Product Description
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DVD Special Features
Disc One:
Episodes: Judgement, Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been, First
Impressions, Untouched
Commentary for Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been
Disc Two:
Episodes: Dear Boy, Guises Will Be Guises, Darla, The Shroud Of
Rahmon
Script For Darla
Disc Three:
Episodes: The Trial, The Reunion, Redefinition
"Making Up The Monsters" Featurette, Stills Gallery, Set
Blueprints, "Inside the Agency" Featurette
Disc Four:
Episodes: Blood Money, Happy Anniversary, The Thin Dead Line,
Reprise
Disc Five:
Episodes: Epiphany, Disharmony, Dead Again, Belonging
Script for "Disharmony"
Disc Six:
Episodes: Over The Rainbow, Through The Looking Glass, There's
No Place Like Plrtz Glrb
Commentary for "Over The Rainbow", Season 2 Overview Featurette,
"Stunts" Featurette, Season One DVD trailer, Cast Biographies
.co.uk Review
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It is with this second series that Angel, the darker Los
Angeles mean-streets spin-off from Buffy, comes entirely into its
own. Angel, the vampire with a soul and rather too much hair gel,
is driven partly by his need for atonement and partly by his
anger at the manipulations of the satanic law firm Wolfram and
Hart, especially the morally equivocal Lindsey (Christian Kane).
At the end of the previous season, they set his emotional
destruction in motion by bringing back from hell Darla, the
vampire who turned him, whom he loved for centuries and then
killed to save Buffy. Julie Benz's soft-voiced passion--"God
doesn't want you, but I still do"--makes her a perfect tragic
foil for David Boreanaz's "billowy coat King of Pain" hero and
mid-season offers further cause for Angel's despairing rage at
his failure to save Darla from being turned vampire again.
There is a nice balance of comedy, horror and the starkly tragic
here--fake swamis, accursed shrouds, sexually abused telekinetic
assassins all come into the mix along with Angel's gang of
sidekicks--pedantic Wesley, abrasive n, flighty clairvoyant
Cordelia--and a new and wonderfully improbable character who
starts as a running joke and becomes so much more--the Host (Andy
Hallett), a green demon with red horns, eyes and hair, who sees
into the souls of those who sing karaoke at his bar. And in a
four-part finale, the group's friendship with the green karaoke
demon Lorne sends them off to his home dimension to rescue
Cordelia, right wrongs and acquire an important new character.
On the DVD: Angel, Season 2 on disc presents all the episodes in
their original 16x9 widescreen format (2.35:1), which enables
viewers to see s as they were originally conceived, for
example in impressive moments like the march of the four vampires
through a burning Shanghai or the climaxes of the mediaeval Pylea
sequence. The sound is a sumptuous Dolby Surround 2.0. The first
Pylea episode, "Over the Rainbow", has a commentary by its
director Fred Keller; the 1959 flashback episode "Are You Now or
Have You Ever Been?" has a commentary by writer Tim Minnear.
There are also featurettes on the set designs--specifically
concentrating on the huge hotel set which dominates Season 2.
--Roz Kaveney