Season 2, Episode 21 | Aired: 12 May 1998 | Written by: Joss Whedon | Directed by: Joss Whedon
The first half of the season finale, and the episode that establishes the full weight of what’s coming. Becoming Part 1 is structured as a series of flashbacks — Angel’s siring in Galway in 1753, his decades of dissolution, his cursing by the Kalderash gypsies, his first glimpse of Buffy — that build a portrait of a soul that has been carrying its own history like a wound. Then it ends with Kendra dead on the floor and Buffy in handcuffs, and everything that seemed stable is gone.
What Happens
Xander, Willow and Giles discover the demon Acathla — a stone demon capable of opening a vortex to a Hell dimension — and realise Angelus intends to awaken him. The Scoobies plan to re-curse Angel before he can complete the ritual. Meanwhile, Drusilla leads an attack on the school library. Kendra is killed. Willow is hospitalised. Giles is taken. Buffy arrives to find the police waiting for her — she’s being blamed for the recent murders — and runs.
The flashbacks are the episode’s real engine. We see Liam in Galway, seduced and turned by Darla. We see Angel in New York in 1996, homeless and feeding on rats, confronted by Whistler (Max Perlich), who shows him a vision of Buffy called to her destiny. “It’s not too late,” Whistler tells him. Angel agrees. He goes to Sunnydale. He watches Buffy from a distance and falls in love with a girl who doesn’t know he exists yet.
Key Moments
The Galway siring sequence — Darla’s seduction of Liam, the transformation, his return to kill his family — is one of the most fully realised pieces of backstory the show attempts. David Boreanaz plays the young Liam with a brutishness that makes Angel’s later guilt land differently.
Kendra’s death. Drusilla hypnotises her and slits her throat with a fingernail. Quick, terrible, irreversible. The show’s first major character death since season one’s The Pack, and this one is not ambiguous.
Monster / Villain
Acathla — the stone demon whose awakening would drag the living world into Hell. And Angelus, who has been working toward this for weeks.
Notable Quote
“You’re standing at the Mouth of Hell, and it’s about to open.” — Whistler, to the newly-committed Angel in 1996.
Where It Fits
Becoming Part 1 is where the season’s consequences arrive all at once. The slow accumulation of Angel’s cruelty, Jenny’s death, Giles’s grief, Willow’s growing power — it all converges here, in a library covered in blood and a Slayer with no allies and nowhere to go. Part 2 will resolve it. Part 1 is the fall.