Angelus' "To do" list:

Buy leather pants- pair in closet way too shiny, wouldn't be caught undead in 'em.

Get chainsaw- didn't have a chance to use one last time.

Blah blah, killing spree, end the world-cakes.

Kill Fred, turn Cordelia- only way to bring the bitch back.

Have lots of violent rough sex. (Hmm..maybe should have Darla resurrected again?)

Catch a plane to NYC to see The Producers. Hear it's excellent.

Hee!

I personally am looking forward to the part where Robin Williams wakes Robert DeNiro up from the coma.

Ah hahahahaha!!!! He said "Buffy!" Hahahaha! I'm gonna die, *gasp* oh man, I haven't laughed so hard since Cordelia ascended. Bwa ha ha! Can't...breathe..."Buffy?" Hee hee hee!

That is some funny shit yo.

Funny how regardless of the Buffy mention, in Angel's mind? Cordelia *is* Buffy. The way she speaks, the way she acts, the things she says..."I can't lose you?" Angel doesn't want Cordelia, he wants an ideal of the "perfect girlfriend" that he has in his head.

Just before Angel killed the Beast I said to my mom "Doesn't this all seem like one big Angel wish fullfillment? It doesn't even seem real." I had no idea it was a dream, I just thought it was weird.

And oh boy, has Angel seen the Indiana Jones trilogy one too many times.

The entire scene with the rocks with the letters freaked me out because it's very, very strange to actually understand what they're talking about when they go into this stuff. I could not make out a single letter on those rocks and I can read Rashi (pronounced 'RA-shi, not Ra-'SHI) and also the next letter after Shin for Seth would be Aleph again for Enosh, not Kaf for Keinan. I'm a little disturbed that Wesley speaking Hebrew turned me on as much as it did...

I do think it's sweet that what Angel wants most isn't just reconciling with 3 (out of the 4) people he loves most, (which, well DUH!) but that they'll reconcile with each other.

In the end, I'm not sure if I should be pissed off that I sat through that and it was all a dream, or relieved because I sat through that and it was all a dream. All that crap about Angelus not being Angel? Made me very, very angry. Not to mention the still ridiculous idea that if something is buried inside Angelus it isn't also buried inside Angel. I don't believe Wesley would be this stupid and wrong and it pisses me off that they're having him be stupid and wrong because then they'll lose whatever moral ground the character stands on and he'll have to grovel at all their feet for being so stupid. And wrong.

Angel to Wes: You've never met Angelus.
SNeaker and Mom of SNeaker, in unison: Yes he did!
Mom continues: He totally met him! Remember, the drugs, and the actress! He had to chain him up! He knocked him down the elevator shaft! What are these people crazy?

SNeaker and MoSN, upon seeing Cordelia's hair in that last scene, in unison: Oh my G-d, what did she do to her hair?

Right now, I'm just so very amused. "Buffy." Tee hee.

YAAAAAAAAAY! Holy beautiful mindfuck, Batman. Beautiful, beautiful mindfuck. I think I have to compose an ode to it.

You know, often I'll write parts of my post during the commercials. Well, thank the beeyotiful Mutant Enemy gods that none of it makes sense now. Because I was on an escalating tear, screaming "Ew! Ew! Ew!" and "Make it stop!" and just growing increasingly bewildered as to who wrote this and how they could suddenly fuck up every wonderful storyline, and how they could suddenly decide that they needed to kill The Beast right away and resolve every resolvable.

And then the horrible Cordelia-Angelness of it. My neighbors must in verity this time believe I'm nuts, because it was nonstop and increasingly desperate yelling. Hearing Angel, with all his feelings for and history with Buffy, say he'd be coming back because of Cordelia. Seeing him kissing her. Having that tattoo on his back revealed for the first time in ages, reminding me so vividly of him and Buffy. Then I started yelling, "Dream sequence! Make it a dream sequence!" And then, not believing for an instant that a dream sequence would come and rescue me, I had a horrible realization: Angel was going to experience a moment of perfect happiness with Cordelia, and that'd turn him into Angelus.

