Angel S2-20: The Short Review

'Over The Rainbow'

Written by Mere Smith

Directed by Fred Keller

I'm trying to be optimistic. I'm trying to keep the faith; to believe that the writers, despite evidence to the contrary, do know what they are doing. Judged as part two of a four-part story, 'Over The Rainbow' may well do what it is intended to do, and do it well. However, there's no getting around the fact that in isolation, it's a disappointment. It's not as bad as it could have been, but it's by no means as good as it should have been.

I can't quite put my finger on why, either. Pylea is by no means as badly realised as I feared; for all that it's a standard, cliched fantasy land, it is quite well done. Although some of the accessories - notably the swords - look a bit, well, cheap, some of the locations are very nice indeed. In particular, some of the woodland shots are stunning, and it's almost enough to make me wish Angel would find more excuses to walk around in the sunlight.

And it's not as though nothing happens, either. Indeed, this is quite a busy episode, and raise a lot of questions about Pylea whilst providing very few answers. The flaws, I think, lie in the plotting. They start in LA, with Gunn. I can just about believe that Gunn would, when push comes to shove, go with the A-team on a rescue mission than stay to take care of his crew. However, we weren't shown him making the choice; it happened off-screen, and that makes the suspension of disbelief, for me, much harder. Then the A-team do a series of really rather dumb things - why, for example, did they not take any supplies with them on their trip?

Pylea itself though, whilst looking, as I said, surprisingly good, is a bit of a disappointment. The host's descriptions of his home seem to have been quite heavily exaggerated. It didn't come across as "a world of black and white", or indeed particularly evil - instead, it was merely medieval. The logic of the society also escapes me; in some cases specific demon types seem to have specific roles - such as the robed ones who tested Cordelia - in other cases, such as the Host's people, they seem to occupy a variety of social niches. The role of humans is also unclear; do all humans in Pylea originate on earth, or is there a separate population somewhere? Narwek's comment to Fred that she should have 'stayed in the woods' makes me suspect that latter. Lastly, of course, there is that ending, which on the face of it appears to be a monumentally bad piece of demon logic - 'hey, she's cursed - let's make her our ruler!' Presumably there's a reason for it, but as an ending for this episode it left an awful lot to be desired.

'Over The Rainbow', then, seems to have been, like last week, a functional episode. It's not a story in its own right and that makes it rather hard to decide how to rate it. I suspect this is intended to be the calm before a storm, to lull us into a false sense of security as to the true nature of Pylea. However, I also suspect it was meant to be fun; to be a bold adventure story, in the best tradition of such things - and I like the fact that the writers are brave enough to try something like this. Time will tell whether it succeeded at the former; unfortunately, I think it failed miserably at the latter. What we have got instead, for almost the first time this series, is an episode that actually lapses into dullness a couple of times. It's almost as if the show is on autopilot; and three episodes before the finale, that's a real shame.