Somnambulist Review by Nemo
Episode 1.11
Original Air Date: 01.18.00
Big Summary | Quoteable | 3 W's | Ficcable? | Rating
Big Summary (for anyone who wants to fic, but missed the episode):
A girl is running down the street in a very Gothic-horror-style dress or nightgown. Something catches her and, as she stares in terror, carves a cross into her cheek, then bites her. She collapses, dead, and the creature throws back its head.
The creature is Angel, who jerks awake in his bed a second later.
Meanwhile, Kate Lockley finds the body of that very same girl in the exact location Angel dreamed of killing her, and her body is in the exact condition of his dream murder. She tells a policeman near her that this is the third victim, and that the killer is just getting started.
The next morning, in Angel’s office, Cordelia is giving a rather rousing speech about their business to . . . an empty chair. Wesley walks in, smirks, and comments that he thinks it’s about to speak. She smirks right back at him and wonders what exactly he’s doing there. He tells her that he wants to compare notes on the current evil, but as he gives her their mail and admits that he knows of absolutely no evil on the street, it becomes apparent that what he really wants is some company. There’s an almost desperate edge to his voice as he babbles, seemingly trying to find a reason to stay as long as he can before she kicks him out. An oblivious Cordelia is rather dismissive until she notices that Wesley grabbed the wrong mail. The items he brought up were for the dentist next door. He apologizes, realizing it’s his cue to leave. He picks up the paper that he accidentally grabbed and freezes.
Cordelia wonders what it is, but Wesley, looking very worried, says that it’s nothing and dashes out.
Angel comes up, acting very out of sorts and demands to know who Cordelia was talking to. She says that it was no one . . . and Wesley. She also mentions that there’s a piece of evidence for another case that they’re working on that she can’t run down, and wonders if Angel could take it to Kate. He grudgingly agrees and almost gets crispy fried as he walks out the front door. He doubles back and heads for the sewers, leaving a very worried Cordelia behind. Neither of them sees that, behind a corner in the hall, Wesley watches on with an expression of severe anxiety.
Angel, meanwhile, finds Kate busy investigating the killings that he’s been dreaming about. He’s deeply shocked as he sees and recognizes the crime scene photographs, telling Kate simply that the crosses on the victims’ cheeks, which she thinks of as sick religious acts, are actually about mocking God. Then, without another word, he vanishes. Kate, no longer too surprised by Angel’s abrupt departures, heads to an investigation meeting and proceeds to describe her criminal profile of the killer, who sounds *exactly* like Angel.
Later that night, Cordelia is locking down the office, and starts to head out. However, she nearly mows over Wesley on the way out, who hurries in, stake in hand. She’s put off by that act of obvious aggression on his part, but he sits her down, pulling out a clipping from the dentist’s paper about the murder. He informs her that, while in Sunnydale, he did extensive research on Angel, and it was the vampire’s custom, in the late eighteenth century, to carve a cross into the cheeks of his victims, so as to let people know he’d been there.
Cordelia is irate, prepared to kick Wesley out for implying that Angel’s behind these murders—until Angel comes in and informs her that he *is*. Then, of course, Cordelia’s all for killing him. Wes steps up and shoves a cross in Angel’s face. Unfortunately, it’s pretty ineffective, and Angel, in a demonstration of what he could do if he wanted to hurt them, grabs Wesley, whips him around, and has his back to Angel’s chest and his throat bared in a matter of seconds.
He lets the terrified Wesley go, and tells that that he has no memory of committing these crimes, but he’s dreamed them all, and he’s enjoyed those dreams. Wesley suggests that it’s possible that Angel is committing them while sleepwalking, and that he’s doing it in the pre-dawn hours, which is precisely when all of these murders took place.
Wesley also has an idea of how to test that theory, and he and Cordelia proceed to shackle Angel to his bed. Cordelia decides that, should Angel actually be killing people, she’d rather not be around to see it, and skips out, leaving Wesley to watch over Angel through the night.
Angel dreams again, but this time, it’s from the eighteenth century, and the murder of a young woman.
He wakes up, and Cordelia rushes in to inform them that another person has been murdered, and Angel couldn’t have done it. Both she and Wesley are extremely relieved . . . until Angel tells them that he did commit the crime.
Back to the dream, we see the vampire who killed the girl stand. He’s a young, blonde man, and Angelus watches him proudly as the young man admits that the girl was his sister. Angelus then proceeds to instruct the young man, Penn, on how to kill the rest of his family.
Fast forward to the present, where a hip new Penn, complete with glasses and a little goatee, pins up articles on his killings.
Cordelia and Wesley listen to Angel’s tale in shock, wondering why it is that, after two hundred years, Penn still hasn’t changed his act. However, there is a more pressing question than Penn’s lack of originality: how do they stop him?
