Or we could go with Gunn’s description to Gwen:

‘For the past nine months, my life could probably best be described as a turgid, supernatural soap opera.’

Let’s just say that it could be fairly argued that s4 is overly dark and overly self-involved. There are points where it makes s6 of Buffy look positively carefree. But for all that, I have to say I’m still a big fan of it.

It does of course have its problems. As well as suffering from the same fallout from the implosion of Firefly that hit the final season of Buffy too, s4 had other problems. Charisma Carpenter’s real-life pregnancy essentially knackered what had been a carefully planned arc, set up over more than two seasons. The scuttlebutt goes that Joss was less than happy for the show to be thrown for a loop like that and it’s only in the past few years that the two have really made up over it. But it meant that Cordelia’s days on the show were numbered.

And so out goes Cordy as the season’s Big Bad and in comes the recently unemployed Gina Torres from Firefly as Jasmine. Personally, I don’t think she quite works as Jasmine and it didn’t really allow Torres to play to her strengths. She didn’t really manage to be quite beatific enough or quite sinister enough when Jasmine is exposed in my view.

But then again, the Jasmine Big Bad arc is relatively short-lived and it is only enlivened by the character beats of the regulars around it. Which we’ll get onto in a moment. However, it does illustrate the series willingness to undermine its own tropes, to question everything it has previously set up. In s2, we learnt that the Senior Partners of Wolfram & Hart are essentially unbeatable, an enemy that can never be beaten so long as evil exists in the heart of human beings. Now, we’re shown that the good guys, the Powers That Be, aren’t really to be trusted either, that they’re as susceptible to corruption, to dictatorial behaviour, as anyone. In Angel, nothing is beyond question, nothing is incorruptible. A question that we’ll return to in s5.

It does mean of all the Angel seasons, s4 is the one that could most be described as a mess. It has some great set-pieces – the rain of fire, the fights with the Beast, Fred’s plucky invasion of the body-snatchers moment – but it does rather feel like what it was, more than a little improvisational. S7 of Buffy did also suffer slightly from the same thing at the outset but I think managed to paper over the cracks a bit more.

The real shame about the chopping and changing of the main arc – one that had clearly been gestating all the way back from s1 and the handing of the visions to Cordelia, through to the ‘new life’ loophole of the s2 episode The Trial – is that it gives Cordy an undeservingly ignoble end to her time in the Buffiverse. However, I think this was going to be Cordelia’s last season one way or another. Her character arc was done basically. She’d gone from high school bee-atch, to compassionate protector of the helpless to glowy goddess Earth mother. There was nowhere else for her to go but evil.

The romance that had been built up between her and Angel had essentially painted the writing team into a corner too. It wasn’t going to be really possible to discard a Cordelia/Angel romance as something that would fizzle out a la Fred/Gunn or Cordelia’s own with Xander back in Buffy. It would be a big deal. But if you go down that road then that has implications for the parent show too. The whole ‘cookie dough’ scene (which I really hate) in the Buffy finale would be markedly different if Angel had to chip in ‘Actually, Buffy, I’m with Cordelia now.’ Can you imagine how that would have gone down?

It’s not helped by the fact that Charisma Carpenter is doing easily her worst work on either show here. We do have to cut her some slack, of course. She’s heavily pregnant, working with a kind of pissed off production team which is undoubtedly going to lead to some stress. But it’s a shame that her time on the show comes to such a downbeat end.

Now, all this sounds like it’s a bad or unenjoyable season. I’ve met more than a few people over the years who would argue that it is, that most of it amounts to ‘people being unhappy in dimly lit hotel rooms’. But I’d say that there’s plenty here to love and I do count this season pretty high up in my Buffiverse ratings – it quite comfortably trumps both s4 and s7 of Buffy for me, for example.

For instance, I’d say Deep Down is a great season opener which really sets up the new paths the regulars are all on. We get our brooding, tortured Angel back. We see the new badass Wesley in action – his scenes with both Lilah and Justine are great. And we see Connor get his comeuppance, courtesy of Fred with a Taser (and the first indication that her time in Pylea has not left her as fully stable as you might think).

