Pieces of Flair

Ok, since it's my last chance to post about Angel....

The final episode aired last night and though it was a good episode, it wasn't much of a finale. Going into it, I was willing to accept certain trade-offs. I was perfectly willing to watch them kill off all of my favorite characters in some sort of mastermind plot that would wrap up five seasons' worth of plot threads. Instead, they killed off my favorite characters and managed to wrap up the threads they planted in the show from last week. This was a little unsatisfying to say the least. I also have a number of other gripes: The Shanshu prophecy story arc that has been a recurring theme for five years was completely unresolved. (And, no, I don't buy that Angel just signs the thing away in thirty seconds, erasing 5 years of story line - what a lame cop out.) Connor just pops in for a visit and Angel never gets around to murdering him - per yet another prophecy. We don't learn anything more about either Wolfram & Hart or the Powers that Be. Nearly all the bad guys were bit characters from earlier episodes that weren't the least bit scary. (Adam Baldwin's character being the one cool exception - that fight scene was pretty good.) And, in case you failed to notice, the Illyria plotline was utterly pointless. Don't get me wrong, Illyria was a thousand times better that the cave-dwelling cow better known as "Fred," and I now like Amy Acker a helluva lot better, but the Illyria character failed to serve any useful purpose. The 4 or 5 episodes devoted to her should've gone towards solidifying the plotline for the final two episodes. Instead, the legion of doom appears out of nowhere as a deus ex machina plot device for the writers to try and make some sense out of the chaos of this season. Lame, lame, lame. And, finally, they kill both Lindsay and Wesley, the two best characters on the show - and although the death scenes were both well done, given the aforementioned story problems, I just feel cheated. On the bright side, this pretty much absolves any desire I might have had to see season 6.

Some part of my brain that won't shut up keeps analogizing this to the way my favorite hockey team played this last season. All of the individual players were excellent, but they never managed to play together as a team. As a result, they had their ass handed to them in the second round of playoffs by San Jose (?!?!!). Team Whedon may have some shining moments of brilliance, but none of it came together this season. As much as I prefer stand alone episodes to the pulpy season-long story arcs, I also like plot coherence. There is a balance between bite size new-viewer-friendly episodes and lengthy soap opera "only devoted fans will get this" episodes, and they failed to find it. We ended up with the worst of all possible worlds - largely unrelated episodes liberally peppered with in jokes that only the devoted Angel junkies would get anyway. Realistically, there was no way to fix all of this in one last episode. The rational part of my brain accepts this. The rest of me wants to see the coach tarred, feathered, and perhaps the subject of a Toby Keith ballad involving boots.