AtS S5: Who Are You People?
I am fresh(ish) off my rewatch of AtS S5 and about to start Another Buffy Podcast's coverage of that season and I have some things to get out of my head.
First...Season 5 is often heralded as the best of AtS. And yes, there is a lot of pageantry and fun episodes and SPIKE IS THERE!!!! so people who like Spike (but especially his "funny" era, not his "romantic" era, which is to say the characterization in BtVS S4 and nowhere else) are gonna jive with it, no matter how little sense it makes for his character.
But for the most part, I'm not going to talk about Spike here. Because Spike is just one of the many problems with this season.
The largest problem is...we don't know these versions of these characters. We can't. Because these versions of these characters didn't exist until the finale of S4.
People are the sum of their experiences. I am who I am today because of the cumulative journey of all my yesterdays. If a butterfly flaps its wings, yadda yadda. Well, at the end of S4, Angel did something massive, arguably monstrous, and without explanation -- he removed the memories of the past however-many years from his teams' head.
So going into S5, we have no idea what these characters think they have been through.
This would not be a big issue if it were ever addressed, but it is not. We never once get a rundown of what the entirety of the series has been from the perspectives of MOST of our cast.
The problem with removing Connor is that Connor, whether on-screen or not, has been a plot engine going all the way back to S2. Sure, we don't learn that Angel assaulted boinked Darla because of a prophecy until S3, but that prophecy retroactively loops in the Angel/Darla plotline of the previous season to create Connor. Then, we have two whole seasons of Connor driving the story.
Why was Wesley ousted from the gang in Angel's new world? Was he? We never know.
Why is Cordelia in a coma in Angel's new world? We never know.
Did Fred and Gunn's relationship evolve/devolve the same in Angel's new world? We never know.
Did Wesley have an emotionally intense intimate relationship with Lilah in Angel's new world? We never know.
How was Jasmine conceived in Angel's new world? We never know.
There are so many major plot points that got us from S1 to S5 that are literally hand waved away, replacing the versions of the characters WE KNOW with versions who have lived stories we not only never saw, but have no idea never happened.
Something similar happened in Buffy with their S5, and involving a character who was, rather than removed from their memories, woven into them. And this could've been sloppy, too, if we'd never gotten to a point where the characters, particularly Buffy and Dawn, reckon with the reality that is they can't trust their own memories. If Dawn's inclusion into the story weren't the story itself. They spend a lot of time not only addressing the late-in-show anomaly that is "what you saw before isn't necessarily what came before for these characters," but devise the entire season around it. It feels intentional, not sloppy. And even so, adding Dawn does not require a lot of heavy lifting because she did not become relevant to plot until she was added to it, so you can easily fit her into S1-4 without having to massively overhaul the narrative.
Removing Connor has the opposite effect. So much of the AtS story that we have experienced is intrinsically tied around his existence, his actions, and his decisions.
If AtS S5 spent any time meaningfully exploring what removing Connor from the story did, the ethical implications, how it shaped the characters we're watching live their own version of an AU, or any of these things, it might have been great. And sure, I will allow for the fact that they did not anticipate S5 being the final season, so maybe there were plans to explore this more meaningfully if it continued. But the fact that there was no earnest attempt to explain to the audience who these people are now as a result of the lives they think they've led retroactively makes the rest of the series kinda...pointless? Like why should we watch any of S1-4 if the finale of the series largely ignores the driving force of the emotional journeys that came before? The only person in S5 who knows what happened in S1-4 is Angel, and this is only mentioned a few times, never actually explored.
The only time they come close to touching on the missing memories is a storyline involving Wesley. After Fred dies, he goes on a vengeance quest and eventually learns the truth about what happened -- but it's just Wesley, and nothing comes of it. He sits around and broods about what he learned, never confronts Angel about the memories he replaced, or the trauma of learning the past few years of his life were not lived the way he thought, or even, AT MINIMUM, what those years entailed. Again to compare to S5 of Buffy, we get numerous instances of the characters going, "Remember when this thing with Dawn happened?" only to realize, in mid-convo, it didn't, and having to grapple with that knowledge.
And here is why this is, IMO: the writers done fucked up. They knew it. They fucked up in S4, which is universally hated, with their treatment of Cordelia, with everything revolving around Connor's character, and they decided to hit the reset button. And that might work for some people -- if you engage on a surface level and are happy just to be rid of a character you don't like, regardless of what it means for the story, then sure. Fine. Whatever.
For me, someone who actually did enjoy AtS, I've always felt that S5 was a different show, and I had a hard time articulating why. I thought it was Spike's bizarre, character-arc-ignoring behavior. I thought it was the absence of Cordelia, who operated as the heart of the show for half of it, and how flippantly Angel went from being ride-or-die for Cordy to "ehh, she's in a coma." I thought it was the fact that they were tonally trying to match Buffy, when the entire reason people claimed AtS was the superior show was its darker, more mature themes and plots (in other words, things they insinuate Buffy did not have). And it is all those things, but it's also the fact that they made the journey we went on through S1-4, the good, the amazing, and the shittastic, completely irrelevant, and they never addressed that in a way that would make the decision to nuke all those storylines narratively satisfying. They just ignored it, and hoped the audience would too.
And a good part of the audience did. Which honestly fucking baffles me, because if they're fans of the show, don't they want the majority of the show they watched to have mattered? Even a little?
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