I have trouble differentiating the first three seasons of Angel in my memory because they lacked an overall story arc. That makes it hard to argue that seaosns 4 and 5 aren’t the best Angel seasons, since those are the only two that I recall clearly. But I don’t think I’d put them as the two best of the Buffyverse. Buffy S5, S6 and S3 are really good. Would it be weakminded if I went with a 5-way tie? heh.
[spoiler]Season three is when it got arc-heavy, with Holtz and Connor, and ostracized Wesley. It built everything up wonderfully, but it got absolutely terrible the second teenaged Connor showed up, and didn’t stop sucking until the fifth season.
\The common wisdom (which I disagree with) is that the last two seasons of Buffy were the worst, and that the first season was pretty boring, but it’s worse than all three of those combined. There are no words strong enough to describe how terrible the fourth season of Angel was.[/spoiler]
Well, this is where it gets to spoilery to talk about here, but I can distinctly tell the seasons aprart like this.
Angel in a nutshell:
Season 1: Meh
Season 2: Better, but only OK
Season 3: Oh, now this is getting kind of good
Season 4: Wow!!
Season 5: Amazing!!
You need to watch the first 3 seasons again then. Season 1 is essentially a prologue with a lot of groundwork laid in the final two episodes. Seasons 2, 3, and 4 are structured as one large arc. Angel was not ever like BtVS with clear “little bads” and “big bads” and a formula that was built into the pacing of the episodes. Season 4 doesn’t even make any sense without the 2 seasons worth of build-up and plotting that led to those events. I think it’s one of the best plotted, best paced, ambitious story arcs I’ve ever seen on television. I can’t think of another series that had one story span so many seasons and kept it cohesive from start to finish.
Yes, but that’s exactly why they blend together. It’s easy to tell at a glance what season any given episode is in, but other than the last couple episodes in a season I wouldn’t be able to place an episode based on just a plot summary.
[spoiler]Season 1 - In the original office, or even more obvious if Doyle is there
Season 2 - In the hotel but no Fred
Season 3 - Hotel with Fred
The thing is, I can’t seem to separate Seasons 3 & 4. The entire Darla/Connor storyline is fixed in my mind as a single season for some reason.[/spoiler]
Ahh, sorry. I see what you meant. I’m a bit quick to rush to the defense of AtS because I feel like it’s often unfairly dismissed and I just love it so.
I personally tend to blur seasons 1 and 2, thinking that season 3 is season 2. So Olives really hasn’t seen the episode that got me to look up how Vampires worked in this series
The one where Angel turns into a full demon while in the hell dimension.
Finally saw it. ‘‘The Body.’’ Major unboxed Buffy Season 5 Spoilers to follow.
Finished about three hours ago. Streaming tears from start to finish–my husband too. We just watched and handed the tissue box around in utter silence. We had planned to get back to work immediately following that episode, but we couldn’t. Instead we cooked dinner together.
Still feels like a giant weight on my chest.
Out of everyone I related most to Anya. When my uncle died a couple years ago very unexpectedly at just 30 years old, I was utterly dumbfounded and had no idea what to do. The way she just wanted to help but didn’t understand what was appropriate and was just experiencing death in general for the first time… all very much my experience. Trying to be there for my grandmother in her grief when I was very much reeling myself required herculean effort, and I still feel like I failed. That’s what I think is extraordinary about this episode – there’s a role for everyone to recognize themselves in.
The way they did the first several minutes in real time, making you feel the weight of discovering the body and sitting with it and feeling Buffy’s shock was pretty brutal. The sound of her ribs cracking and everything, it was just too real.
I also hope the makeup artists got some kind of award for the job they did on Joyce. You knew she was dead right from the beginning; she didn’t look right. Realizing Buffy still was not able to come to terms with that was really hard. Realizing she was trying to breath life into a corpse was really hard. Seeing Joyce progressively look less and less like Joyce was really hard. I really feel it was one of the most important things makeup has ever done in a television series.
Very well handled with Dawn, particularly as her drama of the day was pronounced ‘‘really not all that important’’ and her friend had no idea how right she was. All the little things, the worrying about what to wear and the punching the wall and the way things somehow are normal at the same time as they are surreal… all very true. Probably the most realistic depiction of death I’ve ever seen on a television show.
The episode was almost flawless. I felt the sudden vampire rising in the morgue at the end took us too much out of the story. I get the point they were trying to make, that you have to deal with the same old shit at the most impossible times, but it broke the realism of that moment. Without it I feel like the episode would have worked as its own perfectly contained universe completely devoid of context.
Totally draining, but definitely worth it. So glad we did not watch that right before bed.