Whew. This is what Dorothy must have felt like waking up in that bed.

Did Angel say "Buffy"? I didn't quite hear that. It doesn't matter. It was still glorious.

In more superficial matters, I love Fred's haircut. She looks gorgeous. And Gunn's "Can I play wif it?" was a shining moment — totally childlike and adorable.

Hmm, now I'm taking a mental inventory of what was real and what wasn't. Unfortunately, one of the horrible mistakes still stands (but, man, I'm so grateful and admiring of that whole clever construction that I don't care). I yelled in unison with you and your mother, SNeaker. Wesley never having seen Angelus? I honestly don’t get it. It’s not like the Angel side of Mutant Enemy to make a continuity mistake like that. Did they just forget? Even if they thought reminding people of the Rebecca drugged-Angelus episode would diminish the effect of Angelus' appearance, the writers had to know that it couldn’t be swept under the rug. Wesley and Angel’s lines could so easily have been tweaked to reflect that, or they could have had another character talk to Angel in that scene. “You haven’t spent much time with Angelus” or something like that.

Yeah, SNeak, I also thought they owed Indiana Jones some royalties. "Idiot! In Latin, Jehovah begins with an 'I'!"

I do think Angelus is not Angel, so I have no problem with that. And I just figure that it's The Beast's intervention that's making Angelus able to hide secrets from Angel. Wesley did say last week, "The Beast must be making you forget." I'm glad The Beast isn't dead yet, because such good bad things happen as long as he's around.

And I'm glad that wasn't Wesley and Angel's real reconciliation. Because when it comes, I want the others to apologize to Wesley. And I want it to be a great deal more emotional, so I can cry and cry. Wesley loved and admired Angel so much. I want Wesley and his rift with the others to be completely healed, so that he can in time return to the trusting, happy life he enjoyed with them, the way it was when they all went to the ballet, for instance. And for that, the wounds really need to be ripped open again... if they can get through his layers of scar tissue.

And the award for grossest extension of a metaphor goes to me.

Really, how genius is it to intentionally screw up a show in exactly such a way that the audience — disappointed and fucked over so many many times — will believe it's true and that the show's suddenly taken a right turn into Suckdonia?

Best line of the night definitely had to be "Buffy."

I liked it. Angel and Cordy felt wrong and icky to me. The whole thing with Conner and Angel beating the Beast was a little too pat. Angel's pep talk was like pep talk #9 million and between him and Buffy I'm getting sick of them.

I find it amusing that in his dream sequence Angel finds Conner as whiny and annoying as I find him in non-dream sequence time. And how icky was it that Angel dreamed that Conner actually said to him "I could feel it in her touch ...blahblahblah... she was really in love with you." Gross. "And she is too old for me anyway." Hah!

From the reactions I've read so far, that is going to go down as one of the best lines ever.

I missed this before:



Or maybe he just wants Buffy.

I have to admit I totally fell for it. I sat there in disappointment and outrage that Angel and Cordy would have sex knowing the consequences. I also acknowledge that I was sitting there thinking "but this show has been so good, lately, how can one episode undo all of that?" So, it's hard to really comment on this episode because most of it never really happened so it makes no sense to complain that the Beast was killed so easily or that the Angel/Cordy scenes (Andy? Cordgel?) were just ... wrong. There were some funny moments, like when Angel was going on about how they needed to find the Beast and how they'd have to start in the warehouse district and then the Beast comes crashing in and Angel is all "Okay, then." Hee. Also, Gunn's fooling around with the sword and hacking the table in half. I loved the look on his face and his "My bad." I also like how Angel's definition of true happiness isn't just about having sex with the woman he loves, there is also his need to have everyone in the group also making peace, not just with him but with each other. That was a nice touch.

