Season Four of Angel was by necessity a scrappy, improvisational narrative mess that managed by sheer force of the writing and performances to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. However, it also cleared the decks of a lot of the show’s long-term baggage. The ever-present antisyzygy of Angel/Angelus was dealt with (not that Angelus can never reappear now, just that Angel would seem to have made as much peace with his dark side as he’s going to be able to).

Similarly, the Powers That Be thread of the show’s arc is gone. The Jasmine storyline meant that the PTB no longer have quite in the position of authority they once were. They’re tainted now and interestingly play almost no part in s5, beyond Cordelia’s vision in You’re Welcome. And with Cordelia gone, so is the Vision Quest aspect of the show too.

The only thread really still open at the beginning of Season Five is Wolfram and Hart and their mysterious overlords the Senior Partners. And this is where the show focuses its attention this year. So Season Five starts with essentially a blank slate. And at least for the first half of the season, almost all the major characters have been slightly reset from the dark places that the multi-season Connor arc had taken them.

They’ve essentially had a ‘reverse-Dawn’ pulled on them, with their memories altered to remove any trace of Connor. Thus we get a Wesley who’s a little less screwed-up and badass than the one we saw throughout season four. Although it’s never made clear just how much their memories have been changed. For example, how does Wes account for the massive scar across this throat from his encounter with Justine, which presumably he now has no memory of? And does that mean Fred and Gunn had their romance? Did it still end as badly as seen in s4? Did they still kill the professor? It’s all a bit too much on the vague side and more problematic than the insertion of Dawn into Sunnydale because the Connor arc did not exist in isolation from the other character beats of the likes of Fred/Gunn, Wesley/Lilah and so on. We can’t help but wonder just who our main characters are any more, exactly what they’ve experienced. But it’s a short-term problem as their old memories are brought back as a result of Wesley destroying the memory spell. (Although, interestingly, this whole issue is one that Dollshouse plays with in some detail and just as unsatisfyingly, in my view.)

But aside from the narrative partial reboot, season five looks and feels different. The ‘necro-tempered glass’ means that the now defunct Angel Inc no longer have to skulk in the shadows and in gloomy dimly lit interiors. There’s a lot more sunshine, a lot more open spaces, shiny chrome and glass and brighter colours now. And it helps brighten the look of the show considerably. The Hyperion was a great set — moody and evocative but it was also kind of on the sombre side and in s4 especially we spent rather too much of the time there. It made the season just a bit too dark, with too much of a restricted, muted colour palette.

The tone of the show is a lot brighter too. It is, in fact, a lot more Buffy-like, I’d argue. Gone are the tightly serialised episodes of seasons three and four (a stipulation of the executives for renewal, along with a significant budget cut) with each episode being largely standalone. Part of the fallout of the new standalone policy is that some of the heavy lifting of the arc has to be done through recurring metaphors. Thus we get Lorne and his fractured mirror, his private and public personae divided by the broken glass. We get Fred hollowing out Angel in his dream sequence in Soul Purpose to foreshadow what’s going to happen to her (and we get Gunn growling threateningly in the same scene, perhaps emphasising his betrayal to come). And we get Angel literally transformed into a puppet, just in case we didn’t get the message earlier when Roger Wyndham-Pryce spelled it out for us. It’s not what you’d call subtle.

There’s also a lot more lighter, funnier episodes like Life of the Party, The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco, Harm’s Way, The Girl In Question and Smile Time, with much of the humour being of the broader style of the parent show, rather than the darker, more mordant, stuff we’ve been used to seeing on Angel. For many the comedic highlight of the season is Smile Time and Puppet Angel. I’ve got to admit that while I find this amusing enough, it’s a one-joke story for me and one that slightly outstays its welcome. I far prefer Life of the Party, which has some great jokes (Gunn marking his territory) and some great ‘drunk acting’ from Alexis Denisov and Amy Acker. It also serves to foreshadow Lorne’s character arc for this season and the increasing difficulty he’s having in remaining the joker in the Angel Inc pack.

The whole Buffy vibe of the season is also helped by the sheer number of familiar faces we see this year. From the permanent addition of Spike and Harmony (ably filling the shoes vacated by Cordelia) to a couple of cameos of trainee Watcher Andrew. And, of course, we get one final Cordelia episode. It was nice that Cordelia finally gets a proper send-off after the unpleasantness associated with her character in s4 and it’s interesting that she becomes the only one of the original Scoobies to have an on-screen demise. As mentioned above, the Cordelia role was taken by another long-term Buffiverse favourite Harmony. Harmony at Wolfram & Hart slots into a kind of cross between Cordy and Anya from Buffy and provides many of the lighter moments as Lorne is inexorably dragged into darkness by the season’s events. Harm’s Way is another great comedic episode with lots of great sight gags — most notably, Harm’s ever-filling closet.

