I didn't mind season five. I thought the addition of Spike to the cast was a hilarious counter-point for Angel's character and I'm actually a huge Recon-ed Conner fan. However I agree that the memory wipe did cause so many problems in regards to Wesley's character and I totally agree with you on the Wesley and Fred arc. Did they know the end was coming when they did that?
Oh, you need to fix up some of the symbols. I hate it when the system craps up.
They actually did know about the cancellation. They heard about it while Underneath was in production. And as much as I am a Wes/Fred shipper, I wish there had been some expressed interest on Fred's part before the events of You're Welcome. It wasn't developed naturally at all, to the detriment, in my opinion, of A Hole in the World.
I totally agree with you that mind-wiped Connor was an improvement — I just don't think it was necessary to rewrite everyone else's memory of the proceedings.
EDIT: Do the symbols look better?
Yep all symboled up.
Yeah, why not just mind wipe connor... Curse you Fridge Logic!
Season 5 is good. It's probably the only TV example I can think of that undergoes a total paradigm shift, successfully. That said, it's good they ended when they did, regardless of what fans say.
Season 4 wasn't all bad either. ..okay, it was largely crap, but I did appreciate how bleak it was. Everything fell apart. That's why I'm glad we didn't get season 6, because it basically would have been a continuation of Season 4's finale, as if the Deus Ex Hand Wave never happened.
I'm a skeptical squirrel
Actually, the mind wipe wouldn't really change anything, I imagine it would work in the same way as Dawn's introduction in Buffy: it wouldn't change anything, it would simply alter the memories of the characters in a way that would make it so that they would be the exact same person in the exact same situation.
I preferred Season 5 to Season 4. Why, you may ask? Well:
1) Bitch!Cordelia is out of the picture (seriously, she was a pretty lame villain).
2) Season 5 is light on Connor, who is honestly my least favorite of the main characters (next to Darla, but she's dead and I'm okay with that).
3) Illyria.
Also, they knew the series was cancelled early into the final season. Joss Whedon has stated that the final scene was not a cliffhanger but a "final statement:" that Angel and his team will never stop fighting.
Well, Joss can say what he wants but we all know it was a final flip-off to the scum at the WB-a crappy network which let BTVS go to an even crappy network and then sacrificed it's best show in a fit of pique by a network exec.
Season five was okay but I thought it was too stand-alone ep heavy and didn't get the final arc moving until way too late in the season. The again, I seem to be one of the few people who actually loved season four.
shupercool298, there's a HUGE difference between Dawn's entrance and Connor's exit. Dawn's entrance can still have events make sense in the character's minds; she's just there, and because she's so young, she doesn't have any actual effect on the way events transpire at all. Taking Connor out of everyone's memories? Connor had been a major catalyst for plot advancement for the last two seasons. Consider this new world without Connor: Why did Darla kill herself? Was Angel still lost at the bottom of the sea for months? How did the whole Holtz storyline wrap up? Most egregiously, how is Wesley the same person without remembering Connor at all? Betraying Angel for Connor's sake completely changed Wesley; it's arguable that he went through more character development than any other character in the Buffyverse, all because of that single act. And none of that is explained.
Philbert, I'm a fan of Season 4 too. Mostly because I LOVE Jasmine. (Not in an in-universe sense, of course...)
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Season Five
Season Five of Angel is among my least favorite of the series. Though the last third nearly redeems it, the first two are so mediocre that the season suffers as a whole. The truth of the phrase 'the worst of x is still better than y amount of z' in Angel's case still doesn't stop the season from being a disappointment.
Many problems can trace their roots to Season Four's Home. The mind-wipe served as an potent reset button for Connor's daddy issues and cleared much of the purported continuity snarl, but the writers largely failed to examine the repercussions of the reset. Angel essentially destroyed his friends' memories, writing over years of character development in the process. Wesley was transformed irrevocably by the consequences of Connor's kidnapping; his remaining virtually unchanged through the wipe was frustratingly nonsensical.
Angel was always a show about the characters, and Mutant Enemy has always been best at writing about them through story arcs. Firefly overcame the structural limitations of the stand-alone by focusing primarily on their impact on the characters. In Season Five, however, episodes which would have transformed characters permanently in previous seasons often failed to make such an impact. The sporadic references to the characters' social lives in Offscreenville were painfully tantalizing, especially when the show had focused on them so much in the past. Speaking of wasted dramatic potential, please don't get me started about Wesley and Fred.
But then Fred died. And though A Hole in the World itself was almost embarrassingly maudlin, it was the starting point for one of the strongest arcs in the show's entire run, providing some of the most fascinating material since Season Four. The Girl in Question was a painful misstep, but Power Play and Not Fade Away allowed the show's superbly-written character drama, smart humor and impressive action pieces to come together in a manner which been in scarce supply the entire season.
Angel's finale managed to fix everything that had been wrong with its fifth season, making its cancellation especially gutting. While Smile Time marked a dramatic upswing in quality, and the Illyria arc is one of my absolute favorites of the series, every second of filler in the first two-thirds of the season is agonizing with the knowledge that it's the last.