The wife and I have picked up our year of Whedon again recently. We're heading into the home stretch: Buffy is done, we did a brief interlude into the world of Firefly, and we're now about half-way through the final season of Angel.
We never watched Angel Season 5 when it was originally broadcast (our cable package doesn't include the WB, is the easy excuse -- it turns out that they actually did broadcast Angel on the local UPN station back then as well, but - as I recall - it was a weird night and time, so we just gave up.) So far, we haven't been too impressed. It was nice to see Lindsey back for a spell, sad to see Cordelia's fate. Spike seems generally like an appendage, he probably should've passed with the end of Buffy. Something weird seemed to happen to the basic character of the show that season; perhaps it's just the 'working for Wolfram and Hart' conceit. It feels forced and more than a bit desperate.
But tonight, we saw the episode Smile Time and, I gotta say, All is Forgiven. Holy crap, what a good time. LeeAnn and I were literally howling with laughter at a couple of points. (Angel: "I got a lot of demon in me.")
Perhaps my favorite moment of the episode was Spike's (predictable) ridicule when he discovered stuffed-plush Angel. In the knock-down fight that ensues, you can just see James Marsters barely containing his glee at the absurdity of it all:
Another favorite moment for Marsters was the fifth season Angel episode in which the title character, played by David Boreanaz, is magically transformed into a puppet. One of the episode’s key scenes involved a throw-down between Spike and the all-too cuddly Angel puppet.
“It was fun fighting that puppet,” Marsters says. “They wired it to me and just said ‘go.’ Just totally low tech and let the actor do his thing.”
We're actually looking forward to the rest of the season now. (Okay, the Nazi U-boat episode was cool, too.)
