Meadhall of the Comitatus

Of course you may have watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but did you ever sit down and watch the spin off show Angel? Canceled unexpectedly after 5 seasons despite its high popularity, some (myself included) say that it beats its predecessor by a long shot. With all 5 seasons on DVD you can of course check things out for yourself, but how exactly does the show (and the season box sets) rack up? Well, let’s just start with Season One.

DVD Features:

• Available Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
• Commentary by: Joss Wheldon and David Greewalt on ‘City of’, Jane Espenson on ‘Rm w/ a Vu’
• 22 episodes on 6 discs: City Of, Lonely Heart, In the Dark, I Fall to Pieces, Rm w/ a Vu, Sense and Sensitivity, The Bachelor Party, I Will Remember You, Hero, Parting Gifts, Somnambulist,Expecting, She, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, The Prodigal, The Ring, Eternity, Five by Five, Sanctuary, War Zone, Blind Date, To Shanshu in L.A
• Featurettes: “Season 1,” “Introducing Angel,” “I’m Cordelia,” and “The Demons”
• Cast bios
• Still gallery
• Scripts for “Five by Five” and “Sanctuary”

Angel is an interesting show in that it not only accepts its former Buffy ties, but also tries to slowly break away from them. Angel is “the vampire with a soul” who’s made it his job to “help the helpless” after moving to LA, leaving behind Sunnydale (and slowly the “Buffy-verse”) forever. At first I wasn’t sure how the show was going to work out, since I recalled when this show came out that during Season One at least there were a few tie in episodes with Buffy (something would happen on Buffy that would later effect Angel, they had back to back time slots and I guess the writers for the shows, who were the same, decided to exploit that) but strangely so far its seemed to work out. Even references to earlier things that happened on Buffy are fairly well handled, in ways I didn’t notice back then (having the ability to watch both shows).

There are some clever cast tricks on Angel, you can tell that there were certain characters they simply wanted to do more with that were infinitely tied to the Buffy universe, but they could drag them over to Angel and expand on the characters and rip away their old ties and let the characters grow. In this sense Angel is definitely the more “adult” show. The characters are rarely one dimensional, and constantly grow and expand whereas on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and perhaps half the shows on WB at the time) characters never really changed that much no matter what happened to them.

Angel accomplishes this by having an interesting and constantly overarching storyline progression that may be hard to spot at first, but after seeing most of the seasons and then going back to Season One, I was surprised at how much I’d missed (not only in terms of the episodes themselves, but also the characters).

On the technical side, the show does a bit better than most television shows, and as the season progresses the effects improve. Considering they probably started with a limited budget before signed on to a full series it’s pretty commendable. One thing I never liked about the “Buffy” way of doing things though was the way vampires look. They look completely human but then their faces morph into these ugly, big browed monstrosities with fangs. You get used to it but it never did sit too well with me at first, although it does lead to a bunch of interesting scenes because they can play with that little bit extra. Perhaps that’s why they did it, and even if not it’s still good overall usage.

For a show about a vampire though there’s not as much blood as you would think, although more blood and and guts appear later in the season. There’s some interesting (and sometimes gruesome) things to be sure, but once or twice all I could think was “huh, why isn’t there blood there”? I’m guessing it was because it was a TV show.

And speaking of that, let’s get to the technicals of the DVD. The footage all has a nice transfer, but it’s still shot for TV, which isn’t necessarily bad since you’ll be watching it on a television. Fortunately it loses most of the graininess you might otherwise see though. The audio itself is clear enough, it seems to be mixed at a somewhat better fidelity than it was on television, but it’s nothing spectacular, just slightly better than normal quality TV audio. One big plus I noticed though was a good separation of sound between the music and the sound effects/dialogue in the mix. I was a bit disappointed by the extras. Only a few episodes had commentary, and the featurettes were okay but there could have been more of them, and they were just placed randomly on episode discs (in one case stripping the disc down to 3 episodes, instead of the normal 4 on a disc). Instead I believe they should have had more commentaries and a “Special Features” disc with featurettes and other things. Also, another thing that irked me was the way the menu was set up. The episode listings weren’t intuitive, and once you went into an episode the layout of options was unintuitive. Fortunately when you went back to the main menu though it went to the correct next episode, so when you were done watching the current episode and went back to the main menu you could get to the right spot. Luckily if you get lost there’s a little booklet that lays out the episodes (including quick plot summaries).

So for a show, I give this season 4 1/2 stars. But for a box set, I can only give it 3.

On a personal note “Five by Five” and “Sanctuary” (consecutive plotlines) are two of my favorite episodes.