Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

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This article is about the character. For the episode, see Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode).
Angel
love interest for heroine Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a young woman whose destiny as "the Slayer" is to fight the forces of evil, such as vampires and demons. However, their relationship is complicated by the fact that Angel is himself a vampire cursed with remorse and a human soul, which motivates him to assist Buffy in her duties as Slayer. The character's popularity led to the production of the spin-off Angel, which follows the character's struggle towards redemption after moving to Los Angeles. In addition to the two television series, the character appears in the comic book continuations of both series, as well as much other expanded universe
literature.

In the character's backstory, he was born Liam in

18th-century Ireland and, after being sired, assumed the name Angelus, achieving infamy as the most sadistic vampire in European history. After angering a Romani clan, he was cursed with his human soul, leading to great personal torment and the decision to resist the evil impulses that come with being a vampire. He later assumes the shortened name Angel, and over the course of Buffy and Angel, he matures into an altruistic champion of mankind, and learns he is a central figure of several prophecies concerning an approaching apocalypse
. In later editions of the comic series, Angel adopted the identity of the masked Twilight and gathered a cabal of humans and demons who had become wary of the rise of multiple Slayers.

Angel ended its five-year run in 2004. However, the canonical comic books Angel: After the Fall (2007–2009), Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight (2007–2011) and Angel & Faith (2011–2013) depict the character's continued story, in which he is caught up in events of cosmic proportion and must deal with the fallout from enormous mistakes he has made.

Season two of Buffy and season four of Angel feature storylines in which, deprived of his soul, he resumes his Angelus persona and torments and kills some of his allies. He has attracted significant interest due to his dichotomous personality in the presence or absence of his soul, and the ways in which his relationship with Buffy conforms to and subverts the tropes of romantic drama and horror fiction.

Appearances

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Angel's first appearance is in "

from God that he was brought back for a reason. Buffy and Angel initially attempt to be friends but eventually resume their romance. However, Angel becomes more and more aware of their limitations as a couple and breaks up with her in the hopes that she will be happier without him, leaving Sunnydale altogether after attending Buffy's prom and helping her in the battle against Mayor Wilkins (Harry Groener
).

Angel

After his departure from Buffy, Angel appeared in his own spin-off series, titled

Sanctuary" where she attempts to kill rogue Slayer Faith (Eliza Dushku) to whom Angel shows compassion, and Angel appears in Buffy's "The Yoko Factor" where he squares off with Buffy's new boyfriend Riley (Marc Blucas
). They finally decide to stay away from each other's business and stick to phone calls at this point. In the season one finale, Angel is given some hope at redemption when the Shanshu prophecy reveals that a vampire with a soul may eventually become human after fulfilling his role in the upcoming apocalypse.

In season two (2000–2001), Angel discovers that Wolfram & Hart has brought his

Forever", comforting Buffy after her mother
's death.

Season three (2001–2002) sees Angel struggle with

Holtz (Keith Szarabajka), who abducts Connor into a hell dimension where time passes differently. Connor (Vincent Kartheiser
) returns days later, fully grown and under the belief that Angel is a soulless monster. Holtz kills himself and Angel is framed for his death by Holtz's lover, prompting Connor to take revenge by sinking his father to the bottom of the ocean. Over the course of this season, Angel's friendship with his colleague Cordelia evolves into romance, but circumstances prevent him from ever confessing his feelings.

In Angel's fourth season (2002–2003), Angel is rescued from the ocean by his former friend Wesley. As Los Angeles crumbles under signs of the apocalypse, Angel is forced to cope with the romantic relationship between his son and Cordelia. In order to find out more about the

penultimate and final
episodes of Buffy, presenting Buffy with an amulet, which is given to Spike, to help her battle the First Evil.

In the fifth and final season of Angel (2003–2004), the character has made a deal with the Devil to become CEO of Wolfram & Hart's Los Angeles office. All of his friends have also become W&H employees, hoping to reform the organization from within under Angel's supervision. Angel's life this season is complicated by the increasingly blurred line between good and evil, the deaths of loved ones Cordelia and Fred (Amy Acker), and the possibility that the Shanshu prophecy may in fact be referring to Spike (who is now also a vampire with a soul and has joined the team) and not Angel. Allowing his friends to believe he is being corrupted, Angel secretly plots to bring down the Senior Partners of Wolfram & Hart by assassinating the Circle of the Black Thorn, the Partners' primary agents on Earth, even signing away his prophesied humanity in the process to convince them of his complex deception. Realizing that he may never be able to fully stop the forces of evil, Angel and his friends enter into a suicidal battle against the armies of the Senior Partners, and the series ends with the question of their survival unanswered.

