"Expecting"
Airdate: January 25, 2000
This episode's a hard one to sum up. I want to say that it's like Rosemary's Baby except for the way Rosemary's Baby was creepy and freaky and good. So I'll just say that the basic storyline -- in which Cordelia has a one-night stand and wakes up nine months pregnant with a litter of demon babies -- reminds me of many a bad science fiction film. So as far as comparisons to Rosemary's Baby go, it's actually a bit closer to The Astronaut's Wife.
Actually, I did manage to fit pretty much the entire story into one aside in the paragraph above. Cordelia goes out with a guy named Wilson, invites him in, has sex with him, and wakes in the morning to find him gone and herself pregnant. Wilson can't be reached, but Angel finds Cordelia's girlfriends to be in a similar state of preggers-ness, and one of them tells him that Wilson and his crew hang out at a local gun club. Angel goes there, they try to jack him up, he jacks them up instead, and Wilson sings like a canary.
Meanwhile, back at the VampRanch, Cordelia and Wesley go for some prenatal care and discover that Cordy's not carrying just one demon baby; she's got seven. This is a multiple-birth case that's sure to make it on 60 Minutes. While Wesley is busily trying to identify the demon so the births can be stopped, Cordy -- now under the telepathic control of her unborn children -- goes all protective-mom and clocks the annoying twerp, then leaves to go rendezvous with the big ugly father of her evil spawn.
She meets up with the other pregnant women there, and for some reason that's lost on me, they all change into froofy white nightgowns. Oooh, sinister. They then proceed into a large pool of icky muck, prepared to die giving birth to their little bad seeds, and the proud papa emerges from hiding in a show of effects that's almost as cheesy as The X-Files' Lord Kinbote (but not cool-cheesy like the subterrainian homesick alien, more like "our effects budget sucks" cheesy). Wesley, that knight in shining armor, that savior of women in distress, that complete bumbling moron, shows up just in time to distract the demon while Angel rolls in a canister of liquid nitrogen. Wesley shoots a hole in it, the demon is frozen because as we know, when you shoot a canister of liquid nitrogen you end up with a uni-directional perfectly functioning weapon which kills only the thing it's meant to kill and not all the girls sitting like zombies in a pool of sludge. Yeah, okay, MacGuyver. Whatever.
The demon baby thing is resolved when they freeze the demon-dad; all of the women simultaneously abort their little unborn kids in what is apparently supposed to pass for a "the demon kids mystically dematerialize" way rather than the "the fully-developed demon children are forcibly aborted into sludge in a torrent of bodily fluids" way. And... I'm sorry, but that is just fucking gross, and isn't it convenient that they just happened to be standing in sludge already so that the whole no-longer-pregnant thing doesn't seem as revolting as it really is?
Cordelia climbs out of the pool, swings some hanging metal thing at our frozen demon and shatters him into little bitty pieces. The next day at the office she's moving-on girl, and also touchy-feely girl when she tells Angel and Wesley that she trusts them. Awww. Somebody get me my camera, it's a goddamn Kodak moment.
After four years of beating the "sex is bad" theme over the head on Buffy, I think I can safely say that I get it, we all get it, and we understand that perhaps the writers have some sexual issues that they might want to see a therapist about. Okay. Could we now move on to something that's not horribly overused and horribly predictable? How 'bout we see Cordy kick a little ass for a change instead of being the victim all the time? Oh! I know! Have Angelus' demon transfer itself to Cordy. She'll become evil, she'll get an ax, and she'll chase after Wesley with the intent to cause him serious harm! Now that's entertainment!
-- Lisa Kincaid
Angel airs Tuesdays on the WB.
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