Angel, "The Thin Dead Line" Review (2x14)

Brief Synopsis: “Anne informs Angel Investigations of renegade cops that are brutally attacking people on the streets for no reason. At the same time, Kate brings the same case to Angel’s attention. However, these cops aren’t what they seem, as they all died months ago...”


"Happy Anniversary" (2x13) quick link here                                                                                                           "Reprise" (2x15) quick link here

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With that being said, let’s get started, shall we?



This is a zombie cop episode without actually labelling the villains ‘zombies’. What works for this episode is that the zombies look just like humans and the episode has a genuine creep factor to it (something that was most definitely missing from Buffy’s attempt at a zombie episode, “Dead Man’s Party”). The message behind the episode is clear and it’s something that is constantly under scrutiny and debate...law enforcement officers are given the power and authority to make changes in the community and carry weapons, but how much power should they possess? What happens when these law enforcement officers don’t act lawful themselves? What happens when they abuse the system? Police officers have the whole legal system backing them, so how can you fight against that if the officers or system is corrupt? Until the reveal that the cops are actually dead, how are Angel Investigations supposed to fight the villains and help the helpless? They can’t kill the cops, they can’t give them a stern talking to...they’re powerless to fight the system. Parallels to Wolfram & Hart, anyone? While there are certainly elements of racial discrimination in this episode, I feel it primarily revolves around the powerful vs. the poor, as opposed to the white captain vs. the black street kids, which works better for the message behind the episode, in my opinion.

The episode opens with Cordy, Wesley, and Gunn receiving a fresh case from yet another of Virginia’s rich country club friends. It’s a good job that Angel returns soon after Wesley and Virginia’s breakup because they clearly couldn’t have survived financially without her friends. Unlike their last case, which was basically a ‘whodunnit’ mystery that happened off-screen, this case happens a little more at the forefront...only not until the next episode. I was so sure that “The Thin Dead Line” was going to focus on the girl’s third-eye! After showing us this rare phenomenon, the episode quickly forgot about this story and morphed into Kenny and Len being chased by a police officer. This scene was particularly odd as it didn’t show us why the police officer was after them. Had they broken the law? Kenny and Len quickly run to Anne’s homeless shelter, where she invites them in and they explain that they did nothing wrong. Kenny is played by the terrific Kyle Davis, who also appeared in a few episodes of “Dexter” season six as Steve Dorsey, and a few episodes of “American Horror Story” season one as Dallas. After Anne’s appearance in “Blood Money”, I was expecting that to be the end of her character. In the three episodes of the Buffyverse that she’d appeared in (“Lie To Me”, “Anne”, and “Blood Money”), she’d come full circle. She started as a vampire-loving fangirl that was desperate to be sired. After meeting Spike, she ran away to Los Angeles and was living on the streets until Buffy found her. She inherited Buffy’s middle name (‘Anne’) and started a homeless shelter to help the helpless of Los Angeles because she knew what it was like to be without a home and lost in the world. That’s some heavy development for a minor recurring character. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to see her back here. I’m a big fan of both Anne and Julia Lee, so her appearances are always exciting. What I enjoy about Anne’s participation here is that it isn’t forced. It’s not rammed into the story just so Anne can tell Wesley, Cordy, and Gunn that she recently worked with Angel and he screwed her over to mess with Wolfram & Hart. Granted, that helps, but it also makes sense in the context of the zombie cops because Anne runs a homeless sheltered in a particularly rough part of the city.

While on the subject of Anne telling the members of Angel Investigations about her interactions with Angel, she fails to mention that he ultimately gave her $2,000,000 instead of the $100,000 she would have otherwise received from the fundraiser that Wolfram & Hart threw for her. Anne not telling them makes sense because Angel told her that she’d have to hide the money from Wolfram & Hart, but it does irk me that Anne is so quick to complain about Angel. Yes, he used you and stalked you (...minor details...), but he’s also the reason you’re moving into a larger homeless shelter and able to help vastly more people.

