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Angel - Season Four (Slim Set) (0141304227)
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| As the fourth season of Angel starts, everything is still as we left it: Angel has been sunk to the bottom of the sea in an iron box by his inexplicable and vindictive son Connor and Cordelia has been summoned to higher realms to await orders. Gunn and Fred are left in the Hyperion Hotel, unsure about what has happened to their friends, and Lilah is working hard to seduce Wesley to the dark side. In the first few episodes, some of this is resolved but it's almost immediately replaced by far worse crises: prophesies of doom accumulate more rapidly even than usual in this wonderfully gloomy show and a horned rock-like beast rains fire on Los Angeles. This last year is Angel's most tightly dramatic season yet--with a story arc of surprising intensity punctuated by the show's usual wit and sexiness. Season 4 is presented on DVD in Dolby 2.0 Surround Sound and anamorphic widescreen. It comes with insightful, and often hilarious, commentaries on seven of the 22 episodes as well as featurettes--a series overview, profiles of the characters of Jasmine and the Beast, a farewell to the Hyperion Hotel (the characters' base for three seasons), and a discussion of the apocalypse that Angel has to deal with from episode 7 onwards). --Roz Kaveney Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
Before I get into the real review of Angel: Season Four, I have to admit that the way everything was tied together was utterly brilliant. Angel winning Darla a second life, but the life really going to Connor, why Cordelia only saw a portion of what Angel was saying about her, why she "ascended", everything. It's all beautifully woven together to make way for the main arc of Season Four.
THE RISKS: And what a risky arc it was. Having a main character being controlled by an "evil" higher being was more than risky. The character of Cordelia, in this Season, was misused for the point of the story. I'm not sure if this was an ultimately bad idea, but it was very uncomfortable watching Cordelia sleeping with Connor and, especially, kissing the Beast. Also, creating something epic enough to follow Angel: Season Three, the best season yet, is hardly an easy feat.
THE VILLIANS: There were three "Big Bads" in this season, pretty much: The Beast, Angelus, and Jasmine. The Beast was perhaps the most terrifying demon in Angel history, so that was a treat. And as for Angelus, I've been waiting for his return since the second season of Buffy (!), though I think he would have been more entertaining her if Joss Whedon wrote an episode or two that had him. Jasmine was all right, albeit annoying, though her ambiguity was wonderful.
THE GOOD GUYS: Angel is, as always, wonderfully played by David Boreanez. Wesley, Gunn, and (especially) Fred come to the forefront in this season, and I only wish that there was more of Gwenn (electro-chick) to go around. Connor, however, was a disappointment. He was acted AND written to be overtly melodramatic and the result is unlikable. His movements are jerky and his dialogue forced: Booooo!
THE MAJOR HITS AND MISSES: This season is far more arc-dependant than any other season of Angel, which is good. It's rewarding to have such a long story finally come to an end and pay off, but I wouldn't have minded a few "monsters of the week" here and there. However, it just doesn't seem to have the emotional intensity of the third season. This season is Angel's weakest, though it's still thoroughly enjoyable.
EPISODES TO DEVOUR
1. Deep Down (Can't help but cheer when Angel confronts Connor)
5. Supersymmetry (Fred shines)
6. Spin the Bottle (This is, perhaps, the best episode of the Season. I thought it sounded like a silly idea for an episode at first, but it was amazing)
7. Apocalypse, Nowish (The most popular Angel episode, and for good reason)
9. Long Day's Journey (Anyone who knows what the title is referencing gets points)
10. Awakening (Tricks the audience. Completely marvelous)
17. Inside Out
19. The Magic Bullet (Things start to fall back into place)
22. Home
8/10
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Author: Guest
After an amazing season 3 culminated in tragically hopeless catastrophe, I had such high hopes for season 4. Episodes 1 - 6 are dark and interesting, but season 7 is the beginning of the downward spiral. None of the characters are likable or interesting after that point.
The story line was leaden. After growing into a self-less champion for good in season 3, Cordelia acts like a depraved moron until she is revealed to be little more than a body suit for a dark force...except it takes *FAR* too many episodes to reveal this. Much of the final 15 episodes are made up by long, boring, circular talks between Cordelia and Connor (yawn). In the words of Buffy: "Alright! I get it - You're evil!" The blah blah Oedipal/Modred weirdness of the whole season is just not appealing or well-written enough to be intellectually stimulating. Would that Cordelia had never come back for season 4, because it's just too awful that her sassy-yet-big-hearted self was nowhere to be found.
Connor and the Cordy-suit have a baby - a goddess figure named Jasmine...who is kind of like a cross between LaFawnda from Napoleon Dynamite and a New Age yoga instructor. A full five episodes are filled with long, dull scenes of people being adoring acolytes of this unimpressive villain. Connor's character doesn't develop...period. Sorry folks, but he doesn't get gone until the final scene of the final episode. In a word, blah.
Some good stuff: The gang releases Angelus for interrogation purposes and he goes postal, of course. It's well-played by Boreanaz and highly entertaining (Oh, and Angel's hair is slightly shorter and darker, which is a nice change). Faith returns for a few episodes, the best of which is Orpheus. Faith and Angelus share flashbacks of Angel's good deeds ("Dude, you just saved a puppy!"), while guest star Willow works to restore Angel's soul and give guidance to floundering Wesley.
