Seasons three and four of Angel are so closely bound up with each other that I’m not sure it even makes that much sense to consider them as separate. But that’s what I’m going to do anyway.

They’re really both part of a meta-season that stretches across all 44 episodes, with the finale of s3 merely acting as a resting point, a huge cliffhanger on which to temporarily suspend the story. It’s actually even more complex than that, as this uber-arc also calls back to the events of s2 and, as we’ll find out in s4, from even before that.

This arc, of course, concerns the return of Darla, now expecting Angel’s child, and the subsequent birth of said kid and the chaos it brings to the Angelettes.

But before we get to the real meat and drink of the arc, there are some things that have to be gotten out of the way first. Namely, Buffy. The season opens with Angel working through his grief at Buffy’s death by beating on some demonic monks. A few more episodes in when he learns of her resurrection (this season runs concurrently with Buffy s6) and we get Wesley and Cordelia re-enacting their imagined reunion:

Cordelia: Lemme break it down for you, Fred.

Cordelia [as Buffy]: Oh, Angel, I know that I am a Slayer, and you’re a vampire and it would be impossible for us to be together, but—

Wesley [as Angel]: But… my gypsy curse sometimes prevents me from seeing the truth. Oh, Buffy…

Cordelia [as Buffy]: Yes, Angel?

Wesley [as Angel]: I love you so much, I almost forgot to brood.

Cordelia [as Buffy]: And just because I sent you to Hell that one time doesn’t mean that we can’t just be friends.

Wesley [as Angel]: Or possibly more?

Cordelia [as Buffy]: Gasp! No! We mustn’t!

Wesley [as Angel]: Kiss me!

Cordelia [as Buffy]: Bite me!

Angel: [entering] How ’bout you both bite me?

Fred: You’re back!

Gunn: How’d it go?

Angel: I think those two pretty much summed it up

Not only is this a very funny scene, it serves to illustrate a key problem Angel the show has. It has to move on, to new relationships, new conflicts, but Angel’s relationship with Buffy constantly hangs over the show. Thus it has to be put into the wider context of Angel’s life – both his past and his future – otherwise it’s going to overshadow and devalue the two key relationships for Angel in s3 – his love for Cordelia and his love for his son (and by extension his long-term and complex relationship with Darla).

As an aside, it probably worth noting that Buffy the series continues to need Angel to fulfil a certain role – one that he’s actually grown out of in his own show – the tortured but faithful lover. It’s interesting that in his brief return to Buffy s7, during all that guff about ‘cookie dough’ and his own hurt feelings about ‘getting the brush off for Captain Peroxide’, he never feels the need to mention that he’s in the meanwhile fallen – and fallen hard – for Cordelia, or that he’s had a child with another woman. I think this is part of the reason Angel didn’t stick around for the final showdown in the Hellmouth. He just doesn’t fit in there anymore. He’s grown beyond Buffy and Sunnydale.

Angel s3 also has another couple of issues it has to deal with before it can get onto the arc proper. One is Gunn’s commitment to the group. The Pylea episodes bring home the need for Gunn to make a decision between Team Angel and his old team back in the ‘hood. And this is brought to a head in That Old Gang of Mine. It’s also the most direct examination of one of Angel’s key themes – that demon doesn’t necessarily mean evil and that human doesn’t necessarily mean good. This has been simmering ever since the show’s beginning, and even spilling over into Buffy, but it had now become necessary to lay it on the line – primarily, because this was the season where the examination of these grey areas was going to really start impacting on the show’s core characters.

But it’s also been an issue that Gunn could walk away from Angel Inc at any time and return to his old life. After this episode, it’s no longer going to be that easy for him. And there there’s the other, more significant, thing holding him at the Hyperion — his relationship with Fred. Another bit of business that had to be taken care of was the establishment of Fred as an Angelette. I have got no end of praise for Amy Acker as Fred. She’s created a character who is clearly meant to fulfil the group’s need for a Willow character but Acker is to be commended for creating someone wholly distinct, as profoundly lovable as Willow is in her own way, and yet also deeply damaged (although how much is not something we’ll really see until s4).

