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Angel
Episode 4.05, "Supersymmetry"
Written by Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain
Directed by Bill L. Norton
Yay for Fred! She got a theory printed in a prestigious Physics Journal! So Gunn gets to have sex with her! Yay! That's how this one opens. It's nice that a show with this much of a tendency towards the dark and somber can occasionally show a moment of merriment. Take a moment to appreciate that, before Angel discovers that Connor is sleeping in the same bed as Cordelia. And she hogs the covers, by the way. That's gotta be distracting, especially when you have to try and comprehend what the hell Fred was writing about. I couldn't do it - neither could Angel or Gunn.
Apparently some people could, however, and soon Fred is scheduled to present her theory to a group of intellectuals at a local college. Everyone seems to be going - even Wesley, who blows off Lilah to be in attendance. Lilah in turn follows him there, understandably jealous. Unfortunately for her car, she leave shortly before a portal to another dimension opens above Fred and a large betentacled beast attempts to kill our favorite wallflower. Angel and Gunn manage to fight it off, and afterwards Angel tears Lilah's car apart in retribution. Of course, Lilah didn't do it (how much fun would that be? Oh wait, quite a bit probably).
The whole portal thing throws poor Fred for a loop, however, and she starts writing on walls and behaving very much like a Pylean slave. This, of course, sucks, so Angel and Gunn work to figure out who was responsible for the attempt on her life. This involves an interesting new trick Angel displays, in which he reconstructs the environment from a moment in his past and is then able to relive it as it happened. That's kind of cool, but I find myself surprised that there wasn't a use for this little trick in any of the episodes previous. Anyway, Angel discovers the second most likely suspect - a college student he and Gunn soon encounter in a comic book store. There, Gunn makes the most terrifying threat in the history of geekdom (paraphrasing): "Imagine this is Daredevil #181. I'm Bullseye, you're Elektra." Every once in a while, Gunn manages to make himself seem just a little bit cooler. First juggling, now this. Nice. But this kid didn't do it. He was just there to see if Fred was really one of the girls from the physics department who had disappeared over the years. Yup, that's right - Fred ain't the only one.
Soon, Fred finds out for herself the culprit when she discovers a book on interdimensional portal-opening (or something like that) in her old professor's office. She decides to go all "Dark Willow" on his ass, except in a less magicky, more halberdy way. (No, "hadlberdy" isn't a word, but you come up with a better adjective for painful death with a halberd, hmm?) Angel and Gunn naturally try to discourage her, but the second their back is turned, she turns to Wesley, who is far more supportive of vengeance, apparently. Of course, he tells her that Angel and Gunn are right, and she concedes that fact. She also says that Gunn just doesn't have the stomach for this kind of thing, which is why she loves him. Read: She doesn't love Wesley. The poor guy just can't catch a break.
Everyone soon reaches the professor, who unleashes unto Angel a pretty unstoppable demon. "Oh, come on, I'm holding your head!" is one of the better lines so far this season, I must say. While he is distracted, however, Fred opens up a portable to some probably very nasty place. Her professor is almost sucked into it, too, but Gunn stops her just in time. Fred doesn't kill the man who sent her Pylea. Gunn does. That was an unexpected twist, I must say. Bonus points for that.
Unfortunately, those bonus points must be subtracted when one considers the futility of the Cordelia/Connor subplot this week. Connor is clearly attracted to the beamnesiaed one (again, not a word - bite me), and in a fit of vampire killing passion, they kiss. Cordelia senses that this just isn't right, however, and moves out. One is lead to wonder, of course, why she moved in with Connor in the first place, at least from a storytelling point of view. If the only purpose of her living there was to make Connor infatuated with her, there were other ways of handling that. Creating a new status quo and then rearranging it in the next episode is an awkward device that doesn't keep us on our toes, it keeps us disoriented. Hopefully the Cordelia subplot will clarify itself in the next episode or so, perhaps when Angel answers her question, "Were we in love?"
Another odd bit of plotting in this episode was the lack of the "surprise" ending. Normally, when a character is assumed to be the one responsible for some kind of wrongdoing, it ends up being someone else. For example, in "Supersymmetry," Fred's professor is assumed to be the Bad Guy because Fred found a piece of circumstantial evidence in his office, after which she jumped to a conclusion. Dramatically speaking, it is very rare for this kind of reasoning to be proved right - more likely, the culprit would have been the (probably) jealous TA, introduced earlier. In this episode, however, it really is the guy she figured it was all along. I find this surprisingly distracting - it's surprising because it wasn't a surprise. On one hand, it's a nice change of pace, on the other, it feels weird. Not bad, per se, just off-kilter, again keeping "Supersymmetry" a few points away from a perfect rating.
A decent episode, with a nice degree of Fredness, too rarely seen, which I give:
Episode Rating: 7 out of 10
Hollyfeld never ever hogs the covers. Well... maybe a little.
