Angel: Season 02 on AllMovie

With evil law firm Wolfram & Hart firmly established as the chief source of villainy in Los Angeles, Angel began its second season with its first truly extended story line: the war between Angel (David Boreanaz) and his lawyerly nemeses for the soul of Darla (Julie Benz), his newly resurrected, newly human vampire consort. A Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran and a staple in Angel flashback scenes, Benz was able to modernize her fan-favorite character and add a sympathetic thread to Darla's elegant villainy. But when evil babe Drusilla (Juliet Landau) arrived during sweeps month to re-vampirize Darla and crush Angel's soul, the story line shifted to explore the idea of hero-as-vigilante. A rift developed between Angel and his compatriots, sending the title character on a darker path and leaving his resentful friends to continue their own efforts to "help the helpless." As Wesley became the de facto leader of Angel Investigations, Alexis Denisof was finally able to play the character as something other than comic relief. Charisma Carpenter, too, slipped into something a little more heroic as her character, Cordelia Chase, struggled to control her painful visions from The Powers That Be -- and that plot device, which had begun as a supernatural version of Charlie's disembodied voice on Charlie's Angels, soon allowed the writers to add a deeper, richer dimension to Cordelia's previous mixture of sarcasm and sex appeal. Meanwhile, new series regular Gunn (J. August Richards) slowly integrated himself into the mix. And, although he wouldn't become a regular cast member until the fourth season, Andy Hallett's green-skinned, karaoke-singing demon character Lorne injected campy humor into the show's already diverse mixture of styles and tones. Crossovers with parent series Buffy the Vampire Slayer continued. However, the producers' plans to explore the rehabilitation of bad-girl slayer Faith went nowhere when actress Eliza Dushku proved unavailable for anything but a quick cameo. (She would return two seasons later.) In fact, guest-star scheduling problems caused the entire season to peak early, with the departure of longtime supporting characters Kate Lockley (Elisabeth Rohm) and Lindsay MacDonald (Christian Kane) and a fateful sexual tryst between Angel and Darla. The final four episodes introduced a completely new, Wizard of Oz-esque story line that, although hardly a hit with fans or critics, did facilitate another addition to the cast: Amy Acker as Fred, a Southern belle with a scientific bent.