I also like how Wesley continues to be apart from the group and that he still doesn't feel the need to explain his actions, he just goes off and completes the task and then returns with the results. Meanwhile, back at the Hyperion, everyone is thumbing uselessly through books or singing bad Barry Manilow tunes.

In watching this show, I'm wondering if Angel would ever be able to experience true happiness again just by having sex. I would like to submit that Angel could at least have sex once with his true love and not lose his soul because in the back of his mind he'd be worried that he'd lose his soul again and that would be an impediment to his experiencing true happiness. Since it's been established that just having an orgasm wasn't the source of his true happiness, I think Angel could have sex at least once with a woman he loved (the second time around he may decide he's safe and then -- oops! Angelus). Not that I want to put any ideas in the writer's heads that would actually give us a replay of the Angel/Cordy sex scene.

I miss Lilah.

Okay, I was totally taken in. I was busy apologizing to rmd for the stupidity I was making her sit through (she's only seen maybe one other Angel episode this season so far) when the fakeout was revealed and then we were screaming and pointing at the screen in delight.

But it's annoying that it's perfectly plausible to me that they'll write that craptastic an episode.

I'm glad that there was more than making love involved in true happiness (even in this Angel-fantasy). Emotional resolutions and saving the world also involved, yay! Oh, and willfully ignoring the potential consequences of having sex. I was glad that part was put in.



So true! One of the lines I thought she delivered worst as Cordy was perfectly on as Angel's fantasy of Cordy. (It was something on their way to get the sword, 'I just get the visions, I don't....' something something, delivered with no spark, just a business-like don't-mess-with-the-Slayer attitude.)



But no, that wasn't the real Angelus. That was Angel's drug-induced hallucination of being Angelus, not the real thing. No, honestly. That's what I hammered out in my head at the time. Because drugs don't make the soul go away, and clearly they didn't, because they wore off and he was Angel again. So it wasn't "perfect happiness", just something Angel mistook for it. It's true, Cordy's the only one who's met Angelus.

I'm with Claudia on the Wesley-Angelus thing. I think of drugged Angel as Angelus-Lite.

And ejg stole my word. Mindfuck is the best possible word to describe that. I completely fell for it. I kept thinking, Oh, no! This is what brings Angelus back. I actually believed that they were doing a "Buffy Season 2" twist, where you think you know who the big bad is, but it actually turns out to be Angelus.

Then afterward I kept thinking stupid things like they were going to have to find the sword before Angelus so that they could slay the Beast. And then I would remember that none of that stuff happened. The idea that Angel would construct such an amazing and complex fantasy in his head... Well, I didn't think he had it in him.

"Buffy," was, indeed, the best line of the night. Because in Angel's dream, every single thing that was wrong with his world was fixed, and the thing that really did the trick was thinking of Buffy instead of Cordelia. At least, that's what I'm going with.

And hey, notice? Last time he and Buffy hadn't managed to save the world (from the Judge). Angel's concerns are broader now, or something.

As far as Angel telling Wesley that he'd never knew Angelus, I agreed, thinking that meant Wesley was never around when Angelus was really himself. It's as if Wesley saw a vivid photograph of Angelus in the drug-induced season one episode, but Cordy's seen him in all his technicolor, IMAX glory.

I loved that because we'd seen Angelus' smile in the reviews, I kept looking for ME to find some kind of happiness for him, after which he would turn. It seemed as if everything would be that opportunity. After he gets out of the cage and kills the shaman, I thought that maybe there'd be a time-delay portion of the soul-removing spell, and since the shaman was allied with the Beast, why wouldn't he return Angelus? Angelus would be better than Champion Angel. Or did I misunderstand that part? And then it was the reconciliation in the cave hallway, and then Connor defending his dad, calling him Angel, and then with the sex and the teamy goodness. That was fun. Angel's imagination was so trite and so pat, and so gooily emotional, it was funny in retrospect.

I loved Cordy's hair in the last scene, and my favorite funny part was in the very first scene, when Connor says the answer is among them and gestures to Angel, who tha camera pans to in his office, singing fancifully to Lorne, without sound.

