Angel (David Boreanaz)<\/a> moves to LA to start a new life and help those in need. He joins forces with the resourceful Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) and the half-demon Doyle (Glenn Quinn) to battle supernatural threats.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWe should always go back to the beginning, because it skillfully establishes the setting, develops characters, and lays the groundwork for the entire series. It also, almost effortlessly, ties in the last seconds of the finale. <\/span><\/p>\nIn showing Angel\u2019s pain and how troubled Doyle coaxes and persuades him out of the darkness, it does so much work in its stripped-backness. Two troubled men, one-on-one, \u201c\u2018Cause you got potential. And the balance sheet ain\u2019t exactly in your favour.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n When the final episode aired, I felt ripped off. But decades later, I get it. I have grown into it. It\u2019s now my favourite ending \u2014 I have the biggest soft spot for the characters.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAfter all, it\u2019s so painfully, quintessentially Angel to end with the team still fighting, half already dead, and more clearly on their way out.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBuffy fans who treat Angel as a continuation, an add-on, do it a disservice. Many popular fandom criticisms focus on comparing it to Buffy\u2019s essence and foundations rather than what its own was meant to be \u2014 different. <\/span>In aesthetics, mission statements, thesis, and the way they pull from various eras of life. Buffy is about growing up \u2014 Angel is about being grown.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFrom the first episode, Angel is an intimate, up-close, staring-you-right-in-the-face experience of addiction, the need for redemption, and how a person earns it. Always with the knowledge that if he experiences pure happiness, he will lose what separates him from the inner monster.\u00a0<\/span><\/p> Those scenes tell us to come and get close. It won\u2019t be pretty; it will get a little gritty and intense, but it\u2019s a conversation we need to have.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFor all the show\u2019s bravado and charisma, for all its reliance on glamourous grime, chiselled jawlines, murderous stare-offs, artfully swishy leather trench coats, trapped ballerinas, a wee little puppet man, \u201cshiny\u201d demons, dubious Irish accents, and even dodgier wigs, there is always a tightness to Angel, a clawing angst, something burrowing under his skin, throwing him off balance.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAfter all, the character went from being Liam, the young, drunken layabout, to Angelus, a bloodthirsty serial killer lacking a soul, and then having one thrust upon him as a punishment for his crimes. Separate from the otherworldly nature of the show, Angel is a man who has to live with himself.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe show ponders the question: What would it do to a man to hear the screams of pain of his victims over and over, to listen to them pleading and begging to carry the knowledge that you were responsible for the most heinous acts imaginable, that your hands had inflicted torture, and that you, in a far-off era of life, relished it? How would that eat at a person?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
![\"Sarah](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/3\/2020\/04\/Buffy-Angel-283a524-scaled-e1715786949463.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Sarah")
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