The team sets out to investigate what kind of child Darla is carrying while Holtz acclimatizes himself to the 21st century and Wolfram & Hart make plans to take the child for themselves.

After last week's episode full of set-up, here we have... another episode of set-up. Now, before you take this as a criticism, here it seems to work. As proved last season, Angel has an impressive ability to surprise by gradually building plotlines, only to throw all of them into the mix at ones, give them a good old stir and see what happens. Sure enough, not only do we have Darla here, concerned over the nature of her baby and badly wanting to be rid of it, but we also have the return of Holtz to modern life and, if that's not enough, Wolfram & Hart get in on the act as well.

It all comes together exceptionally well, with new problems for Darla and the team cropping up at regular intervals to keep things moving along nicely. The Lilah/Gavin Park dynamic is coming along better, although it's still no substitute for Lilah and Lindsey from last season. Lilah is doing better out of the change, however, finally showing that she can be just as conniving and underhand as we've always known and bringing her expertise to Gavin's surveillance operation. Particularly good fun is Holtz's encounter with the Wolfram & Hart infiltration team, not only because it's always funny to see W & H employees killed off but also because it shows just how dangerous Holtz is, something that hasn't really been explored to this point. If he can do asmuch damage as he does to a roomful of Wolfram & Hart commandos, what can he do to Angel?

On the one hand I'm left feeling this story arc is taking a little too long to reach fruition, but with W & H, Holtz, a vampire cult praising Darla's child as the promised miracle child and the revelation that the kid is apparently human, there's a lot to deal with here and it'll be fascinating to see where it goes from here. Whatever happens, it looks as though Angel is in really quite serious trouble this time...

****

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