Sorry Buffy fans, Angel's controversial ending was actually perfect

From the pilot’s opening moments to the finale’s closing seconds, a well-thought-out plan seemed consistently in place, although it often felt muddled in the middle.

In the debut episode, vampire-with-a-soul Angel (David Boreanaz) moves to LA to start a new life and help those in need. He joins forces with the resourceful Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) and the half-demon Doyle (Glenn Quinn) to battle supernatural threats.

We should always go back to the beginning, because it skillfully establishes the setting, develops characters, and lays the groundwork for the entire series. It also, almost effortlessly, ties in the last seconds of the finale.

In showing Angel’s pain and how troubled Doyle coaxes and persuades him out of the darkness, it does so much work in its stripped-backness. Two troubled men, one-on-one, "'Cause you got potential. And the balance sheet ain’t exactly in your favour."

When the final episode aired, I felt ripped off. But decades later, I get it. I have grown into it. It’s now my favourite ending — I have the biggest soft spot for the characters.

After all, it’s so painfully, quintessentially Angel to end with the team still fighting, half already dead, and more clearly on their way out.

Buffy fans who treat Angel as a continuation, an add-on, do it a disservice. Many popular fandom criticisms focus on comparing it to Buffy’s essence and foundations rather than what its own was meant to be — different. In aesthetics, mission statements, thesis, and the way they pull from various eras of life. Buffy is about growing up — Angel is about being grown.

From the first episode, Angel is an intimate, up-close, staring-you-right-in-the-face experience of addiction, the need for redemption, and how a person earns it. Always with the knowledge that if he experiences pure happiness, he will lose what separates him from the inner monster.

Those scenes tell us to come and get close. It won’t be pretty; it will get a little gritty and intense, but it’s a conversation we need to have.

For all the show’s bravado and charisma, for all its reliance on glamourous grime, chiselled jawlines, murderous stare-offs, artfully swishy leather trench coats, trapped ballerinas, a wee little puppet man, "shiny" demons, dubious Irish accents, and even dodgier wigs, there is always a tightness to Angel, a clawing angst, something burrowing under his skin, throwing him off balance.

After all, the character went from being Liam, the young, drunken layabout, to Angelus, a bloodthirsty serial killer lacking a soul, and then having one thrust upon him as a punishment for his crimes. Separate from the otherworldly nature of the show, Angel is a man who has to live with himself.

The show ponders the question: What would it do to a man to hear the screams of pain of his victims over and over, to listen to them pleading and begging to carry the knowledge that you were responsible for the most heinous acts imaginable, that your hands had inflicted torture, and that you, in a far-off era of life, relished it? How would that eat at a person?

Returning his soul was the ultimate retribution, forcing him to live with and live in his crimes. Angel has hand-me-down pain, self-doubt, and a dose of self-pity. In a famous and oft-quoted stand-off with Spike (James Marsters), that other soul-having vampire, Angel’s voice is laced with resentment and petulance: "You asked for a soul. I didn’t! It almost killed me. I spent a hundred years trying to come to terms with infinite remorse." There are dips, notes and cycles to everything. It never lets up.

From the first episode, the first scene, and the ups and downs of five seasons, it all led up — built up, up, and up — to this emotional series finale, punctuated with the ultimate cliffhanger, perhaps more justifiably labelled an unknowable ending.

In the finale, Gunn (J August Richards), the long-term human ally, asks, "What if I told you it doesn’t help? What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it’s all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive, and they will never let it get better down here? What would you do?"

In those scenes, those questions, we go back to that earlier up-close, stripped-back simplicity.

As they all bow their heads in grief and exhaustion, covered in yet more blood, LA grime and shadows in an alleyway as they are fading, Spike asks, "In terms of a plan?" and Angel responds, "We fight," and, "Let’s go to work." It is fitting that the last image is Angel’s determined face when he was once so unsure, the last sound of his weapon being used as the last of the team confronts a seemingly endless army of foes — and a dragon.

Did they live? It hardly matters. All it was ever about was a person, a group, putting everything they had into it — trying.

The show fades out and leaves it open for viewers to participate however they want - you can stay in the conversation. It’s still being discussed, dissected and speculated on. For me, it ended in that first second of darkness.

I didn’t read about what happened after that in other forms then, and I have consciously chosen not to read about it since. We should be comfortable saying goodbye and thanks for the memories. We can grieve a set of characters — and know their story is done once the screen fades to black.

I’ve loved this TV show for most of my life, but it took some growing up and growing into it to really get it. Back in the day, I was scribbling David Boreanaz’s name in hearts all over my school books; there is nothing wrong with that. But, as time has passed, my appreciation has become more nuanced, a more grown-up thing.

The ending of the show - particularly the closing moments before it fades to black - stands out as its most poignant lesson and overarching reason for being. It represents the world as it messily is rather than as it neatly could be.

It also gives us the possibility — what could’ve been, what might’ve been, and what ought to have been.

Angel is available to watch on Disney Plus.

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