There’s a lot of complaining about Dollhouse going on out there in the interwebs. People on my twitter feed incessantly talk about giving up on the show, but I just don’t understand at all. The show is not bad. It might not be as amazing as Firefly was, though most people didn’t really know that until after the show was canceled because nobody watched the freaking thing, but to pretend like it is some arduous task to watch the show is absurd. Buffy wasn’t great in its first season, nor was Angel. Joss Whedon, from my experience, usually gives you good before you get great. And this show is good.

If anything, the problem with this show is that it’s too eager to explore the possibilities of this show. It’s too ambitious. The first episode explored the concept of delayed catharsis by proxy, when Echo’s imprint finally stood up to the man that had haunted her for years. The second episode examined the history of the Dollhouse while furthering the ongoing story of Echo’s awakening. The third episode discussed the way in which our society constructs and controls people just as much as the Dollhouse does its Actives. The fourth episode waxed poetically about art and what it is to be human, ideas entirely foreign to Echo, offering up the leading question “are the Actives even human at all anymore?” All of the ideas being examined are interesting and could have an entire series devoted to them, but Dollhouse has only begun. Perhaps its the seemingly haphazard exploration of these ideas that jars people, but it’s not the show’s fault that people had underwhelming expectations.

Nevertheless, this week’s episode continues to ask these sorts of questions. It opens with a group of cult members entering a store on a shopping excursion singing and smiling all the while. After a brief kerfuffle with a local yokel — where he hilariously responds to their continual singing and ignoring of him with “are you deaf, or you just tone deaf?” and offers up helpful nicknames like “Osama Bin Gandhi” — they leave, but their shopping list is left behind with an ominous “Save Me” message scrawled on the back.

Because of the rumours of what happens on the compound, the senator of the state where this cult resides is being pressured by his constituents and he wants a Dollhouse Active to help with the situation. Because of the note, they’ve obtained a short-term “sneak and peek” warrant but they wouldn’t be able to infiltrate the compound with an undercover agent that quickly; what they need is a true believer. And so Echo is imprinted with the personality of an extremely religious person, Ester Carpenter, who has been blind since she was nine. Both to facilitate the retrieval of surveillance of the compound and to reinforce the imprint’s belief that she is blind, Topher and Dr Saunders implant cameras into her eyes which redirect the eyes’ signals to the ATF leaving Echo blind.

Echo quickly gains the trust of the cult, primarily because she truly believes in the faith they espouse. And this is an idea that is mostly glossed over but is most definitely put out there to chew on: they program religiosity. Faith is often seen as something people have or don’t have, so this is another sacred cow the show is willing to challenge with the imprinting of the Actives on the show.

Though the trust of the cult is gained, their leader is more doubtful. He takes Echo to a dark room and shines bright lights in her eyes, looking for some sign of false blindness, but her pupils neither dilate nor retract. Then he suddenly aims a gun at her head but she is blissfully unaware of this and continues to praise him while the gun is pointed right between her eyes. He walks away mostly convinced that she’s the real deal, leaving Echo in the room to be walked out by Seth, the second-in-command. Unlucky for him and lucky for the ATF, the room he leaves her in is also where he stores his massive weapons cache.

The ATF has seen enough and is ready to go in guns blazing, but Boyd wants Echo extracted first seeing as her mission has been completed and it’d be dangerous to leave her in place during the raid. Of course, the head ATF agent is a huge dick — as they always are — denies the request and begins his breach. As Echo is being officially becoming a sister of the church, the ATF agents trip an alarm along the perimeter and have to fall back. But Jonas, the head of the church, is on alert now and begins accusing Echo of leading the ATF there. He bangs her around, disabling the cameras in her eyes, thus returning Echo’s vision. “It’s a miracle.”

The siege on the compound continues until Jonas decides that Echo truly was a miracle and a message to him: he’s not going to fight back with his arsenal. The church members head into a different building. I don’t like where this is going.

As this is happening, Boyd is trying to figure out who wrote the message, hoping for some inside help. After looking at the security footage in the store, he discovers that it was the ATF agent who manufactured the yokel’s conflict so that he could put that note there and further his investigation. “Nobody ever asked to be saved. Not by you.” Boyd says, in yet another little moment that opens up a world of ideas. Something that I noticed after I’d watched this episode was that, really, this cult didn’t actually do anything wrong. The members lived a pastoral life so there was no money to bilk from the members. There was no sexual abuse, no children being married off, no harem of women for the leader. Instead, this cult is just a bunch of people who believed a certain thing and wanted to extirpate modern society from their lives. They had weapons, but I think to complain about that is equivalent to complaining about the right for individuals to bear arms. I don’t know if this is meant to be a commentary on how society is discriminatory to people who are merely different, or an attempt to show how evil can be hidden in seemingly innocent environments, or something else entirely, but I thought it was interesting that little was done to demonize the cult.

