For its second episode, Angel wastes no time in staking out some fairly bleak territory and tries a storyline which is far too wrapped-up in the adult world of disappointment, disillusionment and cynicism ever to have worked in Buffy. ‘Lonely Heart’ is also a well-paced take on the serial killer genre, and to cap it all introduces the character of Kate Lockley, who’d become a recurring character for the first couple of seasons, so there are a few things to cover off here.

To begin at the beginning, Cordelia draws the comparison between the worlds of Sunnydale and Los Angeles when she says that in high school, it was easy to date because everybody had so much in common- not the case in a major city like Los Angeles, where the people around you are more that likely to be strangers, and everybody spends their time maintaining a facade while being desperately close to make a connection with other people. The bar "D’Oblique" (the "oblique" aspect is a nice allusion to the fact that it’s exactly the sort of place where people aren’t going to be straighforward with you) is a desperately bleak and dispiriting place, full of lonely singles trying to make a connection- which in most cases seems to mean sex and little else- and at the end of the episode, although the burrower parasite has been destroyed, the loneliness hasn’t and places like D’Oblique and the people who inhabit them continue. The people we meet at D’Oblique seem to be misfits who would be out of place in most situations; the first victim we see is the plain and unassuming Sharon, followed by the geeky Kevin, although it has to be said that one of the particularly clever things about the episode is that it allows the actors who play the burrower’s hosts to act against their physical type, so Sharon becomes a vamp and the possessed Kevin is intense and brooding. It’s a clever touch, though, to make the burrower itself part of this scene, looking for the perfect host while at the same time destroying each body it inhabits.

If ‘Lonely Heart’ comes from a particularly bleak place on an emotional scale, the actual content also pushes it over the edge in terms of things which could and couldn’t have been done in Buffy. It’s pretty much explicit that D’Oblique is a casual pick-up bar, in spite of the various patrons’ self-deception about looking for that special person (and the fact that we never really find out about Kate’s hit rate, not least because she’s about to become a sympathetic continuing character and we can’t be allowed to speculate about her sexual history). But it’s the burrower’s method of transmission which crosses several lines- there’s a fairly blatant sexual allusion in the way that the head thrusts out of the host’s body and into the next victim from behind, leaving the host body to decay rapidly- without saying it in so many words, it’s working on associations of rape and AIDS but in a way which is all the more disturning for its subtlety. It also sets out initially to mislead the viewer- after Sharon has become the new host, we see a new and more sexually confident woman putting the finishing touches to her make-up, see the previous host’s corpse in the bed and assume that Sharon is the murderer- which would put it on a par with the original conceit at the heart of Buffy, where the petite blonde is the trained killer- whereas in fact it’s the demon inside her. The plot itself is again deceptively simple and falls into a recognisable genre where our heroes have to find the killer before it strikes again, but the surrounding touches are anything but simple- Kate’s response to Angel setting himself up as a righter of wrongs is the believable hard-bitten detective’s reaction of making Angel himself the prime suspect because he ticks all the serial killer boxes, and it’s touches of reality like this which lift the episode out of the ordinary.

As a second episode, ‘Lonely Heart’ carries on along the same lines as ‘City of...’ in terms of using a straightforward concept to allow the characters to grow together and the infant series to develop its own identity. More overtly horrific than most of the things seen to date in Buffy, it introduces an important supporting character in a novel way- because Angel and Kate first meet as potential lovers, we find out about Kate’s vulnerabilities, trust issues and world-weariness first, rather than finding out about them over time- and the burrower story is strong enough on its own to keep the episode going without recourse to sub-plots and overt comedy. Its only real weakness is that because the series is only a week old, it doesn’t really have the distinctive Angel feel to it, but it’d be a strong entry in any series and a good second episode.