Angel is sitting alone in a dark room, sucking on his index finger, moping, not unlike Batman in Batman Forever. The lights come on and Doyle enters the room. Quoth Doyle "It's Friday night; it's the most social night of the week!" And so on and so forth. Angel suggests that if Doyle wants to ask Cordelia out, he should just do so. Doyle hedges, and asks Angel to talk him up to Cordy: "But whatever you do, don't mention that me being [sic] half-demon, because women get a little funny about that." I have nothing to say about my ex at this point. Really. Enter Cordelia, with business cards. Which they all insist on referring to as "calling cards" as if we're in the nineteenth century. Insert cutesy confusion as to what exactly the graphic on the cards represents. "A butterfly?" guesses Angel. Doyle thinks it's an owl. Cordelia points out that it's actually an angel, duh. "So obvious and yet so clever on so many levels," says Doyle. Cordelia, rightfully irritated, swats at Doyle, who doubles over in pain. Uh oh, he's having one of his visions. He sees completely random, incoherent images of a bar/dance club. It's "one of those terminally stuck in the 80s places."
Cut to the bar in question. I don't go to bars much, so I have no idea why this one seems particularly stuck in the 80s. A blonde at the bar is approached by a guy in a jacket-'n'-t-shirt ensemble. They exchange names (Kevin, Sharon) and shake hands. As the music throbs, the guy says, "God I really hate places like this...don't you?" The music and ominous camera work lead us to believe that the guy is even more evil than your average guy in a singles bar.
Credits. Okay, the rockin' cello is pretty cool.
Still at the bar. Kevin and Sharon say that when they were young it was easy to meet their people, but now it turns out you have to go to skanky bars to meet your ideal complement. What. Ever. As they exchange platitudes, Cordy, Doyle, and Angel enter the club. Cordelia is wearing some kind of red spaghetti-strapped tube-top thing that makes me feel old. Doyle is wearing his customary brown leather jacket and Pacey-esque loud shirt. Angel is wearing his customary black leather jacket and dark t-shirt. How many cows died for this show? Their plan is to look for "someone who might be in trouble" (Angel's suggestion) or "someone who might be about to cause it" (Doyle's suggestion). Cordy hands a pack of business cards to Angel and she and Angel go their separate ways. Doyle leans back against a pillar.
Angel asks the bartender if anything "unusual" has happened, but the bartender reassures him that "the real hot women don't mosey in 'till around 11." Angel looks stupefied. More than usual, I mean.
Yes, he said "mosey."
Cordy passes out business cards to everyone in the bar: "Hey, you look troubled...or is that just your lazy eye?" Heh. Doyle intervenes, and points out that given her pitch, Angel could be taken as a vigilante for hire. Cordy says she is "an actress, a student of the human animal. I don't have to talk to people to know their story." She points to various people at the club and identifies their motivations. Of a guy on the dance floor: "Jazz hands, over there? Mama's boy. Peter Pan complex." She gestures to a girl: "Self absorbed closet-dud with a big old the-world-owes-me chip on her shoulder." (So help me, the girl looks like Amaya on The Real World.) Then Cordelia points to "Sarah, plain and tall." Why, it's Sharon from the teaser, leaving the bar with Kevin in tow. Cordy speculates that she must be rich to have snagged the "Calvin Klein model she's leaving with." For the record, Sharon's attractive and wouldn't need money to get the attention of some lame-oid in a bar, okay? I know it's TV-world and all, but I feel the need to point that out. Anyway, Doyle is impressed, sorta, but points out that they should be trying to find someone who is in trouble now. Cordelia asks how Angel is doing in their search.
