like all fans, you sort of put all your hopes and expectations into that episode because it's the last one. They can't possibly wrap up all the dangling plot lines and points.

And then of course they have to say something Profound about the message of the series.

-el Masq- cowboy hat in place, describing exactly the challenge confronting Joss Whedon and Jeff Bell in writing the episode, and all of our difficulties in watching it.

5.22- 'Not Fade Away'

Hello everyone.

And so to the final episode ever. Which is a really excellent episode, as long as you're not looking to take away some kind of 'The hardest thing in this world is to live in it', one line summary. Lindsey mentions Cliff Notes, and this is an episode which cannot be simmered down, because it's a complex inter-tangle of characters and plots and ideas on just why we're here, and what we should do about it. Like this board. Like the show.

I somehow doubt Arthur Hugh Clough's been given a lot of thought since the episode aired, so let's rectify that...

When the smoke clears, we'll see where we stand.
-Lindsey

SAY not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

Quintessentially Victorian, and one of my grandfather's favourite poems, but deeply relevant to Angel's final decision. Angel is not fighting this battle because the tide seems not to be coming in, but despite the fact, in belief that it will eventually come flooding in. This isn't a kamikaze mission formed from a moment of perfect despair, but a calculated response to the stimulus of the season. And Angel ends fighting, with Spike the shadow, Gunn the human and Illyria the demon along side him. The balance of Liam, Angel and Angelus that he's been meaning to strike for 277 years. It is just work for him. The work of Anne, doing a pawn's work despite any higher plan. The work of Buffy, battling on to save the world not because it's her destiny, but because, in seeing those murdered children, the cartoon watching high schoolers on the verge of growing up, she realises it's what needs to be done. Willow in 'Choices', giving up a million premier offers to premier colleges. Cordelia's 'Demonise me already!'. Connor pummelling Hamilton.

But if we end on the fight continuing, that is resolutely not a penil point end to the episode. The last scene doesn't encapsulate the rest of the episode. In a way, the show's last scene is analagous to the Season's last episode. Season Five is not 'said best' by 'Not Fade Away', (in the way that, say, Season Two Buffy is said best by 'Becoming'). Rather, this is one message among many in a more serial, more cerebral season. We dug the Greek Hero of Season Two, the melodrama of Season three and the turgid supernatural soap opera of Season four, but here we're into a theme and variations style. And, if he had any taste, Handel would be proud.

The episode never loses a customary, bleak humour. There are references which have been used before, and some new but germane ones. A few that caught my ear here were:

-If you're about to tell me to 'Kill Spike', then I might have to kiss you.

A 'Much Ado About Nothing' reference, to Beatrice' 'Kill Claudio'. Benedick and Beatrice end up kissing, and Claudio, Benedick's more self-interested, less arrogant foil (actually basically the leading man, but Shakespeare was doing a Whedonesque subversion!), ends up considerably other than dead. Here the Black Thorn imagine themselves toying with Angel and Beatrice does with Benedick. But in reality, the Shanshu is on the other foot.

-'Don't I at least get the chance to deny you three times?'

Spike is up with the Biblical inter-relevance as ever. But he's never been the Betrayer in this Season. The betrayers have been almost everyone else. Gunn, without realising it, in signing the sarcophagus into Wolfram and Hart. Knox, the sober voice of science, actually a crazed cult member. Angel, in betraying Connor and raping his friends' minds. And most of all, Wesley, repeating the betrayal of Season Three in breaking the Orlon Window, and hence remembering both. Here Wesley gets to affect a final betrayal of Angel, but in the end he doesn't have anything but solidarity with him.

But Wesley in this episode is the one man who will not spend the day trying to achieve perfection, and the one man who has always been so careful to celebrate the difference between 'Truth and Illusion'. Are we to see Gunn's sudden interest in Anne, Spike's poetry and Lorne's final performance as mere illusion? Are they trying to re-capture characters they once were, in a fragile belief that that's how they are going into their battle-hardened carapaces for the final fight? Or is Wesley unnecessarily hard on himself?

IN my opinion, although it is right not to ask Illyria to re-suummon Fred, Wesley is suffering from an inability to recapture any pleasure in the world where he lost Fred. To find those shafts of hope he talked about so beautifully, but so desperately, at the end of 'Shells'. There, Illyria asked 'Is that enough?', and we heard no answer. Here it appears clear that for Wesley, it never quite was. He battled on, not believing he was about to die, but with not enough strength in life's moments of clarity, of beauty even, to make himself live.

He finds himself with one of my father's favourite poems, about a man fallen into Wesley's tragic frame of mind:

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest -that I loved the best
Are strange -nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below -above the vaulted sky.

