like.
Tropes that grate on me.
Or stock characters I find obnoxious.
"--you're a girl!"
But I noticed something interesting happen each and every time I sat down to write a script for the 'Buffy' Guide
writing for an episode that I had previously written off.
Whenever I’d pick apart those episodes with my flawed microscope
I found almost invariably that I discovered something I loved.
'Lonely Heart(s)' is one of those episodes.
"I get visions."
"We do things a certain way in L.A."
"I'M BAD!"
'Lonely Heart(s)' opens on Angel sitting in his darkened office contemplating...
...well...
...Buffy most likely.
Doyle comes in and tries to bait Angel into a night on the town
and Cordelia shows up with the calling cards for the new agency.
"A butterfly?"
"No wait, no, it's an owl!"
Doyle has a vision of a club somewhere in town.
Somehow or another they narrow down the location
...kind of unclear.
At the bar, a young woman is being hit on by a dude with a pretty sweet sport coat t-shirt combo.
The 90s yuppy at eleven makes a move to invite the woman back to his place
and we can tell by his abrupt change in expression that he’s a predator of some kind.
The camera traverses the bar and gives us a cross section of lonely disconnected singles.
Team Angel show up and starts looking for a source of trouble.
Cordy proves surprisingly adept at analyzing the various personality types at the bar
while Angel handles all approaches hamfistedly
before running into…
“Are you maybe in need of some rescuing?”
...Kate.
Doyle starts a bar fight while trying to defend Cordelia’s honor,
which Cordy is having absolutely none of.
“The lady’s with me, alright.”
“No, I’m not.”
And in their first group attempt to rescue someone Team Angel starts a bar fight and loses a victim.
Back at the office, they’re researching the history of..D’oblique
with a curiously fast Netscape Navigator dialup connection
and they realize there’s something that’s been stalking the bar for quite awhile now.
While studying lore for hints as to what the demon might be,
Cordy accidentally cuts a smitten Doyle.
"Ugh!"
“Demons."
"Is there anything more disgusting?”
Angel manages some successful sleuthing
and tracks the location of the next victim.
When he breaks in they’re already dead
...or...
...occupied.
So the demon is one that passes from victim to victim as a way of living forever.
Angel confronts the demon who is a body swapper in search of a permanent pad.
“I already know it's not the one the I can live in.”
“Then it’ll have to be the one you DIE in.”
God, I love those kinds of cheesy action movie lines,
...and I’m NOT kidding.
By the way, if you’re watching the non-4:3 version of the show
there’s one of the worst instances of fourth wall breaking I think I’ve noticed yet.
Demon gets away and Kate breaks in just in time to Scully the wrong idea.
Kate tries to arrest him
...and Angel escapes.
He calls Kate and asks her to meet him at the bar.
The real demon baits Kate into the back room
and tries to jump bodies with her.
Angel saves her.
A disgusting necrotic burrower demon tries everything he can to “make a connection” with someone else.
Angel catches up to the demon in the alley and sets it ablaze
while Kate shoots the thing dead.
They exchange an amicable goodbye
...and Angel hands Kate his bat signal.
“What is this a lobster?”
Though I didn’t quite cover it,
we’ve already been introduced to the concept that Angel needs to connect himself back into humanity.
A key point for his character in this season.
In the pilot, Doyle brought up how it wasn’t enough for Angel to be saving people.
Goodness and meaning aren’t simply measured in numbers.
And the math might cause him to erroneously believe he could sample a victim.
There are obvious echoes here to Faith’s dilemma in 'Buffy Season 3'
when, after stabbing a human being, she said to Buffy:
“Anyways, how many people do you think we’ve saved by now?
"Thousands.”
"And didn't you stop the world from ending?"
"Because in my book, that puts you and me in the plus column."
I think the writers are beginning to frame a few ideas here.
The first is that our humanity, our identity as an individual
is at least partially defined by our relationships with the people around us.
And Angel has lost his primary defining relationship
- Buffy.
After wandering the world alone in a meaningless walkabout,
Whistler introduced him to Buffy
and helped him find some purpose to connect with the world again.
And his relationship with Buffy,
his representation for all that is good in the world,
made the consequences of his actions as Angelus,
...vivid.
Especially when he again, turned
and Angelus attempted to destroy the only thing in life Angel cared about.
And it was those consequences that the First capitalized on in 'Amends',
when the First attempted to manipulate Angel into performing evil.
Angel gives up and tries to kill himself
but is once again brought back into the world by the relationship that managed to do it in the first place,
...Buffy.
When it’s clear he can’t stay with her
Angel flees to L.A..
And I think, we see him here acting as he thinks Buffy would want him to act.
He’s doing good, but he’s doing so because he wants to be the half-man that Buffy fell in love with.
That is STILL the ever present defining relationship of his character.
Something represented in his hangup call to Buffy in Episode One.
This is Angel now.
With no defining connection to the world,
no desire to find one
and no reason to do what he's doing
other than trying to live up to the expectations of an ex that is no longer in the picture.
Remember, he wasn’t trying to save anyone before he met Buffy, guilt or no guilt.
What I think this means is that action without faith, action without purpose, is empty.
And at the beginning of 'Lonely Heart(s)', we see Doyle trying to move Angel out of this moment he’s frozen in.
I think by the end of the episode we see Angel, grasping for his human half, has found some clarity.
It’s gotta keep trying to make the connection.”
“Why?”
“Because that's what lonely people do.”
Emphasis on people.
The burrower metaphor is an interesting one as it functions on a few different levels.
As a representation of loneliness and how it can LITERALLY eat you up inside.
There’s an STD aspect to the monster.
And there’s the idea of poisonous loneliness actually making you unattractive to the people you are desperate to get close to.
Obviously, this is a model for Angel letting his loneliness fester
and, while his sexual act can have potentially dangerous consequences,
sex isn’t actually the only balm to loneliness.
In fact, without a connection it can be a piss poor one.
Late 90s L.A. continues to be a prominently featured character.
I’m pretty sure I’d rather have a serious illness than go to a place like D’Oblique.
As Twitter user @valekennedy pointed out,
"it looks like the type of club that would give you a serious illness anyway".
The title of the club is probably a reference to the 1955 black and white French noir,
'Diabolique' *'les diaboliques'
- about two femme fatales, a murder and a detective.
Though, the show continues to subvert the traditional noir.
And Angel is the superhero detective yes,
but he is far from Phillip Marlowe,
strolling up to the bar and laying a sweet line on a beautiful blonde.
“Are you maybe in need of some rescuing?”
There's also the scene where Angel tries to Batman he and Kate out of the basement
and instead...
[crash]
Watching this episode, I noticed both 'Buffy' and 'Angel' have dated bits.
But it’s interesting how dated on Buffy feels like nostalgia.
Dated on 'Angel' feels like the reason we changed everything away from that in the first place.
A lot of late 90s corporate douche bag.
Still, I think I learned to appreciate 'Lonely Heart(s)' this time through.
The club is a little gross
and our leads haven’t yet developed anything near what I would describe as chemistry.
But within the context of Angel’s arc
... it makes sense.
And I like what it's asking Angel to reach out and grasp.
A reason.