#fang four

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.