By the end of Season Three of BtVS, the Buffy/Angel story arc had no place left to go. And the whole show was going in a new direction as the Scoobies left high school and went to college/real life. There was no longer going to be any place for Angel. His story was done. Wasn’t it?

No, not even remotely. It had taken David Boreanaz two seasons to really get to grips with Angel’s character and he was increasingly shaping up to be ideal leading man material. A spin-off featuring the vampire with a soul could be a winner.

But what kind of show was it going to be? Where was Angel going to go after his inevitable break-up with Buffy. We get our first inkling in the S3 BtVS opener, Anne. Set in LA, it was perhaps a darker episode than we’d ever seen of Buffy, tinged with real life issues like homelessness and human despair being filtered through the supernatural trappings of the show. Many of the images of the LA montage in the first act would find their way into the Angel title sequence and, of course, Anne would later become a small but arguably pivotal character in Angel. (And ‘Anne’ did also feature Carlos Jacott, who would later reappear in s1’s Bachelor Party.)

Like BtVS, Angel took a while to find its feet. Initially it attempted the private detective/story of the week format. Much has been made of the show’s debt to Batman but personally I think the early episodes of Angel owe a far greater debt to The Equalizer, which is what they often remind me of. It’s certainly notable that by the end of s2, the detective agency angle has become far less of ‘a thing’.

The half of the inaugural season shows a marked disinclination to stray too far from the roots of the parent show, with lots of guest appearances and interconnected stories. Among the guest appearances, we get Spike, Oz, Harmony and, of course, Buffy herself. This is all good, of course, and it’s like having an extra helping of Buffy to enjoy, especially at a point where the parent show was going through something of a ropey patch. And in general I’d say those stories are stronger than a great many of their Buffy s4 equivalents.

But I’d say that it wasn’t until Eternity that the show changed gear slightly. The episode The Prodigal had started to flirt with Angel’s backstory but Eternity was the first where it had the courage to play with the characters and explore the implications of the mythology. And it marked the show’s first real engagement with Angelus. From this point on, Angel began to develop a tone and themes and a style that was very much its own. (And would, I’d argue, start to influence the parent show in its final seasons.)

And despite being a continuation of a Buffy story, the following Faith two-parter continued the trend. It’s immensely enjoyable to watch the two Buffy episodes and go straight to the two Angel ones and despite the overlap between them, there is still a marked difference in the style of the shows beginning to emerge. Angel is far more about grey areas than Buffy is. In Buffy, Faith is the villain, albeit a deeply conflicted and sympathetic one. In Angel, she is someone who needs saved, who needs help. If anything, it’s Buffy who is portrayed negatively. And we see things in Angel that BtVS would never dream of showing us. The torture of Wesley for a start but would we ever have seen Angel striking Buffy in the parent show?

Interspersed with what is essentially the resolution of Faith’s arc, we also see more and more flashbacks of Angelus and Darla. It’s often forgotten what a pivotal character Darla is in both series. She is, of course, the first vamp we ever see and her resurrection is the major cliffhanger of s1, foreshadowing what is to come in the excellent s2. And Julie Benz gets the chance to really run with the character here.

Thematically, if Buffy is about development and growing up, then Angel is about what happens when you get there. Later series of Buffy would tread this ground too, of course but Angel’s tack is slightly different. Even in later series, Buffy is about hope, about looking to the future. Angel is about the regaining of hope that has been lost and therefore dwells a lot more on the past of almost all its characters. From Doyle, to Angel, to Wesley, to, er, some characters we don’t meet until later seasons, they all have a past and to some extent it comes back to haunt them, define them, change them.

I won’t dwell to much on characters in this season, except to give a shout-out to the late Glenn Quinn who gave a short but fine performance as Doyle. Clearly a surrogate for Max Perlich’s Whistler, Quinn brought a nice roguish charm to the part, although I always suspected he was slightly too young for the character. I’m also not sure if there would have been that much mileage in the character and bringing Wesley into the mix was a far better idea.  But Quinn still deserves some kudos and he died way, way too young.

And this is the last we see of the old-school Cordelia. From To Shanshu in LA onwards, we start to see a Cordelia who matures, who becomes a more maternal, nurturing figure. It’s necessary and desirable to see her character evolve and mature but there will always be a part of me who will miss the old Queen C. But just as the Scoobies had to grow up, so had Cordelia. And Wesley too for that matter. But much more on that in later seasons.

One of the most notable things about Angel is that it to an extent did away with the concept of the seasonal Big Bad. Many of the seasons had major villains, of course. But the Big Bad in Angel was always constant. It was always Wolfram & Hart. The demonic law firm would continue to provide the hum of sinister menace in the background for pretty much the entire series.

As ever, please leave your thoughts below but no spoilers for anything beyond s1 of Angel and seasons 1-4 of Buffy.

Season three was the Buffy formula at its most perfect. Good blend of Scoobies. A strong arc. A cast and production crew now utterly confident in what they were trying to achieve.

But it couldn’t stay like […]