Angel - "Harm's Way" Review
By: Michael Hickerson

Written by Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain
Directed by Vern Gillum
Original Airdate: January 14, 2004

Plot: On a girl's night out, Fred encourages Harmony to approach a cute guy at the bar, which lead to Harmony waking up with the guy, who is now dead with vampire bites on his neck. Harmony is worried that if anyone at Wolfram and Hart finds out, she will be killed per Angel's new zero tolerance policy. But things go from bad to worse when Harmony discovers that the dead man is a critical figure to negotations to bring peace to two families of feuding demons....

Warning: If seeing SPOILERS for the first new Angel of 2004 will put you in "Harm's Way" then I strongly suggest you turn back now. I'm about to give away huge SPOILERS. Consider yourself warned...

In short: Not exactly what I'd hoped for coming out of the hiatus...

For Harmony, high school was a pretty easy time. She knew exactly who she was and where she stood within the social structure of Sunnydale High--she was one of the in-crowd, someone that many wanted to be like, but few were allowed to be.

But then, high school ended and the real world set in. Harmony became a vampire, hooked up with Spike, broke up with him and even tried to raise her own set of minions to take out the Slayer. And pretty much didn't find her niche in all of that. Despite her desire to become a super villain, kick butt vampire, Harmony pretty much became little more than a joke--even so much so that Buffy burst out laughing when she finds out that Harmony has minions. Having failed that, Harmony then decides to become a working vampire in the undead world, signing on with Wolfram and Hart and trying to go straight--and by straight, we mean not drinking the blood of humans.

And, so far, that hasn't really been that successful either.

Harmony is still searching for where exactly she fits in with the world of Wolfram and Hart, as displayed here in "Harm's Way." From the beginning, we've seen that Angel and company treat her begrudingly...she's allowed in the meetings, but not really a part of the main group. Her ideas are pretty much dismissed as quickly as her plans for destroying the Slayer were. She wants to help out the group, but you can tell that Angel and company don't have any trust in her nor do they really respect her abilities that much. She tries to do her best--she does hours of research to find the perfect way to open the meetings between the two clans and what htye would want to eat, only to have Angel rebuff her in front of the entire office staff--but she always comes up just a bit short. Every time she tries to do the right thing, it comes out wrong and ends up putting her more and more behind the eight ball.

But neither does she fit in with the non-management portions of Wolfram and Hart. She's seen as part of the upper management team or as someone who had friends in high places that opened doors while others languished in obscurity. She tries to connect with her fellow workers, but since they consider her one of the suits that runs the show, she's not really allowed to have any friends within the office. She can't even find someone who will listen to her or show her the least bit of compassion.

Well, except for Fred, who this season seems to be the friend to the friendless. First she took on the cause of Spike and championed it and now she takes Harmony under her wing, taking Harmony out for a girl's night out when Harm has reached the end of her rope. Fred is just that sweet and kind, but I wonder if part of this might be her remembering how aliennated she felt back on Pylea all those years and trying to make sure that Harmony doesn't suffer a simliar fate.

Harmony and Fred bond--well, a bit. Fred encourages Harmony to be more confident and to try and be active in her life instead of just letting things happen. Harmony does and, with typical results, things go horribly wrong. She wakes up in bed with a guy she met at the bar who is now dead, with vampire wounds on his throat. Harmony disposes of the body (in one of the more amusing sequences of the show) and then hopes she won't be tested for human blood. Earlier in the story, Angel killed a guy from accounting who was sacrificing virgins, in keeping with the new policy of zero tolerance for killing the innocent. So, Harm has good reason to fear--compounded by the fact that it turns out this guy was the only negotatiotor two sides in a demon version of the Hatfields and McCoys would accept as negotiator. Now they want blood--the blood of the person or demon who killed this man..and Harmony is left scrambling to find a way to figure out what happened and what went wrong, since she can't remember any of the evening after she started talking to the guy at the bar.

