reviewed by: Charity Bishop
               

Angel Investigations is suffering in the wake of its two most prominent members' disappearance. It's been three months since Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) and Angel (David Boreanaz) vanished without a trace. Lorne (Andy Hallett), the resident seer, has gone to Las Vegas to find fame and fortune, leaving only brainy Fred (Amy Arker) and street-smart Charles Gunn (J. August Richards) to run the agency. All of their attempts to find out what happened the night Angel and Cordy never came back have unearthed nothing. Little do they know that Angel's son Conner (Vincent Kartheiser) is to blame. Believing that his father murdered his arch-nemesis, the man who raised Conner in a hell dimension, the misguided youth has sent dad plunging to the depths of the sea, where he can live out all eternity in solitude.

Suffering from nightmares and delusions about turning brutal on those he loves, Angel consistently hopes for salvation from his watery grave. Cordelia has ascended to a higher purpose and finds her role as an all-seeing power not to her liking. Estranged Wesley (Alexis Denisof) is carrying on an affair with the new top attorney with the malicious law firm Wolfram & Hart, in the meantime attempting to find Angel's location with an all-out water sweep. When our brooding, undead hero is brought to the surface again, he punishes his son by telling him the truth and casting him out of the agency. Angry and alone, Conner searches for purpose in life. His presence comes in handy when Cordelia is returned to them, without a memory of who she is. While Angel struggles with his feelings toward her, he must watch as Conner rapidly gains her trust. Resident signs point toward a role she will play in the ultimate apocalypse.

When a horned demon emerges from the underworld, blotting out the sun and transforming LA into a vampire free-for-all, the agency finds more than they bargained for. The beast is non-killable, but as bad as he is, he's also working for a higher power, something that has taken root in their midst, just awaiting for the moment to strike. The series rushes toward a dynamic conclusion as members of Angel Inc. are pitted against one another, forcing their leader to make a monumental decision. Considerably better than the less-than-impressive third season, this time around gives us a more structured, complex plot that follows a general plan, leading up to a revelation about why everything has taken place. The writing is as tight and witty as ever, bringing in new characters and resurrecting old ones. It does have moments of weakness, but strengths overrule the flaws. Angel is back to his brooding self, and even has a four-episode arc as Angelus, his demonic alter-ego, in which the agency brings in Faith (Eliza Dushku), a slayer from the Buffy saga, to battle him.

Content concerns are less flagrant but nevertheless disconcerting to squeamish viewers. In the season premiere, one of the associates at Wolfram & Hart has his head lopped off. It goes bouncing across the table, setting the scene for numerous decapitations and severed body parts (both demon and human heads are occasionally shown). When the best wrecks hell on the law firm, hundreds of people are slaughtered. The body count is high and gruesome as the group walk through a virtual land mind of bloody corpses. People are stabbed in the neck, shot with arrows, threatened and/or cut with knives, thrown through brick walls, hurled through windows; and kicked, punched, and elbowed in the face. Monsters are disemboweled and hacked to pieces. Vampires are set aflame or turn to dust when staked. Language consists of numerous sexual terms ("screwed" and "boned"), along with general profanities and abuses of deity. Some of the episodes reveal Wesley's affair with Lilah, including passionate make-out sessions, tearing at one another's clothes, and being comfy beneath the covers. Her bare back is shown as she gets up to dress. Gunn and Fred make out on a bed.

A demonic goddess asks humans to strip down so that she can consume them (several female bare backs are shown; others walk around in underwear). Fred wears a skimpy outfit when undercover at a bar. Angel experiences a dream where he and Cordelia make love. Conner and Cordelia are shown in bed together in a somewhat graphic scene. Angelus speaks frankly about sexual escapades on several occasions. There's also an element of magic. A spell meant to recover Cordelia's memory goes wrong and reverts all the participants back to their teenage selves (Wesley is a nerd, Fred wants weed, Gunn has an attitude problem, Cordelia cries about her cut off hair, etc). Willow (Alyson Hannigan), a witch, comes to restore Angel's soul to his body via the use of magic. She dukes it out against a powerful sorceress protecting his soul. The "goddess" uses various means of hypnotism, magic, and dark powers to achieve what she wants. Under a spell, Cordelia murders an innocent girl and uses her blood to birth an evil power.

There are aspects of truth even though this is a supernatural series. The mega-villain of the season attempts to convince Conner that there is no good or evil, only choices. She desires the right to take away free will so that she might restore peace to the earth, but with an ulterior motive. Christians may be disturbed with the notion that the world so readily worships her. Churches remove the images of their "pagan gods" and replace them with her likeness. There's no indication of the existence of God, only a lot of conversation about the "higher powers" that have left the agency high and dry. Because it's a sci-fi series, this lack of ultimate truth did not bother me. There are means of learning valuable moral lessons from the mythology in the series. I never felt anything demonic in its presentation, but younger or more sensitive audiences will find the series too morally in shades of gray. Our heroes and heroines are hardly without their flaws. Most of them sleep around, others dabble in magic, and more than one of them has committed murder. These are blurry lines for younger audiences to navigate.