Cut to Angel at the bar, as a very similarly clad gentleman walks away from him. Quoth Angel, nervously: "Seriously...I wasn't hitting on you." Hee. Angel leans back against the bar despondently and a girl nearby looks at him and asks if he's okay. She explains, "You just looked...bad. I mean, you don't look bad; you look very nice." The writers of this show seem determined to impress upon us that David Boreanaz is an attractive man. Okay, I admit it, he's not exactly unattractive. Enough. ["I will never admit that. He's butt." Wing Chun] Anyway, Angel introduces himself, and the girl says her name is Kate. They chit-chat. Kate says, "I prefer those cool bars that are hard to get into, but I can't get into them." Angel says he's just "looking for someone to...rescue?" I must repeat that Boreanaz does a good job of making Angel's pathetic social skills sort of endearing and funny. Kate says this is "the strangest line [she's] gonna hear tonight." Angel is awkward and embarrassed and tries to explain that it wasn't a line. Kate apologizes and says that she doesn't need rescuing. Then she goes on, and we gather that she's lonely and insecure. She says she comes to this bar most nights, because "how else are you going to meet somebody outside of work? It's this or...sit at home alone in the dark." I'd suggest Kate develop some hobbies if those are the only ways she can think of to fill her time. She asks Angel what he does, and he stumbles "Well, basically, I'm, uh, I help -- I'm a veterinarian." Heh.
Doyle is doing shots as he tries to chat up Cordelia. Oh, he's a hard-drinking Irishman. How original. She criticizes the helpfulness of his "gift," pointing out that a vision of a bar isn't very helpful. "They should send you one of those self-destructing tapes, you know, that comes with a dossier." Then a frat boy in a shirt that looks like a test pattern comes up and asks if Cordy was the one handing out those cards. Turns out he just wants her phone number. Doyle doesn't like this. Cordy tells frat boy that the number on the card is for people who need their services. Frat boy says he "might be in need of a little service," and asks if Cordy charges by the hour. Doyle tries to intervene and says that Cordy is with him. Cordy denies this. Frat boy gets ruder.
Angel and Kate discuss Kate's trust issues. He asks what she wants, and she says she's "just trying to make a connection." More analytical chit-chat. Maybe Angel should become a therapist. Kate asks if Angel would like to go someplace "more quiet" with her, but he explains that he has to stay at the bar. Kate plays with her drink to hide the fact that she's embarrassed about being shot down. Aw, poor Kate.
As Doyle insists that he doesn't want any trouble, frat boy is joined by frat boy #2. Frat boy #1 says that Cordy is a hooker and Doyle is her pimp. Cordy is incensed. Doyle tries to calm things down, saying "violence is not going to solve a thing." Then he headbutts frat boy #1, and quips, "On the other hand, it's kind of festive." A melée ensues. Oh, sorry, he's a hard-drinking, hard-fighting Irishman. I guess since Joss has given up on the vampires-hate-daylight stereotype, he's allowed to use the drunken-brawling-Irish one.
Angel and the bartender join in the rowdiness and the frat boys are defeated. A redhead starts chatting with Angel. The redhead says, "It's wild...us meeting over a bar fight," as if that happened years in the past rather than five minutes ago. "Isn't it great when two people make a connection?" she continues. Kate watches from afar.
Sharon and Kevin (remember them?) are in bed. There's a shadow falling over Sharon's face that makes her face look really strange. Sharon says she should leave. Kevin says he'd just like to hold her, although from the way he's holding her it looks like he actually wants to cop a feel.
Angel says, "I'm having a hard time believing that Doyle's vision meant that I was supposed to come here and break up a bar fight." Particularly when if they hadn't come, the fight wouldn't have happened. Blah, blah, blah. They leave the bar, and we get our first blipvert of the evening.
The morning, Sharon finishes dressing as she sits on the bloodstained bed. Kevin looks a little bit, well, dead.
That night, the gang searches through newspapers for "any mention of events in and around that bar." We learn that the name of the bar is D'Oblique (no comment), as Cordy tries to do a search of newsgroups. We also learn that Cordy can't type. The search turns up two articles. One describes a missing girl. The other is about the discovery of the "eviscerated" body of a young man. In both cases, they were last seen at D'Oblique. Angel asks Doyle and Cordy to go downstairs and use "the library." Where'd he get a library? Did he take some of Giles's books? Anyway, he says they should make a list of any eviscerating demons that prey on young singles. How many of those can there be? Meanwhile, Angel heads back to the blipvert -- I mean, bar.
Outside of D'Oblique, Angel literally runs into Kate. He apologizes for being rude the night. Then he says that she shouldn't go into the bar, because it isn't safe, but he can't explain why. Kate says, "I can go wherever I want, and you can go to hell." After she walks inside, Angel says, "Been there...done that." You'd think he'd be more bitter about spending untold ages in hell, but apparently he can make jokes about it. I think that's nice.
