Cordelia abruptly returns from her higher dimension in the lobby of the Hyperion Hotel, but she has no memory of who she is and who her friends are despite Angel's attempts to jog her memory back. Connor, who has secretively snuck back into the hotel, overhears everything from the upper balcony. Not wanting to make her feel uncomfortable, Angel and the group decide to keep their demon-hunting business a secret as well as the fact that Angel is a vampire. Cordelia becomes increasingly mistrustful of Angel, Fred and Gunn due to their secretiveness. Lorne tries to read Cordelia's future and sees jumbled visions of apocalyptic horror, which scares him to the point that he flees to his room and is reluctant to tell Angel what he saw. Cordelia has an encounter in the lobby with one of Lorne's clients, a nasty demon who wants to snack on her, and she is saved by Connor who appears and kills the demon. She flees from the hotel and ends up with Connor at his run-down loft where she asks him to be her protector. After one of their trysts in his apartment, Wesley overhears Lilah talking to her subordinates at Wolfram & Hart's over her cellphone about Cordelia's reappearance and sending a team to kidnap her, so he goes to the Hyperion hotel to tip Angel, Fred and Gunn about it. An armed team from Wolfram & Hart's forcibly enters Connor's loft and fight with Connor and Cordelia. The two are almost on the verge of losing when Angel, Fred and Gunn burst in and even the odds. Lilah, who has been remotely monitoring the events, tells her team to leave. Cordelia tells Angel that she prefers to stay with Connor rather than go back with him, Fred and Gunn. When Angel and his team arrive back at the Hyperion, they find Lorne gagged and tied to a chair. Lorne reveals that while they were gone, another Wolfram & Hart team came and used a demon to forcibly extract his visions about Cordelia from his mind since they believed that she had direct contact with the Powers That Be and wanted informations about it. Wesley later confronts Lilah who admits that she used him to separate Angel and his team from Lorne by making sure he overheard her talking about Cordelia so that they could extract the information from Lorne. Angel is last seen thinking about what might have been.
Tropes
- Bad Liar: Lampshaded by Cordelia re the Fang Gang.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Why Connor helps Cordelia.
- Big Damn Heroes: Subverted by Lilah. The Fang Gang arrive in time to stop Wolfram & Hart from seizing Cordelia, but Lilah figured that would happen. Instead while the gang is away from the Hyperion, Wolfram & Hart brain-suck Lorne who has the information they want, having read Cordy's future.
- Booby Trap: Connor has set up booby traps around his hideout, which snare the Spec Ops commandoes when they attack.
- Bound and Gagged: Lorne (presumably to stop him singing while his brain is being probed).
- Brutal Honesty: Connor tells Cordelia of how he tried to kill her and Angel. This wins her trust more than the evasions of her friends.
- Call-Back:
- Angel confirms with the others that they can see Cordelia too, in case she's another hallucination.
- Cordelia looks through her Sunnydale yearbook, which references the events of BtVS "Graduation Day Part 2".
- Cordelia sings Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All", the same song she sang way back in "The Puppet Show".
- Comically Missing the Point: Cordelia finds pictures of herself in various hairstyles and concludes that she's a spy.Cordelia: I get it now. You're all spies. Probably all Russian. And you've brainwashed me, and want me to believe we're friends so I'll spill the beans about some nano-techno-thingy that you want.Gunn: So... I look Russian to you?Cordelia: Black Russian.Angel: That's a drink.
- Covert Pervert: Connor snags a feel of a sleeping Cordy. Albeit possibly while he's asleep, too.
- Description Cut:
- Happens literally — The Fang Gang promise to explain everything. Cut to Cordy looking stunned.
- "Evil is coming, and it's planning on staying." Cut to Lilah in bed with Wes.
- "She's probably terrified." Gilligan Cut to Cordy casually hanging out with Connor.
- Exact Eavesdropping: Wes overhearing Lilah's phone call. Averted when it turns out that was Lilah's intention all along.
- Foreshadowing: Lilah taunts Wesley with her Evil Plan of finding Connor and befriending him as a Cool Big Sis or Mrs. Robinson. Only Cordelia gets there first.
- Funny Background Event: Angel piling the bottles of blood from the lobby fridge into his arms and taking them away in the background while Cordelia's being distracted.
- Game Face: Cordy asks if she's a nun, having found a bunch of crosses which she casually drops into Angel's palm. Angel promptly vamps out, scaring the hell out of Cordy, but not as much as the demon she later runs into whose face splits open so he can eat her.
- It Doesn't Mean Anything: Lilah wins a dollar when Wesley is the first to use the 'relationship' word.
- Kill It with Fire: Connor sets a vamp on fire using a car cigarette lighter.
- Literary Allusion Title: The episode name is a reference to Yeats' poem "The Second Coming".
- Mind Probe:Lorne: They had—they had a demon. I-I wouldn't talk. And the thing burrowed... inside. And took Cordy out.Angel: Lorne, how much did they get?Lorne: All of it.
- The Nicknamer: Mr Bumpy Face (Cordelia re Angel)
- Never Recycle a Building: Connor has moved into an abandoned natural history museum, full of dust and stuffed wildlife, complete with working electricity.
- Not What It Looks Like: While Cordy hides behind the counter, Fred and Gunn enter the Hyperion toting weapons, Covered in Gunge, and talking about squashing (demon) babies.
- Oh, Crap!: When Lorne reads the future from Cordelia's singing.Do the words "slouching towards Bethlehem" ring a bell? Or how about despair, torment, terror? And I'm not referring to little missy's choice of song, either, although that was horrifying in its own right. What I saw was jumbled. It was pieces, flashes. It was enough to make my skin crawl away and scamper under the bed. Evil's coming, Angel, and it's planning on staying.
- Poor Communication Kills: This episode is filled with lying and secret-keeping that eventually drive Cordy out of the Hyperion and into Connor's abandoned building.
- Relationship Upgrade: Wesley loses a bet by referring to what he and Lilah have as a relationship. It's a fairly sweet moment between them, undercut by Lilah immediately taking advantage of him to distract the Fang Gang so W&H can attack Lorne.
- Sarcasm Mode: Cordy's still got it.Angel: We were afraid the truth would scare you.Cordelia: Yeah, and the lying and deceit have been so comforting.
- Sidekick: What Gunn insists he's not.
- Super-Senses: Angel picks up Cordelia's scream from the other side of the Hyperion.
- Super Window Jump: Who didn't think the Wolfram & Hart Spec Ops team would come crashing through those big windows in Connor's crib?
- The TripleAngel: What do you remember?Cordelia: I don't know. Numbers. Animals. Flossing.
- Trouble Entendre: Fred trying to let Angel know in front of Cordy that they've got to go hack some demon babies to death.It's an ugly divorce case thing. You know, private eye stuff. (to Angel) I should get Charles and terminate it before the situation multiplies.
- Vagueness Is Coming: And it's planning on staying.
- Walk-In Chime-InAngel: Somebody has to know where Cordelia is.Wesley: (entering the Hyperion) I do.