So, now that I’ve praised the show for being measured in its treatment of cults, it’s time to disprove my entire argument. Echo is asked to recite a story about people being sent into a furnace to die and not being harmed by the flames because of their faith. Meanwhile, Seth heads off to do… something.  I really don’t like where this is going.

When Seth returns from setting fire to the building, some members decide enough is enough and start to leave but ultimately Jonas convinces them to remain in the building as it burns, relying on their faith to pressure them into staying. But Echo argues against him saying “You can’t force a miracle.” When Jonas remains steadfast in his faith, she knocks him out with a honking big candle holder and gets the rest of the church to finally flee the fire. All but one, that is, who asks “Where will we go?” and further asks “How can you doubt after God restored your sight?” to which she replies “I don’t think God let me see again so I could just watch.” Which is a wonderful skewering of the general mindset of a lot of fundamentalists. And so he spits in her face. She knocks him out, a useful problem solver in any situation, and Seth carries him out. But as she’s leaving Jonas awakens and cocks his gun. Before he can shoot Echo dead, someone in ATF gear walks in and shoots him dead. Too bad it’s Laurence Dominic, head of Dollhouse security, who’s had enough of Echo’s shenanigans and thinks this situation is a great opportunity to solve that problem. He knocks her out leaving her in the flames.

Shortly thereafter,  Boyd comes in in similar gear and rescues her, carrying her out of the fire as the ATF Agent-in-Charge tells reporters that they’re not hopeful for any more survivors. Oops.

So Echo returns to her peaceful life in the Dollhouse, but as she’s returning Dr Saunders asks her if her vision is ok. And after Echo looks around she looks intently at Dominic and ominously replies “I see perfectly.”

The two B plots of this episode revolve around Topher and Saunders, and Ballard and his lovelorn neighbour. Topher noticed that Victor had a “man-reaction” while in the shower. He noticed this while having a conversation about the Valsava Mechanism and he stutters after noticing it, which I’m pretty sure is a joke that nobody but the writer, Tim Minear, got; until I looked up the Valsava Mechanism. Be brings this up to Dr Saunders who cites her reports expressing concern over “residual imprinting” and then suggests they examine the shower videos from the recent past to see how long these “man-reactions” have been occurring.

Ultimately, they find out that Victor’s “man-reactions” aren”t a side-effect of repeated imprinting, because he only gets them when Sierra is in the shower as well. Turns out he’s just got a crush. DeWitt tells them that the purity of the Dollhouse must be preserved — immediately after Jonas had said something similar to Seth, to really drive home the comparison of the Dollhouse to the cult — and orders that Victor be scrubbed. Not sure what that means, but I am sure Victor won’t like it.

Ballard, on the other hand, is continuing his search to find any record of Caroline, Echo’s original identity, by going to someone with access to more government databases to search. Unfortunately, there’s no record of her anywhere. His neighbour brings him his pain medication and some “leftover” manicotti, even though it’s enough to feed a family of four, and she also has another mysterious package that somebody left with her down in the lobby of the building. It has the video of Caroline that Alpha was watching in the pilot on it, which only further intesifies his investigation, leaving his neighbour to be even more jealous and more lovelorn. There’s also a scene of Ballard watching the events at the cult unfold on TV and briefly seeing Echo. After the fallout, he tries to find her but is shot down by the ATF Agent-in-charge who’s a dick to everyone it seems.

There are a few really good beats here. Ballard trying to flirt and admitting it’s been a while. The man who gave the package to Ballard’s neighbour simply being a lazy mailboy was also a funny red herring. Neither of the B plots offer anything of real significance, but they both fill the episode with real humour while continuing to fill out the Dollhouse universe.

There are so many good things happening in this episode, that the complaints of others become even more baffling to me. This is an adventurous show that manages to examine TV-unfriendly ideas while remaining TV-friendly overall.  The people that are complaining about this show increasingly seem like people complaining because they think it’s the cool thing to do. Next week’s episode apparently is a big episode in the mythology of Dollhouse, so hopefully, it will shortly become cool to like this show.

On a meta note, this review/recap is around 2000 words, and the previous one was around 3500. Both of those numbers seem far too large. As this progresses, I think I’m going to find myself really paring down the descriptions of the plot and of specific scenes, however much I may enjoy them, and focusing on the philosophical questions and mythology the show introduces. But be warned. Sometimes I just don’t know when to shut up.

From what I’ve read online, this was originally scripted as the seventh episode of the season. Some of the direct correlations between scenes in the pilot and this one make that statement suspect but it does explains why there’s so much exposition regarding the mythology mysteries, answers which normally would have taken half a season to unfold. But if if truly was the seventh originally, I can see why they bumped this episode up because it was an amazing hour of television.

