"Whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create," Harmony Cobel said in the first season of Severance, so it should not come as a surprise that angels have made their way into plenty of shows and movies over the years. It's A Wonderful Life has a guardian angel. The ongoing series Good Omens depicts an angel and a demon's unlikely friendship. There are films about fallen angels (Legion), angels who want to experience mortality (Wings Of Desire), and wayward angels in purgatory (Gabriel).
Though I am not religious, I love supernatural elements in my media. I find few things more intriguing than the characterization of something awe-inspiring and mysterious. The trouble is that angels are particularly tricky to get right. They are so loaded with cultural baggage that it's easy to fall into cliché. Write a too-perfect angel and you risk seeming boring or naive; overinvest in the flaws and you get a jerk with wings. Angels who allow themselves to be outwitted by humans are hard to take seriously, but if they are faultless, they become less interesting characters. As a result, depictions are all over the map, with varying levels of success. Yet writers persist in trying, and viewers persist in watching, because there is just something timelessly compelling about the figure of the angel. Here are three different techniques, from two TV shows and one game.
Devil-Angels
Supernatural is the classic example of a work that drains as much divinity from angels as possible. The show has a seriously ambitious plot in terms of characters—Lucifer comes in, then the archangel Michael, and even God, plus a bunch of peripheral demons and angels and other creatures. But Supernatural is not interested in the divinity of these creatures. Oh no. The angels are pieces of shit, God is a struggling writer who eventually tries to kill everybody, and everything is covered in several layers of grime.
In the universe of the show, angels’ wings are oh-so-conveniently not visible to human eyes. When an angel arrives, they illuminate the setting, and if they’re in front of a wall you can see the shadow of their wings for like two seconds. Woo-hoo! It’s a neat idea, and the angel Raphael is the best manifestation, sporting wings of electricity instead of shadows. I also can’t imagine CW's budget allowed for anything much more elaborate. When angels die (shows like this really don't respect immortality—there's always a special knife or something that can kill supposedly indestructible beings), their eyes and mouth start spewing light for a few seconds, another meh effect that does just enough to differentiate angels' appearance from humans. Angels also need a person’s consent to possess them and thereby exist on Earth, which they’re often able to get, but it usually seems like an excuse to avoid an expensive, splashy shot of Heaven.
Visually, all this is ungratifying, and perhaps that's the point: Supernatural is arguing that angels are no better than people, and they might be worse. The trouble is that even when the show tries to be epic, it can't escape drudgery. In Season 13, Michael (possessing Dean, one of the main characters) takes on Lucifer in what should be a literal clash of the titans. After Michael shows off giant wing shadows for a blink, the dudes fly at each other and repeatedly exchange punches to the face. On the brink of death, Dean/Michael stabs Lucifer with an “angel blade,” which can kill angels (fuck outta here), and that’s it. The battle sucks. It's just a tussle in the air in which the participants happen to be extraordinarily powerful.
Supernatural deciding that almost every angel is villainous is an interesting idea early on, but it gets old fast. They have selfish ambitions and aren't even that powerful a lot of the time, often neutralized by a ring of fire or killed with a sharp stick. Wing shadows are nice; angels who were consistently even one step above pathetic could have been better.
Angel-Devils
Lucifer is a police procedural with supernatural elements starring the titular lord of Hell. I fell hard for this show in 2019, binging four seasons in less than a week and indoctrinating as many of my friends into the cult as I could. An episode of Lucifer typically saw the characters solve a homicide case for 40 minutes, then used the last two minutes on a supernatural nugget or an important breakthrough in Lucifer's identity. I always assumed that when the divine storylines grew to epic proportions, the show would be forced to reinvent itself, leaning into the big stuff and dumping the police element. I soldiered through episodes of mediocrity awaiting that moment, but it never quite happened. Lucifer crash-landed the plane, introducing God as a character in Season 5 (he wants to experience human life and helps Lucifer solve a case, sigh), then shedding him almost immediately and proceeding with an entirely unnecessary and unpopular Season 6.
Lucifer takes the opposite track to Supernatural, focusing on a potentially benevolent angel tasked with running Hell instead of a bunch of dopey angels in Heaven. A fallen angel as a protagonist allows for a much deeper look into his psyche than any angel in Supernatural: Lucifer goes to therapy, fights with his family, and eventually hashes things out with God before the big guy dips out as soon as their relationship is repaired. Still, Lucifer is too scared of the Heaven-Hell of it all. The show visits Hell sparingly in the first four seasons and doesn't visit Heaven at all until the fifth. Plus, Lucifer's traumatic backstory is only ever spoken about, never shown. I anticipated a flashback of his rebellion against God for almost the entire show, but instead we just kept getting vague references.
