Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Twenty five years later (Part seven)By Matthew Martin| November 19, 2021 TV Blogs Previous Page Season Four begins with a mini-arc focused on bringing Cordelia back (Angel returns, as expected, right off the bat). When she does, she has amnesia, which is red flag number one for the season as amnesia storylines are always just the worst on TV. It does provide us a fun little Joss Whedon-directed one-off episode, “Spin the Bottle,” in which everyone reverts (mentally) to their teenage selves. The arc ends there and immediately we’re dealing with a demonic monster called “The Beast” that blocks out sunlight and wants to wreak havoc on everything. It soon becomes clear that The Beast is being controlled by someone and, shock of shocks, we discover it is Cordy of all people. Well, the fan surmises, clearly this isn’t Cordy because she would never go evil like this. She’s either being mind-controlled or this is an imposter of sorts. We’re led to expect a grand reveal that will end with Cordy returning, the proper bad guy getting defeated, and everyone picking up the pieces together. Instead, we get another mini-arc that sees Angelus return in the most convoluted fashion, as well as the return of Faith, which serves more to reintroduce her to the world before he heads off to Buffy Season Seven. Angelus’ big comeback to the Buffyverse was a big deal at the time and WB marketed the heck out of it, but the end result is a far cry from the latter half of Buffy Season Two. There it felt like a natural progression of the story. Here it feels like a ratings stunt. The whole thing ends with a kind of wet fart episode, as Angel and Angelus share the screen in the mind of the main character while guest star Willow restores his soul. I won’t hate on Willow; on the contrary, Alyson Hannigan fits in with this case like hand-in-glove and had she joined the show for season five it would have been magical. She’s the lone bright spot in this otherwise dreary mini-arc. The storylines shift again after Angel is back to normal, this time with everyone wanting to know why Cordy went bad. It turns out she is very very pregnant and in a relationship with the much younger Conner, whose diapers she changed as a surrogate mother not one year ago. I don’t care how you rationalize the time-shenanigans of being in a demon dimension, this was weird and creepy and I don’t like it at all. The arc ends abruptly as Cordelia gives birth to a fully grown woman. This takes us all the way into left field for the final mini-arc of the season, centered around the villain Jasmine. I should start by pointing out that there are moments in this arc that are very well done, especially the decision to make Fred the hero. The big picture idea of it is also great: Jasmine wants to bring peace on earth at the cost of a few people here and there that she will eat from time to time. Just a few people when you can stop all wars and violence? It’s a great ethical question and the payoff is brilliant, but it’s the little details that have to hold it all together, and they all fall flat. But nevermind that, because really the show does nothing with this arc; the whole thing is wiped from everyone’s memory by the last episode anyway. It doesn’t matter. But while everyone is talking about Jasmine this and world peace that you know what we’re not talking about? Cordelia! She basically drops off the map. What we will learn in the next season, which I will spoil here because it’s relevant, is that Cordelia is dead, and has been since the end of season three. Nothing we see in season four is really Cordelia. She’s gone. Season Four Cordy is just a pale imitation whose only purpose is to bring Jasmine into the world…only to be discarded in time for Jasmine to be discarded before the season even ends. So what on earth happened? Charisma Carpenter got pregnant and the plans for season three had to be scrapped just before production began. In response, Joss and co. decided their new idea would be to write a story in which Charisma’s character gets pregnant and gives birth to the villain of the season. Looking back, you can sort of see how the entire year is about Cordelia bringing Jasmine into the world and thus, in a meta way, how the whole season is Joss’ angered expression of frustration over how much Carpenter getting pregnant messed things up. Apparently working her pregnancy into the show in a normal way wasn’t possible, even though they have literally made the character pregnant before on the show. Instead, the story they settled on was to turn Cordelia into a villain and then retroactively have her be dead going back to the end of season three. It feels like a slap in the face to a character who helped define this series and was a bright spot for the show in its very rocky early episodes. Her growth from “vapid high school mean girl” to an essential cog in the Angel Investigations wheel is one of the best evolutions of a character in the whole Buffyverse. For it to end with such a deliberate whimper is more than unfortunate; it’s shameful. Angel’s fourth season ends with the last episode akin to Buffy Season Four’s “Restless,” in that it comes after the big bad is defeated and the arc is ended and deals with the fallout. As the heroes are told, by defeating Jasmine, Angel and his team essentially stopped world peace. That makes them, in the eyes of the ever-villainous Wolfram & Hart, the worst bad guys in the history of the world. Naturally, Angel is offered the chance to go pro with his evilness and take over the law offices to do with as he pleases. It’s a really clever little twist and one that almost makes the slog of the season that preceded it worthwhile. But, as with the season as a whole, it’s not the idea but the execution that falters. Angel’s condition to take over the Office is that essentially the past two years be erased from everyone’s memory. That means Conner, Cordy, Jasmine, Wesley going bad, getting betrayed, turning bitter; it’s all wiped from the record books with the team starting over from scratch. If there’s a more audacious reboot of a series this deep into its run (that works as well as it will) I haven’t seen it. But then again, these are the same people who introduced Dawn on Buffy’s show in a way that avoided all the tropes and cliches typical to a “new character comes into a show late in its run” shakeup. It’s not a surprise that they would try it here and, as said, it pays off. More about that next time, as we consider the final year of the Buffyverse, Angel’s delightful, but sadly final, fifth season… > Part 8
