Warren.
Ah yes. Water cooler vengeance!
^^ You didn't know it at the time? Didn't you know that the show was moving to the WB before the finale aired?
You mean moving
from the WB
to UPN.
Uh, the lab guy who helped create Illyria in
Angel.
"Were you even
listening?"
Yeah.
Angel was always good at dark humor, but it never got more darkly humorous than this. I love the way Wesley totally undermines Angel's speech about how they're so much more noble than Illyria but just suddenly shooting Knox in cold blood.
FAVORITE HEROIC DEATH:
Doyle in "Hero."
"The good fight, yeah? You never know until you've been tested. I get that now."
DEATH THAT MAKES ME SHAKE MY HEAD WITH REGRET:
When Drusilla & Lindsey come in to re-sire Darla in "The Trial."
"How did you think this was going to end?"
Very sad. I still think that, in another life, Angel & Darla could have lived happily ever after.
DEATHS THAT RIP YOUR HEART OUT WITH A SPOON:
Cordelia in "You're Welcome." Even though we don't actually see it, the look on Angel's face when he gets that phone call says it all. In a very simple, straight-forward way, Angel feels it, and lets us feel it too. Sadder still because all of the signs were there. We just didn't see them.
Fred in "A Hole in the World"/"Shells." After the sucker punch of Cordelia's death already left us dazed, Fred's death managed to pull the rug out from under us just when we had stumbled back to our feet. It's so painful that, when Illyria impersonates Fred in "The Girl in Question" & "Not Fade Away," rather than feel a mild sense of pleasure at seeing her again, I feel the same way Wesley does, as if it's a violation & a perversion of Fred's memory.
MOST SURPRISING DEATHS:
The first one I'd like to mention is an oft forgotten death-- Illyria staking Spike from behind in "Time Bomb." At that point, it was well known that the show had been cancelled. And after the deaths of Cordelia & Fred, I was starting to expect that the entire cast might be killed off one by one over the few remaining episodes. So when Illyria killed Spike, I believed it was real. (The one error they made in the episode was they should have gone straight to commercial after this. Then, I would have spent the entire commercial break convinced that Spike had just been killed off. But by not going into commercial until after Illyria also managed to kill the rest of the cast, it signalled to me that none of these deaths were going to last past the end of the episode.)
Penny's death in
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog was natural from a thematic perspective. I just didn't expect Joss Whedon to go there, not when the series had been so relatively light up until that point. I was expecting Joss to finally relent and give us a happy ending. After all, it's a musical.
Wash in
Serenity. I had never seen the TV show, but just from watching the movie, Wash had been my favorite character ever since:
"This landing could get real interesting."
"Define 'interesting.'"
"'Oh god, oh god, we're all gonna die'?"
I was heart broken when he died. True, it was effective in ramping up the jeopardy for the other characters. I started to suspect that none of them would make it out of this, except for perhaps Mal, River, & maybe Jayne. However, in some ways, I was no longer able to enjoy the rest of the movie because I had already lost my favorite character in such a cruel, shocking way. This was at one of the summer preview screenings, so there was a woman from Universal waiting outside with a clipboard to ask us what we thought about the movie overall. None of us could express how we felt about the movie
overall because we were all so aggrieved over Wash's death. He was all we could talk about. The poor woman really had no idea what she had walked into (which shows just how little regard Joss Whedon has for his subordinates' well being
).
Lilah Morgan in "Calvary." I suspected that Cordelia would turn out to be evil. I didn't suspect that she would demonstrate it in such a visceral way.
MOST OVERRATED DEATH:
Lindsey in "Not Fade Away." I do kinda like that it was Lorne that killed him instead of Angel or someone else more important. But I'm still bothered that he was killed at all. He was helping them. Lorne suggested that Lindsey would always be part of the problem. I disagree. Of all the W&H employees over the years, he seemed to be the only one that ever showed glimmers of a conscience. For a show that was supposed to be all about redemption, Lindsey's potential was prematurely quashed. (But then, I really don't like anything they did with his character in Season 5. They never should have brought him back after "Dead End.")