Between 2001 and 2004, Joss Whedon and

Buffy the Animated Series, which was set during the show's first season. Had the series been picked up by a network, it would have featured Angel (voiced by David Boreanaz) in more adventures set during Buffy's first season. Following a 2008 leak of the pilot to YouTube, Loeb expressed some hope that the series may be resurrected in some form.[1]

Comic books

In 2007, Angel began appearing in two canonical continuations of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel from Joss Whedon. The first of these was Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, published by Dark Horse Comics, which continued the story of the Buffy television series. Later that year, Whedon and IDW Publishing released the series Angel: After the Fall, which continued on from the series finale of Angel. The two series were published by different publishers due to Dark Horse initially giving up the rights to licensed Angel comic books several years ago when the series was still on air.

In Dark Horse's Buffy continuation, Angel initially appears to feature in Buffy's dream sequences (in the comic's third and twentieth issues, as well as in the Dark Horse Presents special Season Eight comic "Always Darkest"), but is later revealed to have been in the series from the beginning.[2] He then features substantially in the remainder of the series. Angel features as the central character in IDW's After the Fall, however, which has no crossover with the events of Buffy. Whedon devised the storyline for After the Fall issues 1-17 with writer Brian Lynch, but did not write for the series himself as with Buffy. Beginning with the eighteenth issue of the series, IDW chose to continue telling Angel stories in an ongoing comic book with rotating writers and artists, although these stories "did not come from Whedon himself".[3][4] In the continued series without Whedon's involvement, Angel engages in episodic adventures, while the series also takes breaks to focus on other characters. Subsequent writers included Bill Willingham.[5] When rights to Angel settings and characters reverted to Dark Horse, IDW promised to end their ongoing Angel series with its forty-fourth issue in 2011, and began negotiating with Dark Horse so that it would bridge continuity with Season Eight and the upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Nine.[6] Its final Angel story is the hardcover send-off Angel Yearbook. During its tenure, IDW also published various miniseries depicting Angel and related characters, such as John Byrne's Angel: Blood and Trenches (2009), and several Illyria and Spike stories.

In After the Fall, set after the fifth season, Angel and his friends struggle as Los Angeles has been moved to a hell dimension by the Senior Partners who have also turned Angel human as a punishment.

Groosalugg. As a mark of respect for his friends, he names a wing of the Los Angeles public library after Wesley and Fred; Wesley is no longer a ghost. Angel leaves the human, traumatised Gunn an Angel Investigations card and returns to his duties helping the hopeless.[19]

In Season Eight, Twilight appears in the

Whistler (Angel's mentor in flashbacks from Buffy season two) that this course of actions leads to the only possible future in which Buffy survives.[32] The final arc, "Last Gleaming", depicts Angel's first encounter with the higher power which bestowed Twilight's superheroic abilities on him. Spike explains the next step in the prophecy, which concerns the new universe springing from the mystical Seed of Wonder, a source for all the magic in the universe, buried beneath Sunnydale.[33] Although he tries to stop more of the damage caused by the Twilight dimension's coming, the Twilight dimension (the aforementioned higher power) possesses Angel.[34] To protect the seed, a possessed Angel then tries to kill Buffy and Spike, and goes so far as to snap Giles' neck. This prompts Buffy to destroy the Seed. This stops the Twilight dimension from destroying the existing world, and Angel is dispossessed, but the universe is also stripped of all magic.[35]

Following on from this, Angel headlines the series Angel and Faith, primarily set in London. Its stories aim to be respectful to the storylines featured in IDW's forty-four issue Angel run,[36] and maintains a very tight continuity with Buffy Season Nine and other related comics.[37] In his series, Angel faces the looming threat of his now unstable former mentor Whistler, who helped bring about his transformation into Twilight, as well as his two dangerous former acolytes, half-demons Pearl and Nash, in addition a group of British Slayers who cannot forgive his actions as Twilight. Along with Faith, he lives in Giles' London apartment where they are joined by Giles' ageless aunts, witches Lavinia and Sophronia. Angel intends to honor Giles' memory, and seeks to collect fragments of Giles' soul from magical items as part of a plan to resurrect him. In the series' conclusion, Giles is successfully resurrected, albeit as a young teenage boy, and the gang pursue Whistler, Pearl and Nash to a rooftop, where they plan to unleash a horrific magical plague on the world as an inelegant means to restore magic to the universe. Nash is killed, and Angel is able to persuade Whistler to see the error of his ways, successfully limiting to the extent of the plague to an area of Hackney in London. In the season's denouement, Faith returns to America alongside Giles, while Angel remains behind to guard over the plagued neighborhood, now called Magic Town, where residents—magically mutated into all manner of creature—are already causing problems.