Last week’s main story was a little lackluster, despite the interesting implications of what happened in it. This week was more exciting, less cerebral. The sort of exciting adventure the show needed to let its audience see a less restrained side. Not that this was a light-hearted romp; an episode where a seemingly innocent adrenaline junkie’s weekend date — with the crazed survivalist Richard O’Connell played brilliantly by Matt Keeslar — for Echo turns into her running for her life from the same man determined to find out if she’s worthy of living, if she can escape his manhunt, isn’t something to dance around about. But there’s much more levity in this episode, and the dialogue has become much smoother. The growing pains the pilot suffered from are almost completely gone here.

While this week’s main story was by far the more interesting half of the episode, the flashbacks in the Dollhouse to the events of a few months ago were excellent as well. The naked man who ended last week’s episode is Alpha; an Active, presumably one of the earliest versions of the Actives given his name, who, either at least partially retained his implanted personalities despite mind wipes after missions or was implanted by an unknown party with a personality and skills he shouldn’t have, broke free killing almost everyone in the Dollhouse and disappearing. He spared Dr Saunders her death, instead slicing her face leaving her scarred and damaged, and left Echo alive and unharmed surrounded by the dead bodies of her fellow Actives.

In this back story, we also learn of the imprinting process Boyd, Harry Lennix’s character, went through with Echo which made her unconditionally trust him in any circumstance. This trust is ingrained in her via key phrases which she reacts to in a preprogrammed manner. Which is why when, in the midst of the hunt, Echo ignores Boyd’s invocation of the key phrase and instead takes charge of the situation and going up against O’Connell on her own Boyd is perturbed. As would the Dollhouse if Boyd mentioned it, but it seems like the paternal connection he has with Echo will encourage a few helpful omissions from his report.

Alpha is said to have been killed after his escape by the Dollhouse, but we know he hasn’t and his message to Ballard was received this week while Paul was examining the crime scene from last week’s episode, much to the chagrin of the detectives actually assigned to the case. (Ballard has a few scenes this episode and they’re all fairly unrelated to the rest of the action on screen which is why it’s possible they were taken from whatever was originally the second episode and injected into this one to make the continuity stick.) Now that Ballard has a face to connect to the Dollhouse, albeit a face that doesn’t exist according to the FBI database, he will be even more determined. There’s a nice scene in there where Ballard’s attractive and clearly into him neighbour tries to offer him a nice home cooked dinner and gets shot down via the obliviousness and doggedness of the agent. It’s a little heavy-handed at getting it’s point across, but it’s still better than the kickboxing scene from the pilot.

The beauty of Joss Whedon’s work, as I noted when discussing the Buffy episode Doppelgangland, is his ability to combine stand-alone story lines with ongoing arc threads and this episode is an brilliant example of this. O’Connell’s actions originate from him and the conflicts he introduces are resolved within the span of the episode but the mystery of his origin’s, which were meticulously constructed by someone else (most likely Alpha), add to the overall arc. Similarly, the back story related to Boyd’s introduction to Echo not only allows some exposition regarding the process and Active and their handler go through together but also develops the long-term relationship between the two characters which is built upon by the main action of the episode.

If this episode is a sign of what’s to come from Dollhouse, then consider me in it for the long haul. However long that may be.

This post discusses some relatively old developments in the Buffy “Season 8″ comic which I haven’t kept up with in recent months so forgive me for being outdated and for spoiling you at the same time.

Is a recent interview with Joss Whedon, Joss claimed that he had heard no complaints about Buffy’s foray into homosexuality, or perhaps simply bisexuality, or perhaps even simplest sexual experimentation.

Really Joss?

I’ve got a few complaints. First of all, it didn’t flow naturally. I’m working off of old memories now, but I don’t remember that cut to Buffy sprawled out covered in sheets next to a fellow slayer making a heck of a lot of sense. It works in that we all know that Buffy gets horny when she slays. But if that were the case, then why did her experimentation not happen when slaying with Faith years ago?

Another argument I’ve had with myself is that Buffy, in that universe, was still basically the age of a college student and that’s a time ripe with experimentation. But it’s not that age that induces experimentation, but the maturity and independence of that time. And Buffy has had to be incredibly mature for years. Her times for experimentation are over. One of my biggest complaints with Season 7 of Buffy was that Buffy still acted like a petulant child a lot of the time. She should have been more mature, because she was more mature. The same applies here.

Overall, I just don’t think the situation was handled very well. I’m sure they could have done a lesbian storyline with Buffy smartly, but to me there were simply too many things that didn’t add up or make sense in the greater scheme. I’m not alone either. There were quite a few people who didn’t like the direction the story took on forums, some of them being quite hyperbolic about the whole thing, but most citing their issues with the story in reasonable terms. It didn’t ruin Buffy for me, it didn’t ruin the comic for me, it didn’t even ruin the storyline for me, but to say there were no complaints is a little presumptuous.