-John Clare

An odd amount of imagery fits with Wesley here- the forsaken friends, the Two Men Joke as 'the living sea of waking dreams', Illyria as 'strange, nay, rather stranger than the rest'.

RIP Wesley.

And what of the rest of our Gang? And who is that gang anyway. Going roughly from the outside to the inside, here's the lowdown:

Harmony, the bumbling cleric, is eventually irked enough by Angel's distance and bad mood to betray him to Hamilton. And there's the telling line towards the end where Angel denounces her as 'soulless', and Harmony, brilliantly for once taking the literal as the metaphorical, (a direct inverse of her comedic mistake for most of this Season), responds with 'I would if you had confidence in me'. Damn the metaphysics, this is the point. Harmony's betrayal has come from Angel's lack of interest and confidence in Harmony. Harmony's betrayal is not treated as a stab in the back to anyone who believed a soulless vampire could be well-meaning, but as a further indication of Angel as the hapless Lear.

The reason why this is clear from a storytelling perspective is that Harmony, the to-be-betrayer spends the first act having an unbeating heart-to-heart with Angel about what it was to be human. The bad parts, but the heart of it. Angel as the Heartless boss, the metaphor for the isolated vampire for so long. If my heart could beat, it would break my chest And then Spike in 'Soul Purpose', the Real Boy. But that's all smoke and mirrors, for in a world where the Black Thorn pricks all those in its way, leadership is barely about humanity. It takes Angel to win this mission. The Angel who abandons his Shanshu for the cause. The Angel for whom prophecy is bunkum, and the past is prologue. The Angel who lives in the anticipation, and the action, of fighting the dragon. The Angel immortalised for ever in the very last scene, as a man, for perhaps the first time- living right and precisely in the present.

The tragic irony of this situation- the reason why Angel can do this in his final scene, is that he's about to die. It is only in the final scene of the fifth Season that the audience is not thinking about what will happen next. For our expectations as the audience are in a large part the Show's prophecies. Whedon has gone to great lengths to subvert the prophecies, to turn them on their heads. And in doing so, we see the Shanshu means nothing, and our collaborative future, little more. What matters is Angel's fight with the Dragon. The dragon with a tradition from the distant past, and a likelihood of surviving into an unknown future. But it's very tangible presence in the now is what makes it such a great symbol.

Lindsey looks like he might be the winner in all this, just for a moment. Angel seems to have reconciled the part of himself from Season Two, the 'Epiphany' speech, with the verging on madness of 'Power Play' and Lindsey's speech at the end of 'Underneath'. And, perhaps for the first time, they have a go at understanding each other. Lindsey and Angel here are Buffy and Spike in 'Becoming'. The unlikely people, with different purposes angling towards the same outcome. We even get intimations of a possible budding relationship. One which a certain character, and a certain Idea, kill off with bullets to the chest.

For there is a moment in this episode which is the bleakest in the run, and one of the bleakest I have ever seen in television. Lorne's final few scenes here- metaphors for a vast array of different people, are the alternative ending to Angel's half-happy one, where despair wins out, and cancellation ends in ultimate grief and nihilism. Tell me you've watched the scene where Lorne shoots Lindsey and not felt uncomfortable and sad. But tell me also that it didn't feel true in some way. Wesley's death in this episode, while working thematically, never reached the heights of pain and truth Lindsey's did for me. And all because of the perpetrator.

'There's something stronger than loyalty: hope', speaks Sebassis and ventriloquises Whedon, playing off Angel's scary sentiment in the season premiere that the one thing stronger than conviction is mercy. Conviction springs from loyalty: to a cause, to a person, to reality. Mercy springs from hope. It is not strained. It comes because the hope-giver believes, like Giles in 'The Wish' or, bleakly, Wesley smashing the window, that there is Good in the world, and, as Sam says a little sentimentally at the end of 'The Two Towers', that it is worth fighting for. Angel gets to hope above loyalty. But the prophecy is no longer emblematic of the Hope to him. Now his hope lies in fighting for fighting's sake.

But when we lose that hope? When we lose the ability to believe that Lindsey may still be good? When we lose the ability to think we can fight on after our mission has finished? Then we become, as we have become so often, Lorne. Lorne's lines in this episode are, for me, gut-wrenching painful. For we see him sing, and we're lulled into an oddly false sense of security- that he, like the Spike we are to see later, is living what he really wanted- and remembering what his lfie was like before Wolfram and Hart. And then the knife-twist. Firstly when Lorne says to Angel 'Don't try to find me'. And we realise, that for this viewer, for this writer, it's not a world where the fight goes on after Darling Violetta play the credits out for the last time. For him, this really is the end of the line- the end of the spirit of a show which didn't seem ready to die.

