My fairy godmother, (or Angelmother?) yabyumpan has been kind enough not only to provide me with tapes of the beginning of the fourth Season of Angel, but also, (and very excitingly for me, as I've seen no new Buffy in six months), of the final (sob) Season of Buffy. Following is a fairly sedate ramble about different expectations and viewing and writing experiences. Please feel free to cut to the chase.

By the time of 'Tomorrow', the combined might of the second and third Seasons of Angel had impacted so much on me as to make it impossible for me to say which one I loved more. Not only that they were shows of the same writing and directorial quality, (which for me is indisputable), but that I was emotionally and viscerally as involved in Angel as Buffy. For me, the trinity which have kept me going through recent Buffy, whose characters really fascinate me, are Dawn, Buffy and Giles. The centrepiece character, the apparently innocent character, and the more mature character. The characters and their actors intrigue me. By the end of the third Season of Angel, there was a similar trio: Angel the centre-piece, Wesley the apparent wisdom, though sliding off in a surprising direction, and Fred, the new adjustment to the fold. So I thought to myself; what would be fun, in a shallow way, would be to compare these Seasons, and now I am able to, which is lovely. I therefore steal KdS' format [only temporarily- I dropped the Buffy reviews after 'Beneath You'. Both together was too much effort!], and will only review one Angel episode at a time, pairing it with the corresponding Buffy episode. The Angel episode will go first for three reasons. I expect it to be a better read because the Buffy reviews will be from watching on not only a spoiled basis, but heavily influenced by other people's reactions, which I read with interest last year. The Angel Odyssey starts from the beginning and will one day be complete, whereas the Bumble starts on just one Season, without the momentum of the previous six. Finally, I personally am finding the forward momentum of Angel more compelling than Buffy at the moment, partly because I don't know what's about to happen.

4.1- 'Deep Down'

This is a wonderful episode from Steven DeKnight. He supplied two of my four favourite episodes from Season Six of Buffy, ('Dead Things', and 'Seeing Red'), but their brooding painful style was obviously considered perfect for Angel, so he took a promotion and immediately got to write a Season premiere. It remains in the tradition of excellent openers. I tend to think that Buffy openers, while sometimes fine, are very rarely excellent, whereas Angel has the knack of starting off wonderfully.

The teaser is ingenious. We see the abundance of the food round the table, (comparable to that elegant seen way back in 'Parting Gifts'), and all the characters back together. It becomes manifestly clear that unless this is to be an episode in flashback, this opening cannot be real. It's too perfect, and the stories of at least Wesley, Cordelia, Angel and Lorne, as well as the reactions of Connor, are too obviously different from the events of 'Tomorrow'. Before long we have realised that this is Angel's perfect situation, and it soon sours. Not only are we seeing into Angel's psyche, there is also a playfully exaggerated romanticism about this scene and Angel's later dreams, as if the writing staff are gently playing with the fans who wanted a simple happy ending to the third Season. The other dreams start to reveal a trend. We see the 'alternate' Angel/Cordelia scene, where they do meet at the rocks, and declare their love. We also see a scene where Angel and Connor sort out their differences. In each case, the dream is desirable until something happens which appears to be attributable to Angel- the food turns to blood or he snaps Connor's neck. He has an intense feeling of guilt, (who would guess?) that everything that has gone wrong has been his fault- that these paradisal places are only false due to his inadequacy. Each time, he wakes up under water in terror at the end of the dream. Yet the end of the dreams are clearly not real either. Angel dreams of the best case scenario, is petrified by the worst case scenario, and must really deal with a world somewhere in between- the world of the final scene, where his lines are as brilliant as anything since 'Epiphany'.

Back to these later. Some other thoughts:

-Kartheiser has an uncanny knack of taking on Angel's facial expressions. The way he had the youthful glee over his vamp- killing with Fred and Gunn reminded me very much of Angel�s goofier persona. His self-mutilation, in an attempt to show that he had been hurt by the vampire and had no choice but to kill her, was very similar to Angel�s grim determination.