The episode Fredless is just terrific, subverting the narrative of the ‘what if the parents are evil’ trope (cf Family in s5 of Buffy) but also helping to consolidate Fred’s place within the group. I find Roger and Trish and their sincere and deep love for their daughter genuinely moving. It also makes us understand Fred that much more and why both Gunn and Wesley should be so attracted to her.

As well as obviously being about family (from Fred choosing between her blood relations to her adopted family to Angel and Darla having Connor and Cordelia taking the role of the surrogate mother), the key theme of s3 is trust.

Many of the characters have their trust tested or broken. Cordelia’s trust in Angel when the lied about not having slept with Darla. Most obviously, Wesley breaking the trust of all of his friends. But there is also Fred learning to trust people in general, learning to live in the world again. And there’s Darla learning to trust the Angelettes in her time of need. This is mirrored in Justine, and later Connor, and their horribly misplaced trust in Holtz. And then there’s Wesley and Lilah. What kind of trust is their relationship ever going to be built upon?

Despite its open-ended, game of two halves aspect, we do kind of have a Big Bad in this season, more than we did in s2 at least, in the form of Holtz. A time-shifted avenger, Holtz is a great nemesis for Angel. Implacable, single-minded, ruthless. I feel that physically Keith Szarabajka was not quite imposing enough but, jeez, what a voice the guy had on him. And with his pseudo-Slayer Justine in tow, there was perhaps something of the Watcher gone rogue about him. It’s perhaps no surprise that most of the verbal confrontations took place between Holtz and Wesley. Of all the people on Angel’s team, he is in fact the one that has the most common ground with Holtz.

Holtz understands and exploits Wesley’s weaknesses. One is that Wesley has major issues with his own father. His desire for respect, for authority, for leadership, is clearly there so he can prove his worth to his own father. It also means he has empathy for Holtz, but also a strong desire to make sure that Angel does not fail as a father. Wesley understands the damage perhaps more than any other of the Angelettes.

He also has a Watcher’s training and sense of duty and Holtz knows to exploit that as well. We’ve seen as far back as s3 of Buffy that Wesley is a more focused Watcher than Giles ever was, and is more willing to do the hard, painful things that need to be done, whether that is sacrificing Willow to the Mayor and Faith, or kidnapping Angel’s son. But we’ve never seen him take it this far before.

Wesley is a character who undergoes a major transformation throughout his time on the show and s3 is where a lot of the key stuff happens. He begins the season in the most comfortable state we’ve ever seen him. Hair growing out, suits replaced with plaid shirts, this is almost Wesley as slacker. Well, not slacker exactly but the tension is gone, the lack of ease with himself. He’s comfortable with his role, he has both the respect and the sense of belonging he’s craved all his life, he’s falling in love and he’s approaching contentment and happiness. And we all know that on a Joss show that’s never a good sign.

The first sign of the trouble to come is in Billy when both we and Wes become aware of his darker side. To Wes it clearly comes as a shock that it even exists and for a while it forces him to withdraw into himself. But even when he returns to work, that sense of unease is back. That darkness isn’t going anywhere now and indeed Wes ends the season in a not terrific place – recovering from having his throat cut, abandoned by all his friends and cosying up to Lilah. As Fred confesses to her parents in Fredless, ‘I didn’t mean to get so lost’. And now Wesley is lost too and it’s going to take some time for him to be found again.