And then in killing Lindsey, the audience dispense with Hope. With the belief in time for Angel's full redemption. With the belief that Illyria will one day become a Real Girl. With the belief that Spike is on a road to resolution, or that Gunn can invest his refound humanity into Angel's aching void. Lorne's story is not the bottom line in this episode- as so often [see 'Spin the Bottle'], it's the metanarrative up and around the narrative. But if you want full-on despair, track Lorne's story this Season. No character has ever had a bleaker denouement to their journey in the Whedonverse. By which I mean, even those who died tended to die with some love around them- or some purpose. Our embittered audience kills the Hero's shadow in their life. Cancel their cable and drive off elsewhere.

And so away from the tragedy, and to Spike. And, it turns out, thematically at least, that he's been right all along. He just never had the experience to show it. When we see him knocking back drinks, we assume we are to see the falsely painted punk rebel for one last time- the fighter in the Trophy Duster. But we forget that he's left the coat behind in one of his many Purging Fires- this one in particular the one in Italy. Spike's not getting the old Dutch courage he offered Willow for a brawl, but for a recital. Finally the inner poet wins out over the outer front of street fighter. And as I was saying to Anne when I didn't know these lines were in this episode, it's fascinating how a few intonation shifts can change some lines of verse. It brings back memories of the two different versions of Angelus' monologue in 'Passion', the one by Ty King and the re-tooled Whedon one.

Here, we get the following lines:

My soul is wrapped
In harsh repose,
Midnight descends
In raven-colored clothes.

But soft: behold
A sunlight beam
Cutting a swath of
Glimmering gleam.

My heart expands,
Tis grown a bulge in it,
Inspired by your beauty
Effulgent.

Now the shift of 'Your beauty' up a line gives less emphasis to 'by', makes 'effulgent' scan better, gives 'beauty', the most important word, it's own showcase, and changes the style of the whole four-liner from doggerel to rather good. And the first eight lines are much better than the last four. Spike has become what William wanted to be, rather than a reaction to his desires. And that's unspeakably moving. Of course, the fun of unspeakably moving in Whedonland has always been the under-cut. And hence the immortal line: 'This next one's called "The Wanton Folly of Me Mum.'

Gunn connects with Anne, the person who Buffy inspired all those years ago- the only thematically important cross-relevance to Buffy in this episode. The episode is not about Angel or Spike's love, so Buffy's inspiration of the two is dealt with obliquely as Chanterelle passes oon what Buffy taught her to Gunn. It's an excellent sleight of hand.

And thence to Angel. A few intelligent thoughts elevates the carefully complex resolution to the season. We have the final gentle dig at religion with the cult intoning like a Catholic service in the first act. Angel's lone voice will drown out all the rest. In Sebassis' case, literally. We have Angel's 'Live' speech, something that each member tries with varying degrees of success. Wesley fails, and Lorne's attempt is hollow. But Gunn and Spike have found things to hold on to, just as Illyria does in telling Gunn that he is 'not unpleasant to [her] eyes' and in grieving over Wesley's death. And so they survive to the alleyway- the same alleyway that we see Angel in every time we see the opening credits- that alleyway in the very first episode. We've come first circle, but now, Angel is not alone. Now, he understands how symbolically Illyria (Angelus), Gunn (Liam) and Spike (Angel) make up his character. It's taken five years, and it's been five years in which, aside from self-reflection, he has achieved one good thing, 'the only good thing we have ever achieved'.

And so to Connor. Connor helps kill Hamilton off his own back. Connor understands where Angel fits into his life, and doesn't begrudge him the odd bit of time. He has a sense of humour, and is grateful for Angel's action. And when Angel can say to a fully remembered Connor, that 'as long as you're OK, they can't' destroy him, we have a first, so near to never found moment of true father/son understanding. Which closes the arc set up by 'Home' in an elegant and speedy way.

Angel is thrown out of an executive window in just the same way as he did to the head lawyer, Lindsey's boss, in 'City of...'. But because he really isn't part of the corporation, he brings in family to be avenged. He has understood the need for love and emotional honesty.

He has also understood, that though he lives in a world run by an angry atheist, there is still a very definite spirituality in there somewhere. To complete my tri-generational poetry spree, I return, as so often, to Carol Ann Duffy:

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Spirituality. Loss. Language. Belief. That's five years of Angel to me. A dark and perfect joy.

So ultimately the messages we're supposed to take are, like the devils in the swine and Jasmine's followers are legion, as Angel repeats the echo of last Season. An echo that repeats through time, but

TCH