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.

Season one has a lot going for it. It ends on a really big cliffhanger, it introduces something which can drive Angel’s ongoing adventures, and the show develops and sympathizes a character just so they can kill him in the ninth episode. Many people think that Glenn Quinn was canned, but Joss Whedon was clear from the beginning that the character was going to be killed heroically shortly; it was something he wanted to do with Jesse in Buffy the Vampire Slayer but didn’t get a chance to accomplish.

The show was much less serialized than in later years, but you could still see the reverberating consequences of stories. The most interesting aspect of the season is the growth of Angel. As Wesley said, it’s our desires that define our humanity and, while there was a tacit understanding of why Angel fought the good fight, the Shanshu prophecy gave Angel something to desire; something to make him human. Angel moves from that view as his story continues, he begins to fight the good fight because it should be fought, not because of some base self benefit. Angel is always seeking redemption, but somewhere along the way he realizes that redemption isn’t a destination, it’s an ongoing process.

Already in the first season, you can see how the stories told on Angel will be much darker and ambiguous as to who is evil and what is moral. And neither the questions nor the answers get easier as the show progresses.

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.

Well, I’m fifteen minutes into the Buffy season four finale and all I can say is “University isn’t like that!” Universities specifically give first year lectures to professors who know how to treat students. They wouldn’t pick out the one person talking during the lecture and scream at them and kick them out because they’ve yet to register for the class. But aside from that, why would Buffy crumple under that pressure? I’m a huge fucking mess and I wouldn’t have accepted that kind of verbal punishment without some sort of defense.

And when Buffy started off in high school at the beginning of the series she made all sorts of friends quite fast. Hell, by the end of the series she was commanding a damned army of students! Do the writers really expect us to believe she’s the demure, insecure wallflower she’s presented as in this episode? And are we really supposed to believe that she could get her ass kicked by a poser on-campus vampire? She has, to date, kicked the Master’s ass, defeated Angel and Spike — two notoriously vicious brutal vampire of the past — and yet this wannabe vampstress can kick her ass? I don’t care how bad she’s feeling about not fitting in on campus, vamp slaying is mechanical at this point and she needs a real threat for it to be realistic.

I’m not great at making friends, in fact I’m terrible at making friends, but even I managed to scrounge up a couple people to talk to in between classes, so to have the show act like someone who is as pretty, as funny and as interesting as Buffy would have trouble making new friends, in any situation, is beyond absurd.

A lot of people hate season 4 a lot because it introduced Riley, and while I never had any strong distaste for Riley myself, I get the feeling I’m going to be considerably more annoyed with this season than any of the previous ones. There are some really great episodes this season, including the Emmy-nominated Hush, but that doesn’t mean the season as a whole isn’t poor. More as my marathon progresses.

Well, with the third season of Buffy finished I decided it was a good time to kick off the reading aspect of this uber-marathon. So when I woke up today — around midnight because of my bizarre sleeping schedule at the moment — I started reading the third book in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series: The Waste Lands. And now, around 3 in the afternoon, I’m done. That was without a doubt the fastest I’ve ever read a novel in my life. It’s not the fastest in terms of time read because I took 15 hours to read the book, but I’m pretty sure I read The Road in less time, just spread over a longer period of time.

But the marathon process behooved quick turnover so I read and I read and I read. And it was a damn good read. The pace was quick, and the story was filled with bizarre twists. The most entertaining thing about the series though is the inexplicable connections between the two worlds. From the soulful singing of the old folk song “Hey Jude” in Mid-World, to the mystically haunted locations strewn about our world that seem to have indelible connections to Roland’s world that has moved on. The next two books are both 700 pages so they’ll be a little more arduous and might have to be split over multiple days but I won’t find out until I’ve watched a couple more seasons of Buffy/Angel.

Looking back on the last twenty hours or so, I can’t remember an unamazing episode of this season. Buffy is usually good even if it’s not great, but this season was easily the strongest and most consistent the show ever produced. Are there more impressive, or just plain better, episodes in other episodes? Hell yes, but the way the story laid out over the season and progressed with a slow lumber for the first half of the season and steadily ratcheted up the tension from there on in puts it a step above any other season as a whole. And it managed to be depressing, moving, haunting, mirthful and joyous along the way.

Xander was still a douche when it comes to Angel but it was considerably more sedated than in previous seasons so it didn’t bother me nearly as much. So much happened in this season with all of our main characters growing up in some way or another. Xander finally managed to find a place in the world and accept his place in the Scooby gang. Willow grew into the wiccan arts, a story thread that will continue to build for the rest of the series. Even Cordelia is given moments of real growth. But beyond that, this season was about how things change. Not always for the better, but things change. And as Whistler said in the season two finale “the big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.”

And one thing I have to say about the Faith storyline is this: it’s what the writers of Lost wanted for Michelle Rodriguez. They didn’t get it because they made the character too unlikeable too fast, but because Faith started off as a more vivacious version of Buffy, and was slowly revealed as a deeply troubled person we feel for her much more. I only mention Lost because as I was rewatching the Faith arc it reminded me so much of Ana Lucia that I felt it deserved comparison.

This season was about self-discovery which, unsurprisingly, is something that normal students must go through as they prepare to either enter the real world or head into post-secondary education. Either choice is scary and leads to a much more complicated and dangerous world, and the tone of future seasons only represents the realities of our world transposed to the realities of theirs. They made it through high school and next season… things fall apart. Not only is the former gang schizmed across two shows but the trials they are put through change them all in drastic ways. I can’t wait.