Angel
"Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been"

Airdate: October 2, 2000

Are you now or have you ever been a bloodsucking fiend from beyond the grave?

Angel once again goes all mystery-guy on his employees, setting them to the task of researching the Hyperion Hotel, a now-vacant building that's been host to plenty of messed up crap, mostly suicides and mass murders and the like. As it turns out, Angel lived there during the 1950's, and he had a spiffy-do haircut and sexy-lookin' shirts and everything. Of course, shirts like that look better on Doyle, but I digress.

While Wesley and Cordelia faithfully dig into the hotel's history, Angel's at the Hyperion itself, having a look around and remembering the past. He's good at that. Funky flashbacks take us back to the 50's, when the hotel was all ritzy and home to many a Hollywood hopeful. Angel notices a lot of weird stuff going on, like a salesman holding a conversation with nothing, and all sorts of shady characters lurking about. Angel nearly befriends a woman, Judy, who's staying at the hotel, but she has a secret to hide: she worked at a bank until they found out that her mother was black and fired her; angry at the world and the bank, she stole a very large quantity of cash and took off. Angel helps her hide the money and tells her to stay in her room while he tries to exorcise the demonic presence that's haunting the hotel, but when she's mobbed by the hotel manager (played nicely by Forever Knight's John Kapelos) and other guests, she fingers Angel as the bad guy. Egged on by the whispers of the hidden demon, the Hyperion patrons beat Angel and haul him out to the lobby, where he's hung from the rafters. Once the act is done, the people seem to come back to themselves, but it seems to be too late.

While this story could've ended with Angel beginning his path to redemption by helping the people in the hotel, it's got better things in mind and a much more interesting story to tell. Extremely pissed that his neighbors tried to kill him, Angel releases himself from the noose and is greeted by the ugly-lookin', grinning embodiment of the local demon, which tells him that the people in the hotel need his help, and he could save them. This is where we see that the Angel of the past -- even the souled one -- is not the Angel we know now; rather than taking the opportunity to do good, Angel invites the demon to make a buffet of the place, and retreats into the night.

Okay, so he's growing on me. He's kind of a cutie.

In the present day, Angel's assembled his happy band of helpers: Cordelia, Wesley, and the newest bad-ass addition, Gunn. Together they conjure up the demon, which still resides at the hotel, into a physical form that can be killed. It taunts Angel and he realizes that somehow, it's still feeding off the fear and paranoia of someone in the hotel. Angel electrocutes the bad guy and goes upstairs, where he finds Judy, now fifty years older, still sitting in her room. She recognizes him, and wants to go outside now that the force keeping her there is gone, but she wants to rest first; she lays down and dies. Angel's recovered the bag of Judy's stolen cash from its hiding place, and goes back down to the lobby to tell his associates that he's buying the hotel and they're moving in: Angel Investigations has a new home.

This episode manages to kick ass on a number of different levels, foremost among them the depiction of Angel as a scary loner who gives people the heebie-jeebies. The only thing I'm worried about in this turn of events is losing the barely-any-money atmosphere from the first season; though the bag of money may be enough to buy a haunted hotel that the realtor's been trying to unload for years, it won't keep for long, so while they may be as broke as ever, the fairly opulent surroundings of the hotel won't lend much toward the can't-afford-blood atmosphere. Still, it's a new space -- with plenty of rooms to board the hopeless and Gunn's homeless crew -- and it should offer some cool stories in the future, what with all the murder and mayhem surrounding the place. Maybe Phantom Dennis will move in and find some new dead friends.

-- Lisa Kincaid

Angel airs at 9/8C, Tuesdays on the WB.

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