But let’s hear it for Lilah. In s1&2, she was rather overshadowed by Lindsay and Holland Manners but now she gets to shine. The other two Wolfram and Hart regulars of this season Linwood and Gavin pale next to Lilah. Gavin is a rather one-dimensional arrogant toady and Linwood comes across just a bit too much like Holland-lite. But she’s wonderfully pitiless in forcing Angel to rescue Billy from the hell dimension, and equally formidable when she guns down the same. And she’s consistently great throughout the season, ending with her coldly pragmatic seduction of Wesley. And like Holtz, Lilah knows how to play Wesley:

Lilah: You know, I always forget. At the very bottom of hell, in the ninth circle, the devil’s frozen in ice, right? He’s got three heads, three mouths, and these mouths are reserved for the worst sinners. I can’t remember, who is in the center mouth? What was his name? The one person in all of human history who was deemed the greatest sinner. Who is it?

Wesley: Judas Iscariot.

Lilah: Right. The worst spot in hell is reserved for those who betray… So don’t pretend you’re too good to work for us.

It’s not by flattery, or even purely by sex appeal, that Lilah lures in Wesley. It’s by his loneliness and his own self-reproach and self-doubt. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have any genuine affection for each other. But that’s something for next season.

And kudos to Julie Benz too. It’s sad to see the end of Darla – let’s not forget, the first recurring character we ever see in the Buffiverse – and she gets a great send-off. Darla – soulless, then ensouled, then vamped again and then resouled courtesy of the baby inside her – finally achieves a kind of redemption in her self-sacrifice for her child. It takes her a while but she eventually renounces evil, she wants her soul. In the end, she learns how wrong she was to reject Angel when he became ensouled. It’s a great character arc and to my mind Darla gets one of the great death scenes in either Buffy or Angel – up there with Buffy’s death in s5 and Spike’s in s7.

In fact, there was a rather cool Spike-like vibe to Darla in this season. I did enjoy Darla’s amorality sparking off the other Angelettes, much in the same way that Spike did off the Scoobies. It’s just a shame it didn’t go on for longer.

And a quick word about Connor. Like Dawn in Buffy, it’s kind of hard to like Connor, what with him being portrayed as the rather one-notey stroppy teenager. Although he is clearly a lot more badass than Dawn. But I think the problem is the same as Dawn’s and that Vincent Kartheiser – so great as Pete Campbell in Mad Men – doesn’t have that much to play with here.

But we’re actually kind of limited in what we can say about Connor at the moment as we end the season really only halfway through his arc and with so much more of it to come. Has there ever been a season of Buffy/Angel that left so much unresolved, so much on a cliffhanger. Wesley turning to the dark side, Cordelia ascending to the higher plane, Angel dumped to the bottom of the ocean. As the popular phrase goes, is this the end for our heroes? Stay tuned.

Any thoughts on s3? Or did vampires and nappies and wailing not do it for you? Leave your thoughts below, but keep s4&5 of Angel off limits for now.

Rather like Buffy itself, Angel didn’t really find itself until the closing episode of Season One. To Shanshu in LA was a powerful ride – the proto Angel family are finally truly tested, and Wolfram & Hart, simmering in the background until then, step up to cause real pain to the crew. And the emergence of a key Buffiverse figure from Angel’s past.

I say proto because the Angel ‘family’ even at this point isn’t fully formed yet. Unlike Buffy, which established its core Scoobies from the opening episodes, it takes some time for the Angel team to coalesce. (And what do we call them anyway? Angelettes?)

But then again, teamwork works slightly differently in Angel than it does in Buffy. At the relatively few points in Buffy where the Scoobies were divided – The Yoko Factor, End of Days – it’s a big deal and tends to be resolved quickly. Not so in Angel, elements of the Angelettes (I’m going to go with that) are estranged from each other right through the following three seasons. It’s not until Season Five that they are a (still debatably) tight unit, which makes sense, I guess, because it is of all the Angel seasons, the one that most resembles a Buffy one.

But we’re not even quite there yet. We’ve got the core trio of Angel, Cordelia and Wesley. Gunn has been slowly added to the mix and is a mainstay now. And here we have Lorne. Lorne, I think, is one of the great Buffiverse characters and Andy Hallett (RIP) does terrific work in bringing him to life. He becomes a chorus for the whole show – as can be seen in the very opening scene of s2, which is wonderful misdirect of ‘ooh, evil demon, oh no, wait, he’s going to sing a song’.

