During the strike we started working through the complete DVD set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which Emily had never seen before, and most of which I hadn't seen since the show ended almost five years ago. We're at about the halfway point now -- just done with season four of Buffy and season one of the Angel spin-off -- and I find myself changing a lot of my thoughts about this particular double-season, which I'd sort of written off as a misstep at the time. I'll go into detail, but spoilers ahoy, of course.

Part of the rap against both seasons, I think, is the lack of a good overarching villain. Buffy has Adam, who isn't introduced until more than halfway in and doesn't even make it to the season finale, and Angel has, well, nobody. Wolfram & Hart, the evil law firm that stands behind much of the nastiness in the series, doesn't become a major factor until the second season, and the only significant arcs found in the first season are Buffy crossovers. What I'd forgotten, though, is how good some of the monster-of-the-week episodes were in both shows, and how good the four-part crossover with Faith's return was.

The thing about the apparently standalone episodes in these seasons is that they're actually very thematically unified, which becomes much more clear when you're watching them in bunches. Having destroyed the high school setting that had been home to the show's first three seasons, Buffy's theme was one of rough change and transition. Buffy moves into the dorm and her roommate is, literally, a demon; she and Willow both have to move on from first loves; Xander watches everyone move on with their lives while stuck in his parents' basement; the new social openness of their world allows division and mistrust to breed, and the culmination of it all is a Voltron-like spell that has them all fighting as one. The season finale restates these themes in a series of dream sequences that constitute one of the most impressively shot TV episodes in recent memory. On top of that, you've got a couple of terrific episodes in which Oz both departs and briefly returns, and the Emmy-nominated "Hush," which is actually much better than I remembered. It's where Joss Whedon really hit a high mark as a director, and I think it led artistically to much of the great stuff he's done since.

Meanwhile, these excellent episodes are all part of Angel's first season theme of heroic redemption: the pilot, in which Angel kicks an evil corporate vampire out a high-rise window and into the sun; "Bachelor Party," in which a mild-mannered demon plans to marry Doyle's ex-wife and also eat Doyle's brain; "Hero," in which an apparently major character, Doyle, dies after just nine episodes; and "I've Got You Under My Skin," in which a child possessed by a demon turns out to have been responsible himself for all the stuff Angel thought the demon had done.

The big Faith crossover is in some ways the high point of both shows' season. She and Buffy switching bodies allows Whedon to play with the tropes of both characters in ways that slot perfectly into the big theme of life disruption, while her appearance on Angel gives him a way to show Angel as an uncompromising repenter, even while Wesley is being tortured and advocating for Faith's imprisonment and, perhaps, execution. What is identity? How do you do right? These are big things tackled well in these four episodes. Indeed, I might even go so far as to say that season four of Buffy is better than season three. Angel, for its part, only gets better after season one, but it's worth noting that it does what it does extremely well, and there's something to be said for a genre show that can use theme as well as it uses plot. The fact that these supposedly "weak" seasons are this good has me really excited for Whedon's new show.