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Back
in the early days of Buffy, Pocket Books produced one
of the best guides to any series in the shape of The Watcher's
Guide. Since then, they've produced two further Buffy
guides before, inevitably, turning their attention towards Angel.
Like
those subsequent releases, The Casefiles isn't as good
as the original, despite having more episodes to cover (44 compared
to 34).
In
fact, the same problems that caused me to mark down The Watcher's
Guide Volume 2 crop up here as well.
Each
episode of Angel's first two seasons is covered in depth,
but as with TWG 2, there's probably too much depth, with
at least half a dozen pages devoted to most episodes.
The
bulk of this is taken up by "Action Taken", or the
plot as it's more commonly known. Obviously with this amount
of space devoted to the plot, we get a step by step approach,
liberally peppered with plenty of quotes, which is a bit of
an overkill to be honest.
Other
sections are better handled, especially the details of lines
cut from the finished episode, especially since Pocket Books
scripts haven't been anything like as good as the BBC's Doctor
Who ones, which flag these things up as a matter of course.
This
being an official book, there are plenty of quotes from the
cast and crew, unlike, say, most of Virgin's unofficial guides
which have to borrow from magazine interviews for this sort
of thing (and it's the behind the scenes guys that usually have
the more interesting things to say). Elsewhere we get some nice
colour photos and some brief bios of the cast, which are nothing
to write home about.
A
decent guide to the first two seasons of Angel then,
but as with pretty much of all of Pocket Books' Buffy/Angel
non-fiction releases, it could have been even better. BACK
TO THE TOP
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THE CASEFILES, VOLUME ONE
Written by NANCY HOLDER,
JEFF MARIOTTE
and MARYELIZABETH HART
POCKET BOOKS
£12.99
RATING
7/10
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