Angel realizes what he has to do and goes to Kate, taking her into the room with the bulletin board containing the evidence for the case, and, staring at all the crime photos, realizes that Penn is reenacting the slaughter of his family, one at a time. Angel tacks up a sketch of Penn and describes the next target: a young man near a bar. With that, Angel leaves, returning to his car, where Wesley waits. Angels hands him a police radio to hook up so they can keep informed. When asked where he got it, Angel simply informs Wes that he got it from a police car.
Meanwhile, the kid Angel described is trying to get people to buy him beer, and, when approached by Penn, willingly follows him towards a “discount liquor store”. Penn mentions that the young man reminds him of a brother he once had, before promptly attacking the kid. However, he’s stopped by police roaring in. Penn leaps up two stores and through a window into an abandoned building. Kate arrives and goes in after him.
Angel and Wesley hear about the incident, and put pedal to metal.
Kate tracks Penn upstairs, and finally finds him in a room. When he tries to approach her, she shoots him three times. He falls down and she walks over to check him, only to have him get up and attack her.
At about this moment, Angel comes storming in, attacking a confused Penn, and, in the process of a very impressive fight, vamps out. Kate is shocked and very shaken as Penn runs away. As he tells her about vampires, she starts to get her hackles up, calling it crazy. To prove his point that she isn’t ready to handle the dark forces, Angel grabs her cross and lets his hand get a little toasted.
In response, a shaken Kate begins to research old accounts of similar cases.
And Cordelia is once again interrogating the empty . . . Penn. Not realizing who she’s talking to, Cordelia prattles happily about Angel and Kate, before realizing what she’s said, and that he’s pumping her for information.
She keeps her head, and, before Penn can attack her, throws open the window blind, cutting the room in half with sunlight. Penn is trapped on the side of the door, while Cordelia is joined by Angel on the other side. The two vampires bait each other verbally, and Angel accuses Penn of being unoriginal and clichéd. Penn backs up behind the door, which opens and an oblivious Wesley walks in, only to be head-locked by Penn. Angel and Cordelia freeze as Penn tells Angel that his work *had* been getting stale. So, he’ll spice it up now with something new and innovative. He tells Angel to think of the worst possible thing, and Penn will do it. Then, Penn throws Wesley onto Angel, knocking them both back, and makes his escape.
Angel goes to Kate’s apartment for help, but finds that she’s done research on more than just the cases. Not only does she know that Penn has been in L. A. twice before, but she also knows all about Angelus. And, unlike Wesley and Cordelia, she doesn’t see the gray. She only sees black and evil, and tells Angel that the next time she sees him, she’ll stake him.
Angel goes back to his gang, armed with the information that Penn was in L. A. before. They discover that, both times, he stayed in the same apartment. With that, Angel and Wesley take off. They burst into Penn’s lair, only to find him gone, and details pictures and maps of a school bus route left behind.
Meanwhile, Kate tells her officers that Penn will very possibly come after Angel next, and they’ll need to keep an eye on him in order to catch the killer.
Unfortunately, what she didn’t think of was that the killer was already there. He takes out her officers, and snatches her.
Angel, who came to the police station with Wesley to warn them about the school bus, hears what’s happened on their police radio and takes to the sewers to head Penn off. He finds them, and distracts the other vampire long enough for Kate to douse Penn with holy water. She’s thrown out of the way, and the vampires go at it, no holds barred. It’s a truly beautiful fight to behold, and eventually it’s ended by Kate driving a broken two-by-four through Angel’s gut and into Penn’s heart, dusting him. When Angel tells her she missed, she tells him that she didn’t.
Back at Angel investigations, Angel broods on the roof as Cordelia comes up to give him information on her latest vision and to give him a pep talk, telling him that he’s not Angelus anymore, and everyone knows it. He’s changed. Angel warns her that some people change back. When he tries to ask her if she’d stake him if he went evil again, she immediately affirms it, much to Angel’s relief.
Back to Top
Quotable Wes (and a few others):
(Re: Wes telling Cordy about Angel’s old custom to sign his victims)
Cordelia: Okay, you get to leave now. You’re not going to come in here and accuse Angel like this.
Wesley: Cordelia—
Cordelia: No! I don’t care what he did back in the powdered-wig days! He is good now, and he is my friend, and nothing you or anyone else can say will make me turn on a friend!
Angel: (entering) Cordelia, he’s right.
Cordelia: You stake him, and I’ll cut his head off.
(Re: Angel’s possible killing spree)
Cordelia: And if we *are* back on the liquid lunch, better safe than cocktails!
(Re: Penn)
Angel: Kate! She doesn’t know about him!