-Wesley briefly gets called Ahab. How fitting is this aside? Clearly the obvious allusion is that he is on his boat, but further we have this idea of monomaniacal searching of the ocean for Angel�s box. Quite what inspires Wesley's search is open for discussion. It is not as clear as him wanting to be forgiven. If that were the case, then he would have stayed in the Hyperion after returning Angel to AI. His mission seems to be as solitary as ever, and he once again hurtfully excludes AI by not explaining his leads and his plans. The question of whether the ends justify the means is harder to fathom. While Fred and Gunn are floundering hopelessly, with a mole in their midst, Wesley kidnaps the double-dealing Justine and makes her talk. In doing so, he rescues Angel from his captivity, trading one person's freedom for another. Or so it might seem. In reality, Justine's cage is an apt metaphor for Holtz, serving his angry vendetta until the last, and even past his death. Although Justine realised she had chosen the wrong man back in 'Forgiving', she still felt chained to doing what is right. Despite Wesley forcibly keeping Justine as his slave, (some might say fairly light vengeance for a cutthroat, particularly comparing Wesley to Holtz), he still allows her the opportunity of setting herself free. Whether this is sensible or right is questionable. Whether keeping her in a cage is right is also questionable, but looking just at Justine, it becomes clear that she is always the pawn. She needed to be rescued from sheer despair after her sister�s death, and Hotlz allowed her to be; replacing it with a vacuous respect for his authority which kept her as imprisoned as Wesley�s bard. By the time she is on the boat, she is so conditioned to playing the drone that she can be stopped from using the wrench even by an illogical threat from Wesley. If Wesley were unconscious, Justine's bucket would be irrelevant. But it's not about logic- it's about power.

Lilah is an interesting comparison to Justine in this episode. Initially, we see Lilah apparently controlling Wesley, and Justine being controlled by him. But this is not it at all. In the last three episodes of Season Three, the seduction by the femme fatale was never quite right. We didn�t see Wesley entirely under Lilah's snare- it always seemed sizzlingly mutual. Here we see that the control that we expected, Lilah slowly corrupting Wesley, is actually switched- Wesley is keeping his most pertinent actions and emotions from Lilah. But while Lilah is the puppet in this section of their relationship, she is still fiercely certain that she is slowly wearing him down towards evil, and his removal of self-determination of Justine is perhaps testament to this. And while Justine, reliant only on Holtz' approval, now has a broken, empty life to start from again, Lilah's situation is much different. For while, a little unbeknown to her, she has become as helpless as her mother in controlling Wesley, the side which makes her think she is her mother's opposite, and will never be the dithering dependant fool that she sees in her Mother's eyes, is still functioning well. In Wolfram and Hart, she has consistently shown herself to be more stylishly evil than the scared Linwood, and his death seemed as likely as it was graphic, (reminding me a little of the Polanski version of 'Macbeth' with that shot of the severed head rolling back onto the screen).

-The apparently monomaniacal Wesley is in reality a much more deeply complex character than the iconic Ahab ever was. Instead of again denying Justine her freedom, he himself seeks a little atonement for his sins, in letting Angel drink form him. What he expects this to achieve is extremely moot. As can be seen from his speedy leaving of the hotel, it is not re-integration, at least yet. I personally cannot believe that Wesley simply wants Angel to owe his life to him, to see if that changes the balance of the scales. Can I believe that it is a truly selfless act? Perhaps, in some twisted way, Wesley sees his giving of blood to Angel as an analogue to Wesley's initiation into AI- the action that Angel took which allowed him to turn form a faux Rogue Demon Hunter to a real one. Perhaps it will all be explained later. The beauty of the density of the DeKnight script is that all the actions in this episode are ambiguous and more complicated than they first seem. The motivations seem deeply twisted and complex.

-This leaves the beautiful final scene between Angel and Connor. This is almost transcendant writing- really wonderful- and one of those feats that Angel does so often- intimidating Connor enough to make him believe Angel is a threat- like he did to Bethany in 'Untouched' after being run through with a metal stake. It's one of those staring contests, a force of will to see who really has the power. Angel does. Connor still, shakily, sits down. He takes all the explanation that his Father gives him. He answers truthfully about Cordelia, and he finally leaves the hotel. Fred and Gunn, our everymen, look in with awe at this story.

-Meanwhile, Cordelia has decided that being a shiny star is 'so boring'. It's a nice ME-ian touch to end an enthralling show with such anti-climax, and it supports the whole theory that Cordelia's choice to lose a part of her humanity was wrong.

This episode is about what people deserve. Wesley claims 'we all get what we deserve'. Linwood, the not-quite-evil enough, gets beheaded for being an inadequate boss. Angel seems mostly unruffled by his MC Esher perspective. Justine reaps her just desserts more obviously than the rest- mostly because the act of revenge is enacted by the hypothesis maker- Wesley. I do not believe we are expected to believe what Wesley says is gospel, or that it doesn�t have some aspect of truth running through it. What I do know for certain is that this was a stellar episode, even before that final scene.

A Buffy Bumble- 7.1- 'Lessons'

The style of this will be slightly different, as I am spoiled, and so a long meditation on the purport of the Istanbul scene would be silly. I'll just pick out a few salient points which I haven't seen discussed at quite the same angle as I took them, and hopefully not bore or recycle too much.

