Angel walks down the grubby hallway and sees a large sign on a set of sliding doors that says simply, "Don't." They must have known Angel was coming. He obeys the sign by snapping a padlock of the doors and opening them instead of just kicking them down, and steps inside.

In the room is a large metal egg hanging on the wall, and under it, a man sitting on a box with a towel draped over his head. The man twitches a bit, and moans, "You shouldn't be here." The egg on the wall starts to slide open, pouring light out into the room. Angel stares up at it quizzically. Dumb-ass. Then the egg suddenly opens completely with a flash of light, and Angel is knocked back into a convenient pile of boxes. The egg closes. The pile of boxes shifts, and then a little three-fingered puppet hand appears, and Angel pulls himself up into view, all puppety. He looks down at his hand, raises an enormous eyebrow, and says, "Huh?"

Commercials. "It gets an 'A'!" I crow. I ask Johanna if she thinks the puppet will vamp out. She's skeptical, but I say, "If the puppet vamps out, it gets an 'A+'!" By the way, in order to avoid saying "Hee!" five thousand times in the rest of this recap, just assume that I'm laughing at almost everything if the puppet is in the scene.

There's some user-error involved in pressing "record" again when the show returns, but luckily I just miss a few seconds of Fred technobabbling at Angel over a speakerphone. Fred mentions that she's called the CDC, which is funny to me because I've met some CDC folk, and maybe they're not all like that, but if they are, Fred would fit in with them really well. Angel tries to interrupt a few times as Fred details her research, and finally shouts, "Fred! Believe me, it's mystical!"

Fred, Wesley, and Gunn enter the office, wondering what's so urgent. Angel's chair is turned around to face the wall. I wonder how he got home. I guess since he's still got his vampire powers, it wouldn't be that hard. Oh, but imagine him taking the elevator upstairs -- he'd have to jump up to hit the buttons! Angel spins the chair around for a dramatic reveal. I imagine how he must have called everyone on the phone, and then jumped down from the desk and turned the chair around to face the wall, and pushed it real close so that when he was in the chair, he could kick the wall to spin the chair around. And I totally believe Angel would do all of that just for a dramatic reveal, too. The MoG boggle at the sight of the puppet. Fred rushes over to him and gasp, "Oh my God, Angel, you're...cute!" Angel turns his head away from her and holds his hand up as he moans, "Fred, don't!" I'm dying. Fred can't stop cooing over him, and reaches out to feel his feathery hair. Angel turns back to her and snaps, "You're fired." It's Cary's turn to enter and be boggled. Okay, my favorite thing about the puppet is the eyebrows, which I couldn't appreciate in the still photos. They replicated Boreanaz's prominent brow by giving the puppet these massive articulated brows that extend out about an inch, with little strips of fuzzy eyebrow on top of them. It just kills me. Angel explains that he visited the Smile Time offices, and he felt a spell "trying to get at [him]." He makes some wonderful hand gestures as he adds, "Then I met this guy with a towel over his head, and something exploded...I woke up like this." The MoG try to keep straight faces as they discuss the problem. Cary speculates that it's "some kind of puppet cancer." Angel grumps, "I do not have puppet cancer!" He says that this is a serious problem, and that children are in danger, and then he catches sight of a clock on his desk and gasps, "Hey, its Smile Time!"Angel hops down and rushes into the conference room, which means there's a shot of him bopping past the MoG with his mouth hanging open. I can't take it.