Wesley: And you’re not going to tell her! You can’t just walk into a police precinct with intimate knowledge of these murders, then claim that a two-hundred-year-old Puritan is responsible! You’d be locked up faster than Lady Hamilton’s virtue! (Realizes there’s a lady, or, well, a Cordy present) My apologies.
Cordelia: That’s okay; I don’t know what that meant.
(Re: Kate)
Wesley: So, I take it that you told her everything?
Angel: Just enough to get her killed.
Wesley: Well, we’ll just have to see that that doesn’t happen.
Angel: Exactly. (Hands Wes a police radio) Once you hook this up, we’ll know about it.
Wesley: Where’d you get the police radio?
Angel: Police car.
Wesley: Oh, dear.
(Re: Angel’s end-of-the-episode brooding)
Cordelia: People really do change.
Angel: And sometimes they change back. If the day ever comes that I—
Cordelia: Oh, I’ll kill you dead!
Angel: (smiling) Thanks!
Cordelia: What are friends for?
Back to Top
The 3 W’s:
Weapons:
It’s an episode all about vampires, so, as you can imagine, we have the full array of vampire-fighting weaponry aboard. Multiple stakes are seen (not to mention Kate’s humongous impromptu stake, a wonderful addition to our found-weapons), as well as Holy Water used by Kate to produce some rather badly-done blisters on Penn’s face, her gun, used to shoot Penn before she realizes what he is, and well as a cross that Wesley tries unsuccessfully to ward Angel off with.
The other weapon, and, I suppose, the one of note in this particular episode is Penn and Angel’s thumb-knife. That baby’s quite an interesting gadget. It fits on the thumb much like a large thimble, and curves out in what can only be described as a talon. It’s quite ornamental, and obviously used almost solely for torture, being that it’s too short and too awkward to use effectively in actual combat. Still, if you feel the need to write a torture sequence, I would recommend this item.
Wear:
The good: the continuing contrast between Wesley and Angel. The costumers are aware that they have two similarly complected men, and use it to their advantage by putting them in contrasting color schemes. While Angel continues to imitate Batman, Wesley is put in light, airy colors of khaki and pale blue for this episode.
The not-so-good: The designer’s continued desire to make Kate Totally ‘80’s Barbie. I mean, she has a nice butt, but must they show it off by giving her pants that go all the way up to her natural waist? Yikes.
Also in this category is some of their olden-day wear. For one, the makeup on Penn’s sister is completely modern and really broke the illusion of the past. I know they wanted her to be pretty, but, seriously, if you want to do period, you have to go for it, and not put that eyeliner on. Also, in that same scene, Penn’s outfit, though the appropriate colors of the period, seemed a little too frilly to be a Puritan’s. And Angel’s hair in that scene? It’s called a ribbon, my friends. A man would *not* have walked around with his hair down in those days. It really just wasn’t done.
Wesley:
Obviously, our boy had less to do in this episode than the previous one, but what he got was very good. I was particularly impressed with his first scene. There’s a beautiful desperation to his character. He’s a man who has lost any sense of self-worth that he might have possessed, and is desperate for anyone to act as if he’s wanted, as if he’s making some sort of difference. He can’t trust himself to think it, so he needs external validation. Denisof is excellent at layering his performances in such a way that there tends to be more subtext than text. Although Wesley really hasn’t integrated completely into the unit, yet, he is already a truly fascinating character just because of the stellar performance that brings him to frantic, pathetic, vulnerable, *real* life. Much kudos.
Back to Top
So, is the episode ficcable?:
Oh, yes! For one, what was Penn thinking, just tossing his hostage back? Why not take him with? What happens if Penn decides that the “worst possible thing” would be to take Wesley instead of Kate? What would Angel do to ensure his friend’s safe return? Exactly how much *does* Wesley mean to the group at this point?
Or, if you’re not in the mood for harrowing tales of search and rescue, how about an introspective piece? It’s obvious that our boy is desperate for someone to tell him that he’s worth the air it takes to keep him alive. What’s he willing to do to get it? So many possibilities, so much time, so write away!
Back to Top
Episode rating:
(“That’s an Angel? It looks like a lobster with some sort of . . . growth.”)
4 lobsters out of 5
This was a good episode, and the title really kept you guessing as to who was the real murderer for a while. The guy who played Penn did an adequate job, occasionally getting on my nerves a bit, but Boreanaz and Denisof really made up for it with their performances. As for Kate, well, I was never a huge fan. This really isn’t Elizabeth Rohm’s fault, either, to be fair. She’s done quite a good job, but it’s just that . . . well, Kate’s boring. She doesn’t compel me or move me or make me laugh. She’s just there as a plot device to get information the gang couldn’t have obtained, otherwise, and I really hate it when a character is nothing but a way to move the story along. So, being that it was a Kate-centric episode, I couldn’t give it the full compliment of lobsters. Still, solid work, overall.
Back to Top