I will say that I think I like watching Angel much more with the TiVo. While the show is live, I can rewind just a few seconds and re-watch a funny joke, or catch something I missed, which is how I caught that joke, since it was pretty quick.

"Buffy!" Ha! I wonder if Angel will remember his little fantasy scenarios when he returns, and he'd better return. I like Angelus just fine, but not for more than a few episodes. (That was another time the 8-second back button helped, when I had to make sure he said "Buffy")

It's amazing how, once you know the ending, this is one of the funniest episodes ever.

Ok, even if the Angelus that Wesley met was just an illusion type thing, he still met something that was Angelus-like, that called himself Angelus, that they referred to afterwards as Angelus, that hurt him emotionally and physically, so to say that he only knows what he read in books still seems wrong to me. How hard would it have been for Wesley to say "You forget I did" and Angel to answer "No you didn't. You met a watered down drug induced illusion. You've never seen the real thing."

I went back and checked the scene with the Hebrew script because I am pathetic and I *actually know stuff* for once. I'm well aware that no one else cares. Maybe the reason the spike went through Wesley's hand was because the next numerical value after aleph-1 isn't hey-5; it's not like roman numerals. The first 9 letters each have their own single digit numerical value, so the next number would be bet-2.

And Keinan starts with a kuf, not a kaf.

Shut up, I *know stuff.*

I can't put into words how angry this Angel/Angelus "they're just alter egos business" makes me. "Angel? Is not a vampire. He's a champion. Angelus is the vampire. Two completely different people." Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You want to keep it vague, fine, but I am NOT buying this crap, and the idea that I should is destoring the character and undermining the entire series for me. I miss Season 2. (Darla: You don't learn that kind of darkness, it's innate, it was in you before we ever met...you're gonna miss those dreams Angel. You should've heard the things you said, nasty things...)

I'd say I was relieved that at least the dream reminded Angel of what happens when he falls in love and consummates that love so he'd finally call it quits with Cordelia, except that I am convinced that this is going to end with Angel getting his soul back, all shiny and pure and squeaky clean and completely lacking in happiness clause. Because Angel should only get the perks of being a vampire (ie. superpowers) and none of the limitations. After that maybe he'll find a really good sunblock, because lord knows this show isn't about a vampire, it's about Generic Superhero Man.

You're right, that would have been much better.

And I'm sure you're right that this is now one of the funniest episodes ever. I haven't rewatched it yet. Oh, but I will.

Almost forgot this:
Or it could mean that in order to be happy with Cordelia, everything else in his life has to be in place. Whereas with Buffy, when he was with her, it didn't matter that the world might end, being with her made him *that* happy.

Hee. Should I be bitter that Spuffy and C/A have turned me into a B/A 'shipper by default?

The only element missing from Angel's dreamscape was a confrontation over a chasm.

"You throw me the Tooth, I throw you the whip."

And, speaking of continuity, isn't the Ninja In Red from the same group as the one who 'extracted' Angel's soul way back in "Enemies"?

I'm still in shock from how much fun it was to watch that. Like "Reunion" all over again.

I’m not the sharpest tack in the box. That ending all happened so quickly that I didn’t understand that it had been Angel’s dream (I thought maybe all of them had experienced it) and that it had been his sensation of perfect happiness, until I read all your explanatory posts.

So he said “Buffy.” What, if any, significance are you guys attributing to that? I personally like him saying that not because I want or think it’s a prelude to Angel getting back together with Buffy (someday, I’d like, once she’s herself again), but because it’s wonderfully insulting to Cordelia. It means he’s not really in love with Cordelia, but just replaying My Greatest Love Affair’s Greatest Highlights. Cordelia becomes Harmony that time Spike made her dress like Buffy. I love jenelope’s theory that he couldn’t climax without actually turning Cordelia into Buffy.

I may be wrong, but apparently Angel doesn’t need Fred and Gunn to reconcile in order to be happy. That was an interesting omission.