When Anne remarked to Kenny that she knew someone who might help, I was expecting it to be Angel. I was pleasantly surprised to find that since moving to Los Angeles, Anne has befriended Mr. Charles Gunn, and it’s actually him that she goes to. At the same time that Angel Investigations take the police brutality case, Angel himself is also made aware of it after he’s stopped by a police officer and attacked for absolutely no reason. Angel killed the police offer, but the police officer kept coming even after he was decapitated. Angel seeks out Kate for answers. Even though Kate has only been missing for a few episodes, it feels like a lifetime. Last season Kate was a big part of the story, but now she feels more like a bit player. Was this because they had less for Kate to do due to Angel’s journey into darkness and his drama with Darla, or because they had bigger plans for Kate down the line, but they were forced to re-adjust after Elisabeth said she was leaving? Either way, Kate is certainly more important and heavily featured in these next three episodes than she has been in the rest of the season. Kate’s appearance in this episode is important because it sets up the conclusion of her journey in “Reprise” and “Epiphany” perfectly.

Another point of note about this episode is that it contains the first appearances of Gunn’s friends Rondell and George. Rondell and George are from Gunn’s old crew, however they weren’t shown on screen in season one’s “War Zone”. I feel like Chain should have been one of these two characters as he was basically Gunn’s best friend when we were introduced to Gunn in “War Zone”. Incidentally, I saw Maurice Compte (who played Chain)  in “Breaking Bad” recently! He still looks the same 11 years later. Rondell and George are an important part of Gunn’s journey here. Not because of their importance to the episode, but because of their importance to Gunn’s character development. George appears in two episodes of “Angel” and Rondell appears in three. Each time they’re used it’s to show the audience how Gunn is drifting further and further from his old life and crew into a new life with Angel Investigations. Here, Rondell and George start off as sarcastic towards Gunn because they haven’t seen him in a long time...“When I got the call, I figured it must be Christmas or something”. This brings Gunn into conflict with himself...does he spend more time with his crew and less with his new business partners? Can he do more good and save more souls with Angel Investigations? Where does his loyalty lie? Because of this conflict, Gunn is snippy with Cordelia on the phone. He tells her to handle the three-eyes case without him and then swiftly hangs up on her.

Gunn: “Here’s the plan, I want y’all to roll the camera and wait for the cops to start hassling us.”
Anne: “How do you know they will?”
Gunn: “‘Cause we’ll be the ones walking while black.”

While this exchange is played for humour, the message behind it certainly isn’t. Racial discrimination, gender discrimination, religious discrimination, they happen all the time throughout the world by people who are in a position of power. What “The Thin Dead Line” is trying to do (and does a very good job of) is explore both sides of this argument. In a lot of cases, the discrimination is unjustified and often against the law (hate crimes). However, because the people in question are in that position of power, they’re able to get away with their behaviour with no negative repercussions. How many times in your life have you felt as though you were treated unjustly by someone in a position of power...the police, your school teachers, your local government representative? It’s not an easy topic to explore without delving into territory that seems preachy, but this episode offers us that in the form of Jackson. Jackson is a character that acts just like the police expect him too. Jackson is a law-breaking thug who uses intimidation to gain respect and carries a gun. Jackson is helping enforce the notion that everybody from that neighbourhood is a criminal and doesn’t deserve help in the eyes of some people in a position of power...

Jackson: “I’m just doing my thing, man. Why don’t you go on and get out of my face.”
Gunn: “Your thing hurts everybody! Why do you think nobody cares they’re clamping down on this neighbourhood?”
Jackson: “‘Cause they’re a bunch of racist pigs.”
Gunn: “There’s that. And then there’s people like you...a thug with a gun, keeping the cycle going.”
Jackson: “Not my problem.”
Gunn: “No, see, it’s my problem, alright?! ‘Cause they shot my friend over there!”
Jackson: “Oh, yeah. White man dying...not exactly losing sleep on it.”

Frankly, I find this whole topic fascinating and would love to discuss this to death, but I don’t want to stray too far off-topic, so I’m going to move on from the abuse of power and discrimination outside of this specific episode.