But it won’t be until the very end of s2, and you could argue s3, that the Angelettes are fully formed. We need Fred first. Angel’s team is not entirely analogous with the Scoobies but there are similarities. Lorne increasingly becomes the Xander figure, the one with the funniest lines used to defuse the melodrama, and Fred is very much the Willow figure – although perhaps a more fragile and damaged character than even the post s6 Willow.

Something also mentioned before is another fundamental difference between the Angel team and the Scoobies. The Scoobies belong. They are the status quo essentially, with the demons, the vampires, the forces of darkness, being the outside threat, the incursion that threatens that status quo and must be repelled. This situation is reversed in Angel. The team of Angel investigations are the misfits, the outsiders, trying to subvert and defeat the status quo of LA, as personified by Wolfram & Hart, the Hollywood establishment like Rebecca and Oliver from s1 etc.

Lorne also emphasises the other mission statement of the show – something we’ve talked about before – that ‘demon’ in the Angel world does not necessarily equate with evil. Compare that with Buffy, where it’s a lesson that’s not learned until later seasons, primarily with Clem and Anya (and it’s a lesson I’d argue that it learned from Angel). For s2 of Angel at least, Lorne’s club Caritas is a key locale and one which the gang will keep returning to.

The key theme of s2 Angel is very much the shades of grey mentioned above. It’s raised in the first episode Judgment. Angel kills a demon who turns out to be good and has to take his place. It’s a mission statement – things are no longer as black and white as they might appear in Buffy.

A second theme is introduced in the second episode, Have You Now Or Have You Ever Been – and that’s questioning just what it means to have a soul. As we’ve been arguing about Spike’s arc in Buffy, and whether having a soul doesn’t necessarily mean being a good person. Just the same as being a demon doesn’t necessarily mean being evil. Angel has a soul in this episode but he’s still not a champion. Still not a good man. We’ll see an ensouled Angel fall many times this season — when he begs Darla to take him back during the Boxer rebellion, when he lets the demon in the hotel take all the guests, when he unleashes hell on Wolfram & Hart. It puts the nobility ascribed to Angel in the context of the newly ensouled Spike in s7 of Buffy into doubt and, I think, casts Giles’s decision to throw in so quickly with Robin Wood in an ever more questionable light.

Once those two strands are introduced, they are examined in detail in the Darla arc of this season. Many of Angel’s acts are questionable – allowing the massacre of the lawyers, setting Darla and Drusilla ablaze – and as Darla comments: “That wasn’t Angel. That wasn’t Angelus either. What was that?” It’s not a question easily answered. No more than there are any pat, simplistic answers to the question of Spike’s goodness, or lack thereof.

The key episode for me is Epiphany, not just for this season, but for the entire show in general. To Shanshu had identified the need for Angel, as an immortal, to have some kind of goal to aim towards. But then it immediately begins to question that, and the danger of the ‘ends becoming the means’. Throughout the following episodes we see the implications of that. Angel is in real danger of losing his soul and not by any supernatural means.

The episode Reprise immediately preceding is also key and reinforces the ‘grey’ areas that Angel deals with. Descending in the lift to the Home Office, he’s still labouring under the belief that there’s a prize, a victory to be won. But there is no absolute evil. No Big Bad to be defeated. Evil exists in the heart of every human being alive. It can never be defeated. It can only be understood. It can only be forgiven.

It is not until Epiphany that Angel realises winning the prize is not the point. Victory is not the point. The fight itself is. It’s probably not possible to fully appreciate the eventual finale of the show without taking that point on board.

All I wanna do is help. I wanna 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.

When Angel gets that, it sets the trajectory for the rest of the show. Not that it’s going to be anything like an easy ride for any of them.

