So the ratings for the Season. Disclaimer as ever:
a) Given the time, read the reviews and don't take the numbers at face value. No Angel episode is without merit, and there's certainly no episode this Season, (not even that one), which doesn't enrich another.
b) Some inconsistencies may exist between my preferences earlier in the Season and my ratings now. That's because I prefer to rate after an entire Season after I've seen where it's going:

Alrighty, then:

Conviction: 8
Just Rewards: 6
Unleashed: 7
Hellbound: 7
Life Of The Party: 2
The Cautionary Tale Of Numero Cinco: 9
Lineage: 7
Destiny: 10
Harm's Way: 8
Soul Purpose: 8
Damage: 7
You're Welcome: 9
Why We Fight: 6
Smile Time: 7
A Hole in the World: 9
Shells: 10
Underneath: 9
Origin: 7
Time Bomb: 8
The Girl In Question: 10
Power Play: 8
Not Fade Away: 9

TOTAL: 171/220
Comparison:
Season Two: 158
Season Four: 156
Season Three:156
Season One: 147

OK, I wasn't expecting that much of a differential, but it just goes to show Season Five's consistency.

Thank yous as ever to anyone who's read one of these things. Double thank yos to anyone who's replied to one- some of the replies have been extraordinarily brilliant in this Season and every Season. And triple thank yous to aliera, who's made this Season possible by her very persistent shipping (the postal kind, not the fanfic kind), and yabyumpan, who started this madness off in the first place.

Penelope unpicked all the work she'd done in her cloth every night, so that the suitors after her since Odysseus' appaent death in the Trojan war wouldn't get their hands on her. Kinda analagously, Yeats wrote the lines (Don't worry Rah, it's not 'The Second Coming'!):

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world."

That kind of determination is what, despite all his faults and my minor and few major problems with his work, I still assoicate with Whedon. And if just a touch of that persistence has rubbed off on me during the last 140,000 words, it is him to whom I have to be most grateful.

For such a muse of fire.

Thanks everyone for reading.

TCH