Grade: B
At the offices, Cordelia prepares for a night on the town while Angel and Wesley follow one of her visions to the site of a prospective demon attack, which they manage to avert. Meanwhile, Cordy brings her charming date home for a romantic evening, and fails to arrive at work the next day. Going to check upon her, Wesley and Angel are shocked to find her in a state of shock and nearly nine months pregnant, barely consolable by Angel's promises of help. Realizing that Cordelia's date is unreachable by phone, Angel determines to track him down while Wesley attends to Cordelia. Following the man from haunt to haunt, Angel eventually runs him to earth in a gun club, where he demands to know what has been done to Cordelia. Meanwhile, Wesley takes Cordelia for a prenatal checkup, which makes it abundantly clear that she is carrying several non-human children. Visiting a friend of Cordelia's who was with her the night before, Angel finds her heavily pregnant as well, which only confirms what he has already learned; an entire group of men in the city have pledged themselves to a demon, who has enlisted them to impregnate unsuspecting women by proxy. Back at headquarters, Cordelia begins falling under the influence of the demon's telepathic connection to her, and Angel is shocked to find her dipping into his supply of blood for her own consumption. As Wesley identifies the demon who is the most likely suspect behind the epidemic of pregnancies, Cordelia, now completely enslaved to the demon's will, knocks Wesley unconscious and leaves the offices. Angel, also injured from a run-in with the demon's followers, manages to get Wesley on the phone and inform him of the location of the men's shrine to the demon, where the women will be likely to go. Wesley informs Angel that the demon is reportedly near-impossible to kill, and Angel asks Wesley to bring a gun along. Arriving at the abandoned warehouse where the women have been drawn, Wesley confronts the demon, stalling for time until Angel arrives with a canister of liquid nitrogen, the contents of which Wesley is able to to expose the demon to via a straight shot from a previously hidden gun. The demon destroyed, the women's pregnancies are ended, and the demonic thrall abruptly stopped. Later,as Angel and Wesley express concern over Cordelia's wellbeing, she assures them that the most important lesson she learned from the entire debacle is that Angel and Wesley are willing to risk their lives to help her, and that she trusts them both completely.
Observations:
- An enjoyable romp of an episode without straying into overly heavy territory or being of much significance to the seasonal story-arc; the most important aspect is being able to witness the current Angel Investigations team acting as a loyal family for the first time, rather than as a group of slightly fractured co-workers.
- Also, suspiciously similar to this, plot-wise, although I suppose that Angel did come first. Russell T. Davies (who purportedly did "have an eye" on Whedon's work when reviving Doctor Who) has something to answer for.
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