Of course, Spike also carries some of the humour as he did on Buffy, but this seems to me to be a slightly different Spike we see here. No longer evil but also shorn of his lovelorn dedication to Buffy, he has to relate to others in a slightly different way. In a way, we focus on another of Spike’s obsessions – his relationship with Angel. This is a profoundly competitive one on both sides, now exacerbated by the fact that they now both have souls. “I wandered in torment for a hundred years,” moans Angel. “You moped in a basement for three weeks.” But this soul rivalry has a more serious edge too and the episode Destiny highlights this as both vampires compete to find a mystical grail, although the real point of the episode is the fight between them.

Spike: Look at you. Fighting for truth, justice, and soccer moms. But you still can’t lay flesh on a cross without smelling like bacon, can you?
Angel: Like you’re any different.
Spike: That’s just it. I am, and you know it. You had a soul forced on you as a curse, make you suffer for all the horrible things you’ve done. But me, I fought for my soul, went through the demon trials. Almost did me in a dozen times over but I kept fighting. ‘Cause I knew it was the right thing to do. It’s my destiny.

But this fight between the two of them also highlights the core of the conflict between them.

 Spike: ‘Cause every time you look at me, you see all the dirty little things I’ve done, all the lives I’ve taken… because of you! Drusilla sired me, but you… you made me a monster.
Angel: I didn’t make you, Spike. I just opened up the door, and let the real you out.
Spike: You never knew the real me. Too busy trying to see your own reflection, praying there was someone as disgusting as you in the world, so you could stand to live with yourself. Take a long look, hero. I’m nothing like you!

This also brings the Shanshu prophecy of s1 back into play but with a new twist in that there are now two candidates for the ‘reward’. Or there are until Not Fade Away when Angel signs away his right to it, meaning that should they survive the apocalypse, it is Spike, not Angel, who will be the ensouled champion who claims the reward. Which is a brave and typically downbeat note for the series to introduce in its final episode. But more of that below. A brief word on Lorne. Aside from the brief jaunt to Pylea to get a glimpse of his origins, in s2-4 we don’t really learn a lot more about Lorne. He’s the equivalent of Buffy’s ‘get Willow to do a spell’ in that he’s the go-to plot device. Lorne will have an underworld contact to keep the story moving usually. This year, however, he does have an arc. As I said, it’s first raised in Life of the Party that Lorne too feels the pressures of life. This has actually always been there – how often do we see Lorne without a drink in his hand, for example?

But this year we see him propping up the bar as the morose, defeated drunk. We’re constantly reminded that the chipper, all-singing, all dancing Lorne is a façade he creates for the world. And after Fred’s death, that façade is increasingly seen less and less frequently. There’s something slightly shocking about the sight of Lorne punching Eve. He’s the one member of Angel Inc who you couldn’t imagine doling out violence like that. And it reaches its endpoint in Not Fade Away when Lorne is given the task of executing Lindsay. It’s another bleak scene, only slightly offset by the humour of Lindsay’s outrage at being “offed by a flunky”. And with that, Lorne walks away from the show, not with a smile or a joke or a song, but in utter emotional defeat. I think it’s fair to say that Lorne’s association with Angel Inc has left him pretty much destroyed as an individual.

Which brings us nicely onto Fred. Fred’s role in the first half of the season is to once again bring the torment and thwarted romantic desire to Wesley. And despite her not-terribly serious dalliance with Knox but it’s pretty clear that she and Wes are finally going to get it together and the relief is palpable because it’s been a serious long time coming. But not so fast. This is a Whedon show, ain’t it? So their relationship bliss lasts for one episode before Fred is infected by Illyria. (Has there ever been a more luckless character in the Buffiverse than Wes? Shot in s2, throat cut in s3, has to decapitate his lover and has a general trip to emotional torment-land in s4, has to gun down his overbearing father in s5 and now finally wins the love of his life only to lose her again and end up mortally stabbed to death in the finale). I’ve been consistently impressed by Denisof’s work in the Buffinverse ever since he arrived in s3 of Buffy. And if it were ever decided that it was time for an American Doctor I don’t think he would be a remotely terrible choice.

A Hole in the World is to me one of the best ever episodes of the Buffiverse. It’s certainly the character death I found the hardest to take. Anya’s, Tara’s, even Buffy’s, deaths were all surprises and all heroic so that we only process them as part of the wider narrative events of the episode. But here, Fred is ‘killed’ in the first act and the rest of the episode is taken up largely with watching her die. And Acker and Denisof hit it out the park here, both putting in amazing performances. Is there anything quite as heart-breaking as Fred’s final plaintive “Wesley, why can’t I stay?”.