When I finished my epic Buffy/Angel marathon, I felt a wave of deep satisfaction wash over me. I felt more energized than I had in months. Not only that, but I finished with a few days to spare in my Christmas break from school. So I decided to kill off the last few days of my free time by making my marathon fully-fledged. No, I didn’t watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie — though in retrospect it would’ve been interesting, despite the departures from Joss Whedon’s script that the film takes — I watched all of Firefly. Firefly was Joss Whedon’s love child, and it was his devotion to that show to which many fans attribute the lower quality of some later seasons of Buffy and Angel. I, of course, believe that they never lost their quality, but do admit that Joss’ touch was less prevalent.

Another thing that most people seem to generally agree on is that Firefly is the best of the three Whedon shows. I tend to disagree on that as well.

Firefly has a great cast and thanks to some great writing they managed to form a familiar and familial bond in the short time they had with each other (the show was canceled before its first 13 episode season had even completed airing) but I don’t think that’s a particularly exceptional task when it comes to Joss Whedon. I don’t think that just because it was Joss Whedon who created this show that its achievements are lessened, I just don’t think that in the grand scheme of things, Firefly told the stories it wanted to tell.

It managed to get across some great stories about family, commitment, friendship, and didn’t shy away from hating on big government. In many ways, the merging of government and corporate seen in Firefly was more fully fleshed out in the final season of Angel — not coincidentally after Firefly had been canned — and it was hardly visible in Firefly; the only reason it’s known is because of obsessive fans hunting for clues for future arcs in the severely truncated run time.

Are Firefly’s episodes great? Yes. I wouldn’t deny that. In fact, the few episodes that aired may have been better than most of the episodes of Buffy or Angel, but I’m into shows for the long haul. It’s the season long stories and the growth of the characters that keeps me coming back. If Buffy had ended in the first season, the few people who grew attached to the show in that time would have enjoyed the show but what would they think of Xander? Xander is probably the most noble person on that show and his personal journey is the most deeply touching and haunting. Without the time it takes to develop that kind of depth, the character is fun but empty. I like the fun, but the empty? Not so much.

In the end, it comes down to distance. To use a lame car analogy, Firefly might be able to drive faster than Buffy or Angel, but it didn’t get as far as them so it’s immediately a lesser series. So, while I fully believe that Firefly would have been a better series if given the time, it wasn’t given that time. It’s still a great show, but because it was so short — more specifically, so unexpectedly short — it falls short.

Final words for the televisual part of Angel’s story. And while I know people who weren’t fond of it when it first aired, I’ve loved it from the first time I saw the cut to credits. It’s not quite a Sopranos-sized ending but it still leaves you hanging, and even better it 100% fits with the major philosophy of the show. Just like the ongoing atonement and redemption, the fight against evil never ends, and you don’t do it for the prize at the end. Evil’s not there to be beat, it’s there to be fought.

There is a problem here though: the amulet. Why would Wolfram and Hart give it to Angel? There are some rationalizations made along the way but some contradict each other and none are particularly satisfying for me. It really comes down to one thing: it was a double-edged deus ex machina. The first being the thing that will save the thirty slayers from the army of twenty million ubervamps to cap off the most climactic battle in Buffy history. The second to bring Spike to Los Angeles. And dei ex machinis annoy me. But and they are not unprecedented in the Buffyverse, so I can manage.

If you ignore that little qualm, which doesn’t much interfere with your enjoyment anyways unless you’re someone who tends to quibble the minutiae, this season not only caps off one of the best shows that ever graced Television but also introduces some larger ideas that the show could have explored in future seasons. Previously, the show explored the ideas surrounding Faustian bargains and Pyrrhic victories, and those themes are expanded on this season which puts the phrase “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” to the test.

Angel and his team have been offered a powerful weapon to wield against the dark forces of the world, the only problem is it exists because of those dark forces, so to keep the weapon you have to pick your battles. Therein lies the rub, and man do the senior partners rub that shit. This season, above anything else in the series, shows that Wolfram and Hart are not really evil. They operate because of the evil in the world, and the evil inherent in the way businesses are run. Firefly had a company, Blue Sun Corporation, that arguably was the greatest force of evil in that universe, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Joss Whedon was in an anti-corporate mood when breaking these stories.

The interesting thing about this season is how various ignorant factions of evil battle each other and the casualties are all Angel’s friends. Gunn was given knowledge of the law, which led to the rebirth of Illyria inside of Fred. Meanwhile, Lindsay was employing the amulet, used in the finale of Buffy, to garner favour with the senior partners and join the Circle of the Black Thorn. And the senior partners were slowly wearing away the team’s once heroic worldview. As Lindsay said near the end of the season, heroes don’t compromise with the world; they see the world the way it is and they fight it.