Apparently you side with Cordelia on the issue of Angel being two watts dimmer than Angelus (and damn that was funny). But I buy it. Any being with such a long life would have a rich inner life, and that’s not even addressing the fact that the substance of Angel’s particular life is already the stuff of epic fantasy. He’s a literate, thinky fellow — all the guy does in his off hours — and while they may not be the most intelligent thoughts, I bet they’re damn interesting. And lurid.



It’s a nice — and plausible — theory. But I just can’t see it that way. I think the drugs suppressed Angel’s soul temporarily (possibly as The Beast is doing now?), releasing Angelus. Because otherwise you have Angel pretending to do all those things just because he can; and not only do I not want to think that of him, but I honestly can’t think it of him. This isn’t like what they say about drunk people only doing the things they’d want to do while sober. This is murdering your friends. And Angel would never, and doesn’t have it in him.

SNeaker, you’ll notice that Angel himself hasn’t entirely changed his traditional opinion as to whether he’s Angelus. At one point in this hour, he says, “What Angelus did… what I did…” He’s confused, he's wavering. I personally don’t think he is Angelus. He feels guilty for those crimes because he remembers them as though they were him, as though he was inside committing them, and that’s got to be a psychotic trip; because he has an overdeveloped sense of guilt; because his heart is just that decent; and because, as aforementioned, he’s a little dim. Darla always maintained that the darkness came from Angel, but girlfriend had nothing but agenda when she said those things: she wanted him to believe them, and she herself needed to believe them, because then otherwise the man she loved wasn’t the whole man. I think Liam had darkness in him, but no more than your average fairly good guy; not murder-rape-and-torture darkness.

I confess, it's been a long time since I've seen Eternity. But as I recall, Angel didn't murder his friends. He didn't kill anyone. He didn't do anything but be really mean to them and throw them across the room. Which, yes, harsh, but decidedly non-fatal. And that's entirely consistent with his having his soul but not being aware that he does (I mean, I *think*--I'm not actually entirely sure what that would mean). I think it's all played up very neatly by the "People mistake me for the character I play" dialogue. In this case, he mistakes himself.

Yes, it's quite possible that he just didn't get around to it before they knocked him out, but it just doesn't feel that way to me.

And really, to me that all ties back to what originally made Angel such an interesting character for me--the split between all our good impulses and our bad ones, and the way he experiences that split.

But this soul stuff is so thorny I'm not sure we're really talking about different things here. What's the difference between Angel's soul being suppressed and Angel mistakenly thinking he's lost his soul?

I really believed he was planning to kill them. And I don't think Angel would throw his friends against walls.



Well, I go on the foundations of the Buffy episode "The Dark Age," in which we saw the actual demon hanging out inside of Angel, waiting to be released. So I see a huge difference between those two scenarios: the agency of the violence. If, as in the first scenario, Angel and his Magickal Soul are suppressed or put out of commission, that really bored demon gets out and starts maiming and killing. The "Angel thinks he has no soul and so starts acting like Angelus" means that Angel, as a man, only refrains from killing and maiming all the time because of society's expectations and his own expectations.

From that perspective, I agree, the second option makes an intriguing id, ego, superego metaphor. But I don't think everyone's id is just sitting around hoping the ego and superego will go on vacation so it can maim and kill. Rut and steal, maybe. But not maim and kill.

Also, it gets complicated, because there's a second agent in his body. He's like those double-yolked eggs: two ids.

It's true. Sometimes I think that's the best way of reading Angel. But only sometimes.



Heh, well, no. Not universally. I think there are some who would, and I think they'd be reacting in extreme anger to feeling afraid or abused. But that's neither here nor there. I think if we're going with the id reading, then on Angel it's magnified out of all proportion for dramatic effect, and that we don't need to take it to be saying anything *that* literal about how real people experience their drives and desires.



No waiting!

But are there two agents, or a changeable agent? It depends which reading you're going with (among other things).

Hee!