That’s the one episode I can never re-watch. Too powerful.
Thank you to everybody posting to this thread for not even hinting about it. The above post means it was a successful episode.
I thought they were trying to juxtapose fake death (vampire) with real death (Joyce). Just a reminder to the audience how much real death is different from the vampires on the show.
Silenus, I’m also glad no one said anything about Dawn. Olives had the right reaction when she was introduced.
Emphasizing this because I do appreciate. Didn’t even see it coming, even a little bit.
In fact, today, before watching the episode, I made this post in another thread, in the most innocuous way possible.
Sr. Olives and I were discussing the possibility of Joyce’s death when the whole brain tumor thing both started. I said, ‘‘If she does die, it will probably happen in Season 6 because the Dopers told me that’s a really bleak season.’’ I mean what’s so brilliant about it is that you spend the first half of the season wondering if she’s going to die, and then when you’ve decided she’s not going to, she just dies and you never see it coming.
I have just decided to report this post and request a moderator change the thread title to ‘‘Progressive unboxed spoilers’’ or something similar to reflect the fact that we have major spoilers through the middle of Season 5. I would hate for someone to wander in here innocently and have any of the events spoiled.
For me, the saddest moment in The Body is actually the end of I Was Made to Love You. Buffy, in her compassion, sits with a “dying” robot while her mother is dying/dead at home.
Ugh, I never thought about it that way.
But the ending of that episode is definitely sad.
‘‘Mom? Mom! …Mommy?’’ 
Just the thought of that line makes my wife tear up. I know, I just was talking to her about this thread.
I thought the vampire rising at the end conveyed the actual horror of the dead rising. Up to this point in the show, it’s mostly played for laughs, isn’t it? Waiting in the cemetary while some hapless vampire tries to crawl out of a grave only to be staked as soon as he reaches moonlight, ha ha, what a buffoon. This vampire really hit me with the emotional horror of what that reality would really be.
Later in season 7 (no spoiler) I believe Buffy and friends hid out in coffins at a funeral home waiting for it close up so they could dust some random vamp that had nothing to do with the story. As per usual, that entire scene is played for laughs. (And it is pretty funny.) But in the context of what we saw at the end of The Body, the reality of that plan is horrifying.
I’m not saying this is what everyone else should see or even what the writers intended. It’s just what I took from it.
On an unrelated note, Logo wrapped around and played almost all season 1 this week. It was tough slogging through it, but one thing that struck me quite a bit: (Major spoiler through the end of the 3rd episode of season 6.)In Nightmares, one of Buffy’s worst nightmares realized was being buried alive. She then woke up a vampire and they focused on that, but the segment before they went to commerical with her screaming in the grave as the Master buried her alive. Probably not intentional, but it offered more context for how psychologically devastating it would be for her to be yanked out of heaven and wake up in a coffin, buried alive.
Oh, and another thing about ‘‘The Body’’ – first on-screen Willow/Tara kiss. I like that it was just a normalized thing for comfort and intimacy rather than some kind of sexually charged makeout session.
And a question I’ve been meaning to ask for a while. If it’s not too spoily, what is a 'shipper? I’ve seen that term used a lot in this thread.
'Shipper is shorthand for someone who “ships” a certain relationship on a show. Meaning they want to see 2 specific characters in a romantic relationship or loved it when those characters were in a relationship. This sometimes accompanies a mashup combined name for the couple such as “Bangel”, for Buffy + Angel. So when someone says they ship Bangel it means they loved the Buffy and Angel relationship above any other relationship one or both of the characters ever had.
A ‘shipper’ is a t erm used to refer to people (generally on internet message boards) who want certain characters to hook up/date/keep dating.
So if someone was a Spike/Buffy shipper, they’d want Buffy to start dating Spike. A Riley/Buffy shipper would want Riley to come back to Buffy. If someone was a Tara/Willow shipper, they’d be all happy that they are together. Those are the normal ones. There are weirder ones where people “ship” characters that don’t make sense, usually because it makes straight people gay…there are some shipper that also make the gay people straight, but they always seem outnumbered by the ones wanting two straight dudes to start making out. Things like Xander/Riley, Spike/Angel, etc…these are more or less just things people have in their heads/their bad fan-fiction, they know it’s not something that will ever be in the show. Just something to talk and argue about with other shippers.
Oh, and it’s not just a Buffy thing, there are shippers for pretty much every popular show.
Thanks!
Then there were the Shipper Wars. Bad times, those. Thousands of lives lost, millions in collateral damage, and the environment still hasn’t recovered. The Creator plays with us, as a cruel child tortures insects for fun, with total disregard for anything we might be feeling.