All of these evils twist and distort our heroes intentions, making them less and less heroic, whether they know it or not. And when Angel is finally returned to the right path, it made sense that Cordelia would be the one to do that for him. Not because Cordelia was Angel’s most recent Love — we’ll exclude Nina since they weren’t dating yet — but because she’s the one who’s been with him since the beginning. She’s seen his ups and downs and knows what he wants to hear and what he needs to hear. It was a fitting end to the character, though if they hadn’t made her so damned mature over the past couple years it would’ve been entertaining to see her get completely swallowed up by the glitz and glam of the Wolfram and Hart lifestyle.

There are some who feel like the ending for this season was bad: they are wrong. It was the most tragic yet uplifting ending the show could have done and it’s the melange of those two characteristics that has always made Angel such a fantastic show.

Apparently, season seven of Buffy is really not that great. Are there moments of brilliance? Of course, every season of Buffy has moments of brilliance: Xander’s speech to Dawn about being normal among the superpowered is a testament to Xander’s humbleness, wisdom and strength, and that final speech where Buffy explains how every could be will be from that day on brings me to completely unmanly sobs every time I see it. But man are there things to complain about.

Dawn is completely annoying almost all of the time. One of the few episodes she doesn’t piss me off is the aforementioned where she thinks she might be a potential slayer; in that episode, she’s mature, responsible and selfless. But in every other episode where she plays anything beyond a peripheral role she’s a completely insufferable selfish childish brat. The first time through I’d probably given up hope of Dawn being a character of any depth, but damn my naivete I really thought going into this rewatch that I’d like Dawn by the end of all of this.

And I already knew I didn’t like Kennedy all that much, but it’s amazing just how much I truly hate her. It’s not that she’s bossy and acts like she knows more than Buffy, and it’s not that she does nothing but encourage Willow’s magic, willingly ignorant of her dangerous addiction, and it’s not the hastily developed lesbian relationship between her and Willow, which was probably only created so that Joss Whedon could finally state conclusively to the world that Willow was not bisexual but homosexual. It’s that the writers so obviously want her to be an appealing character by making her strong, independent and “sassy” but, in my eyes, it just made the character abrasive and annoying.

And Buffy was just plain annoying. After about the 30th speech to the potentials about how much they suck and they’ll probably all die trying to conquer this evil… it gets a little tired. Almost every second episode of the season ended with Buffy giving a rousing speech full of bravado both stating how unprepared they all were for this and how they’re going to win regardless. Meanwhile this speech was immediately preceded by Buffy getting the shit kicked out of her or some other terrible calamity. So we get a season full of barking paired with useless impotent bites.

The writers were trying to show how desperate the situation really was but by doing so they made the ultimate success seem… unrealistic. When the single Turok-Han is released early on in the season it’s OK if he kicks Buffy’s ass at first; that’s expected from new enemies. But when, for three straight battles, she is utterly pummeled and barely survives it’s a sign that this is a formidable enemy and not a minion. This is not her being off her game for a fight, this is a real badass kicking hers.

But what happens when the final plan is devised about, oh say, five minutes before the climactic battle? All of the potentials, who have barely been trained in battle let alone hardened by years of real world apocalypse aversion, become ubervamp destroying machines because they have… the exact same mystical strength Buffy always had. So what turned the ubervamps into a bunch of pussies? Plot contrivance, that’s what did.

But that kind of thing is something I’m usually willing to ignore if the other aspects of the story felt true; but the emotions Buffy went through during this season didn’t feel true. Buffy constantly isolates herself despite every single one of her friends constantly trying to open her up. And I don’t think that leadership implies a solitary life. I think Buffy thinks that, despite all the friends she has been surrounded with her entire career as a slayer. And quite frankly, it’s getting old. Well actually it got old in the fourth season but its annoying persistence has yet to win me over.

I think I would have appreciated this path of further isolationism if it led to some lesson for Buffy, but all it led to was Buffy Being Right. When Buffy is finally called on her self-righteous, mightier than thou bullshit by… all of her long-time friends and the potential slayers she isn’t taught a valuable lesson about how to lead without alienating your charge, she doesn’t see the dissent and rethink her authoritarian stance, she gets pissy and decides that hey, her friends are all fucking worthless anyways. I mean, Spike agrees with her so she must be right, right?

So Faith gets a chance to take charge and she royally fucks up. Right? Well that’s what the show would like you to think. In reality, through some magic (literally people, this is a show about vampires) she managed to get some information out of one of the Harbingers but it turned out to be a nasty trap. Well that’s some bad luck but there’s no way for them to have known. Buffy is gracious enough to admit this when she returns to pick up the tattered pieces of their dissent. She ever so graciously absolves Faith of her sins. And then Faith decides to let the audience in on how completely alone you are the second you’re responsible for anyone else, just so any stragglers in the audience can finally figure out the Buffy was right all along. Of course, her feeling alone doesn’t really explain her behaviour except that when you feel alone, no-one else matters so treat everyone like shit instead of treating them like people which isn’t a particularly good message.

