The Prodigal

Season 1, Episode 15
Written by Tim Minear
Directed by Bruce Seth Green
Original Airdate: 22 February 2000

“Darling boy. So young, still so very young.”
Darla

REGULAR CAST

David Boreanaz as Angel
Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia Chase
Alexis Denisof as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce

GUEST CAST

Elisabeth Röhm as Kate Lockley
Julie Benz as Darla
John Mahon as Trevor Lockley
J. Kenneth Campbell as Liam’s Father
Henri Lubatti as Head Vampire

CO-STARRING

Frank Potter as Uniformed Delivery
Eliza Szonert as Chamber Maid
Bob Fimiani as Grounds Keeper
Christina Hendricks as Bar Maid
John Maynard as Uniformed Worker
Glenda Morgan Brown as Liam’s Mother
Mark Ginther as Head Demon Guy
John Patrick Clerkin as Black Robed Priest
Michael M. Vendrell as Suit #2

SYNOPSIS

In Galway, Ireland 1753, a human Angel–then named Liam–hits on a servant girl. His father arrives, explaining how ashamed he is of his son and hits him. In present time, Angel fights with and kills a demon. Kate shows up at the scene of a hostage situation in a subway only to find that the suspect is gone and Angel got to him first. Kate’s father, Trevor Lockley, arrives at the scene as well after hearing about the incident on a police scanner. Back in Angel’s past, Darla watches as a drunk Liam fights with several men.

Wesley looks up information on the demon and believes it to be a Kwaini demon. This demon however, is not a violent demon, and they’re not sure why it would have attacked the people on the train. Angel tries to talk to Kate about this, but she wants to forget the whole thing and move on. Wesley and Cordelia locate the demon’s body and are going to perform a test on it. Angel follows a deliveryman who was on the train to the apartment of Kate’s father. Mr. Lockley gives the man a package.

Angel questions Kate’s father and tries to get information from him, but Trevor tells him nothing and shuts the door in Angel’s face. Again in Angel’s past, Liam says goodbye to his family and fights with his father before walking out of the house forever. After quite a bit of partying, it’s again seen how Darla makes Angel a vampire. Kate goes out to lunch with her father and they talk a lot about Angel. Wesley dissects organs from the demon and determines that it is in fact a Kwaini demon. He also finds that the demon was on a special kind of drug and attacked the train because someone one board possibly had more of the drug.

Cordelia returns after following the deliveryman and has pictures of him at a place called Kel’s Exotic Auto. Mr. Lockley speaks with a couple of men in suits about the job he has been doing for them. He is paid for his cooperation and silence. A large demon speaks to the men in suits, telling them to kill Angel and Mr. Lockley. In a flashback to the 18th century, Liam’s family mourns at his funeral. That night, after the burial Angel rises and is greeted by Darla. She watches as he morphs and kills his first human. It’s later seen that the new vampire Angel visits his home and kills the members of his family.

In the present, Cordelia and Wesley work on the new security system while Kate arrives with information on the train’s passengers for Angel. Hoping he can prevent something bad from happening, Angel leaves to warn Trevor about the danger he’s involved in. Cordelia and Wesley are attacked by a couple of Kwaini demons, but Angel returns in time to save them. The security system they recently got turns out to be more annoying and troublesome than helpful. Angel quickly leaves for Trevor Lockley’s place in hopes of saving him.

The men in suits visit Trevor Lockley to make sure he hasn’t said anything to his daughter. Angel arrives but before he can be invited inside, the men in suits reveal themselves as vampires and kill Trevor. Angel kills one of them, while the other escapes. Kate then arrives, finding her father dead and tells Angel to leave. Covering himself with weapons, Angel gets ready to go out and kill all those involved in Mr. Lockley’s death.

Arriving at Kel’s Exotic Auto, Kate shoots several of the vampires and stakes the one that killed her father. The demon they are all working for shows up and manages to survive several gunshots. Angel shows up and helps her fight and kill the remaining vampires and finally chops off the head of the lead demon. Kate walks away, saying that Angel doesn’t know anything about loosing a human father. Back in Angel’s past, Darla finds that Angel has killed all of his family. She reminds him that even though his father is dead, his memory will always haunt him. Kate visits her father’s grave while Angel watches from the safety of the shadows.

TRIVIA

Tim Minear explains the problem with filming on location: “They shot the graveyard stuff at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, which is right behind Paramount. That was a real cemetery, and it was very cold that night. We could see our two vampires’ breath, which is a little bit of a problem, but they couldn’t afford to take it out.”

At Liam’s funeral, the eulogy given by the priest is presumably much longer, but we hear only a few phrases, such as: “Taken too soon from the bosom of his family, a man of just 20 years and 6, Liam was well-loved by everyone he met. Receive this your humble servant. We pray that you may take his eternal soul into your care, Father.” Liam was turned into vampire Angel in 1753; not long before that, funeral orations were philosophical and theological in nature, along the lines of: “Now, the rest of you, try to avoid the sins of this sinner,” but they began to focus on praise and memory of the departed in the late 18th century.

Bob Fimiani, the actor who portrays the unidentified groundskeeper, also portrays Mr. Ward in The Yoko Factor and Primeval and Glith-roo in Heartthrob.

Mark Ginther, who portrays the head demon in this episode, returns as Lasovic in The Ring and Jonathan’s demon form in Life Serial.

CONTINUITY

This is the first appearance of Darla on Angel. She’ll become a key figure in the series, beginning with To Shanshu in L.A..

Before Kate questions the delivery guy witness, Angel tells her: “People have a way of seeing what they need to.” This recalls Giles’s response in The Harvest: “People have a tendency to rationalize what they can and forget what they can’t.”

Darla’s line to Angel, “What we once were informs all that we have become,” stands in direct contrast to Buffy’s insistence in Doppelgängland that “a vampire’s personality has nothing to do with the person it was.” In the same episode, Angel almost corrects Buffy on this point, but he decides better of it.

Some of the 1753 scenes are originally from Becoming (Part 1).

It is implied in this episode that Cordelia had her 19th birthday two weeks earlier; in Birthday, her birthday is set about the second week of January.

GOOFS

The cemetery groundskeeper recites the Lord’s Prayer improperly, omitting the phrase “on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

When Angel’s father is the last mourner present, he is shown breaking down and crying as the camera zooms down on the grave.

When the camera pans back up, he is suddenly stoic with no evidence of tears.

Wesley states that he has performed a “vivisection” on the Kwaini. Vivisection surgeries are performed on living subjects; as the demon was deceased, the procedure is called instead a dissection or an autopsy.

The tip of a boom mike can be seen when Kate and Angel are in her office talking about “evil evil things.”

Trevor’s eyes blink when Kate is crying over his dead body.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

EPISODE
I’ve Got You Under My Skin / The Ring

STORY ORDER
Who Are You / Superstar