Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Twenty five years later (Part eight)By Matthew Martin| December 12, 2021 TV Blogs Previous Page THE RESULT… With a reduced budget, a need for episodic storytelling, and a showrunner ready to put his most impactful mark on the show, Angel entered its fifth season ready to embrace a big shakeup. We had hints of what was to come at the end of season four which, in hindsight, almost feels like a Whedon pitch to the network for a way to get the show renewed. Instead of a dark, brooding series about a ragtag bunch of crimefighters battling demons both external and personal, Angel shifted gears to being about a bunch of pampered adults being given the keys to a multi-million dollar operation. The only catch is their new boss is evil incarnate, meaning the team will have to wrestle with the moral and ethical quandaries of working for an evil law firm (but I repeat myself) while trying to use the resources of said firm to fight the very evil that currently employs them. On paper, it’s a pretzel’s worth of twists and knots and confusions, but on the screen, it works. As always, credit to Joss Whedon, who never slows the pace down long enough for you to wrap your head around the conflicts of interest running amuck here, and only ever slows down to zoom in—way past those confusing parts—to focus on the personal struggles that come with being a hero but working for a villain. For the past several chapters in this series, I have repeated the fact that every season of Buffy tackled some aspect of “growing up.” Whether it’s about understanding and accepting who you are (season one), dealing with the heartbreak of your first love (season two), graduating high school (season three), the messy confusing time that is being a freshman in college (season four), losing a parent and learning how to be an adult without a safety blanket (season five), grappling with the depression that comes with feeling like a failure as an adult (season six), or finally stepping out of adolescence and admitting that, while you don’t have all the answers, you at least have the perspective to know the world is going to keep spinning without you trying to hold it up (season seven). Angel never quite worked the same way. If anything, Angel was not about a handful of big lessons, but instead, was about one big lesson. There’s a line that is uttered early in season one that Joss has said he viewed as the thesis for the show: “If nothing we do matters then all that matters is what we do.” In other words, it would be easy to be a defeatist, considering how evil the world is (and getting worse every day) but just because everyone else is evil doesn’t mean we have to be. We can choose to be good, to do good, to buck the trend, to push against the tide. It might end with the tide finally overwhelming us but so be it, at least we’ll have done what we could do. At no time is that idea challenged more than in Angel’s fifth season, where his takeover of the evil Los Angeles branch of Wolfram & Hart means the temptation and ease to compromise is more readily available than ever before. Evil is all around Angel that he ends up working for evil, to the disgust of Buffy and the Scoobies. If you want to find an allegory, there it is: Angel is a show about leaving high school and struggling as a start-up entrepreneur (season one), dealing with the drama that comes with bringing your personal life into your work (season two), having a fallout with the coworkers you had come to view as a quasi-family (season three), completely losing your way for a bit as you struggle to keep your business afloat (season four), and then finally selling out to the man and seemingly sacrificing your principles to “win” at life (season five). The new episodic nature of the show perfectly complimented the shift to the law firm. New clients meant a new story every week, and the addition of Spike to the roster (another one of WB’s demands, apparently) meant new comedy and drama dynamics as well. But as much as I loved watching each new plot unfold every week, I most appreciated how Joss and co. stuck to their guns and didn’t forget that this show is about the people in the center, not any recurring guest of the week. Angel has always been about Angel and his struggle being an “evil monster” living in an evil world while trying to be a good person. Season five puts a spotlight on that and forces Angel to come to terms with his place in the world as a hero and as a potential figure of prophecy (the so-called chosen one who will fight for good in the final battle of the something something Shanshu).