As mentioned above, unlike Buffy, there is no clear-cut Big Bad in Angel, leading to a big finale. Who is the Big Bad here? Is it Darla? Is it Angel himself? Is it Wolfram & Hart? They are, of course, the most likely candidate. But then they are in every season. As Holland Manners says, they’re not something that can be defeated. They’ll always exist. Even the High Priests in Pylea are a kind of branch office of W&H.

The Darla arc of s2 is not only satisfying in its own right and helps inform Angel’s character arc (fleshed out with the flashbacks of Angelus and Darla in their hey day) but it also puts a new light on Angel’s whole relationship with Buffy. As the fake Tish Megev points out, Angel’s whole relationship with Buffy has to be looked at through his much longer one with Darla. Darla is the anti-Buffy in many ways (appropriately enough as Julie Benz was once in the frame to play Buffy). Buffy’s love for Angel is a lot more innocent than his for her, as schoolgirl first love tends to be. Angel’s real feelings for Buffy are much more complex, mixed up with how much he’s relating to her as an alternative to Darla, or perhaps even as another aspect of his atonement. Buffy reminds him of Darla but she also is to him what Darla never could be, someone who won’t reject his growing kernel of goodness, of the capacity for love. That’s not to say he doesn’t love Buffy, of course, but how often have we dated someone just because we know they remind us of an unresolved former relationship in some way?

And the question is were Darla and Angelus in love in the way Dru and Spike were. It’s emphatically stated not but I’d say it’s open to interpretation. But what is clear is that Darla has constantly misinterpreted their relationship. Even when she has a soul, she still doesn’t understand the extent of what she’s done to Angel all those years ago. She thinks it’s a gift but Angel puts her straight. “You damned me.”

Part of her antagonism to Buffy is that of the lover scorned. Even when Angel beds her again, her pride can’t accept that she can’t give Angel what Buffy had. It certainly puts another light on the schoolgirl outfit she wears in s1 of Buffy. Retrospectively there’s a whole lot more going on there than we might have first realised.

For me, the Darla arc of s2 is the richest set of episodes of either series and if it wasn’t for the Pylea mini-sequence at the end, it would stand out as my favourite season of either Buffy or Angel. It’s not quite the joyous rush of s3 of Buffy or have the emotional punch of Buffy s5, but it is the most satisfying. And of course that arc is not over. Angel’s actions with Darla are yet to have huge repercussions for the rest of the show.

All this, of course, makes it sound like that s2 of Angel is short on laughs. It really isn’t. As well as having many stand-out lines in the general run of things – Lorne and Cordelia get all the best lines but even the heavyweight glumsters like Angel and Darla have their moments. Angel might be a champion but he’s still a sucker for a Manilow ballad, for example.

But the season does still contain some of the funniest episodes of the whole series – and comfortably matching some of Buffy’s funnier episodes. Guise Will Be Guise really gives Alexis Denisof a chance to flex his comedic muscles, much needed, considering the rather dark trajectory that Wesley is about to embark upon. The Thin Dead Line too has its moments and there’s plenty of broad comedy in the Pylea sequence.

A quick shout-out to some of the performances. Big kudos to Andy Hallett, who I think is great as Lorne. And also to Julie Benz, who brings real depth to Darla, a vampire who is a key part of Buffy lore but who was rather one-notey till now.

I feel that the Angel writers don’t quite get Drusilla right, making her somehow a bit too modern and generic evil vamp rather than out-and-out loopy. But it was nice to see her play a key part in this season.

But a special shout-out, I think to Sam Anderson as Holland Manners, who I thought was the best evil face of Wolfram & Hart. As a villain, he’s rather like the Mayor. The affable older man who is in fact a complete son of a bitch. Like the Mayor, the paternal older boss is a figure we can relate to, who is not the traditional face of evil, and that makes him all the more effective. A nice moment, however, was his horror when he realised he’d, er, bit off more than he could chew and that Angel wasn’t going to save him. Over the coming years there will be a number of Holland replacements but none of them will quite have his smiling malevolence.

