#ats meta

while yes dru is evil and a vampire she's still obviously very upset about what happened to her and those moments seem to be her times of lucidity, not delusion. not to mention that she's already been beaten out of the notion that she can escape angelus, she tried to as a human and it didn't work, it likely won't work now either, especially if darla sides with him. but with spike around there's someone who basically always takes her side and fights to keep angelus away from her. who is, at least, a buffer between her and her tormentor. he also takes care of her and validates her, something neither darla or angelus seem to be interested in doing at all.

i feel like people tend to intellectually remember what happened to her but forget that it you know, has long lasting consequences when say, they evaluate her behavior in late s2 when angelus comes back. like... yeah ofc she goes back to appeasing him and shit. spike's a wheelchair and she was beaten into shape to be "daddy's little girl" (gag) YEARS before she even MET spike. her abuser is back and her defender is out of commission not to mention her whole view of reality has been actively warped by the most narcissistic sleezoid around.

and all the reasons why people love spike or point to as why he's better with buffy or whatever.... dru was the one who saw those first and picked him because of those. like... it's wild to see people act like they spent a loveless century together and spike was just used the whole time when we SEE them literally in love, he states MULTIPLE times she means so much to him and we get an OUTSIDE SOURCE CONFIRM THEY HAVE "AFFECTION AND JEALOUSY FOR EACH OTHER". we have the spike we know of today because drusilla saw the hero in him and wanted him to rescue her. and ya know, he kinda did. multiple times. over a century of deep, mutual horrifying love. you only even GET spike and buffy in the same ROOM because he loved dru so much he saved her from a mob, traveled with her across a continent (maybe 2 depending on direction) and over an ocean for even a SHOT at a cure. like... cMON.

Welcome back to another discussion of faith and food. In previous posts I’ve talked about how in Season 3 of Buffy, Faith is ALWAYS hungry. Which is contrasted with Buffy who “sometimes has a nonfat yogurt.”

I’ve written before about how I read this as the show trying to show her hedonism while ignoring that she’s a food insecure child. Most of her time in season 4 of Buffy she seems to be powered by spite and a cursed locket so we don’t really see her stopping to eat.

It’s crucial to me that the next time we see Faith with food she’s REJECTING most of it and choosing “live off popcorn.” Her material circumstances haven’t changed that much, she’s been squatting and stealing money for food. But her rejecting food is a sign of her rehabilitation.

I might do another post later about how the lines of dialog following this scene are especially wild in how they position Faith’s relationship to food.

We get to see Liam mentally at age 17 as a human. He's an extremely anxious, terrified, superstitious, incredibly socially awkward guy who subscribes to a strict social standard. The world is what it is and that's just how it is. He is not flexible.

To cope with the scary, confusing situation he voices that he would like to go get drunk. His womanizing proclivities are also voiced a couple times. He states that he feels cold inside when introspecting.

Without his experiences and guilt, when he is outed as a vampire, he fully leans into an Angelus-lite persona while ensouled because he views himself as rejected by society. It's honestly pretty jarring how his personality shifts so quickly from the scared, timid blank slate at the beginning of the situation to someone extremely dangerous.

He ends up quickly choosing to embody what his understanding of evil is because what he is is considered the other/enemy by the others. I don't even think it's about rebellion, it's just that since he can't be another way he might as well be exactly what they say he is.

And while I hem and haw over the first four seasons, the real hang-up for me is where to place Season 5.

As a primary fan of the Fanged Four, I relish every opportunity for any of the four to appear on screen—especially together. In that regard, Season 5 is as much a jewel in my heart as Season 2. I devour every moment Angel and Spike spend together (or spend thinking and talking about each other). But, loathe as I am to admit it, I do feel that Spike’s addition to the team brings a certain amount of suffering to the show’s final arc.

The comparison to Buffy’s Season 7 is hard to avoid, there’s a creeping sense that too much time is devoted to the Spike-branded shenanigans. He’s funny/sad/charming/pick-your-adjective and his scenes are undeniably entertaining, but the focus on him often comes at the expense of the broader ensemble. Angel has always been a story about intersecting paths and moral compromises, and by the end of Season 5, many of those threads get sidelined so we can watch the Angel & Spike Odd Couple routine.

