Angel realizes that he has to provide for his child, so Angel Investigations expands its operation in an attempt to start earning some serious cash.

Somewhere along the line, there's been a slight loss of the element of surprise. Once each of the subplots begins, it's only a matter of waiting to find out what's going to go wrong. A group of demons with a mission? A woman wanting her dead stalker boyfriend gone? A man wanting a nest of vampires taken out? Although not all of these three storylines are predictable, it's a shame that not one of them is quite what it seems, as you would think that the law of averages would allow one to turn out simply enough. Of them all, the stalker one is probably the one that requires the least effort in predicting what's going to happen, as I'm pretty sure that either this show or Buffy has done something along similar lines at some point.

It's not a bad episode, though. There are some fun moments in it (although Wesley and Gunn both wanting Fred is an aspect that's not going to be that easy to maintain or very fascinating to watch) and it's certainly got plenty going on. The Holtz parts, because of this, seem a little pointless; after all, with three plots already going on at once, why add in another? And it seems more to remind us all he's about than for anything much to happen. All he does is leave his new woman assistant with a spike in her hand for a few days. Yes, it's nasty and demonstrates Holtz's single-mindedness, but it's not particularly relevant.

After the last episode, it would be nice to see some of Cordy's demon powers get a look-in. So far we've only seen her levitate; what else could there be, or is this it? Surely she must be some kind of demon. It's a bit of a shame that we don't find out towards the end, as that would have been much better than Wesley, Gunn and Angel all showing up in the nick of time.

It's good to see Angel finally getting some business as well; after all, surely he's had to survive on something all this time, yet we never see much in the way of clients. Overall, then, not a bad effort that does deal with some key points of the series' set-up, but I can't help feeling there were a few things that could have worked better here.

***

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