Ah, Angel. We’ve had some good times together. Now, many years after you finished, I’m ready to say goodbye.¹ Luckily, you gave me a pretty good episode to say goodbye to. Alright, so things are a little contrived, a little forced; but I dealt with all my issues with that in the last review. I’m here to enjoy the near-perfect final days that every character has here, and as they were by and large awesome, that’s not a difficult task. So let me take things one at a time.

Goodbye, Gunn. You have, on occasion, been the most boring character on the show, but then you’re usually the most normal, and it’s important to ground things. In particular, you’ve been on a hell of an interesting journey this year — but it’s nice to have you as the conscience of the group now that Wesley’s returned to his borderline psychotic self. It’s also good to have you and Anne (nee Chanterelle) restating that beautiful, simple philosophy that’s been running through the show since day one; that the smallest good deed matters no matter what massive, horrible things might be threatening humanity.

Goodbye, Lorne. You had one awesome year on Angel, where you were mysterious and cool, with a hint of malevolence. Then you had three years as a lame and repetitive source of one-liners. You get something vaguely interesting to do in this final chapter, but it’s not your moment at all, it’s Angel’s (though it doesn’t really, to me, feel like it belongs to either of you). You have truly been hurt by the inviolate rule of “keep a character around regardless of whether you’ve thought of something interesting to do with them”.

Goodbye, person who looks like Lindsay, sounds like Lindsay, and acts like some schizophrenic² moustache-twirling, revenge obsessed loon. I can’t express how completely unnecessary it was for you to come back, or how disappointing it was that you came back such a shadow of your former self. Finally, in this story, you get one last glimmer of your former glory as a character who refuses to be pigeon-holed as good or evil. And then Angel gets Lorne to shoot you. Apparently, because you have a tendency to turn evil, and are unlikely to seek redemption. What a fucking hypocrite that blood-sucking prick is.

Goodbye, Illyria. You were the one truly cool aspect of this season, even though we had to lose Fred to get you. Angel had a pretty good run, but if there’s one thing that really made the idea of a sixth season interesting, it was you.³ It was nice to see Fred and Wes finally get together, but much more awesome to see the far more fascinating and disturbing relationship between you and Wes develop. And we get an ending of sorts to that plotline here — a moving and peculiar one, even if it is based on what seems ridiculous stupidity on the part of my favourite character:

Goodbye, Wesley. It’s been great. You may well take the honour of being the one character in all of Joss Whedon’s shows with the most interesting and consistent character development. It’s a shame then, that in your last hurrah, the brains of the group comes up with a plan that amounts to no more than “walk in, start shooting, hope for the best.” This from the man whose clever strategies allowed him to storm a Pylean castle three years ago. What kind of a backup plan is a pen-knife? I was screaming at my television set. I’m still annoyed now, and it’s been five years for heaven’s sake. Luckily for you, every other bit apart from that is rather good.

Goodbye, Spike. I didn’t want you here. You might have been one of the best things about Buffy‘s last year, but bringing you into Angel seemed like some kind of invasion from the crummy show to the good show. Pleasantly, the story of Angel and Spike has been rich in potential ever since the bleached blonde one turned up in Sunnydale. Unexpectedly, by the end of the season Spike’s almost become Angel’s conscience, or at least, the voice of the part of Angel that likes to see things in black and white. It’s this element of Spike that’s prominent this week, though happily there’s also a little bit of time to pay off the roots that were explored back in ‘Fool for Love’ when he finds time to recite his poetry on his last day.

Goodbye, Harmony. You were evil, and often slightly annoying evil, but every now and then, very funny evil. I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of you becoming a regular, for similar reasons to my resistance to Spike. And yet, you end on a high; betraying Angel and then getting indignant when he accuses you of being the sort of person who’d betray him.

Goodbye, Angel. You’ve come a long way. Once upon a time, you were just a cliched, brooding love interest for Buffy. Now, you’re a conflicted, intriguing, heroic, petty, interesting character. Who’d have thought? I said bad things about you earlier, but if I keep that out of my mind (and I do try) then you have a wonderful swan-song, with one final, truly awesome and satisfying fight. But what’s really satisfying this week though is to see you finally have a happy moment with your son. Oh, the pain we’ve gone through to get to this point. Crappy sideplots with sub-par Wolfram and Hart flunkies. Hours of angst-ridden, torturous moments with a sullen teenager. Bloody murders and attempted suicides. But finally, they can hang out in a cafe and joke around. It’s as close to a happy ending as our soulful vampire hero is ever going to get, and if Angel’s learned one thing over the last five years, it’s that he’s got to appreciate these things when they come to him.

