Chris warned me that this episode might bother me but I should plow through. At this point, with five episodes to go, he’s allowed to preface episodes that way. And to be fair, A connor-centric episode is a pretty good thing to gamble against.

But I loved it.

I don’t know that Connor’s plot needed to be tied up - I would have accepted the memory-erasing even though it was a cop out. But this was braver and better and cooler than just walking away from him.

But Angel deserved that closure and the Connor charectar deserved that. And oh man - the Sahjhan prophecy deserved it. The Sahjhan prophecy. I had just accepted that it was irrelevant when time/space and everything got altered. But this is how it went down. That blows my mind about prophecies. Going back in time and trying to alter them is sometimes a crucial step in their realization.

So I guess this show falls down on the side of prophecies being real?

I also think Wesley deserves to have those memories. It was such a crucial point for the character. I don’t love that he chooses, at the end, to accept the fake memories in order to make life livable.

So that leaves me with the Wesley arc. He’s the one I have the highest hopes for. Almost killing his father pushed him farther than he had been at the end of Season Three. And now I want him to push past that into darkness and, hopefully, eventual redemption. I want that so bad. But right now, in the wake of Fred’s death, he’s just kind of drinking and being dead inside. And I get it. That emotional shut down is something, but it doesn’t play as well or with as much impact as TYING UP A WOMAN IN YOUR CLOSET LIKE A DOG. Surprise me, Wesley. Surprise me.

Illyria. Ugh. Okay. I hate the costume. I would say that 90% of what bothers me about her might be cured if they had kept her in Fred’s clothes and if she didn’t look like an X-person. (That’s for you, Brett!)

But beyond that, I have no interest in watching an elder-demon-god stand on a roof and make sweeping generalizations about the way humanity tastes in the air and what it says about how they live their lives. Don’t care. What I would want to see is an elder demon who has been foiled and is now trapped in a human body and has to deal with being human - with some minor super strength because the games with Spike are fun. (Demon-turned-human, kind of like Anya which is my favorite story arc ever ever in the history of this universe although she should have died in Selfless.) And that might be what they’re moving toward but I can’t tell. (There’s sometimes trouble in followthrough with Angel. Did Illyria plan to be born and resume control? Did Illyria just want to be born and it wasn’t thought through. If she was SUPPOSED to be reborn into a human body - that was the plan, as Knox told us - then why is she so upset?) And I know they keep trying to emphasize that This Is Not Fred but I would rather there was more Fred in her and this was some of the struggle because that’s a more interesting place to send that charectar than just a regular ‘ole victim death.

Anyway - Connor was great. Chris and I agreed that if Connor had played like THIS when he was on the show, he might have worked. (He also should have been older. It’s ridiculous that they didn’t just bring him back at the age that Angel was when he became a vampire. I get it, they wanted to keep the father-son aspect but they could had that without keeping an out of place kid on the show.) And I love the ambiguity about how much he remembers. I mean, he clearly remembers everything but is following the Wesley path of choosing to believe the easier truth. And that’s awesome. Everybody wins. Everybody is great. This episode was so good.