With that unexpectedly long rant over with, I feel I should finish this off by saying I still loved the season. The story was compelling, I still loved the characters (most of the time), and, like I said at the beginning of this whole mess, the final moments of the show are terribly moving and I don’t just tear up, I sob like a baby when it comes around. When it’s all said and done, the finale was practically perfect, but there was a lot of parts of the build-up that didn’t ring true for me. But I can live with that if it lets me have the ending the show received. The ending a show that held my heart for so long deserves.

I don’t have much to gripe about when it comes to Angel; it had a long term serialized story that was gripping, complex, and powerful. Whether that story was planned from the end or not is inconsequential, because the end result flows naturally from point to point. But just because a story is natural doesn’t mean I have to like its direction.

My biggest gripe with Angel was the Cordelia/Angel love story. They were very close and grew closer as the show continued but their love should have remained platonic: the deep respect and admiration shared between champions who have fought beside each other. And their relationship was not a heavy catalyst for anything else. All of the events necessary to bring forth Jasmine could have happened over the course of the series without the burgeoning love. The conflicts therein fed into certain developments along the way but those developments could have happened some other way.

I also don’t like Cordelia being evil, even if it is only because she’s being controlled by a Power That Was. Though when you rewatch the season it’s fun to see all the points where evil Cordelia is subtly twisting the world around her preparing for Jasmine’s arrival.

Season three and four of Angel told a really compelling story, continued to explore themes of redemption and atonement, and had murky water, “so grey there’s hardly any black or white to it” ambiguous moral decisions galore. So it’s hard to complain. Much like season five of Buffy, there’s nothing especially horrible about it, but the moments of greatness come with a nasty tinge of adequacy and questionable plot development.

For a long time I’ve considered Angel the superior show. Not because I thought that Buffy was bad but because I thought Angel was that good. But that being said, it’s been a long time since I really explored the reasons behind that decision. And one of the things that’s been racing through my mind as I’ve been flipping between Angel season two and Buffy season five is how damned amazing both of these shows are. With each new episode I start to think “man, this show really is the best of the two” but each show makes me think that!

Both have been so impressive and expressive with their core message. From the startling and terrifying realism of the shock of losing a loved one found in The Body to the nearly beatific monologue Angel gives at the end of Epiphany, both shows were just endlessly awesome through and through those years. One thing that I noticed this year was the much improved serialization on Buffy. In previous years, there was an overall season arc but each episode felt fairly self-contained but this year the stories spread out over the season in a much smoother manner. I still think that seasons two and three were their best stuff but the constantly intensifying story really made the season much more dramatic and addictive.

But as much as I like the more mature themes the show explores in the fifth season, I can’t help but remember the annoying early Dawn. I never loved the character, even in the final year of the show — probably because she was more and more frequently given the childish reactionary personality the annoying selfish half of Buffy handled in earlier seasons — but in the first half of this season she’s like Wesley Crusher on crack for annoying fans. It seems to me that they created the Dawn character to give Buffy someone to care for and not lead — a daughter of sorts — but I don’t think the show ever recovered from her introduction. For that season the story was beautiful and moving and I love the sacrifice that ends the season, but after that she returns to being an annoying teenager who gets in the way more than anything else. Like season four, season five has some fantastic episodes and some really moving moments, but there are aspects of it which still rub me the wrong way. Of course, it’s still a vast improvement over season four in virtually every way.

And yet, with all the greatness going on over on Buffy, Angel still wins out for me. The thing that really stands out about Angel to me is this: there is no Big Bad. When the season is over, the world doesn’t decide that evil is Just Not Worth It for the summer before a new unspeakable evil decides to give it a try. From the very first episode of Angel, Wolfram and Hart is shown as ambiguous at best with regards to morality. But they’re never the Big Bad. Evil simply persists in Angel’s world. Holland Manners says to Angel that if each and every human didn’t have a little tinge of evil in them, Wolfram and Hart couldn’t exist. This goes with the idea that Angel is in many ways about the banality of evil. Wolfram and Hart isn’t the source of the evil we see in our world, it survives because of it. When Angel finally understands this after a dark turn in his character he comes to a realization:

If there’s no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters then all that matters is what we do. ‘Cause that’s all there is. What we do. Now. Today. … 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.

That idea is the reason I think Angel is the better show. Angel comes to a realization that, no matter what you do, evil will persist but that doesn’t matter; what matters is what we do in the face of evil. This sentiment echoes something Angel says in the fourth season.

Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh, and cruel, but that’s why there’s us. Champions. It doesn’t matter where we come from, or what we’ve done, or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be. To show it what it can be.

