As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Logic
- Holtz is specifically mentioned to be hellbound upon his death. So where was he when LA went to Hell?!
- This is the Buffyverse, where there are countless hell dimensions. The one that the Senior Partners sent LA to didn't involve any dead evil people.
- Lorne's species can live several days after being decapitated, and be put back together. We learn this after he gets decapitated by his own people. Shouldn't they already know this?
- This was actually addressed in the episode. You have to mutilate their bodies after decapitation to kill them and his people knew that. It was only because Gru swapped his clothes out onto someone else's body that they mutilated the wrong corpse.
Fridge Brilliance
- Angel is angry that Spike got a soul and only angsted for a week while he has been suffering for over a century. This is because of how they got their souls. Spike went and had his soul magically implanted back into him. Angel was cursed with his soul so that he would forever be tormented by all he had done. It is virtually impossible for Angel to ever truly process and move on because the curse locks him into feeling like he can never atone for his crimes.
- If you just watch Buffy, you have to wonder how the world has lasted this long, given that The End of the World as We Know It always seems imminent...then you watch Angel, and find out that Wolfram and Hart are behind almost every evil thing on either show, and they don't want to win, meaning that all of Buffy's enemies are being played for suckers.
- I just realized that Cordelia had her first vision immediately after she broke down crying about Doyle. The visions he passed on to her were activated when she had a strong emotional response thinking about him.
- Cordelia telling Fred to shut up near the beginning of "Fredless" seems kind of mean at first, until you remember that the rest of the Fang Gang (especially Wes, Cordy, and Gunn) pretty much communicate in snark and insults. And since the rest of this episode is spent firmly establishing Fred as a permanent part of the team, Cordy's "Shut up, Fred," could actually be interpreted as an early indication that she's accepted Fred into their group, to the point where Cordy's comfortable being snarky towards her.
- If you're wondering how John Stoler saw Jasmine for what she really was in "Shiny Happy People", when he was in the back of the crowd and it’s established in-universe that only exposure to Jasmine's blood breaks her hold on you: Stoler ran into the vampire who had Jasmine’s blood on him before joining the crowd, this breaking her hold on him preemptively!
- Illyria wonders at the Wolf, Ram and Hart being such a powerful entity when in her time they were little more than a joke. This is explained enough by the absence of Old Ones on Earth that lowers the bar considerably, but it could also come from the fact that the Senior Partners thrive on the evil in every human. Since humans now dominate Earth, this would give the Senior Partners that much more power.
- Angel's evil and soulless alter ego is called Angelus, the series is set in the city of Los Angeles. All of them different translations of Angel. But given the film noir set up of the show, Angel knows that as long as he remains in that city, helping the helpless, his dark side will always be there, and all around him (as there are always people around, and he is still a vampire, and even with a soul he still has to fight his bloodlust daily). And as Wolfram and Hart reminded him, evil will always exist there.
- In "Judgment", Angel singing "Mandy" in his first karaoke at Lorne's club becomes pretty sad when you listen to the actual lyrics
. Sound like a certain vampire's relationship to a certain slayer...and later on to a certain brunette named Cordelia. - In "City of..." Doyle tells Angel: "I come in uninvited, so you know I’m not a vampire like yourself." The thing is, that rule doesn't apply to demon lairs... and Doyle is himself a demon. The reason Doyle didn't know the rule is because he looks human, and no vamps would attempt to test the demon-lair rule on him because they're screwed if they're wrong. This line wasn't just a throwaway As You Know informing new viewers that vampires Must Be Invited, it was also establishing a tiny bit of Doyle's character!
- For the longest time, I never understood Lorne's power. A) is he an empath or an oracle? B) why does his precognition never help with the threat of the week? Then it occurred to me that the answer to both is that he is an empath. Judging from his successful cases, he doesn't issue big dramatic prophecies, he just offers valuable life help. And why is this? Because he's from a place where everyone's all about dramatic prophecies, heroism, and the like... and has decided that it has no rhythm.
- Angel suddenly being strong enough to be the main hero after being Buffy's sidekick makes sense when you realize that vampires get stronger as they age, and Angel spent several centuries in hell.
- Billy Blim's claim that all men have "primal misogyny" in them may seen like a bad aesop, but it makes more sense when you consider the idea that Billy simply views humanity through his own twisted lens and assumes that all men think like him.
- Billy's belief is also disproven when his touch fails to affect Angel.
- Everyone criticizes goofs on both shows where Angel breaths heavily when he's emotional (since vampires don't have to breath to survive/don't have functioning lungs), but it has been shown that they can choose to breath (e.g. Spike can smoke) what if Angel is just so overdramatic that he chooses to breath heavily even though he doesn't have to?
