A group of people is killing demons arbitrarily for enjoyment rather than to protect humans from them, and Gunn discovers that it's his old crew out on a killing spree. Can he stop them before they go too far?

Now, I'm all for stories that flesh out Gunn's character, as he's too often ignored and used mainly as hired muscle. This episode does help him a little with a couple of surprise revelations, the main one being how he feels about Angel. While he doesn't exactly hate him, he can't get over the fact that he's a vampire and admits that the pair will never really be friends. However, as Angel points out in a well-written final scene, he needs someone on the team who is willing to kill him should he ever turn into Angelus again.

It's a shame to see the back of Merl, with Angel's opening chat to him where he is unable to be nice particularly good fun, but it does make the point effectively that Gunn's old crew aren't being choosy about how they kill. The problem is that then the story begins to stall. Gunn keeps returning to his former associates to make them realize what they are doing, but gets nowhere, and agonizes over whether to report what is going on to Wesley. He doesn't and, again, the two have a strong confrontation at the end when Wesley tells him exactly what he thinks of Gunn's behaviour.

It all ends in The Host's karaoke bar with a stand-off between Gunn and his crew as they challenge him to kill Angel. This is the other aspect that goes nowhere fast as the stand-off continues for a good third of the episode with lots of talking and not much happening. It does make some interesting points about how the team are fraternizing with far worse demons by visiting the bar, and the final fate of the ringleader of Gunn's crew is suitably unpleasant, but it goes on way too long. There's a fun scene with Cordelia chatting to the furies who put the no violence charm on The Host's bar where she offers them anything, only to realize she's not going to be able to do to them what Angel did. It also does some nice work with Fred, taking her out for the first time and Cordelia being terribly upset that she promised her a safe evening out only to find herself proven a liar. She's new enough that we're not sure if she'll pull the trigger when she offers to kill Angel, but there's still more work to be done with her, and she can't stay cooped up forever. She does, however, become a wonderfully sympathetic character you feel very sorry for.

In the end then, some good scenes and nice writing, but not enough plotting to fill it out properly.

***

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