“It's not Daddy,” the mad vampire Drusilla says when Angel enters the wine cellar in which she and Darla are about to eat a bunch of lawyers in “Reunion” (A2-10). She adds in disappointment, “It’s never Daddy.”

She is, of course, alluding to the unique (and, from Drusilla’s perspective, unfortunate) transformation which her vampire “sire” has gone through—twice in the course of his eventful existence—changing from the gleefully evil Angelus into the conscience-stricken Angel. The en-souled vampire who confronts Darla and Drusilla in that wine cellar, though troubled and walking close to the edge at that point in his unlife, is not Drusilla’s “Daddy” as she knew him, but rather her sworn enemy, the individual whom her sire ultimately became.

This schizophrenia is a well-known aspect of Angel’s characterization, and it runs so deep that Angel and the Fang Gang often talk about his alter ego, Angelus, as if he were a separate individual altogether. Yet there is an equally strong split in Angel’s characterization which goes unaddressed: The Angel we know on Angel is a different character than the one we knew on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

When Darla, Angel’s sire and former lover (to use the word loosely), recalls bitterly in “Dear Boy” (A2-05) that Angel preferred “that cheerleader” to her, one is startled by the notion of Angel dating a cheerleader . . . until one realizes that it wasn’t this Angel. It was that Angel, and he doesn’t live here anymore. Like Angelus, that Angel is a  …