Kate sits at the bar. Angel sits a couple of stools away. They look at each other. Kate is sitting to Sharon, who is putting the moves on another guy. He is whining about how it's hard to meet people at work, he doesn't know who to trust, he was a geek in high school and never got a date, etc. Has anyone not picked up on the theme yet? A guy who looks like a younger version of Mitch Leery comes up and asks the bartender where Kevin is, because Kevin missed work and isn't answering his phone. The bartender says Kevin left with some girl last night and he's probably "sleeping it off." Angel intuits that this is a clue and asks what girl Kevin left with.
Cordy and Doyle do research. Cordy talks about how gross demons are. Doyle tries to suggest that not all demons are so bad. Cordy says "I've known a lot of demons, and slime aside, not a lot going on there." The closed-captioning has her saying "I've known a lot of demons in slimicide," which is another example of the conspiracy to confuse deaf people in this world.
The bartender remembers Sharon's name. Mitch, Jr. describes Sharon as "dowdy" and says Kevin must be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Angel asks where Sharon is, and the bartender says he saw her before, she must have just left. Mitch, Jr. makes more unpleasant comments about Sharon. Angel tries to find out Sharon's last name, and Mitch, Jr. says it's Richler. Angel leaves, and Mitch, Jr. explains to the bartender that he knows Sharon's last name because he asked her out.
Angel races to a phone book and finds Sharon's address. Kate watches suspiciously.
Sharon and her new friend lie in bed. New friend apologizes, and says, "time it'll be better." Then they spoon, Sharon behind him.
Angel races to the rescue. Hey, what happened to his car?
Sharon's new friend says "This is nice. I think sometimes what we really need is --" and we'll never know what it was we need, because some sort of Alien chest-burster type worm thing with pointy teeth bursts out of Sharon's chest and burrows into her friend. Considering we didn't really see much, it was pretty damn gross, so, well done, FX crew.
Angel rushes in (and isn't he lucky that they didn't go back to the guy's place?) to find Sharon's nasty corpse on the bed. He really does suck at saving people, doesn't he? The guy is still there, though, so he's found the baddie only halfway through the show. Angel says "This has to stop, you have to stop." Demon-worm-boy says, "I will, when I find the right one. The one I can stay with." But the body he has now ain't it; he says that he already knows it's not the one he can live in. "Then it'll have to be the one you die in," responds Angel. Yay, a fight! Demon-boy is pretty strong. He smashes Angel to the floor with one chop, and slides him into a wall, which makes his lame plastic vampire eyebrows come out. Then more punching and smashing, and for a grand finale he picks Angel up and throws him (flips him, in fact) across the room. Props to the stuntpeople.
Demon-boy has vanished by the time Angel picks himself up off the floor. Just as he turns around, Kate runs in. "What are you doing here?" asks Angel. Then Kate sees the gross Sharon corpse. Angel starts saying "I know what this looks like," but Kate interrupts by aiming a pistol at him and showing him her badge. "So do I," she says. Whoopsie! And: Hey, a plot twist!
Kate starts giving Angel the Miranda warning, but he waives his rights. Or maybe he just waives his right to remain silent, since he says "I waive it." Hm, was Angel a lawyer at some point? 'Cause he might be able to get off on that technicality if he was arrested. Kate says she's been tracking him since last night. Angel tries to explain, or maybe to sum up, "We're on the same side. I'm tracking this guy too." She asks if he's a private investigator. Angel: "More or less." Kate: "Where's your license?" Angel: "That's the less part." Kate says this is "the carving job of an impotent sicko." I would use a harsher word than "sicko" there if I were a detective with the LAPD. She tries to bait him, "It's frustrating isn't it? Not being able to connect, to love like other people?" Angel says "He gives them what they're longing for -- hope...that their loneliness might end." Then he baits Kate right back, mentioning her inability to trust people. Kate gets ready to cuff him, and Angel apologizes before kicking her aside and jumping out the window. He crash-lands on a parked car, and Kate dashes to the window only to see him scampering away. As Kate turns to give chase, we see that Demon-boy has been hiding on the window ledge all along.
