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Angel

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"Nothing in the world is as it ought to be. It's harsh, and it's cruel, and that's why there's us. Champions. It doesn't matter where we come from, what we've done, or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be."

These words, spoken by the title character of Angel to his troubled son, Connor, in the heart-wrenching season four premiere, have lived with me since the moment I heard them. This and other powerful dialogue, delivered by characters who truly try and often fail to "live as though the world were as it should be," make for a show that, more than just being entertaining, amusing, and often emotional, offers important comments on our world.

Though the central character of this Buffy spin-off is a vampire, fighting to redeem centuries of cruelty by defending humanity from the creatures that lurk in the night, underlying themes in Angel show us that it isn't the monsters and demons out there in the darkness that should scare us it's the ones living within our own hearts. The fact that the overlying evil in the show was a law-firm made up primarily of humans, shows right away that Whedon was creating a world based in very different issues than his vampire slayer and her Scoobies so often dealt with.

From the memorable elevator ride down to hell in season two which turned out to lead right back to our world, since true hell exists in our own violent actions toward each other to the dethroning and murder by the gang of Jasmine a demon goddess whose only crime was to attempt to bring peace and order to our otherwise chaotic world (well, that and eating a couple dozen people a day) in season four, Whedon's spin-off makes an effort to really force us to look inside ourselves, to think about who we are as people, a community, and a race. To think about who we have been, and where we are heading. And this is something that Buffy, for all of its own demon-fighting and deranged goddesses, never made much of an effort to do.

The true heart of the show, of course, comes from the central cast of characters. Every character in Angel is flawed, and has personal struggles that they must overcome. No one's path was darker or more difficult than that of Wesley Windham-Price, portrayed by Alexis Denisof. Starting off halfway through season one as a somewhat bumbling, idealistic and overly self-confidant "rogue demon hunter," following his being fired from the Watchers' Council after his introduction

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