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I liked the arc of season 4... the corruption of Cordelia and Connor, and the return of Angelus and Faith... Having Angel become the villain of his own show was brilliant.

Yeah, for what it's worth, my favorite season was 4 (followed closely by the second half of season 5).

I liked Connor. He was a great villain, in a Dr. Smith sort of way. A villain that Angel should be able to beat, but can't because it is his son. He can be dropped to the bottom of the ocean, but he can't ever fully turn away from his son.

I also liked those two seasons because they were written so smart. People made bad decisions for great reasons. Wesley in particular had evolved from a joke to a very complex character.

I actually found season 2 the weakest. I like the idea on paper of Angel becoming evil in a non-Angelious sort of way, but it just didn't click for me. I find myself bored during those episodes and waiting for him to reunite with his gang.

I do agree Spike didn't gel well with the show for a while. It took ages to find the place for a neutered Spike, until they really got into the two vampires as fighting family.

I enjoyed the character development in Season 3 up until Darla gave birth and Wesley stole the baby and Holtz took the baby to a parallel dimension and blah, blah, blah...bored now.

My favorite season was the first half of 5 until they realized that they had to wrap things up by the end of the year and they had lots of dangling plotlines to handle. Had they been given a sixth season, the Lindsay storyline could have lasted a little longer and the Illyria storyline should have closed out the season, probably ending with Fred's transformation. Some development could have been given to the Circle of the Black Thorn storyline, which should then have been the focus of Season 6; the seduction of Angel by the most evil of evils, whereby he alienates his closest friends, ultimately resulting in his reconciliation with them and his redemption, perhaps through the Shanshu prophecy.

Just one small thing to point out with an otherwise great article, Charisma Carpenter didn't decide to leave the show. She was fired. Joss and Charisma have both confirmed this in countless interviews. She thought she was coming back for a fifth season and found out in the trades that she wouldn't be returning.

Angel was a show that changed tactics every year. Sometimes, it was for the best-- season two is one of the show's strongest years, as they fell away from the "Vampire, PI" bit and into a really dark but excellently written character-driven arc. Also, they had Lorne.

Season one was lumpy, but I liked it well enough. Two was excellent. Three, aside from Wesley's character arc (Wesley is probably the most well-developed character in the Buffyverse), was pants. Four had its moments, but on the whole, I didn't like it-- plus they had to shoehorn in yet another demon pregnancy, and they ended up breaking the story engine so badly they had to dump Cordelia, nix Connor (well, I didn't mind nixing Connor), and completely invert the status quo.

And you know what? Season five was AWESOME. Maybe one or two naff episodes, but it pretty much rocked-- Spike was Spike, Illyria was fascinating, and the last moments of the finale were so perfect, I never wanted to see these characters ever again. And so I haven't bothered with After the Fall.

I'm wondering if I should buy s3 and 4 just to complete the set, as I've got 1, 2, and 5, but... I dunno.

AtS's ultimate theme was "slightly-broken people trying to spit-and-wire themselves into some kind of repair." When you look over the S1-3 cast of BUFFY, the three characters least prepared for stable adulthood were Angel, Wes, and Cordy (Xander didn't regress until S4), so they were all predisposed to the theme when AtS started. S1's early clunkers succeeded in establishing the wayward, heartless, and noirish character of Los Angeles. In fact, I think Doyle's death, Kate's dead-weightness, and Wesley's pathetic outsider type helped the narrative -- the Good Fight can be cruel, the city can drain you, and suckers continue to be drawn in to both -- so that the inherent tension of "why not just BE broken?" explodes in the Faith arc. This in turn reveals the moral redemption theme, and the two themes work in tandem in late-S1/early-S2 and converge in mid-S2 -- Angel's "beige period" of fixed-but-not-moral versus Wes/Cordy/Gunn's broken-but-moral rededication to Angel Investigations, leading to Angel's epiphany that morality, like self-repair (as he told Faith), is a neverending struggle that doesn't necessarily have a fairy-tale ending (as he learned from Doyle).

And then Christian Kane, Julie Benz, and Juliet Landau became unavailable for the S2 finale, the narrative detoured into the enjoyable-but-frivolous Pylea arc, the Wes/Fred/Gunn triangle popped up, Connor derailed the Holtz story, and Saint Cordy developed. Suddenly, the personal stories became mythic ones that didn't always match the persons, and the engine stalled out. Once Cordy becomes fixed and perfect, then why is she still there? If Angel always has the moral high ground and can be broken and repaired at will, then what's the point? Only Wes seemed to be adhering to the themes, to the point where he essentially took over the show for a season and a half.

