Angel - Season Five (Slim Set)

Being this season was the last one so they had to shake up the show. This season has some laughs provide by Spike. Didn't care for what they did to the Fred character though. But all in all it is Angel how could you go wrong.

I'm a big Buffy and Angel fan, so 5 stars goes without saying, but just wanted to give you a heads up that now you can finally get the rest of the story in comic book form, if you're dying to know!

The DVD came shortly after I ordered it.. I would order from this person again. The price was great, and it is the exact one I wanted. Thank you

I have watched Buffy and Angel religiously. I missed most of the last season of angel while it was on TV due to a job that woefully scheduled me that night, and TiVo was not yet mainstream. So when I saw this I was super excited to finally watch the end of this amazing show. After season 4, I was a little disappointed. I hated seeing Cordy evil. But season 5 was even worse. It did have some uplifting moments. The halloween party where gunn peed everywhere and Lorne's alterego thing tried to kill everyone was great. The last episode was awesome. The puppet episode was hilarious. But overall I thought it was whinny. Oh poor us angel people trying to take over an evil company and we can't seem to win. If they had more action and less whining about toeing the moral line it would have been a much better season. It did get better after Cordy appeared through till the end. But overall not Joss' best work. You have to watch it cause its the end. But be prepared to force yourself. Its not as easy to sit down and watch all the way through as the other ones.

The three best episodes of this season are what make the set worth buying.
The first, "You're Welcome" which brings Cordelia back is the episode where Charisma Carpenter finally turns into a fully rounded actress. She always was a great comedienne, and comediennes are consistently underrated; but they do have the problem that their best comic responses turn into "tics". I never for a moment believed in the possibility of a relationship between her and Angel in the series because of that, that sense that she only had a few moves in her kit -- only a narrow range. Lo and behold in this episode she suddenly blossoms out, obviously because of the tremendous emotional issues at stake. Her scenes with Angel (especially the middle one where they talk about what might have been) are beautiful: she finds her range, really for the first time in the whole enterprise -- the whole dark period for her was a dreadful mess. In that little scene where she sits with Angel talking about what might have been she is extraordinary -- she really captures what you can do on television: incredibly subtle acting. Ironically enough you can also see in this episode why she has to die or go away: she has become an adult. The whole premise of Angel is that everyone is a comic character -- it would be impossible for the show to have a real adult on board, which is what Cordelia is at the end. She essentially makes everyone else cardboard. Which is interesting. One suspects that the "higher power level" is to stop being an actor and become a person.

The second and third best episodes are "A Hole in the World" and "Not Fade Away" (there are nice moments in "the Girl in Question, a piece of otherwise crap) because of the Wesley/Fred/Illyria arc. The rest of these episodes are the usual fine stuff, but it is the realization by the writers that they are really on to something new that sparks these scenes. The death scenes and the basic situation are quite astonishing in their vertigiousness. The writers and the actors really did something here: the shifts back and forth between beings are mesmerizing, and the death scenes very fine, not sentimental at all. You can only do this kind of thing on Angel! (The only emotional equivalent are the birth/death pangs of Darla). It is a terrible pity they had to end it when they did: one can only imagine from the brief taste how agonizing the Wesley Illyria future might have been. But what we get is terrific.
Acting lessons......