Dear Boy

Template:Angelepisode"Dear Boy" is the fifth episode of the second season of Angel and the twenty-seventh episode overall. Written and directed by David Greenwalt, it was originally broadcast on October 24, 2000 on the WB network.

Darla kicks her mind games into full force against Angel, in order to turn him back over to the dark side. She arranges for Angel to encounter her in the real world, outside of her dreams. It turns out she was resurrected as human, and her plan is to frame Angel for a string of murders, with Kate Lockley unwittingly enlisted to hunt Angel down, and while turning his allies against him by making him seem insane for his insistence that a human woman is really a resurrected vampire. Also, a flashback to 1860 England shows how Angel and Darla initially found and targeted Drusilla, then an innocent young woman with psychic abilities, and set out to drive her insane by having Angel kill her whole family, and then give her eternal torment by making her into a vampire.

Synopsis

Angel wakes up to bickering between Cordelia and Wesley, interrupted by Cordelia getting a vision with sketchy details. While Cordelia and Wesley try to find the demon and location from Cordelia's vision, Angel daydreams of Darla. The entire gang arrives at an underground water facility where two groups of cloaked men are fighting in front of a Thrall demon, Turfog. The men then attack Angel and friends. Gunn uses his new axe to destroy the demon and all the cloaked men stop fighting. Walking home, Angel is shocked to see Darla walking the streets.

In a flashback, Angel walks through the streets until he finds Darla, who has just killed a streetwalker and her customer. She points out a young woman to Angel, who we recognize as Drusilla. Angel regards the young woman, pure and with the gift of visions, as a challenge and a delight.

Angel tells Wesley and Cordelia about seeing Darla in his dreams and in real life but they think he's starting to lose his sanity.

Lindsey and Darla talk about their progress with their manipulations of Angel.

At a police station, Kate works a desk job, having been transferred due to her strange obsession with the occult. She receives notice from a friend that Angel has moved his company into the old Hyperion Hotel.

A potential paying customer presents a case to Cordelia and Wesley: he believes his wife is either being frequently abducted by aliens, or is cheating on him with another man. Angel Investigations then spies on the woman who is, as predicted, having an affair, but Angel spoils their cover by expressing disgust at the job they're doing, confronting the woman, and telling her to talk to her husband. Having ruined the job and stopped the team from getting paid, Cordelia argues with Angel who spots Darla, but when he confronts her, she insists she's a human woman named DeEtta Kramer. Angel gives chase, only to see Darla step out into the sunlight (revealing that Wolfram & Hart brought her back not as a vampire, but as a human). He almost gets arrested for harassing her, and Cordelia, Gunn, and Wesley fear for his sanity.

Angel goes to Caritas and sings "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" in order to get information about Darla from The Host. But The Host refuses to help him, saying he needs to stay away from Darla.

Angel finds the Kramer home and lurks outside while inside, Darla, and an actor hired to play DeEtta's husband, waits for the plan to take form. Meanwhile, Cordelia and Wesley warn Gunn about the dangers of an evil Angel and Darla combined. In a flashback, Angelus and Darla fool around while a terrified Drusilla, who has clearly been driven insane due to having watched her entire family being murdered by the vampires, watches on. Although Darla doesn't seem to approve, Angelus announces that he's decided to make Drusilla a vampire, regarding it as the perfect torment as her insanity will now last forever.

Darla and Lindsey's plan goes into effect when Angel breaks into "DeEtta Kramer's" home in time to find he has just been set up for murdering Darla's supposed husband. The police, including Kate Lockley, arrive on scene, and Angel is barely able to escape without being captured. As Kate talks with Darla, believing all of her lies about Angel- including that Angel was stalking her-, Angel grabs Darla and takes her away to the underground facility. The facility was formerly a convent, and Angel (having realized that Darla was what Wolfram & Hart brought back in the box months earlier) asks his sire if she can feel it. He does everything he can to bring out the real Darla, and with some persuasion, she resumes her old personality. The two kiss and Darla tries to convince Angel to let her make him happy. He tells her she never made him happy, because when he knew her, he didn't have a soul, and you need a soul to be truly happy, but still she persists and tries to bring his demon out.

Leading a SWAT team, Kate breaks into the Hyperion to search for Angel. She's determined to believe that Angel is and always will be evil. Cordelia and Wesley use logic to try to convince Kate that Darla was once a vampire and that Angel didn't kill anyone. Gunn points out that Darla's story is a lie because Angel, as a vampire, couldn't break into a house without a valid invitation from someone inside the house, unless the legal residents were already dead. However, Kate angrily counters that while they're so busy fighting a grand battle against the forces of Darkness, they seem to forget all the innocents who die in the crossfire(including her father), and those are the people Kate cares about, and she affirms that she believes Angel is at the very least partly reponsible for all those deaths.

Darla refuses to give up on Angel, but he warns her that now that she has a soul, she will begin to feel the weight of all the evil she has done. She leaves him then, and he is stuck underground until sunset. Angel broods in his room until a fearful Cordelia and Wesley confront him to make sure he's not evil. He tells them that much trouble is on the way, and he's looking forward to it.

Photos

Continuity

• Cordelia says that Angel is 248; he corrects her to 247. This indicates that Angel is counting from the day he was sired (and not including the hundred years spent in Acathla's Hell dimension), in 1753 (he was already 26 years old at the time).

Body Count

• a Thrall demon, killed by Gunn with an axe
• Stephen Kramer, drained by a vampire
• Drusilla, sired by Angelus in 1860

Appearances

Locations

• Los Angeles, CA
• London, England (only in flashbacks)

Behind the Scenes

Pop Culture References

• Wesley mentions the great private investigators Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe.

International titles

• German: Wiedersehen macht Feinde (Reunions make enemies)
• French: Cher amour (Dear love)

Music

• David Boreanaz- "Everybody Have Fun Tonight"
• Damn! - "Stinky Stinky Ashtray"
• Robert J. Kral- original score

Goofs, Bloopers & Continuity Errors

• In one of his books, Wesley shows Kate a daguerreotype of Darla that was taken over 100 years ago, showing that Darla had a fearsome reputation. However, Darla says to Angel that he (back when he was Angelus) was a legend and even better than herself. However, the daguerreotype and Darla's description shows that was fearsome after Angelus and Spike.

• After singing at Caritas, Angel apologizes and one sees his hand turning the monitor of the karaoke machine off. When the camera shows him again from a distance, the monitor is on again.

Other

• When Angelus tells Darla his plan to turn Drusilla, even she seems appalled. It's a testament to just how twisted Angelus really was when his evil deeds made other evil things cringe.
• Kate sends a police SWAT team to search the Hyperion Hotel. In real life the Ambassador Hotel which substituted for the Hyperion was used as a training ground for police SWAT team exercises.
• The German episode title, "Wiedersehen macht Feinde" ("Reunions make enemies"), is a play on words with the expression "Wiedersehen macht Freude" ("Make sure you give it back").