And don’t get me wrong-- it is a great routine. Their bickering, their needling, their strangely affectionate competitiveness, it’s all comedy gold, and it’s emotionally loaded with the years of their shared history. But I also can’t help feeling that it represents a step backward for both of them. After everything Angel has gone through, his journey toward purpose, redemption, and reluctant leadership, and everything Spike endured on Buffy, the two of them suddenly seem trapped in an echo of the past. They regress into boys again, circling each other in petty jealousy and one-upmanship. Ghosts haunting the ruins of their own narratives.

That kind of regression could have been brilliant if we’d gotten a season six (or seven, or eight, or nine, ten, eleven, twelve). People backslide all the time in their personal growth, people make mistakes, people get caught up in old grudges and feelings of inadequacy and they let it get the better of them sometimes. Watching them stumble and then learn to rebuild themselves, together, finding a way to genuinely repair that old friendship that hangs over them no matter how much they keep pretending to despise each other, could have been a beautiful next chapter for both characters. Not just because my Spangel-loving heart screams for it (though it does), but because these two need each other. They’re mirrors, foils, and maybe the only people who can truly understand the kind of redemption the other seeks.

Unfortunately, without those future seasons, the story never gets to close that loop. Spike’s presence takes up so much narrative space in Angel’s final act, but in the end, it doesn’t amount to much. His arc doesn’t truly resolve, and Angel’s gets overshadowed. The two of them circle each other endlessly, their dynamic frozen in place—half rivalry, half devotion, neither of them brave enough to admit how much they need the other to make sense of themselves.

Maybe that’s fitting, in a way. The Fanged Four are creatures of unfinished business, always chasing what they’ve already lost in one form or another. And Spike’s addition to Season 5, for all its brilliance and frustration, is the purest reflection of that truth: even in death, even after redemption, some ghosts never stop haunting the story.

I'd like to say: "when we reach that final scene, with the storm raging and the dragon bearing down, it’s Spike who stands beside Angel. Not as his rival. Not as his shadow. But as his equal." and in some ways I do let myself read it this way (for comfort)

But as tempting to read that moment as the culmination of everything their tangled history has been building toward, two men who began as monsters now choosing—together—to fight for something greater than themselves. It could be the perfect full-circle ending. After all the jealousy, the needling, the endless need to prove themselves, they end the story side by side—bickering, bleeding, and still trying.

But that’s the tragedy of it. Because while the imagery is powerful, it feels more like a glimpse of what might have been than the fulfillment of what the season built toward. We never quite get the time or narrative space to let their partnership truly reform, or to see what a genuine reconciliation between them might look like. Instead, it’s a moment that gestures at depth without having the room to earn it.

In that sense, Spike’s addition to Angel Season 5 remains both its highlight and its biggest stumbling block. His presence adds texture, humor, and history, but without the future seasons that might have given them the leg room to really let these two characters grow ,together, his story ends up feeling like more distraction than development.

Still, for all that, I can’t deny the poetry of that ending image. Angel and Spike—my Fang Four kings—standing together at the end of it all. It’s not the ending I might have written, but it’s one that lingers.

you forget sometimes amidst the plots of the episodes, but internally he took doyle’s death HARD, and he felt responsible for it. but cordelia got the visions, and the important thing is that he has cordelia and wesley to ground him and keep him sane and give him a purpose.

so imagine a universe where there is no cordelia in his life. he leaves buffy, he’s distraught, and then he meets doyle. and they’re actually really similar! two lonely pathetic post-breakup irish part-demons who seek redemption. they fall in love over the few months they have together, they kiss, and doyle dies. and angel is completely alone with literally the weight of the world on his shoulders, or behind his eyes in this case. the visions and the grief and the loneliness and all his other angst and pain pile up until he’s nothing but a shivering wreck.

sure wesley and gunn are giving him a home and doing the dirty work for him, but in this universe they don’t have a connection - how can you have a relationship, a friendship, with a husk of a person?