And all of this comes back to the idea that there is no Big Bad. There’s life and there’s what you do with it. Which is a good philosophy whether you’re in our world or a supernatural one filled with demonic monsters hoping to bring ruination to all of humanity. Beyond the appealing worldview there is the fact that, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a great deal of stuff going on with the peripheral characters, Angel was much more of an ensemble show. It wasn’t until the later seasons that Buffy explored the lives of the Scooby Gang in any real depth; there were episodes like Dopplegangland and The Zeppo earlier but they dealt with the insecurities of the character and weren’t a part of the greater mythos of the show. On Angel, on the other hand, characters underwent strife and character growth from the beginning. Doyle’s heroic sacrifices stemmed from what was revealed about him and what had happened to him in earlier episodes. Cordelia’s ongoing struggle with her visions rarely took the spotlight but was persistent even when the plot of an episode was not reliant upon it. Wesley’s development from a bookish weakling to a warrior, though still bookish, and his ongoing distaste for father figures never felt forced and informed much of how we see Wesley’s actions. I did not even mention any of what has happened to Angel over the course of these two seasons; the show is so rich with well developed characters and subplots that it’s not necessary.

There is just so much that I love about Angel and Buffy as shows and as explorations of the human condition through inhuman subjects. Now that these seasons are over with I get to enjoy seasons six and three respectively. Buffy will pleasure me (in my dreams) with episodes like Once More, With Feeling and Tabula Rasa and finally let the fans who had yet to realise it see that Xander is what keeps the world from falling apart. Meanwhile, Angel’s actions from the last season will come back to haunt him in more ways than one and the consequences will reverberate throughout not only the characters but also their world for the rest of the series. This rocks way too hard.

I said earlier that in the end it might’ve been better to simply have a Buffy marathon and then an Angel marathon with any crossover episodes watched during both marathons. Now I know that was the right idea. What I had forgotten was how serialized Buffy became. While not as intricately derived, with deeply layered arcs, as Angel’s are, Buffy’s storylines did begin to take on a more serialized form with many episodes picking up right off from their predecessor. So I’m here watching Angel’s dive into madness and anger and interstitially seeing plot unfold in Sunnydale. The two forms of serialization are quite different and the nuances are laid out in a post I have lying around in my drafts somewhere that will get published one of these days, so I won’t go into it here, but overlapping the two styles is fairly jarring. Add on to that that most of the time there are two completely separate stories and watching them at the same time provides nothing. Only when the rare crossover episode occurs is it worth the effort of overlapping the shows. And even then, the storyline of the other show will likely have other parts that you won’t recognize or understand in addition to the overlapping story. In the end it might not even be worth it to watch the crossovers until you watch the other show. Like I said the last time I ranted about this, I’ll probably never have the chance to do another marathon of this kind so it’s all really moot.

A lot can be said about why Buffy outlasts so many of her enemies and survives so much; one thing that seems to pop up as the reason is her friends, but it’s not that she has friends, it’s the friends she has. More specifically, Xander. The show doesn’t shy away from belittling Xander’s abilities, but he really is the glue that holds everything together. He’s not a great fighter and he doesn’t have powerful witchcraft at his disposal but if he weren’t there, the group would fall apart.

Let’s be honest here for a second, Buffy is a bit of a bitch sometimes, and the rest of the time she’s a huge bitch. Most recently was her behaviour towards Riley during the fifth season. On first viewing it might not have been noticeable but Buffy’s distance from Riley stands out in hindsight. And I feel like his actions, while not completely justified, make a heck of a lot of sense. When I was younger I probably just sided with Buffy because she reacted to any accusations, no matter how accurate, with utter disdain and indignation, but with age and experience I can see what Buffy is doing and it doesn’t endear me to her.

Through the course of the show Buffy reverts to a childish little girl a little too often for my tastes, but every time she does someone is there to give her some freaking perspective. And most of the time it’s Xander. Without Xander, Buffy would either be a mess or dead. Granted, Xander can be a douche sometimes too; they all can. But they all contribute to the slayer. We can even ignore the most obvious example of this — when Xander, as the heart, joined with Buffy to defeat Adam — and still see that Xander is the one who keeps Buffy on track. He’s their rock. He provides stability to the whole gang and from that stability comes strength. And that’s how Buffy wins.

As the episodes overlap I’m beginning to see why having a joint Buffy/Angel marathon has its flaws. When it comes to multi-part storylines, there’s that annoying gap between stories. That is most noticed when there’s a heavy cliffhanger, which I haven’t run into yet, but even with simple two parters it feels weird to take a break between halves to see a completely unrelated stories. But with the interleaved episodes you get to experience those great crossover episodes like when Buffy goes to LA and in the next Buffy episode she comes back frazzled.

