In season 5, I got sooooooooo sick of them saying "You mean that we've taken over Wolfram and Hart, our sworn enemies to try and do good inside the belly of the beast and now we might be being corrupted?" (or some play on that) when rewatching on dvd that I wanted to hurl. I didn't really notice when watching s5 on TV though.

If I remember right, I think they had to this because of the WB. The WB wanted to try and bring in new viewers so they wanted people who were tuning in at any given point to know what was going on in the show. This way they wouldn't have needed to have watch all the previos episodes.

And I agree that it was overkill.

Yeah, it wouldn't have been so bad if there were the usual "Previously on Angel..." bits that did the exposition, but it was always shoehorned into the characters' dialogue.

I just wanted to type something in black bars. It seemed like the thing to do.

you mean, African American bars... let's hear it for bad puns!

weak

sorry.

I just finished “The Shroud of Rahmon” and Wesley mentions that Angel hasn’t had fresh blood in a really long time. If memory serves, didn’t Angel feed off Buffy at some point during S3 or is my timeline off?

Angel fed off of Buffy in the last episode of S3, and since each season of the shows equates to a year of real time, the time difference was two years, maximum.

First, I didn't dislike Conner because he was a "bad guy", I disliked him because I didn't find his character convincing. He whined constantly, but was a total badass (a strange combo). He obviously could tell that Angel and Co. were the good guys, yet he carried out his treachery as planned like a fucking robot.

Second, Fred's survival does work a bit better when you take her experience in Pylea (a stupid arc in it's own right) into account. Point conceded.

Third, the Cordelia arc was dumped without explaination. If she were in a hospital, do you think they might have visited at some point? A huge injustice to a great character. I would have preferred that they just killed her and let her die with dignity.

As far as Conner goes, remember that he was not right in the head. He was raised in a pretty bad place, and Holtz wasn't the best father, from the sounds of things. Remember Conner's story about being tied to a tree?

He was also brainwashed into thinking that Angel was the enemy the entire time he was growing up, then after Holtz arranged his own death to look like Angel killed him, that sent Conner over the edge.

Yes, to somebody who had a normal life, they could see that Angel's group wasn't bad, but Conner was pretty imbalanced, to say the least.

As far as Cordelia goes, you did say you saw the fifth season, right? Who's to say that nobody ever did visit her, and it just happened off camera? I mean, they could have fit it into one of the episodes, but then they would have to have gotten the actress in there to just lie in a hospital bed while the other characters just moped around her for a scene, which would have been a little out of place. Her story got wrapped up pretty nicely in the fifth season, anyway, so it's not like she completely vanished.

In my opinion, season 3 was almost as bad as season 4. Yeah, it's easy to blame a lot of that on the annoyingness that is Connor, but even earlier than that I felt like they were just adding conflict to the show for the sake of conflict. Was there any indication that Gunn had any interest in Fred before he just decided to mention it in Waiting in the Wings? One love triangle is bad enough, but they decided they needed two of them between season 3 and 4?

It seems to me that we're in some pretty subjective territory here, but suffice it to say that *I* simply didn't find Conner's character convincing at ANY point in the show...even season 5. And it wasn't the actor's fault...he was actually pretty OK.

I don't know enough about what went down behind the scenes with Charisma Carpenter to properly respond, but it seemed to me that they purposefully left a door for her character and they never opened or closed it to my satisfaction. I just hate loose ends...as you probably saw in my B5 experience.

How are the events of "You're Welcome" an open door? I mean, she helped Angel stop Lindsey's plan, passed the visions to him, then died.

Along those lines, I noticed something interesting after watching the last few episodes the other day. At the end of "Power Play", while everybody's voting on if they want to try to take out the Black Thorn, the music playing in the background is the same melody that played during Doyle's death scene.

Cordy