I wanted to start this topic as to get your thoughts on the series to this date--March 9

I think it's a wonderful show. I beileve it to be better than the current season of Buffy. I love the aspect of the show taking place mostly at night.

The Only thing i dislike about the show is getting away from helping the down and out it seems to be more and more fighting Demons: Buffy does that, Angel should be different

My only gripe is that the mysterious Wolfram and Hart, lawyers of evil, seem to have left the playing field. They seemed like an intriguing backstory when they were introduced, pregnant with possibilities. What happened?

I like this show, but I get a bit miffed that vampires can walk around in broad daylight and only have to stand just to the side of a window without worrying about burning to death. Even subdued sunlight in a bright room should be enough to do the job. I understand the eps can do more if the vampires can walk around in daylight but I'm a bit of a tradionalist, although I do like variations of vampires, too. I know it sounds confusing perhaps but it's not.

The show takes a lot of liberties with vampires. When they drain blood, ther're supose to drain your're soul out. Mirror reflects souls. Also the daylight is when they must return to their graves, then you can nail them to the coffin with a stake, not this anything wood thing. They also can shapeshift and use trances. And despite Angel's ambitions with the Hell's mouth demon, Vampires are non-demon lifeforms. Ther're just animated corpses.

Who says Brahm Stoker gets the last say as to what a vampire is? Vampires, or beings very similar to them, have appeared in the mythological histories of _many_ cultures. Each one is slightly different, who's to say which one is accurate? Buffy and Angel just take elements from a bunch of different stories and combine them into a single, coherent species which they refer to as 'vampires.'

(Nitpicking aside: Vampires aren't generally considered 'animated corpses,' since they never really get around to being corpses (let alone animated). They go from alive to walking dead in an instant.)

"Whatever you want to call 'em!"

--David Zadok Stroud

I know that even a lot of BUFFY fans consider ANGEL nothing more than the bastard child of BTVS, but I like it. I think it's steadily improved since its inception, and this past season was very good. Of course, the main reason it was so good is because Angel finally acquired an adversary worthy of him. Now that Holtz is dead, all bets are off...

(Nitpicking aside: Vampires aren't generally considered 'animated corpses,' since they never really get around to being corpses (let alone animated). They go from alive to walking dead in an instant.)

Not Buffyverse vampires. Clearest evidence: In "Lie to Me," Spike drains and vamps Ford, but Ford doesn't rise as a vampire until the night after he's been buried. The process obviously takes some time.

I think Angel is far from the bastard child of Buffy. The show has been revamped (pun intended) a few times (anyone remember when it was a vampire private eye show?). But it has come into its own and at times is a far superior show

There are times when it seems to try and mimic Buffy elements (Fred seemed like a Willow/Anya clone when first introduced, Gru was Anya), but it always manages to surprise me (though I still think Fire Cage Guy is Connor). True, sometimes it gets a bit silly (I'm not a big fan of when they went to Lorne(sp?)'s dimension. But they take risks with the characters and stories, something I think the Trek folks can learn from. And that, in the end, is what appeals to me about this show... its ability to continually surprise me: Lorne could easily have been overused, but wasn't, Fred could have easily become annoying, yet hasn't.

And I found this season's season-ender infinitely more compelling and suspenseful than the oft-talked about Buffy season-ender from last year. It's very difficult for me to believe a character will stay dead when coming back from the dead is inherent in the title of the show! But this year's Angel ender left me wondering, Where are they going with this?