Goodbye, Angel. What a good show you were. Sure, you had your rough patches, but there’s not been another TV show that’s mixed such comic book adventure stories, excellent action and violence, involving characters, and had it all work together so well. I kind of miss you.⁴

1. If by “ready” you mean “can be bothered”. It’s, um, been a while. I mean, it’s been a while since I even wrote “It’s, um, been a while.” No other review has had a gestation period this long.
2. I know that’s not what the word means. But I don’t have another word to use in its place. Frankly, I feel at this point it’d be less effort to rename the condition.
3. Mind you, I thought the same of Anya in Buffy, and it turned out she was just a bunch of one-liners on legs.
4. Although if you could just teach the British to choreograph fight scenes as well as you did it’d help no end.

Say, what if Angel went bad? That’s never happened before. Let’s do it as the set up for the final episode. That’ll be interesting.

To their credit, it’s almost interesting. Though a little overwrought. Some earlier setting up of the Black Thorn would have been nice; some hint of the tremendous power and apocalypse-running before Lindsey had to tell us all in his second unconvincing bout of exposition for the season.¹ But no. This episode is pure, 100 percent exposition, with little in the way of entertainment value. If you’re sold by it, you’d probably love it. At the time, I was a little too leery of Angel going the way of Buffy to completely enjoy proceedings.²

The plot goes like this: Angel wants to find a way to strike a blow against evil, prevent the apocalypse, save the day, ra ra ra. However it’s trickier than it sounds. There’s a bunch of folk running it, but he doesn’t know who they are, so he pulls an “I’m all cynical and borderline evil” act for a bit until the big guys let him into their club — though sadly they make him kill the rather nice Drognan as a final challenge.³ Meanwhile, his friends get all antsy and work out that he’s being evil, only to be told by him at the last moment that they’re all stupid and that he’s pretending. At which point they relent, and agree to make one final stand against the darkness.

Watching ‘Power Play’ now, there are redeeming features. It’s particularly surprising (and nice) to see Spike sticking up for Angel — they’ve been through a lot together this season and it shows. Illyria remains the number one reason why I was upset that Angel finished this season — her Crash Bandicoot metaphor for life is brilliant and surprisingly convincing.⁴ I had forgotten about the brilliant Marcus Hamilton, also; at the time I hadn’t seen Adam Baldwin in Firefly, which adds a lot of extra fun to this performance. His demolishment of Illyria is brilliant: “Maybe you just aren’t… that… cool!” coupled with a particularly brutal camera angle.

The other regulars do less well, as the plot makes them jump through a few contrived hoops. Wesley was there when Angel did something damn similar to this, on a smaller scale in ‘Enemies’ five years ago, but all of them are only half-hearted in their suggestions that maybe Angel’s faking it. This would be more understandable if Angel’s “I need power” speech was as convincing as the script thinks it is. At least they’re quick to believe him at the end, and we don’t go through too much “Why should we believe you” crap.

Overall, lame — but I find it hard to condemn it completely because it sets the stage for ‘Not Fade Away’ so nicely. If one episode has to be bad so another can be awesome, is it worth it?

1. I mean, why not have Lindsey mention that something like the Black Thorn existed in ‘Underneath’? Why not have sprinkled the nifty thorn symbol amongst the last few episodes. Perhaps I’m being too harsh — the show was, after all, unexpectedly cancelled.
2. It’s especially dangerous with Buffy writers spending too much time over here in Angel land. I’m not a huge fan of David Fury. Where’s bloody Tim Minear when you need him? Oh, that’s right, making yet another good show that got cancelled.
3. If I had a dollar for every time a TV show has started with a main character doing something shocking, and then done the rest of the show in flashback to explain how we get to that point, I’d have maybe ten dollars. Actually, it’s not that I mind, but it’s more impressive if you can get the audience to spin 180 degrees and be on the character’s side the next time round, rather than thinking it’s maybe a bit bad both times.
4. If a god fell to Earth in a human body, would our lives just feel like a game of Tetris?