Yes, I think where I get hung up is between the literal and metaphorical/poetic interpretations. On the one hand, Angel's quite a good metaphor for the struggle of man with himself. On the other, he actually has a demon, and actually lives in a supernatural world where good and evil are palpable and real. And I've always tended toward the literal.



It's not just people as a rule I can't believe it of: it's Angel. I think that, his confused fumblings and lack of coordination aside, he's a good man (and, as must be said, a righteous one).

I wonder. I mean, yes. I believe he is, too. But I think he doesn't think so, and near as I can tell it's because he feels the man (and not just the demon) has some pretty vile urges he has to constantly work to suppress.

Once more into the rewatch, my friends. Seeing the Angel and Cordelia love scene and knowing it's Angel's dream, it's beautiful and sad. The kinds of things he wants — love, to be loved, normal sex, humanity — sad, silly, mortal. It suddenly struck me how much he and Buffy are alike, how much they have in common. They both have over-romantic hearts. They both just want to be normal girls.

One thing that stood out was Angel saying, "It's not all about you. What you want is not always what people need." I wonder if that has a deeper symbolism, dream status notwithstanding. Is it the acknowledgement of Angel's subconscious that these fantasies he has wouldn't be good for his friends? Or would they? I don't know.

I was also wondering why Angel's idea of happiness is our idea of hell. We like him — or most of us do — so why does what would give him pleasure make most of us scream and frighten our neighbors? Actually, I divide it into two parts. The reconciliations of Angel and Connor, Angel and Wesley, Wesley and Gunn... I was gladdened by all of them when I thought they were real. And the killing of The Beast, that too. It was just that, from a dramatic perspective, they came too soon and ended all the angst (there you go — we want to see him tortured?). The other half of the coin was the Wurve of Fair Cordelia. I think that was the truly abhorrent part, for me. Maybe that's just it. But even his fantasy was revealed to be not entirely about Cordelia... Angel's mind grasping at whatever chess pieces he had immediately on hand to complete the game.

So maybe it's not the fact that Angel was happy that made his heaven a hell, but the particular heaven he happened to choose. Had Buffy, or even Gwen, suddenly walked in off the street and found her way into Angel's arms, I think I would have been along for the ride.

All in all, it's an interesting science experiment, being able to analyze what I thought of this when it was real. This is the one episode no one should be spoiled for.

Well, it's the old want/need adage, no? As someone who is fond of Angel I think that I want him to have all those things which make him happy, but as a television viewer I need to see him suffer because it arouses my sympathy and characters who are content are boring (witness Season 5 Xander.)

Here's the short version of my take on Angel, and what he is:

The way I see it, there are 3 different entities- the body, (where the brains, the memories, and the personality traits are kept) the soul, and the demon. When it comes to Angel I see all of those entities as being completely fused together to make one being. Hence, it's not either the soul or the demon in control of Angel, *Angel* is in control of Angel and he is both demon and human.

The fact that Angel refers to the demon inside him, that we've *seen* this demon in The Dark Age and Through the Looking Glass, only stresses this idea for me. The things that are inside us aren't independant of us, they help make up what we are. I have a heart inside me, but my heart doesn't exist independant of me- I pretty much need it to live, and without a body to reside in, it would be useless. In TTLG, we see the monster that resides in Angel, his true demon self without the human guise, and it's pretty much just a mindless animal. Thus I believe that when a person is vamped an entirely evil but generic demon is created and animates the body. How vicious it'll be, what kind of vampire it will be, is completely determined by the personality of the human it took over. Hence, Angelus being such a particularly vicious vampire is due to traits that existed in Liam, magnified by the evil of the demon, and no longer suppressed by his conscience.

I see it a lot in fanfic, "Angelus is the demon, Angel is the soul, and they're vying for control of the body," but I just can't see it that way. Angelus is the demon, *Liam* is the soul, and both are Angel who is in control of his own body, with the demon representing his evil inclination and the soul representing his good inclination. It's the perfect metaphor for people, with our proverbial "angels" and "devils" on our shoulders. The drugs in Eternity temporarily supressed the good part of Angel, leaving only the demon, Angelus, because that's who Angel is without his soul. But with his soul he isn't Liam, he's Angel- soul and demon together, one entity.