And now as Illyria, Acker puts in a whole new performance which is just as terrific as the work she put in as Fred. Her jerky movements, only slowly re-discovering a regal grace, the coldness, the needlessly but unthinkingly cruel way she interacts with others are all done brilliantly. It’s a real shame that we only really got a handful of episodes of the Wes/Illyria dynamic because they don’t really feel like enough and there was still a lot more mileage in it.

Which brings us to the finale. Lack of cash meant that you were never going to get the CGI-fest, Lord of the Rings type thing that saw Buffy out. And that really would have been missing the point of Angel to go in that direction. Instead we get something that takes The Godfather as its reference point. Some have argued that Angel provoking the wrath of the Senior Partners kind of undoes the lesson learned in s2 after his descent in the lift with Holland Manners, that we get more Superhero Exceptionalism in the form of one large, violent act being able to wipe out the effect of lots of small ones.. I understand what they mean but I’m not sure I really buy it. I think Fred’s death was a wake-up call of just how compromised the Angel Inc team had become. To me, that argument would only ring true if the Angel Inc team was presented with a victory in the end. But they’re not. At best, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. At worse, it’s a defeat that just happens to take place shortly after the episode ends.

How you react to the finale depends very much on your attitude to the news of the show’s cancellation. I believe it ended at the right time. The plans for the direction of s6 are interesting but I think they were better served by the graphic novel* continuation than they would have been on TV. No, I think Angel went out at just the right time. It went out on a high and I find Not Fade Away a far more satisfying denouement than Chosen in Buffy. I always work on the assumption that what’s left of the team assembling in the alley (that alley again!) are facing their deaths. But they’re going out fighting. Which is the point. As highlighted way back in s2, it’s not about the winning, it’s about the continuing to fight, until you can fight no longer. It’s the best, indeed, the only logical way that the show could end. Angel, I’d argue, ended at the top of its game in a way that Buffy didn’t.

I argued on the Buffy threads that the Scoobies after s5 limped on in a curiously disappointing form, having failed to live up to their earlier potential. By s7 they’ve diminished as characters rather than grown. I think the opposite is true for Angel. They’ve all very much grown and are more than when we first met them — those that are still with us, that is. That doesn’t mean they’re better for it, of course (see Lorne above, for example). And it’s interesting to note that by the end of the series, there’s not one member of the core Angel characters who hasn’t taken a human life — the oft-invoked ‘red line’ that can’t be crossed in the Buffiverse.

Taken all in all, despite a rocky patch in its middle, Angel often outstrips and outsmarts its parent show. It often irks me that it never gets the credit it really deserves. Buffy is remembered partially because it has to take the blame for the massive resurgence of vampires in our popular culture and also because Buffy herself is an iconic figure in terms of the heroic representation of women in popular culture. And Angel never really had breakaway episodes like The Body or Once More With Feeling. But it did have smarts, it did have some of the best writing on TV and it did have some of the best character work too. But there does seem to be something slightly off-putting about it for many – notice how fewer voices have engaged with the Angel discussions than with the Buffy ones here. Is this because its erratic scheduling meant that people just never got to see it at the time and it missed its window of opportunity? Or was it too dark/grown-up for teens but still too childish for adults? Was it too male? Angel actually has a pretty good gender split, but it’s iconography is all the male loner atop rooftops and perhaps this leads the casual viewer to think it’s just more of the ‘same old thing’. I honestly don’t know the answer to that one but, as I say, I do often find myself rather irked by the way that the show is often passed over and ignored.

But anyway, here we are at the end. Congratulations if you’ve made it through seven seasons of Buffy and five of Angel. And thanks for sticking with the blogs too. It’s been really enjoyable to read your comments. And if there’s anyone out there who hasn’t actually watched the shows yet, I implore you to go out and do so. There is one more essential masterwork in Joss Whedon’s TV work to go – Firefly. And perhaps we’ll return to take a look at that at some point. But until then, let’s leave it with Angel’s essential mission statement, which I think is a good one:

All I want to do is help. I want to help because I don’t think people should suffer as they do, because if there’s no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world

And put more simply in the last words of the series:

 Personally, I just want to slay the dragon.

(*WARNING. SPOILERS FOR ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL series of graphic novels. After The Fall is a canonical series of graphic novels that follow on directly from s5 of Angel and which Joss has acknowledged follow roughly the path intended for s6.  Put simply, LA was to be dragged down to Hell as a result of the wrath of the senior partners. Angel would continue to fight the good fight in the demon-infested ruins of the city, with Gwen, Connor and Nina operating as a resistance movement. Spike was to have become the Lord High of LA, protected by Illyria, Wesley would have been working at Wolfram and Hart on an eternal contract a la Lilah and Gunn, vamped in his attack on the Senator in Not Fade Away, was to become the Big Bad to be fought by these various factions.)