A second volume of the series launched alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Ten in 2014. Angel defends Magic Town against threats such as Amy Madison during Faith's absence, and acquires several new allies: Eldre Koh, an ancient Nitobe demon freed from his prison by the end of magic; Detective Brandt; Rory, a magically-mutated bartender; and the mutant Tricia and her boyfriend Parker. Angel is also aided by Sophronia and Lavinia, as well as Nadira, a Slayer who hated him for his actions as Twilight but found inner peace after being mutated, and has a deep connection with the magic of Magic Town, which has become sentient. Following Illyria's death in Buffy Season Nine, Angel finds Fred alive again, having been restored by the reset of the laws of magic; she is forced to share her body with Illyria but is able to keep the ancient demon mostly under control. Faith also returns, now working for Zane Pharmaceuticals. A crossover with Buffy Season Ten reveals a new demon villain: Archaeus, who sired the Master and is able to control all the vampires from that bloodline, including Angel, Spike and Drusilla. Angel travels to San Francisco to help Buffy combat the demon lord, discovering that Buffy and Spike are now in a relationship, which Angel believes will not last. Meanwhile, Faith and Fred discover Drusilla in Magic Town, building a vampire army for Archaeus, who follows Angel back to London. The season ends with a conflict between Archaeus and his vampire army (including Drusilla and Detective Brandt), and Angel and his makeshift 'family' (Faith, Fred/Illyria, Koh, Nadira, Sophronia and Lavinia, and the Magic Town populace). Observing the battle, the sentient magic is almost convinced to join Archaeus, but ultimately defends Nadira from him and traps Archaeus inside a statue.

Reception

SFX magazine named Angel as the third greatest vampire in television and film, with rival Spike in first place. They stated that, while he could have worked simply as a brooding love-interest (Buffy) or redemption-seeking hero (Angel), the character also has a "wonderfully appealing, self-effacing humour, helped no end by Boreanaz's ability to look like a slapped puppy". While Angel could be "big and hard and manly", he could also be "sulky, pathetic, in need of a hug". They also cite his poor singing and dancing as examples of his "amusing awkwardness", which "spoke volumes about who he was".[38] For his role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Two, Whatculture placed Angelus at Number One on their list of Buffy Big Bads, alongside Spike and Drusilla, stating that having Buffy's lover become her enemy "emphasiz[es] the tragedy at the show’s centre that Buffy’s Slayer responsibilities mean she has to make difficult choices."[39]

Angel was voted by thousands of

Hello! readers as the sexiest on-screen vampire in 2009. He gathered 34 percent of the vote and finished ahead of other popular vampires like Edward Cullen, Eric Northman, Lestat de Lioncourt and Spike.[40] Forbes named the series Angel as Hollywood's second most powerful vampire show. Rankings were based on television ratings, inflation-adjusted box office performance, as well as presence in popular culture through blog and press mentions since 1979.[41]

See also
  • Forever Knight, 1992-1996, a Canadian TV series, also about a redemption-seeking vampire cursed with a conscience.

