Many Buffy Fans Never Watch An Essential Episode (Because It's Part Of Another Show)

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The Venn diagram of Buffy fans and Angel fans is not, in fact, a perfect circle. Nor should it be—although the two shows share a great deal in both story and style, they are not completely the same. Whereas Buffy the Vampire Slayer deals much more with the issues that young women face as they come of age, Angel is a broad meditation on the nature of goodness and evil—on the nature of the soul that makes Angel unique among vampires.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is about a hero struggling to be a normal girl; Angel is about people who can never be normal grappling with the nature of heroism itself. Yet for all Angel does to distance itself from its roots, it is still a continuation of the Buffy story, and it still incorporates aspects of that story—especially in one particular episode, which serves as a perfect coda to the epic romance between Buffy and Angel.

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Within the Whedon tv-ography, Angel is perhaps the most balanced work, with weightier philosophical underpinnings than Buffy, a more coherent vision than Firefly, and stronger, more dynamic writing than Dollhouse. It picks up almost immediately after Angel has left Sunnydale for Los Angeles, a city already so false that vampires would hardly need to hide—already so corrupt that the humans themselves are often more malignant than the demons (a point which is made explicitly in one of the series-defining episodes of season 3).

For viewers who are accustomed to the typical slayer calculus of demons being bad, Angel immediately overturns that equation, offering the titular hero a demon companion, Doyle, who is a combination spirit guide and pub-stereotype sidekick. Shortly after meeting