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Author: Guest
While the season starts out slow in the first few episodes (I missed not having Cordelia in the mix), the season picks up once the cast is reunited. The events that drive the relationship dynamics between various characters is particularly good. The story arc for the season was fantasic and carried a great amount of dramatic weight. It is a shame that the network wanted more stand alone episodes after season 4, because season 5 was a much weaker overall effort because of that restriction.
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Author: Guest
I absolutely love the show angel and this season was the best. I love this DVD and I wll keep it forever!!!
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Author: Guest
These releases of ANGEL in new thinpak editions is very welcome. I own a large number of television shows on DVD, but the original packaging for ANGEL was definitely among the worse. Almost all of the discs in all five sets have a tendency to pop of the packaging, resulting in loose discs and in a couple of cases some scratching. These new thinpak versions should take care of all the problems. But not only are these being released in superior packaging; they are bargained priced as well.
Warning: Multiple Spoilers
Of the seven seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and the five seasons of ANGEL, the former's seventh season and the latter's fourth season were the most frustrating, and most flawed. Many things were spectacularly well done, but there were also ill judged story arcs that threatened to undermine all the good things in the season. It would not be wrong to say that Season Four contained many of the best things ever witnessed in either show, as well as some of the worst things.
What went right? The year started with perhaps the most extraordinary episode in the history of the series, "Deep Down." At the end of Season Three, Connor had taken what he imagined to be revenge on Angel for the death of his foster father Holtz by locking Angel in a heavy metal cage, and dropping it into the Pacific Ocean. The new season begins with a fantasy sequence in which Angel imagines himself to be at a dinner with all his friends, Connor included, only to awaken to realize he was still on the bottom of the ocean. Luckily, his estranged colleague Wesley has undertaken the search for Angel, and eventually manages to locate where he has been dropped. Throughout the season we get the same conflicted, tormented, alienated Wesley we saw at the end of Season Four, and his character is far and away one of the finest things of the season.
What else went right? The season was far less episodic than any of the five seasons of the show. TV execs hate long story arcs, but there is no question that from an aesthetic point of view long arcs make a better show. There is a sense in which Season Four was one long story. Additionally, there was a great new and underutilized character in Alexa Davalos's Gwen Raiden, an outstanding bad guy in "the Beast" (impressively played by towering Czech actor Vladimir Kulich), and a fantastic three-episode arc featuring Eliza Dushku as Faith. The special effects were as good as anything ever seen in television, including some eerie sequences in which it literally rains fire from the sky and the sun is blackened out in L.A. We also witnessed what may have been the funniest episode in the history of the show (with the possible exception of Season Five's "Smile Time"), the outrageously funny "Spin the Bottle." And Angelus returned for a few episodes. The high points were very high indeed.
In the light of all these delights, what was it that made it a flawed season? First and foremost, an extraordinary error in concocting the character widely known as "Evil Cordy." For whatever demented reason, it was decided originally to make Cordelia the "big bad" of Season Four, a plan that had to be scraped when Charisma Carpenter became pregnant in real life. Since her baby was due at about the time when she would have been required to fight Angel, keeping the original story arc was clearly impossible. Fans will recall that at the end of Season Three, Cordelia had been made a "higher being." In Season Four we would have found that she had been more or less duped, and would be hijacked by evil entities that would return her to do battle with Angel. Instead, they changed the story by having her have sex with Connor ("yeeecccch") and becoming pregnant with his child, who turned out to be not a child but a full grown goddess with a penchant for eating people. For me this very nearly killed all the good things in the season, since I absolutely loved Cordy's transformation from school snob early in BUFFY to heroine who made extraordinary sacrifices in her willingness to fight the good fight. I thought this a horrible misuse of her character. A second major problem with Season Four was Connor, a character that was never very well conceived and never well written. He never really gelled with the rest of the cast, and most of his scenes felt like interruptions in the action. And on top of all this, he had sex with Cordy ("yeeecccch"). It was no surprise when he was nudged out of the show at season's end. The third major flaw in the season was the character of Jasmine (played by the usually marvelous Gina Torres, who I loved in Whedon's Sci-Fi Western that year, FIREFLY). I and many other ANGEL fans found the episodes featuring Jasmine to be utterly unpleasant. Everyone becomes a mindless automaton, blindly serving her needs unless accidentally contaminated with her blood, Fred first, and then Angel, and eventually the others. This was a story line that was developed in the wake of the discovery of Charisma's pregnancy, and it did have the feeling of something that was grafted onto the season, and not an integral part of it.
So, of all the years of ANGEL, this is the one with more fantastically great and horribly wretched elements. Nonetheless, it still was one of the three or four best shows on television this particular season (2002-2003), matched in my opinion by BUFFY (which suffered its own most flawed season), the prematurely cancelled FIREFLY, and the also tragically cancelled FARSCAPE. Which is to say that warts and all, it remains essential viewing.
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