Slouching Toward Bethlehem

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"Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is the fourth episode of the fourth season of Angel and the seventieth episode overall. Written by Jeffrey Bell and directed by skip Schoolnik, it was originally broadcast on October 27, 2002 on the WB network.

Synopsis

Cordelia abruptly returns from her higher dimension in the lobby of the Hyperion Hotel, but she has no memory of who she is and who her friends are despite Angel's attempts to jog her memory back. Connor, who has secretively snuck back into the hotel, overhears everything from the upper balcony. Not wanting to make her feel uncomfortable, Angel and the group decide to keep their demon-hunting business a secret as well as the fact that Angel is a vampire. Cordelia becomes increasingly mistrustful of Angel, Fred and Gunn due to their secretiveness. Lorne tries to read Cordelia's future and sees jumbled visions of apocalyptic horror, which scares him to the point that he flees to his room and is reluctant to tell Angel what he saw. Cordelia has an encounter in the lobby with one of Lorne's clients, a nasty demon who wants to snack on her, and she is saved by Connor who appears and kills the demon. She flees from the hotel and ends up with Connor at his run-down loft where she asks him to be her protector. After one of their trysts in his apartment, Wesley overhears Lilah talking to her subordinates at Wolfram & Hart's over her cellphone about Cordelia's reappearance and sending a team to kidnap her, so he goes to the Hyperion hotel to tip Angel, Fred and Gunn about it. An armed team from Wolfram & Hart's forcibly enters Connor's loft and fight with Connor and Cordelia. The two are almost on the verge of losing when Angel, Fred and Gunn burst in and even the odds. Lilah, who has been remotely monitoring the events, tells her team to leave. Cordelia tells Angel that she prefers to stay with Connor rather than go back with him, Fred and Gunn. When Angel and his team arrive back at the Hyperion, they find Lorne gagged and tied to a chair. Lorne reveals that while they were gone, another Wolfram & Hart team came and used a demon to forcibly extract his visions about Cordelia from his mind since they believe that she had direct contact with the Powers That Be and wanted that information. Wesley later confronts Lilah who admits that she used him to separate Angel and his team from Lorne by making sure he overheard her talking about Cordelia so that they could extract the information from Lorne. Angel is last seen thinking about what might have been.

Continuity

• Angel tells Cordelia about their night at the ballet.

• When Cordelia read her yearbook, it contained references to the school "burning down," the "giant snake," and "flaming arrows." These events all occurred when the Sunnydale High student body fought The Mayor.

• Cordelia sang "The Greatest Love Of All," a song she chose to sing for the talent show six years earlier. Her performance this time around was equally terrible.

• Gunn is seriously dismayed when Cordelia threatens to turn him into a rat. It's because he's a murophobe.

Behind the Scenes

Pop Culture References

• The title of the episode, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is a reference to "The Second Coming (Slouching Toowards Bethlehem)", a poem by W. B. Yeats.

Other

• After looking through some past photos, Cordelia said "yikes" when looking at a photo of her hair when it was first cut short in "The Shroud of Rahmon." This is an inside joke as Charisma Carpenter disliked this specific haircut, as stated in the Season 2 DVD featurette.