I think that to properly handle this kind of stuff out you have two options: you can either have a Buffy marathon where you watch the Angel episodes that directly crossover with Buffy episodes or, if you really need to see all of Buffy and Angel, you should go through a detailed analysis of where Buffy and Angel episodes overlap and schedule accordingly. My best idea so far is to interleave Buffy and Angel episodes unless there is a multi-part story. So if there is a two parter in Sunnydale then you watch them directly after one another and then follow it up with two Angel episodes. This way, each series goes steadily forward but the ratcheted tension of multi-episode stories doesn’t get broken up by intervening series episodes.

There are some problems with that but it’s probably the best way to do it when dealing with a multiple TV shows. Of course, how many shows have interconnected shows running at the same time. I mean, you could have a Frasier Crane marathon, but that would entail watching all of Cheers and then all of Frasier; neither show aired at the same time. I’d wager that no other shows have this kind of problem — with the possible exception of the Star Trek shows, but they have completely separate storylines so you could easily watch them independent of each other — so this may be the last time I have to really think about this kind of problem.

I dislike season 4. It started off with some bad stories, most especially the first episode. The first episode needs to set a tone for the season and the tone that episode set was “weak unrealistic characters.” That said, there are some spectacular episodes this season, and some really spectacular moments. Superstar, Hush and Restless are still some of my favourite episodes ever. Add on to that Spike’s continuing impotence and Anya’s ongoing completely adorable and completely inexplicable adoration of, and devotion to, Xander. And as much as, in my heart of hearts, I want Willow and Xander to be together in the end, if it had ended up with Xander and Anya ending up together… well, I would’ve managed. Let’s not forget Giles’ singing made me an acolyte of Anthony Stewart Head. So I can’t deny that this season has a lot to offer, but of all the things it has to offer stunning storytelling is not one of them. Although the final episode of the season does set up some really great aspects of the Slayer mythos, it’s not enough. The season was all over the place and was in general inconsistent.

It’s been almost a week since I started my insane marathon and I’m not at the 50% point I had hoped for, more like the 33% point. And to make things worse, I’m going a little stir crazy. After only a few episodes I start to want to take a break and either watch something else or just get the hell out of my house for a little bit. It’s really messing up my rhythm.

I’m not sure if the show Angel started off with an idea of where Angel was headed as a person, but it’s episodes like “I Will remember You” that make me think it did. This episode focuses on what would happen if Angel was turned human. The long and short of it is that he’d have lots of sex and eat lots of food, but he’d still have to fight. He’d fight poorly and inadequately but he wouldn’t stop fighting. In the Whedonverse, normal people who are introduced to the dark demonic underbelly of the world in which they inhabit can’t turn a blind eye again. It’s a plot contrivance that Willow, who had been offered positions at essentially every prestigious university in the world, would study at UC Sunnydale, but it’s rationalized by Willow wanting to fight evil. The evils of the world are not things you can simply ignore.

But at the same time, the first thing Angel wants to know of the Oracles when asking of his new fate is if he is “free.” In the third season episode of Buffy, Amends, Angel says that he’s a weak person and he always had been. He was tortured by his past actions for over a century and in the back of his mind perhaps he felt that if he did enough good, the math would even out. And it’s with this shallow idea that Whistler convinces Angel to fight for good and aid Buffy. And with this scene we can see that this idea still holds a place in Angel’s mind; as much as he does what he does to “show the world what it can be” he’s still a weak person hoping for redemption. In later years, he realises that there is no redemption for what he’s done and that fighting with that goal is fruitless. The goal of fighting evil is to fight evil; because the people who can, should.

I really love this episode not only because of the heartbreak Angel must endure — to give up what is surely his ultimate dream — to continue the fight against evil, but also because it shows us a point in Angel’s progression as a character that shows a sort of shallow heroism; but heroism nonetheless.

Well, season one of Angel starts off really strongly. We have lots of really great things going on. The show has a really dry sense of humour and it’s not afraid to mix really great laughs with heartbreak. The season begins with Angel fighting a couple of vamps in an alley, one of whom is the Lost’s future Sawyer Josh Holloway, and when the damsels in distress try to offer him thanks he rebukes them for fear of coming to close to them. It becomes clear that nearly draining Buffy to death in the climactic episodes of last season of Buffy have haunted him and drastically changed the way he deals with human interaction. He’s too scared that it will happen again to let anyone come close, even for a moment of gratitude.

The show doesn’t have the corny or cheesy mentality that drives a lot of Buffy, so its stories can be much darker and the show immediately takes itself much more seriously. Not that Buffy didn’t become a really serious, and sometimes very depressing, show in its later years, but Angel started off with the mentality of showing the real world. This show isn’t meant to be a supernatural allegory for adolescence, it deals with the nuanced evils in the world like the evils of apathy and of banality.

In the coming episodes, the show will grow, and, while it won’t reach its apex until its later seasons, these early episodes show a show ready to deal with the big ideas. Also, this is the first time I’ve watched the Buffy and Angel episodes interleaved since they aired that way lo those many years ago so it’s great to experience all those fun little cross-references anew.