But the wings! Supernatural could never. Lucifer evidently dumped a lot of their budget into the pilot, during which the angel Amenadiel, Lucifer’s brother, unleashes gray-black wings with claws on the end and holds them at Lucifer’s throat. The wings’ mechanism is clever; when they’re not in use, angels look like normal people (again humanizing them, besides the wings and weird outfits, nothing visual indicates angels' divinity), but when it’s time to take flight, they burst out of thin air with a pleasing fluttering noise, exactly how you’d want angels’ wings to sound. Think of a thick newspaper being unfurled in one smooth motion as a breeze blows. The wings sport a tight interlocking of feathers, a bit like a fish’s scales, and are a joy to see every time they appear.
There’s far more wing content in the later seasons, notably Lucifer using his wings as a shield from a hailstorm of bullets at the end of Season 3, a full-on aerial angel battle in Season 5—as if to shame Supernatural for its sorry Lucifer-Michael showdown—and an epic trio of wing entrances interrupted by God’s first appearance. I do not recommend falling in love with this show, as it will let you down in the end, but the wings are almost worth letting your heart get broken. It’s my long-standing belief that a show with Lucifer’s focus on an angel and Supernatural’s willingness to bring in big characters is the perfect show to transcend the earthly realm. Alas.
Knocking On Heaven's Door
The ideal midpoint, I think, does not come in a TV show at all, but a game. You’re not getting a game review here, because Luis already has you covered here, and I am not a gamer. But the angels’ wings in Diablo IV are sick! Like the previous three editions of the game, Diablo IV features stunning cinematics. If you crave wholly supernatural dynamics in your supposedly supernatural media, the battle between the angel Inarius and demon Lilith in Diablo IV is for you.
Inarius’s entrance a few seconds into the clip is already proof that this cinematic is fully committed to creating a uniquely credible representation of divinity. Rather than feathers, a series of glowing tendrils sprout from Diablo angels’ backs that spin, bend, or wave depending on their actions. The effect is more ethereal than gimmicky, especially in conjunction with the blank voids in the angels’ hoods in place of faces. This decision is the smartest yet, and the perfect answer to the angel conundrum. An empty hood sets the angels apart from everyone else and keeps a ton of intrigue alive, but doesn't prevent the viewer from looking at them or hearing them talk. Imagine if you never knew it was Pedro Pascal underneath the Mandalorian's mask. Inarius immediately dominates the field (which is Hell), brightening the space with a wave of light he produces with the laziest of flicks. You know immediately that this is an immensely powerful creature who has only scratched the surface of his capabilities. Just look at the cover image from Luis’s blog. That right there is an angel!
Angels like Inarius don't exactly cover themselves in glory (he kills his son, for starters), but crucially, their appearance and evident power keeps them wrapped in mystique. Inarius retains more of an aura at his lowest moment than Supernatural angels do within five seconds of appearing onscreen. And though Lucifer dwells on a single angel more than Diablo ever does, the game's lore and characterization of angels is extensive.
The battle can hold its own against anything from Lord Of The Rings. Blizzard Entertainment's creative work is remarkable, and here creates a scene that has many a YouTube commenter begging for an entire movie. Inarius takes on a massive winged monster, first killing a little dude to use its horn as a weapon, then stabbing the horn into the big guy’s nose before vaulting on top of his head and plunging his spear into it for the fatal blow. The best moment, though, is when a bunch of Inarius’s earthly soldiers take on another huge demon. Several of them go flying from a huge sword strike. Then, a few martyrs sink their weapons into the monster’s calves and yank them downward to pull the beast to its knees, opening it up for a concerted spear blast from their comrades that kills the monster instantly. As the spears rocket into the demon’s chest, we’re treated to a side view of the scene—an enormous hell-demon getting skewered by a bunch of spears, lit by a bright blast of fire.
Diablo’s angel design is the best of the bunch. Their angels retain much more of their powerful mystique with their hooded, tentacled look than any others I’ve seen onscreen. Diablo feels supernatural in every cinematic it produces and should be the gold standard for a truly otherworldly plot.
Media about supernatural beings has it tougher than almost any other kind of storyline. Angels in particular are meant to transcend the petty concerns of man, but when we put them on screen we can't stop trying to bring them down to our level. I have yet to find a show that manages to perfectly blend this mix of high and low, but I'm still holding out for a miracle someday.