On the W&H team, a quick mention to Lindsey and Lilah too. Lindsey, conflicted and quixotic to the last, will be missed but I’m glad Christian Kane got the chance to do a bit of comedy on his departure with his ‘evil hand’ schtick. Stephanie Romanov as Lilah is great too – a Dynasty-esque uber-bitch but we’ll leave her until a later blog as pretty much all her greatest moments are yet to come.

Alright, let’s get the Pylea stuff over with. I have to say I don’t love it mostly because it was a frankly bizarre and unsatisfying bookend to what I consider to be one of the best run of episodes in the Buffiverse. It’s too broadly hokey for my liking, and feels a bit too much like a B-movie, or a particularly bad episode of the original Star Trek. But there’s still lots to enjoy in the Pylea episodes. Some good lines, many of them from Lorne. And then there’s Joss’s delightful little cameo. (‘Numfar, do the dance of joy.’) Plus there’s Lorne’s head in a box schtick. I can’t help but wonder if that was actually an influence on Dorium Maldovar’s beheading in s6 of Who.

The hokeyness is deliberate, of course. Part of its function is to emphasise the shades of grey of the rest of the season. It’s pointed out more than once that there’s an aspect of Pylea that appeals greatly to Angel – it’s a world of champions, of absolute good versus obvious evil. No more of the nuances of LA, of the need for epiphanies. There’s probably not a Pylean word of epiphany. The scene at the shooting of Cordelia’s commercial is pivotal. Angel gets to bask under fake sunlight, which he gets to do for real in Pylea. He misreads the situation with her director but gets to play the straightforward gallant in Pylea for Fred (‘Handsome man saved me from the monsters’ Hold onto that line. It’s going to come in useful later on.) We’ll see exactly this kind of wish fulfilment for Angel again in s4, although in a rather darker context.

But it’s not only Angel who gets to indulge in a bit of wish-fulfilment in Pylea. Cordelia gets to see her true worth realised. Here she really is Queen C. And she also gets to realise that it’s not all it’s painted to be.

And there are lessons for the others too. Gunn finds that he has to choose a side at last – something that is made concrete in s3. And we start to see the seeds of what Wesley is becoming. The leader willing to make the hard sacrifices, who realises ‘that if you try to get no one killed, you end up getting everyone killed’. We’re starting to see the first glimmer of a more badass Wesley, something which is going to become more and more pivotal throughout seasons three, four and five.

On which note, the evolution of Cordelia continues apace throughout this season. The self-obsessed prima donna of Sunnydale is increasingly tempered with compassion and empathy for the suffering of others. Not that she’s humourless, but she’s definitely more nurturing than she was. It’s interesting that at this point anyway, Cordelia is flourishing and growing as a person, as her old friends in Sunnydale are increasingly floundering in their own personal crises. Who would have seen that coming?

Pylea sheds a little more light on Lorne too. It makes Lorne’s demon-ness as a metaphor for being gay pretty obvious – some might argue too much so, but personally I think it works.

But probably the key reason for the little Pylea excursion was to bring a little colour, a little sunshine, back into the Angel palette after a season that is almost entirely nocturnal, interior, moody and noirish. This is a problem Angel is never really going to get around – being the adventures of a vampire and his sidekicks – until season five, which manages to bring in more of the daylight and brighter colours of early Buffy.

This colour, this lightness, is probably necessary to contrast with the sucker punch of the season. When they arrive back from Pylea/Oz (I haven’t really talked about the Oz symbolism of the Pylea episodes, but feel free to discuss it below) Willow is waiting for them. And she ain’t bringing good news.

In fact, it’ll be a long time before anyone at Angel Investigations is going to have anything that you could remotely describe as good news.

OK, apologies for the length but I’m liable to wax effusive about this season. Leave your comments and thoughts below, but please leave seasons 3-5 of Angel off limits.