References

Notes

  1. ^ Vineyard, Jennifer (2008-08-26). "'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' Animated Series To Be Resurrected?". MTV Movies Blog. MTV.com. Archived from the original on 4 September 2008. Retrieved 2008-09-05.
  2. ^ Phegley, Kiel (January 8, 2009). "Behind Buffy's Twilight Reveal". Comic Book Resources. Archived from the original on 1 March 2010. Retrieved January 9, 2009.
  3. ^ "Kelley Armstrong - "Angel : Aftermath" Comic Book - Q&A". Whedon.info. 2010-06-13. Retrieved 2011-03-20.
  4. ^ http://www.kelleyarmstrong.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=7;t=23682. Retrieved September 5, 2009. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)[dead link]
  5. ^ "Bill Willingham Talks About Angel & Fables at The Blog From Another World". Tfaw.com. 2009-10-07. Archived from the original on 2009-12-19. Retrieved 2011-03-20.
  6. ^ "The official ANGEL IS LEAVING IDW Q&A". IDW Publishing. 2010-08-23. Archived from the original on 2010-08-27. Retrieved 2010-08-24.
  7. ^ a b Brian Lynch (w), Franco Urru (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 2 (2007-11-21). IDW Publishing.
  8. ^ a b Brian Lynch (w), Franco Urru (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 1 (2007-12-19). IDW Publishing.
  9. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Franco Urru (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 3 (2008-01-14). IDW Publishing.
  10. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Franco Urru (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 4 (2008-02-20). IDW Publishing.
  11. ^ a b c Brian Lynch (w), Stephen Mooney and Nick Runge (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 12 (2008-09-04). IDW Publishing.
  12. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Nick Runge (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 8 (2008-06-18). IDW Publishing.
  13. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Nick Runge (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 10 (2008-07-02). IDW Publishing.
  14. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Nick Runge and David Messina (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 11 (2008-08-13). IDW Publishing.
  15. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Stephen Mooney (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 13 (2008-10-22). IDW Publishing.
  16. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Stephen Mooney (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 14 (2008-11-19). IDW Publishing.
  17. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Franco Urru (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 15 (2008-12-17). IDW Publishing.
  18. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Franco Urru (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 16 (2009-01-21). IDW Publishing.
  19. ^ Brian Lynch (w), Franco Urru (a). Angel: After the Fall, vol. 1, no. 17 (2009-02-11). IDW Publishing.
  20. ^ Joss Whedon (w). "The Long Way Home" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 4 (2007-06-06). Dark Horse Comics.
  21. ^ Brian K. Vaughan (w). "No Future for You" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 9 (2007-12-05). Dark Horse Comics.
  22. ^ a b Joss Whedon (w). "A Beautiful Sunset" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 11 (2008-02-06). Dark Horse Comics.
  23. Retreat" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 26 (2009-07-01). Dark Horse Comics
    .
  24. Retreat" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 27 (2009-08-05). Dark Horse Comics
    .
  25. Retreat" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 28 (2009-09-02). Dark Horse Comics
    .
  26. Retreat" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 30 (2009-11-04). Dark Horse Comics
    .
  27. ^ Joss Whedon (w). "Turbulence" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 31 (2010-01-13). Dark Horse Comics.
  28. ^ Brad Meltzer (w). "Twilight" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 32 (2010-02-03). Dark Horse Comics.
  29. ^ Brad Meltzer (w). "Twilight" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 33 (2010-03-03). Dark Horse Comics.
  30. ^ Brad Meltzer (w). "Twilight" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 34 (2010-04-07). Dark Horse Comics.
  31. ^ Brad Meltzer (w). "Twilight" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 35 (2010-05-05). Dark Horse Comics.
  32. ^ Jane Espenson (w). "Commitment through Distance, Virtue through Sin" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight: Riley (2010-08-18). Dark Horse Comics.
  33. ^ Brad Meltzer (w). "Last Gleaming" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 36 (2010-09-01). Dark Horse Comics.
  34. ^ Joss Whedon, Scott Allie (w). "Last Gleaming" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 38 (2010-11-03). Dark Horse Comics.
  35. ^ Joss Whedon, Scott Allie (w). "Last Gleaming" Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, vol. 1, no. 39 (2010-12-01). Dark Horse Comics.
  36. ^ "Angel Returns to Dark Horse Comics :: Blog :: Dark Horse Comics". 2010-08-19. Archived from the original on 23 August 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-29.
  37. ^ "(SPOILER) Big Buffyfest Interview with Scott Allie about Angel's return to Dark Horse". Whedonesque.com. 2010-08-20. Archived from the original on 22 August 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-24.
  38. ^ "The Top 50 Greatest TV and Film Vampires of All Time". SFX Special Edition (39): 33. 2009. Retrieved 2009-09-04.
  39. ^ "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ranking the Big Bads". Whatculture. 2014-04-08. Retrieved 2014-04-19.
  40. ^ "'Angel' hunk David takes 'sexiest vampire' crown from Robert Pattinson in our poll". Hello Magazine. 27 August 2009.
  41. ^ Streib, Lauren (2009-08-03). "Hollywood's Most Powerful Vampires". Forbes Magazine.

External links

  • Buffyverse Wiki
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