Doyle and Cordy enter her nasty, unkempt apartment. Apparently Angel told them to meet him there. Cordy answers a knock at the door and finds Angel there. She says "Oh my God, are you okay?" I have no idea why she says this, because he looks a little breathless but completely normal otherwise. Angel hesitates at the door, "I can't, um..." Doyle tells Cordy that she needs to invite Angel in: "As long as you're alive, vampires -- they can't cross your threshold unless you invite 'em in." Ah, so that's how they're getting around Angel's B&E earlier (and in the last episode): the homeowners were dead. That seems bound to put a crimp in his rescuing business. Anyway, Cordelia makes Angel promise he'll "stay good" and then invites him in. Angel brings them up to speed on Kate's suspicions of him. They start to tell him about the list of eviscerating demons they've come up with, but he says, "I saw it. It's a burrower." Cordy: "It's a donkey? Oh. We didn't see any donkey demons." Hee: donkey demons. He asks them to look for ways to kill the demon, and says he's heading back to the bar. Cordy asks why it'll go back there, and Angel says "It's gotta keep trying to make the connection." "Why?" asks Cordy. Angel answers, "Because that's what lonely people do." Every time someone says "make the connection," I think of Oprah's fitness book. Also, couldn't the demon possibly go to a different bar? And finally: why bother to meet for that five-minute conversation? Couldn't Angel have conveyed all that over the phone?
Musical montage, featuring angsty gothic dance music that I'll admit I kind of liked. Demon boy is with a pretty girl who might be Vietnamese, but I'm really bad at guessing nationalities so who knows. Kate breaks into Angel's basement pad. Angel cruises the bar, or bars. Kate searches. She opens his fridge, and it's probably lucky for him that it's not full of pig's blood or whatever he feeds on these days. Angel searches some more. Demon burrows into the pretty girl. Angel walks the streets, which are lit as if it's dawn. Which is a time when vampires should not be outside.
Angel re-enters Cordy's place, where Cordy and Doyle are napping on the couch. As they wake up, Angel says "Morning," just to drive it home that he's out and about even though the sun is coming up. This time Angel does look awful; his face is sort of blotchy, or maybe the light is just hitting him really strangely, but Cordelia doesn't comment on it. Anyway, Cordy and Doyle tell Angel that the demon's name is Tahlmer, and his only known weakness is fire. Angel decides he needs help, and prepares to call Kate.
Kate answers her phone "Lockley," so we learn her last name and know she can't be a demon. They do a little bit of cat and mouse, and finally Angel asks her to meet him at the bar at 7, and says "I can help you, Kate, but you just have to trust me." Kate is pensive as she hangs up, causing a blipvert.
Kate is sitting at a table at D'Oblique. The bartender walks up and asks if she'd like the usual, because I guess there aren't any waiters in this huge bar, and she shows him her badge. She asks him to let her know if he spots Angel, who he remembers from the fight with the frat boys. The bartender leaves, and a rat-faced guy with a terrible haircut approaches her, saying, "God I hate places like this, don't you?" Alarm bells go off, as the audience says, "uh oh, that's the demon!" As he sits down, ignoring her protests that she's meeting someone, the bartender returns and says the guy she was looking for is in the alley out back. As she follows the bartender away, the rat-faced guy stares at her without blinking.
Kate leads the way into a storeroom and hands a card to the bartender, saying, "Call this number, tell the sergeant that I need --" Then she says "OW" because the bartender hits her on the head with a bottle of wine, or champagne, or something. This episode is chock-full of misdirection, isn't it? I like that. The bottle does not shatter on her head, which is a good thing, because it shouldn't. But then they ruin it because he tosses it back onto a sink or counter and we hear a tinkle of broken glass. The bartender rips open the back of Kate's shirt as she lies unconscious on the floor. So Tahlmer can burrow through skin and bone and muscle, but cotton is too much for it?
As Tahlmer starts bursting out of the bartender, he, that is, the bartender, is knocked on the head with a plank and falls away from Kate. Angel to the rescue! He tries to wake Kate up, and then drags her out of the way just as the bartender tries to smash her with a keg. If he smashes her, he won't be able to use her body, will he? Anyway, there's more punching and kicking, and a bizarre move where Angel grabs a chain-link fence and wraps his legs around the bartender's head. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Strangely, Angel is not getting vamped-out, which normally happens when he starts fighting. Perhaps the presence of a witness is inhibiting him. The bartender manages to toss Angel and Kate down a stairwell into a basement and slams the door. Kate says, "We can't let him get away." Angel responds "He's not going to leave. He's going to kill again, now." Well, that's sort of comforting.
