“Provider”
I’m not sure whether this was planned or not, but both this week’s Angel and this week’s Buffy show our heroes stressing out over money, and putting themselves in danger because for the want of it. In “Provider,” Angel’s worried about Connor’s future, so he’s putting money in a piggybank and the piggybank in a vault, while the rest of the AI team focuses on launching a website and passing out fliers to let the community know that if they’ve got paranormal problems—and ready cash on hand—then they have heroes standing by, ready to help. Only Cordelia is worried that re-focusing on the business side of their business will distract Angel from pursuing his mission as the champion of the helpless, or keep him from tracking down the vampire-hunter who’s trying to kill him. But Angel lets Cordelia know that, “Helping the helpless, finding Holtz and making money are our three #1 priorities.”
So in no time, AIHQ’s lobby is full of humans and demons seeking service, as the gang scrambles from potential client to potential client, getting Lorne to help them with the beasts who don’t speak English. Ultimately, they take on three cases right away, which divides the team, Justice League-style. In one part of the city, Wes and Gunn help a woman who’s being stalked by her undead boyfriend (though Wes reassures her that her zombie ex won’t eat her, because “zombies merely mangle, mutilate, and occasionally wear human flesh”). In another part of the city, Angel helps a man (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, The Comedian!) who claims to be a wealthy businessman looking to get a mob of racketeering vampires off his back. And in still another part of the city, Fred and Lorne have been drafted to help some math-obsessed demons solve a three-dimensional puzzle for their prince.
“Provider” is a straight-up action episode, with some clever twists: Wes and Gunn learn that their client actually killed her now-zombified ex, who’s not such a dangerous beast after all; Angel learns that his client is just posing as a wealthy businessman, and really only wants Angel to clear out the vampire nest so that he can raid their treasure-pile and get back a watch that belonged to a friend they killed; and Fred and Lorne learn that the puzzle-demons only want Fred to prove herself worthy of being decapitated, so that her head (and brain) can take the place of their dying prince’s.
My only real problem with “Provider” is the problem I have with any Angel episode that burns through characters and storylines so quickly: I feel like the writers (in this case Scott Murphy gets the credit) may have squandered some ideas that could’ve been special if nurtured a little more. As it is, while I enjoyed all three stories in “Provider,” none was developed enough to have much meaning beyond their fleeting thrills. The main idea the episode gets across is only that the team makes potentially fatal mistakes when they follow their mercenary instincts instead of pursuing causes they really believe in.
And this is key mainly in the way it synchs up with the main subplot in “Provider.” Very briefly, we see Holtz, who has recently killed the hired guns who had been working for him and is now looking for committed, soul-damaged demon-fighters like himself (and his first recruit Justine) to go after Angel. Holtz has already learned the lesson that Angel and his friends are learning now. The foes remain evenly matched, and are circling each other slowly. I’m pleased to see that the Angel writers know that this particular story need not be dispatched so quickly. It’s one to be savored.
“Doublemeat Palace”
Once again I find that after being peppered with dire warnings about a Buffy episode, the actual experiencing of watching said episode is nowhere near as rough as I’d been led to expect.
Don’t get me wrong: “Doublemeat Palace” is problematic. Director Nick Marck and credited writer Jane Espenson go for a broad, satirical tone that’s never been a Buffy specialty, and though the story holds a surprise or two, none of them are quite as surprising that I’d hoped they’d be. That said, there’s a seed of a good idea in “Doublemeat Palace”—the idea of Buffy joining the minimum wage work force and finding it even more horrific than vampire-slaying—and that seed does sprout occasionally. I laughed at the training video that Buffy is forced to watch when she joins the Doublemeat team: a video that asks, “What happens when a cow and chicken come together?” followed by the hideous sound of grinding implements and faint animal cries. I enjoyed the weird alien vibe of “Manny the manager” and his fierce defense of the dehydrated pickles. I liked Buffy’s co-workers explaining the way the restaurant works in a cultish drone, as though they’d long-since stopped thinking it was strange to have so many automated processes in food-prep. And I loved the way Buffy gets mesmerized by the chicken-slicing and meat-grinding, finding the rendering of flesh, muscle and fat eerily beautiful. (I could go even further and suggest that there’s a connection between Buffy’s bloody mission and her attraction to industrialized chopping, but I doubt that connection was intentional.)