- It could possibly be involuntary too. Vampires still have human brains, and the human brain instinctually keeps us breathing even when we're not thinking about it. Maybe Angel breathes simply because his brain tells him he should be?
- Gunn refused to lend his truck to his friends from his old crew when they had some big vampire battle. He told them to wait to battle till he was done with his Angel Inc mission. At first it seems like Gunn just doesn't want to admit that his crew doesn't need him anymore or that part of his life is behind him, but we later learn that he sold his soul for that truck, so it makes sense that he would just lend it out to whomever.
- Rewatching both this show and Buffy made me realize the parallels between "Surprise"/"Innocence" (Buffy Season 2, episodes 13-14) and "Reprise"/"Epiphany" (Angel Season 2, episodes 15-16).
- Both "Surprise" and "Reprise" end with Angel rushing out into the rain after sleeping with Buffy/Darla.
- In "Surprise", Angel achieves perfect happiness. In "Reprise", Angel achieves "perfect despair".
- "Innocence" is when Angel becomes a villain for the rest of Buffy season 2. "Epiphany" is when Angel changes from the darker direction he has been going ever since Darla was made into a vampire again.
- Both Buffy and Darla are hurt and shocked by Angel's reaction and treatment of them after sex. For Buffy, it's because this is her first time and she's hurt at being treated so callously. For Darla, she's shocked Angel wasn't happy but brings up her own sexual past in disbelief.
- Neither is killed by Angel(us) but for different reasons. Angelus wants to hurt Buffy further while Angel spares Darla out of pity.
- Both ask "Was I not good enough?"
- Season two ends with the Fang Gang returning from their adventure in Pylea only to find Willow there to break the news of Buffy's death. I was wondering why she couldn't have just called them. Then I realised that while Buffy and co. were dealing with Glory, Angel and his crew were in Pylea and thus would have been unreachable, so Willow had to go and deliver the news personally.
- How come this show never got a Musical Episode like Buffy? Well, only Andy Hallett and James Marsters actually had singing ability, as shown by Angel "singing" "Mandy", Wesley, Cordelia and Gunn drunkenly singing "We Are the Champions", Fred nervously singing "Crazy" and Harmony's singing being so bad she should change her name to Cacophony, to say nothing of Cordelia's butchering of "The Greatest Love of All".
Fridge Horror
- Angel gives up his humanity to prevent Buffy dying to protect him. While ostensibly this allows Angel to save lots more innocents, it means that if Buffy died to protect him then she wouldn't be around to sacrifice herself to save the world from Glory.
- In "Untouched", Wesley figures out, with only minimal clues, that Bethany was molested by her father. It begs the question, how did he manage to catch what the others so easily missed? We already know that Wesley suffered emotional (and possibly physical) abuse at the hands of his own father, but the speed and accuracy with which he deduces Bethany's past makes you wonder what else may have been done to him.
- His past also makes "Billy" (where he and others are infected with a violent, misogynistic personality), even more horrifying. His joke- "What do you tell a women with two black eyes? Nothing you haven't already told her twice"- might have been learned verbatim from his father. It makes the scene at the end, where Wesley is crying out of guilt and shame, even worse. He knows firsthand what it's like to live with an abuser, and he just inflicted that on another person.
- "Eternity": Sure, Rebecca didn't know about Angel's curse when she drugged him, but she still knew that he was a vampire and that his natural instinct was to eat her alive, and that she was removing the inhibitions that kept him from doing just that. She knew she was risking a horrible death by getting close to Angel in that state, and didn't care. Either she was Too Dumb to Live or her issues went much, much deeper than we first thought.
- Say, did Cordelia's family ever find out about her fate?
- A bit more Fridge Tear Jerker than horror, but the scenario presented by "The Girl In Question" must have been severely painful to Spike. Think about it; when he was with Buffy while soulless, he spent it being beaten, used and dehumanized. Now, less than a year after his "death", he's told that Buffy has "fallen for" some other soulless demon, and they cuddle and act like a real couple. Pretty heartbreaking for the Ascended Demon who did the unthinkable and sought a soul for her—no wonder the poor guy spends the whole episode moping that he had no real chance with her in the first place.
- Wesley's fears about Angel killing Connor are a lot more understandable when you consider the curse, Angel loses his soul if he gets true happiness and he was very happy when he was fawning over his son...
- Consider Fred's situation in "The Magic Bullet" alone, on the run, with the entire city after her. It seems to this troper like that bears a lot of similarities with her time in Pylea, she even ends up in another cave...
- Lorne has read Lindsey before. How long did he know that eventually, he was going to kill him?