True, there’s not much funny here. The only episodes with a really light touch are The House Always Wins and Spin the Bottle. The latter is basically an Angel take on Buffy s6’s Tabula Rasa. But rather than memory loss, we get a delightful temporary ‘reset’ switch on all the characters. Thus we get a chance to briefly see once more the dweeby, less tortured, Wesley of Buffy s3 and also the vapidly mean Cordelia of those days. We also get a nice insight into Fred’s character – nerdy stoner conspiracy theorist – and the chance to mock David Boreanaz’s risible Irish accent.

But it’s Alexis Denisof who steals the episode. He clearly relishes the chance to do a last bit of clowning around as Wesley to contrast with the grizzled, shotgun/double-pistol wielding badass, suspiciously Bond-like, figure Wesley has become. And he is great at both. Look at his confrontation with Gunn in Spin the Bottle.

Gunn: What happened to you, man?
Wesley: I had my throat cut and all my friends abandoned me.

Now, there are lots of ways that line could have been screwed up. But Denisof delivers it perfectly, neither with too much self-pity nor too much gung-ho. Wesley as badass is not a character reset, or an artificial gimmick, it’s an evolution of character. The old Wesley is still in there and he’s hurt and resentful and actually a little confused.

And it can be more clearly seen in Wesley’s relationships with both Lilah and Fred. He clearly pines for Fred, has done since s3, but circumstances always just put her beyond his reach. And the Fred/Gunn/Wesley love triangle is going to play out for a bit longer too. It’s one of the most complex relationship seen in the Buffiverse. And not just from Wesley’s side either. It’s going to take Fred a long time to realise just what – and who – she wants.

But let’s talk about Lilah too. Lilah is the Other Woman. The temptress. Her relationship with Wesley is dark, carnal, and very adult, in terms of being full of unspoken agendas, desperate needs, psychological undercurrents. It’s full of snatched moments of lust borne out of hate or resentment, of phone sex, of role play. But rather than just play a straight Joans Collins-esque bitch, Stephanie Romanov infuses her with a touching vulnerability. See her jealousy at Fred, who she attempts to mock with the dressed-up parody of her, attempting to convince Wesley just how unthreatened she is. And witness her vulnerability, her hurt even, when Wesley turns the tables on her by making her go through with the sexual role play.

Not that there isn’t clearly genuine love and affection between them. Look at just how difficult Wesley finds dismembering Lilah after she’s thought to have been vamped by Angelus. “You didn’t love me” wails Wesley in their decidedly Six Feet Under-esque encounter in the basement. And his first act when he gains access to Wolfram and Hart is to try and – heroically but futilely – rescue Lilah from her eternal contract.

Wesley’s other key relationship this season is with Faith. The rogue slayer only makes a brief three-episode appearance in the season but it is a pivotal one and constitutes some of Eliza Dushku’s best work on the character. And it’s the culmination of a lot of long-running character arcs.

Primarily it’s Faith’s long-coming redemption. She finally gets to do the right thing, be the hero, be the Slayer. And she gets to repay Angel for what he’s done for her. She gets to save him. It’s telling that at Angel’s darkest hour, when he truly needs saved, it’s not Buffy who’s there for him, it’s Faith. Not that it’s easy. The beating that Angelus gives Faith, coupled with Wesley’s rather ruthless plan to bring Angelus down, really puts Faith through the wringer.

And it does, for me, put a whole new complexion on the Buffy/Faith dynamic in s7 of Buffy. I tend to agree with the Potentials taking Faith’s side over Buffy’s, especially over that whole night at the Bronze thing. If anyone deserved some R&R, it’s Faith. Alright, Buffy died and went to heaven and felt really, really sad about being back. But Faith has suffered just as much, more you might say, and I think by s7 you can give a credible argument that she’s just as much The Slayer as Buffy is. (As an aside, I do think it’s a real shame the Faith spin-off never happened as I’m not sure her character is done yet. And it’s the one Buffy spin-off I think you could still get away with, even after all these years.)