While searching for Gunn, Cordelia spots one of the homeless girls wearing a top that looks suspiciously like one of hers that she was told was one of a kind...Cordy, you know that Angel was recently working with Anne, can you not put two and two together? I know Angel fired his friends and needed an excuse to see Anne, but did he really have to give away Cordy’s clothes like they’d just been through a particularly rough breakup? IT’S CORDELIA! Giving away her clothes is worse than killing her family! Angelus was never this cruel, you bastard!

Gunn, Rondell, and George get exactly what they were hoping for...a renegade zombie cop. Gunn very politely asks the cop what he did wrong (while secretly recording the whole thing), but the cop isn’t responding to him. Out of  nowhere, Wesley runs up the street to defend Gunn and...WESLEY WAS SHOT!WHAT?!

After this happened, I was literally sat there with my jaw hanging for a few seconds. How am I possibly supposed to comprehend this?! Joss doesn’t use guns to kill his main characters in the Buffyverse (this was pre-Tara...ugh,  I have to review that too...)! He rarely uses them, actually! What the Buffyverse does best is take real life issues, throw in a supernatural element, and explore them. The supernatural element in this episode was the zombie cops. The issue being explored was police brutality. Therefore, I was not expecting Wesley to suddenly get shot because it’s all too real! Wesley wasn’t bitten by a zombie or something, he was shot on the street in cold blood, which, sadly, is something that happens all the time in the real world. I was so unprepared for this moment. What’s worse, I legitimately thought Whedon was  going to kill him off and that it would be Angel’s punishment for turning dark. Angel would always have to carry the burden that his decisions meant that he wasn’t there to aid his friend or warn him that the cops weren’t human anymore. Therefore, as you can imagine, I spent the last ten minutes of this episode in what I can only describe as an anxiety-filled catatonia. Every time Wesley was shown to be deteriorating, my heart skipped a beat. I had an imagine in my head of Angel swooping in to save the day, but being too late to save Wesley and Wesley dying in his arms. Thank fuck that didn’t transpire.

The next ten minutes are basically one big nerve-fest. Can Gunn, Rondell, and George get Wesley to hospital before he dies? Then, the zombie cops kill the ambulance driver, and my fears heighten to the point of hysteria. Even after they manage to get him back to Anne’s homeless shelter, I was still convinced that Wesley was ultimately going to die in Angel’s arms. Sweet mama, save me! Even though it’s not frightening or creepy in a “Hush” kind of way, “The Thin Dead Line” succeeds greatly in building suspense and making you legitimately fear for the lives of our heroes. Remember, Doyle died in the middle of a season. “Angel” isn’t the type of show to only kill off major characters in a season finale. Therefore, I feel that my fears for Wesley were completely justified and I was perfectly within my rights to yelp like a puppy whose tail had just been trodden on whenever Wesley’s face turned another shade of pale. YOU CAN’T JUDGE ME!

After Wesley has been shot and Gunn has argued with Jackson, Gunn realises that he doesn’t belong in this world anymore. He doesn’t belong in his crew. He’s evolved! He can do more good and help more people with Cordelia and Wesley. Wesley’s near death experience also helps Gunn to realise that Wesley is his closest friend in the world...whether he’ll admit it or not. I’m not sure when this happened exactly, but Gunn and Wesley have become really close over the past few episodes...it was probably somewhere around playing board games in Cordy’s apartment. Gunn was willing to sacrifice everything to try to save Wesley from bleeding out, and Wesley was shot because he was trying to defend Gunn! BROMANCE! Notice that Gunn leaves Rondell and George to find their own way back in order to go with Wesley to the hospital. Gunn subconsciously makes a very important choice in this crunch moment. I was also really impressed with Cordelia in this episode. When Wesley arrives at the homeless shelter with a bullet wound and clinging to life, Cordelia’s response is “Wesley, I...what can I do?”. She instantly goes into “I’ve got to save his life” mode instead of panicking or losing her nerve. The Cordelia of Sunnydale couldn’t keep her nerve if she was having a bad hair day, and now here she is saving lives and being a leader. She’s instrumental in saving the lives of the homeless people from the zombie cops by taking charge and organising them to board up the house. Yes, Angel stopped them ultimately, but the human losses would have been significantly more if it wasn’t for Cordelia. Her character development over the first three seasons of “Angel” is absolutely incredible.

