Not for nothing, but I want to scream!  I had the merest inkling that this season would not actually resolve the issues that we’ve been building to, but I kept dismissing that idea remembering the track record of this and parent-series Buffy have done pretty consistent season-long arcs.  Yet a little past the half-way point of the episode, I saw that things were not getting resolved.  How could that be?  Was this really going to be a super-happy ending with Angel getting the girl and the child?!  No, something was still very wrong… and then the ending happened and we’re left with a cliffhanger.  I am so glad I am not watching this during it’s original airing. 

As cliffhangers go, this was no Best of Both Worlds, but that bar was set pretty high.  This is still a solid way to wrap a season.  The concern I have is that the material that’s left, namely Connor and Justine, surely don’t have 22 episodes of story left between them, which means things have to take a wholly different turn sometime after season 4 starts.  But in the meantime, what a bitter pill! 

This was like watching a checklist being ticked.  Skip makes an appearance.  Cordy becomes more than she ever was taking her inner demon to new heights.  Wesley continues down the path to the dark side.  Angel gets both Connor and the acknowledgement of love from Cordy.  Justine gets revenge.  Connor gets revenge.  Groo leaves after a heartbreaking moment where he sums up where he ranks next to Angel.  And Lorne moves on… just as I was starting to like having him around.  What do these writers do for an encore?!?

The mix of light and shade is truly something too.  Wes having some intimacy with Lilah is met with a brutally rotten comment from a man we took to be a good guy, “I wasn’t thinking about you when you were here.”  Ouch.  Meanwhile Angel has to tell Fred that her acting as a vampire isn’t up to par, “you’re a vampire.  You’re not in Cats!”  The heartstrings are pulled when Lorne says goodbye and then they are yanked out when Groo does the same.  He knows he’s not Angel and Cordy loves Angel.  When he asks Cordy to say she wants him to say, she can’t do it, and that stung… and I didn’t even really like the character!  

I do have to confess that I broke my own cardinal rule when this ended: I went online to see if Charisma Carpenter was listed in season 4’s cast, because I was heated with the writers.  It’s compounded by the way they wrote it too.  Since the inception of The Powers That Be (TPTB), I’ve felt that was a very ham-fisted way of saying “the writers.”   So when Cordy ascends to a higher power because TPTB wanted her to, it felt like a death, which was shorthand for the writers wanted to write her out.  So I had to check… if she were written out, I’d be super mad!  

Having said that, I was inversely impressed with other things.  I thought stylistically, the scenes that end the episode show Angel sinking underwater as Cordy is being lifted into the sky.  She’s going out in a blast of light, while Angel sinks into darkness.  The light and shade that makes up the writing is captured very literally here.  In fact, it’s got to be said that the Vampire with the soul going down into darkness is such an odd contrast to the human with a demon in her going up towards the light.  I mean, I may hate the way they toss around TPTB, but when the writing captures the cinematic beauty like they do with this, it has got to be applauded.  And believe me, I’m applauding as much as I’m cursing!  

I even think they nailed a very important message when they said that every child born contains a world of possibilities.  Well said indeed.  I think the writers do a great job of the light and shade and that might be the most prominent quality I can think of when talking about this show.  For every comment like that, there’s an equally painful one like Angel telling Justine, “I’m not your boyfriend.  Find somebody else to smack you around.”  So I’m both annoyed by the way this ended and delighted by it.  That’s an interesting emotional conflict. Typically, I have very definite feelings about a show but this one give me mostly ambiguity.  There is only one definite thing I can say about it…

I’ll be tuning in for season 4 soon.   ML