By S4, the vehicle had stopped. S4 itself wasn't half bad in the middle -- "Spin the Bottle" was good, "Apocalypse Nowish" was epic, "Habeus Corpses" was the series' best zombie story, and the Angelus and Faith trilogies were often outstanding -- but besides being a neat riff on 24, the series now didn't have much of a point. At the end, Wes's redemption arc just sort of faded away, Cordy was the flamingest wreckage of the entire Buffyverse, and Angel was a tourist in his own show.

But then came "Home." FINALLY personalizing Angel's struggles with Connor, the themes suddenly reappeared. Lilah's gifts regrounded the supporting cast, and S5 almost copies S1 -- broken people trying to fix themselves in an environment non-condusive to repair, two call-backs to "Hero" ("You're Welcome" and "A Hole in the World"), and a Shanshu finale -- with the added twists of Spike, Illyria, a suddenly-welcome Connor, and the resumption of Wesley's redemption. If "Not Fade Away"'s ending proved anything, it's that the engine still had spark even if they weren't going to drive it.

It's interesting to me that AtS went downhill almost precisely concurrent with BtVS's intrusion on its themes. The episode where the writers started losing the Fang Gang, "Offspring," aired the day before the episode where the Scoobies began breaking in line with AtS S1, "Once More With Feeling." And the last AtS-themed episode of BtVS, "Touched," aired the day before AtS rediscovered itself in "Home." It seems to me that AtS's problem was that it had a parent series in need of a theme and AtS had a nifty one all polished up, and while BtVS was dealing with that theme, AtS had to find something else to do. Appropriately, ANGEL sacrificed itself for BUFFY, then couldn't save itself from the wrath of the Powers That Dubya-Be.

I always thought the best way to interpret the Shanshu prophesy was to claim it applied to Connor. A pregnant Darla is the vampire with the soul (Connor's), Connor gets to become human, Connor plays a pivotal role in Jasmine's appearance and her death, and he gets rewarded by getting a chance to live out a normal life.

But apparently canon decided not to go that way with interpreting the prophesy.

Spike wanders over from the end of ‘Buffy’, which causes a problem [...] There’s a sense, almost from the beginning, that this isn’t going to last. Sure enough, Season Five was the last season,

Come on! Spike was the best thing that happened to Season Five! (Besides Masked Luchadores!)

Not only did Angel get its best ratings...EVER! (Thanks to Spike ...and masked luchadores!)

But it got its most memorable oneliners... EVER! (Thanks to Spike ...and an Italian Woman with huge Bosoms!)

I mean, who could forget... "You're a... You're a bloody puppet!"

Anyways...

I always thought that Angel's story engine was... "Nobody gets out of here alive!"
I mean, they killed everyone! By the end of the series, the only characters that were alive were Lorne and Connor. Everyone else was dead or in the process of dying (like Gunn).

Honestly, I loved that series. I think it was better than Buffy in many, many ways! ...but the order of the day was "there are no happy endings". Even characters that somehow "got away" like Cordelia & Lindsey, were brought back so that they could be "killed proper!"

Just to clarify, I'll admit I never considered the Pylea arc to be part of Season 2; personally, I file Season 2 as ending with 'Dead End', and think of the last four episodes as Season 2.5. Which isn't to say that they're bad; on the contrary, I like Season 2.5, I enjoyed those episodes greatly, it's just that 'Dead End' wraps up Season 2, both in terms of its plot and theme, and the next four episodes make a small, self-contained story arc totally unrelated to what happened before (and shift tone pretty abruptly as well, taking the series on a detour into High Fantasy.)

I should probably have mentioned that, but I seem to have stirred the pot more than enough with my other comments.

I still think season 1 was terrific, and that Doyle's and Kate's stories did a lot to set the tone for the whole series, long before Darla came back. And until "Inside Out" screwed everything up (far more even than Apocalype Nowish had) I think there was always *something* that was working right on the show-- often even screwed-up Connor. And then they went and followed Inside Out with a sequence so good that it made you forget they'd just completely undermined the premise of the show.

I liked the sprawling arc of Season 3 and 4. I especially loved the steady raising of stakes in Season 4, where just when you thought you knew who the "Big Bad" was, they'd be defeated and something worse would happen (The Beast to Angelus to Jasmine controlling the world).

On a related note, I watched the whole first season of Madmen and it was only days later that I realized the character of Peter Campbell was Connor! He looks very different, but you soon realize Campbell's character is defined by all the qualities that made Connor unpopular with a lot of fans (creepy and shifty and whiny).