As I mentioned earlier, Kate’s actions in this episode have major repercussions for her over the next two. Angel beats up the captain of the police force that’s raising and controlling the zombie cops and he smashes up the precinct while doing so. These actions result in Kate being fired in the next episode. Her superiors know that she’s been distracted since her father’s death. She takes on any case with a whiff of a supernatural element, she has a harder shell, and she’s making questionable decisions (like letting Angel go in “Reunion”, which resulted in Angel locking all the Wolfram & Hart lawyers in a wine cellar with Darla and Drusilla). Of course, all of this is because she knows that vampires and demons are real! She can’t tell her bosses this, she can’t confide in them. She’s trapped. Angel making her aware of vampires in season one’s “Somnambulist” ends up costing her her dream job, her career, and everything that makes up her identity. She blames Angel for all of this and tells him as much as she’s overdosing on pills...but more on that in the next two reviews. I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT STOPPING A ZOMBIE-RAISING VIGILANT POLICE CAPTAIN COST KATE HER JOB! WHERE’S THE JUSTICE?! Oh God, when she thinks her father has been reanimated as a zombie cop, my heart just breaks for her. The death of her father is clearly still etched into her mind in her every waking moment and it’s slowly eating away at her sanity. Her father’s death and getting revenge on the supernatural world has become an obsession with Kate. It’s all she can think about. Stripping her of her job is also stripping away a lot of her ability to exact revenge on behalf of her father.

Do you know what my favourite part of this story is? Kate’s conversation with Angel at the end of the episode...

Kate: “Up until three months ago there was a murder every two weeks, a rape every two days, a robbery every hour and a half. And that’s what we just gave back to the people of that community.”

Has Angel stopping the police captain made Los Angeles a better, safer place? He certainly needed to be stopped because he was becoming increasingly unhinged with his orders to the zombies, but were his methods justified before he started going overboard and attacking people for no reason? Was he cleaning up the streets of Los Angeles? Crime rates were certainly falling with his no-nonsense stance. It’s a completely grey area. Which is worse: incredibly harsh policing and less crime or a fairer policing policy and more crime? Again, until the captain went too far and was lost to power, was he doing the right thing? Was he justified? I’m legitimately interested in your thoughts here, gentle readers!

Through Kate, Angel is made aware that Wesley was shot. He rushes to the hospital and bumps straight into Cordelia...

Cordy: “What are you doing here?”
Angel: “I heard about Wesley.”
Cordy: “Well, that’s great. Too bad it takes a gunshot wound to make you give a crap. Wesley doesn’t need you right now. We don’t need you. You walked away. Do us a favour and just stay away.”

The episode closes with Cordelia going back into Wesley’s hospital room to talk to Wesley and Gunn, her adopted family, while Angel is left out in the cold. For the second episode in a row, it closes on Angel looking into the life he gave up from the outside. While Angel fired them and acted like a royal ass for the past few episodes, I still can’t help but feel sorry for him because I understand his reasoning entirely. He explained it perfectly in “Happy Anniversary”. It doesn’t excuse his behaviour, it doesn’t justify it, but it does help you understand it. Angel has slowly been pulling out of his darkness (very slowly) since his conversation with Lorne in the last episode. However, just because Angel wants his old life back, it doesn’t mean that the people from his old life are ready to accept him. Cordy is right, they don’t need him. They’ve got new premises, new lives, and have bonded deeply since he walked away from them. They’ve battled monsters together and succeeded, why would they risk bringing someone back who abandoned them all and left them without a revenue stream? Keeping this conversation in theme with the episode, is Cordelia’s rejection of Angel here, without listening to his side of the argument, justified? Does Angel deserve to be heard out? Grab some popcorn and grab some tissues (for the emotional bits, not the sex scene), “Reprise” and “Epiphany” are upon us.


Quote Of The Episode

Wesley: “What I wouldn’t give for a roving band of Prechian demons right now.”

*Cordy and Gunn stare at him*

Wesley: “...Without the ritualistic slayings, of course.”


FINAL SCORE: 7/10

What are your thoughts on "The Thin Dead Line"? Did you enjoy this episode? Dislike it? Let me know all your thoughts in the comments section below!

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