-Joss Whedon has the knack of coining supreme lines. He can just do it. Here, we are given two crucial and oft-repeated lines, the 'It's All About Power' line, (yes, as Buffy/First says it, it is very Nietzschean), and Willow's 'Everything's Connected' line. I think another line which fell behind these two a little was the 'It's always real' line, which Buffy explains to Dawn in their graveyeard scene, and Dawn says about the zombies later on. It�s a clue to the First Evil- although it may be incorporeal, its effect is real. Anyone who saw Spike's scenes at the end as his hallucination should have been extremely wary of this line- the hints right there that this is not just newly-ensoulled nuttiness.

-The episode is directed nicely, if not superlative-ly, by David Grossman, in one of his more average efforts. I completely changed my mind on the Whedon directed Westbury scenes though. Let's clear one thing up. As I look out of my bedroom window, as I'm doing now, I can see Westbury, in fair Wiltshire. This is darned exciting for me, as all the action usually takes place in California, which for me may as well be the moon. Now the scenery is dead-on, but the thing I objected to from seeing some of the screen-caps for the episode was the campiness of Giles riding up on a horse- and the lack of any houses or anything industrial. This may be rural England- but it ain't 1500. I now retract that feeling. Because, as I really should know by now, Whedon's show is all about doing ridiculous stuff with complete unfaltering belief and no self-consciousness. And he pulls it off- largely because of the really perfect interactions between Willow and Giles. I love the tones of their voices- so mellow and quiet- so incredibly different form the Willow's bombastic end to last Season. The 'I just want to be Willow' line is perfect. And finally, the sense of disorientation, of framing as we pull back through the door violently in the second scene, is beautifully done.

-Michelle Trachtenberg plays Dawn with a little more self- confidence than I�d been expecting. Her speech to the class about herself is lovely, (particularly the Britney Spears lines), and the way that this then falls apart when Buffy comes in and does �embarassing Mom� is wonderful. Dawn appears to think a little quicker than Buffy in a similar situation, coming up with the bee excuse.

-We go out through one opening (the door in England) at the end of Act Two, and in through another, the hole in the school in the next. Everything's connected, and it seems to come from deep down.

-There's a lot of circling going on in the direction for this episode. The camera seems to be always spiralling one way or another. It reminded me of the discussions about the Gyre in Yeats. This Season seems to be spiralling in towards its climax, a climax which certainly has links to its beginnings, but also is new.

-This brings me to my take on the theme of this episode, which is of initiation overseen. It's obvious that we are expected to see Dawn as the worried new schoolgirl, but this comes at the whole High School experience in a completely different way. Buffy oversees Dawn�s new start, as indeed Wood helps Buffy into a new job. Simultaneously, we have the overseeing of Willow by Giles, and the overseeing of Anya by Halfrek. Yet these aren't as clear cut as we might like to believe them. Usually the figures set to help you are portrayed on the screen as wise and undoubtable, like Alec Guiness in 'Star Wars'. Something much more interesting is going on here. None of the mentors are portrayed as reliable. Buffy spoils Dawn's credibility just as she is starting to build up a little rapport from the class. Giles mumbles the highly suspicious line 'We are all the same deep down, no matter how much we may appear to have changed'. I don't accept that we are supposed to take this at face value- although we cut in the next scene to Xander, who looks 'unconscionably spiffy', but actually looks a little nervous as he walks into the Summers' residence. In this case, we are expected to believe Giles' sentiment. Finally, we have Anya, being told by Halfrek to exact a more nasty vengeance, and also that there is something evil a-brewing. Clearly, although Halfrek is right to identify Anya's weakness as a demon, we are clearly not meant to believe that her intentions are right, because we know Anya is not a demon deep down.

Ultimately we are told that discovering who we are is not about being given answers in 'Lessons', or even being given advice by mentors, but a process of self-identification and confidence. Finally, of course, we are left with that startling scene in the basement, and we see Spike, with no help whatsoever in learning his lessons, being tortured. Although Whedon has established that self-growth is the only way to do it- when you are really on your own, there�s a real difficulty in recovering. While teaching may be too simplistic, support may be essential. Above this, there's a very clever setting of tone done. We back out of the intriguing but sometimes alienating flavour of Season Six. Season Seven appears to be very light- light new High School- Buffy in white, the sun-bathed lighting in England- but there's a foreboding cutting underneath the new perkiness, which comes over nicely, and is emphasised by that Istanbul scene- possibly the most inexplicable start to a Buffy Season ever.

Thanks for reading.