LIST: The 9 Best "Angel" Episodes

NOTE: This is the fourth part of a month-long extended multi-part look at various horror (/sci-fi/fantasy) series.  The schedule's been adjusted to:

08/06: The 13 Best X-Files Episodes

08/13: The 8 Best Masters of Horror Episodes

08/23: The 11 Best Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episodes

09/12: The 9 Best Angel Episodes

09/24: Review: American Horror Story
??/??: The Twilight Zone

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9. "You're Welcome"

Written and Directed by David Fury
Season Five

Call it the redemption of Cordelia.  After turning into an alternately skeevy and passive weirdo in Season Four (probably to accommodate her own pregnancy), "You're Welcome" rediscovers Cordelia as the sweetheart who left at the end of Season Three.  She wakes from her coma, visits Angel, and gives him a little direction (some of which clarifies later in the season).  The episode also returns to the start of the whole Angel saga, with an opening-season villain's welcome return and a bittersweet glimpse of the long-dead Doyle.

8. "Five by Five / Sanctuary"

Written by Tim Minear and Joss Whedon

Directed by Michael Lange
Season One

Continuing an arc that began with the Buffy two-parter "This Year's Girl / Who Are You," Angel sees the cross-over of former slayer Faith (Eliza Dushku) in Los Angeles.  Her effort to best Buffy in that two-parter only revealed Faith's own depths of self-loathing.  So she tries to lure Angel into killing her.  Instead, she becomes emblematic of Angel's dogged belief that no one is beyond redemption.  The rain-soaked close of "Five by Five" is matched by the finale of "Sanctuary," when Angel tells former lover Buffy to step off his turf.

7. "Shiny Happy People"

Written by Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain

Directed by Marita Grabiak
Season Four

After a series of wild left-field turns, including Cordy banging Angel's son and a woman giving birth to a full-sized woman, Season Four grabs onto an engaging moral test.  If someone can bring perfect happiness to billions of lives, and all it requires is the loss of free will, should they?  Isn't that a good deal?  The episode unconvincingly ties bliss-giving Jasmine (Gina Torres) to nearly all major series events, but with "Shiny Happy People," Angel ditches convoluted plotting and finds its soul again.

6. "Hero"

Written by Howard Gordon and Tim Minear

Directed by Tucker Gates
Season One

An early shake-up in the show's history, Angel dispatches title-card-earner Doyle nine episodes deep - he fights supremacist demons who intend to cleanse the earth of half-breeds.  It's an impressive shocker in its own right, but the episode gains dimension - unavoidably - given the death of actor Glenn Quinn three years later.  This real-world tragedy both deepens the episode's context as a "goodbye" and shows off the very best that Quinn had to offer as an actor.

5. "A Hole in the World"

Written and Directed by Joss Whedon 
(God, of course it is)

Season Five

The only thing better than creating a lovable character... is killing that character suddenly and painfully.  Whedon does this a lot.  The sonofabitch loves it.  The risk he takes is that a sudden death on a TV show can feel like a stunt.  Now, traditional TV loves stunts.  Stunts boost ratings, keep viewers hooked over breaks... but then everything returns to status quo.  The "stunts" are brief little storms.  Buffy-verse stunts?  They're seismic events.  They topple structures, ignite aftershocks, and forever alter a show's narrative landscape.

4. "Smile Time"

Written and Directed by Ben Edlund
Season Five

Despite a strange opening that borders on the obscene (a puppet on TV lasciviously urges a child to "touch it"), "Smile Time" is all smiles, many laughs, and a few fall-out-of-your-seat-gasping-for-breath moments.  There isn't much ballast needed beyond seeing the brooding, tortured Angel as an adorable puppet, and the episode wisely keeps its supernatural curse limited to him.  Extra credit to the crew for knowing how to frame the Angel puppet for maximum silliness.

3. "Epiphany"

Written by Tim Minear

Directed by Thomas J. Wright
Season Two

The heart of the show, its mission statement, its burnt idealism.  The "main" story here is some nonsense about monsters with third eyes poking from the back of their heads.  The real story?  Angel mends the fences he nearly burned earlier in the season after rediscovering his purpose.  Helped in no small part by the pitch-black finish of prior episode "Reprise," "Epiphany" reworks Angel as someone fighting evil not to regain his humanity, but because doing the right thing is the right thing to do.

2. "Sleep Tight"

Written by David Greenwalt

Directed by Terrence O'Hara
Season Three

A "wham episode" of a TV series is an episode when the drama explodes in a way that fundamentally changes the show (see earlier comments about "stunts" for more context).  Think of Lost and "We have to go back!"  Or "Get on with it, motherf--" from The Wire.  The wham in Angel's "Sleep Tight" is a lullaby sung to a baby.  The lullaby masks a betrayal by Wesley (Alexis Denisof), who's made an impossible decision about Angel's baby son, Connor.  The fallout from taht decision leads to an ending so surprising that the season's time-jumping demon chess-master can only say, "Huh.  Didn't count on that."

1. "Not Fade Away"

Written by Joss Whedon and Jeffrey Bell

Directed by Jeffrey Bell
Season Five

What do you do when there's nothing left to do?  You keep on going.  Angel and company end their story proper (I hear there are comic books) with a final strike against the eternal "Senior Partners," via their Earthly representatives, the Circle of the Black Thorn.  Balancing the zippy momentum of a heist movie with a streak of fatalism, "Not Fade Away" ends the series on the highest possible note, and the abrupt close pushes expectations wonderfully.  Denial of climax has never felt so satisfying.