Midnight, Texas 1×07 Review: “Angel Heart”

This week’s episode of Midnight, Texas was a step back for the series. Considering last week’s episode was such a strong entry for the season, this week’s “Angel Heart” introduced a sloppy (and frankly annoying) villain of the week that was hard to overlook.

This week was all about the angels (and the demons they love), starting with a fellow fallen angel, Bowie, who has a nasty anger issue after Joe left her and the angel business in order to be with the man he loves – Chuy.

The reason for all the hatred? It turns out that Chuy is a demon, well, part demon on his father’s side. But let’s talk about Bowie, she likes to hurt people. She’s loud, obnoxious and struts into Midnight looking for Joe and taking no prisoners threatening to kill off the Midnighters one by one until Joe comes out of his tattoo shop to face her. One of the biggest problems with Bowie’s character, though, is the total lack of character development. Why is she so angry at Joe? I’m not buying that she’s been hunting the man for thousands of years just because he dipped and fell in love. Doesn’t she have anything better to do with her immortal existence?

Besides Bowie, there were plenty of other problems this week, one of them being the Midnighter’s bizarre reactions to deadly situations. When Bowie, Joe and Chuy duke it out towards the end of the episode, Manfred, Fiji and Lemuel devise a plan to send the angel to hell though a mirror portal that Fiji somehow opens up. It’s not really explained how they open this portal or where it comes up, but we are assuming it’s somehow connected to Fiji, considering she’s had some serious demon problems the past couple of episodes.

As you can guess, this plan fails miserably. Lemuel attempts to push the angel into the mirror, but she’s an angel so she just destroys the portal with one hand of bright light. Realizing their plan totally went south, Manfred pulls out the dried-up finger of one of his ancestors out of his pocket, which Bowie annoyingly smacks out of his hand and exclaims, “What’s you problem?!?” It’s probably one of the lamest lines from a villain ever.

This is when Joe has enough and pulls out his wings for the real fight, which Joe is losing spectacularly. It’s only when Chuy transforms into his very, very silly spastic demon self that he somehow manages to kill an all-powerful angel.

The angel-demon subplot wasn’t the only problem with this week’s episode. After the major problems with Bowie and Joe were resolved, all of the characters seem to do bizarre things. First we have Fiji, who has a total breakdown cleaning up some smashed remains of her lawn, crying to Bobo about how she needs peace and quiet and for Midnight to go back to the way it was–simple and peaceful. It makes us question the relationship between Bobo and Fiji though, as it was only a couple of episodes ago that the pair were making out at Fiji’s house, and it seemed that all of a sudden she’s torn over whether or not she likes Bobo anymore. It’s a very sudden shift that threw me off balance a bit. While it makes sense that Fiji is a little angry at him for keeping secrets, this is also the woman who keeps locks of people’s hair in jars, so it makes Fiji’s anger a little invalid.

The next couple who has issues is Manfred and Creek. Poor Creek is traumatized by the death of her little brother from last week’s episode, but she uses the lamest excuse in the book for the sake of changing the plot. She tells Manfred that she needs time alone to figure out the kind of person she wants to be that’s not a daughter or a sister, but what it really is? Just lazy writing. I hope for Midnight, Texas’  sake that the writing improves for next week because we are getting double-time episodes Monday and Tuesday night.

Midnight, Texas stars François Arnaud, Parisa Fitz-Henley, Dylan Bruce, Arielle Kebbel, Jason Lewis, Sarah Ramos, Peter Mensah, and Yul Vazquez. Watch Midnight, Texas on NBC, Mondays at 10/9c.