It makes sense in my head.

I'm with you on some of those things, except that I think Angel is Liam, only older and wiser and sadder... and burdened with some horrible memories.

Another telling and eloquent thing that struck me about Angel's dream was this exchange:

Angel: "I have no choice."
Cordelia: "There's always a choice."
Angel: "Not for me."

He really feels that way, doesn't he? And he's right... I know I say it a lot, but I love the idea: he's a pawn, manipulated at every major juncture of his life. It's interesting to me that he's aware of this, and feels pain over it.

Just finally saw this episode (traveling all week again) but apparently I missed something. Angel was talking to Buffy while having sex with Cordelia? Ouch, burn.

Also amusing was Angel's insistence that Wesley never apologized for anything. Wesley spent at least half a year apologizing for everything. Apparently they've got some sort of collective amnesia about the spring of 2000...

Dude, I know! I was thinking the same thing. "Can I stay for tea? Sorry. I borrowed an axe, sorry. Sorry! Sorry!"

I've been watching the "Buffy" season 3 DVDs too much this weekend. "In 243 years, I've loved exactly one person." It just doesn't seem likely that whatever he has with Cordelia could compare. Or maybe I just don't want it to compare.

SNeaker, your theory makes sense in my head, too.

Well, that was ... that was annoying, actually. Sure, I appreciate the twist at the end. But it's not like I hadn't guessed that All Was Not Well. What I actually thought was that the spell had worked and Angelus, for devious reasons of his own, was playing everyone along by pretending he was still ensouled. Their ending was way better and it was very neat and clever and all, but since we had to sit through all that soppy dreck to get there, I don't see myself re-watching this one much.

Angel is so drippy. He could get a job writing scenes for Spike and Buffy if the detective gig doesn't work out. It was painful watching Cordelia in this one, especially because it did not seem out of character for how she is these days. However, I do appreciate that even Angel knows that Cordelia needs a new haircut, even if he couldn't quite imagine anything that would much improve its current length. What am I saying, even Angel - this is the man who spent hours with hair gel and mousse despite lack of reflection.

I will say that that was a nice moment between Angel and Wesley, the apology bit. While I do think that Wes deserves an apology really, it was just a nice shot of the two actors. And the 'Buffy' bit - which I didn't catch, so thanks for mentioning it here so I could go back and look - was ace. The writers and producers all insist he's moved on but they just can't resist putting in something like that: it's just so naughty.


Can't you just hear Buffy saying this?

Hee! I didn't pick up on that.

Man, I know I would be so much less judgemental about how Cordelia and Charisma look and act now if she still had her beeyootiful hair. I don't think I can ever forgive Carpenter for the hair. Destruction of a national treasure.

Heh. I remember this feeling, but in fact I think this episode very much rewards rewatching once you know what's not real. Seeing it all in a different light, it's a very different story.

Great minds think alike Pandrea. I kept waiting for him to reveal himself as Angelus as well.

And I caught the 'Buffy' reference. Hysterical giggles ensued.

Yay: Angelus is back! That. Is. All.

Ok, it’s not all. Did he really say “Buffy”? Ha. And, awww. I missed that; I may have to go back and rewatch, which is rare for me for an Angel episode.

I so totally fell for it, I was shouting to Mr M in the next room when I thought he was going to have sex with Cordy—and I realised I must be a bit of a B/A shipper, despite my protestations, because I was peeved at the thought that he could get his moment of perfect happiness without Buffy. And I couldn’t believe that they would be so stupid as to risk it, so then I had this theory that Cordy was evil, and ruthlessly seducing him (not very sisterly, eh?) to bring out Angelus. And then the ending. Took me a good five minutes of “huh”ing to figure it out.