In a lot of ways, "Harm's Way" feels a lot like Buffy's season seven "Storyteller" did. The story takes a few moments to step inside a recurring character and to look at the central core figures of the series from an outsiders persepctive. However where I felt "Storyteller" was a nice spin and some interesting character work for Andrew, "Harm's Way" just ended up being rather derivative and disappointing. Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain appear to be trying to get us inside the shoes of Harmony--heck, we spend the first fifteen or so minutes of the story going through a typical Harmony day, just so we can set up how she'll be framed in the next act--and it's not really all that interesting or successful. Part of it is that I think Andrew was given a lot more depth as a character and Harmony has always been more comic relief than anything else. We've not really seen her expanded on in any real way and it's not very well done here. If anything, it feels as though we're still at that point in "Real Me" where Xander mocks Harmony for having minions since she clearly is not a super villain and really has no business taking on the Slayer one on one.

And I think that is why I'm so disappointed with "Harm's Way." It could have been a chance to move us forwrad, to take the character in a new direction. But it didn't. Yes, it certainly felt like Harmony has become a bit more professional and she certainly does try hard to win the affection of those around her. But honestly, that's how she was in high school and then on Buffy. Look at how she went along with Spike's Slayer fantasy just to make him happy. It's the same here--Harmony is trying to play the role of great assistant to Angel, but she's not succeeding as well as she'd hoped.

In a lot of ways, I felt like Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain were trying to take a page from Jane Espenson's book--namely focus an episode on a character that has been a bit of comic relief to the series and while you approach it with a sense of levity, make a serious examination of the character. And while Espenson was certainly the master of this on Buffy, I don't think Craft and Fain quite succeeded with that here. Part of it may be that, quite honestly, I don't really care that much about Harmony as a character. Yes, she's amusing enough in her limited role on Angel and she does serve well as comic relief, but the character isn't as strong as Andrew or Jonathan and really capable of carrying off an entire episode focused primarily on her.

I think another part of it was the way things all worked out a bit too conviently in the final act. The real killer is someone how hates Harmony for taking the out front job of being Angel's assistant and has an ax to grind. There's a battle through the halls of Wolfram and Hart that ends with Harmony dusting the other woman (who is also a vampire) in front of the fueding families, thus ensuring them of the blood they wanted and putting the negotations on the right track. Harmony happens into a solution that works for everyone--well, except for Fred, Lorne and the poor guy who does the random blood tests to see if vampires are off the human blood. All three get whacked on the head and tied up in a storage closet.

Part of my problem with the real killer is she comes out of nowhere. We've not seen her before nor heard of her. It felt like she was just invented for this story to make all the pieces come together. And I honestly wish maybe we'd have some hint of this earlier--if not this season, than in this story. I may have to go back and look again, but I'm not sure we saw the woman that Harmony scorned even in the breakroom scenes earlier in the story either. Of course, I could be wrong about this.

Another part of my problem with the story was after the sweeping, monumental jaw-dropping moment that "Destiny" ended on, we got nothing that dealt with any of that here. I don't mind a stand alone episode so much, but a stand alone episode coming out of two months of no new episodes seems a bit much. I'd honestly looked forward to this one a lot and found myself scratching my head at the end, thinking--that's it?!? (In contrast, the new Smallville out of the hiatus came out all guns blazing in terms of the on-going mythology of the series....so I wonder if I'd chosen to watch Enterprise before Angel if I might not be happier with Angel...interesting question). I wasn't looking for Lindsey to sit up there and chew scenery but at least some movement. Heck, in season three when we had that jaw dropper of Darla being pregnant, at least the next couple of episodes kept checking back to that plotline so we didn't lose track of it.

So, quite honestly, there wasn't a great deal that I really loved about Harm's Way. There wasn't a great deal I loathed either. It was just sort of there--I spent an hour watching it, but I wasn't really moved to love it or hate it. Which is a shame really as I'd really looked forward to this one. Maybe Angel will get back to wowing me next week--becuase it was on quite a roll as we went into hiatus.

So, that's about it for now except a few small things...

--Spike is corporal and decides to go look up Buffy. OK, I'm not bothered by this so much as the fact that in three months no one has bothered to ring up Buffy and tell her Spike is alive. That seems awfully selfish and rude--did we ever think Buffy might have some guilt about Spike and Anya dying to help her save the world and at least knowing Spike survived might help her sleep at night?
--I don't think Spike didn't leave because he couldn't think of a good entrance. He's not just going to hang around L.A. because he can. I think there's more to it than that--whether it's he's still bound to L.A. (and Lindsay and Eve did some mojo in Destiny so he could go to Vegas) or that he really does want to Shanshu and is trying to hide that from Angel to make Angel feel comfortable, I'm not sure...