The bartender checks a mirror and sees that he looks sweaty, bloodstained, and there's a big flap of skin hanging off his forehead. He looks a little zombified, actually. He presses his flap of skin into place, which would have been more disgusting if it hadn't looked and sounded like plastic -- can't they redirect some of the money they get for stunts and put it into better prosthetics? Anyway, he heads back into the bar and proceeds to hit on every girl he can in an amusing parody of scam-artists at bars. Meanwhile, Angel tries to break open the basement door, but apparently the door to this empty basement is tougher than all those apartment doors he keeps bursting through. The bartender's cheesy lines ("Are you a dancer?" "That's a beautiful dress.") aren't working too well, perhaps because he's all bloody and gross. I don't care for the usual heavy emphasis placed on looks, but I gotta admit he's pushing the limits of hygiene there.
Having given up on the door, Angel spies some tiny, narrow windows (with what sure looks like daylight visible through them) up near the ceiling, and says they're getting out that way. Kate says, "It's almost twenty feet up," although the captioning has "thirty feet up." Angel pulls out his trusty grappling hook, which Kate looks at incredulously and says, "Who are you?" Warner Brothers has found a way to revive the Batman franchise, I guess. The grapple wraps around a beam near the windows, Angel tugs on the rope...and the beam crashes down to the floor. Hee hee hee! Kate pulls out the gun holstered on her ankle, goes to the door, and shoots out the lock. I would ask why she didn't do that in the first place, but it was worth it for that joke, so I don't care. Again I say: hee!
The bartender has left the bar, and is wandering down the street. Oh, and it's night still, so I guess there are just some super-bright lights outside those basement windows. Angel and Kate rush through the bar. The bartender is looking seriously unwell at this point; large portions of his face are peeled off. Angel and Kate run outside. The bartender grabs a girl and drags her into an alley past some guys who are hanging out around a fire blazing in a trash can. It's September. And, it's Los Angeles. And we've seen plenty of girls in spaghetti straps and t-shirts, so there's no chance at all that it's unseasonably cold and there's any reason to gather around a trash-can-fire. Maybe they're burning books? Oh well. Angel is right behind them, Kate has apparently vanished, perhaps to call for backup. Angel tackles the bartender and the girl runs away. More kicking and punching, which leads them near the convenient blazing trash can. The bartender tries to do some sort of tackle, and Angel flips him into the fire. The flaming bartender (which would be a great name for a drink, by the way) approaches Angel, but then Kate enters and starts firing her gun, driving him back until he collapses.
Firetrucks and ambulances tidy up the scene. Kate tells Angel, "It all seems to add up." Well, if you say so. "The bartender was connected to every one. I must have talked to him a dozen times; I never had a clue." Angel stares at her blankly. Oh all right, for as much as I pick on him, he is cute. Okay? Now leave me alone. ["Tsk." -- Wing Chun] Kate tells Angel that she searched his place: "Illegally, no warrant." "Why are you telling me?" Angel quite reasonably asks. "I don't know," Kate says. "I guess so we can start fresh. No secrets." Angel's eyes flash with guilt. Kate continues, "That's some pretty weird stuff for a veterinarian." Angel, this would be a good time to at least say you were lying about that, even if she knows you were, just to make some gesture of honesty. But instead he offers her one of his business cards: "If I can help you in any way..." She looks at the card and asks if the picture is of a lobster. Look, yes, it's stylized, but if you know his name is Angel, you ought to be able to put those pieces together. Particularly if you're, say, a detective. Ho-hum. Anyway, Angel takes the card back and says he'll be around. Someone calls for Detective Lockley, and she turns, and when she turns back, Angel has done his patented vanishing act.
Back at the office, Angel tells Cordy and Doyle that he knows they've been working hard, and that the three of them "could...well, should, y'know...maybe, uh...go out. You know...for fun?" "Or we could go home," Cordy offers, getting up and heading out the door. "And you could sit in the dark, alone," concludes Doyle as he follows Cordy out. Angel breathes, "God, yes, thank you," and as an introverted type myself, I kind of sympathize. Angel sits at the desk, turns out the light, and prepares for a fulfilling night of brooding.