Wesley’s relationship with Faith is also resolved, more or less. Wesley’s first and most profound failure was as Faith’s watcher in Buffy s3 and this is something that has constantly been alluded to during his time in Angel. It’s an issue that clearly cuts deep with both of them, as we saw in the torture scene in Five by Five. Here we finally see what that might have been like, we finally see them working together side by side. And it’s not the easy ride we might have expected. In Wesley’s brutal torture of the vamp and Faith’s outrage at it, we see how far he’s fallen, and how far she’s reformed.

And the other final resolution we see is that of the Angel/Angelus relationship. This is the last time we’ll see Angelus, in the present at least, and what we see in Orpheus is Angel’s final mastery over his alter ego. Angelus is at last laid to rest.

But amid all this torture and dysfunctional relationships, there is at least one ray of positivity, one romance that’s flourishing, right? Not so much. The frankly sickening syrupy sweet romance of Gunn and Fred in s3 takes a serious turn for the worst in s4. As mentioned above, from her furious Tasering of Connor in Deep Down to her rebuke of Gunn in Ground State (‘You died and left me all alone’!), we see that Fred is still a deeply damaged person, capable of some really quite dark things.

This comes to a head in Supersymmetry, an episode I used to discount as being a minor one but now can’t for the life of me think why. It’s so loaded with major, major stuff. It’s the thing that sends Fred and Gunn’s relationship into terminal freefall as they both have to carry the burden of having taken a human life. It shows what Wesley is willing to do for Fred and just how broken his relationship with Gunn is. And it shows just how strong Fred actually is. And this is important for the later Shiny Happy People/Magic Bullet episodes.

And I’ve just realised I haven’t said anything about Connor. But what is there to say about his little Oedipal drama except ‘ewwwwww’. As Fred says, Connor’s relationship with Cordelia is ‘kind of icky’ but again the impression is that it was rather forced on the production team by circumstance, or at least ended up being a lot more rushed than it might have been.

It does serve to highlight how much Angel is informed by Classical myth and allusion compared to Buffy. We have things like the Oracles, the Furies, Angel’s descent to the Underworld to reclaim his soul, the sanctuary of Caritas (and what is Lorne but a Pan-like creature?) and we have the Powers That Be as capricious, corruptible God-like creatures, far closer to the Gods of Olympus than any infallible Christian concepts. And now we have the Oedipal myth. Buffy flirts with Christian mythology – demons, heavens, hells and so on – but Angel is much more Classical in its leanings. A world where Gods and Men and Demons all intermingle and none are necessarily better or more pure than the others, just more powerful.

With its detective trappings, Angel has always been something of a Noir show — as that strangely significant alley we see in the opening credits illustrates. And it’s never been more noir-ish than it is in this season. We have laconic, wounded masculine heroes (Angel, Wesley and Gunn all fit the bill in their own way), we have more than one femme fatale (Lilah, Cordelia and Jasmine) and we have a plot that is essentially a huge sting operation. Angel Inv are all conned and hoodwinked into releasing Jasmine into the world. This is foregrounded in a number of ways. The rigged game at the casino in The House Also Wins, Angel blackmailed into releasing Billy Blim in the previous season, the criminal antics of Electro-Girl Gwen and so on. It’s the last gasp of the detective gumshow schtick in Angel and they throw everything at it. Next year they’re going to be playing a somewhat different game.

And so we end the season with Angel Investigations having “ended world peace”. And being given a game-changer in the form of control of the LA branch of Wolfram and Hart. Season Four was essentially 22 episodes of our heroes in pain, and in darkness. But that’s over. Season Five is going to prove to be very different. There’s going to be more laughs. There’s going to be more sunshine. There’s going to be some serious shocks. And there’s going to be a kick-ass resolution – and one which for my money trumps Buffy’s.

Oh, and there’s also going to be some English peroxide bloke.

Right, just one more to go. Do you agree. Leave comments, questions and violent disagreement below. But keep Angel s5 off limits for now.