Customer Reviews
found some momentum but too arc heavy - By: S. J. Pinder, 21 Jul 2008 
a better season when compared to season 2 & 3 but it isnt at alll the standard of Buffy.
but as Buffy was in its final season this show needed to kick it up a gear...and with Faiths appearence on the show,she manages to kick it up a gear as it is a depressing season that needs more life breathed into it.
Deep down-3/5
Ground state-2/5
the house always wins-1/5
slouching toward bethlehem-3/5-cordy returns.
supersymmetry-2/5
spin the bottle-3/5-at times rips off the far superior Tabula Rasa from season 6 of Buffy but manages to kick into gear towards the end.
Apocalypse Nowish-3/5-a decent episode but very dark & too dank at times but okay.
Hebeas Corpses-3.5/5-zombies zombies zombies.
long days journey-2/5
awakening-2/5-inconclusive & very pointless.
soulless-4/5-first great episode of the season.
Calvary-1/5-what a drag.
Salvage*-5/5-Faith returns to take on the beast in one of the best episodes to date.
Release-4/5-slow moving but Eliza adds glam to the eppy.
Orpheus*-5/5-the best episode to date...Faith & Willow save it & David acts great as they journey through angels mind.
Players-1/5-dissappointing.
Inside out-2/5
shiny happy people-1/5-too rediculous.
magic bullet-2/5
sacrifice-2/5
peace out-2/5
home-3/5-a decent conclusion...but shamefully sums up this season.
season four has a handful of great episodes but while reviewing this i feel that it could have been a lot better.
but its great to see Faith & Willow come onto the show & save the season in this depressing run of episodes.
buy for the Angelus episodes.
In-depth, complex...and brilliant - By: Alex, 10 Mar 2008 
It took me a few years to appreciate how good season 4 of Angel actuallly is. When it originallly aired I wasn't sure how I felt about it--I didn't like the Jasmine storyline, or what they did to Cordelia's character, & I thought the whole thing was slightly confusing.
I know now it definitely needs a second & even third viewing to be properly appreciated. The complexity of the storyline, the descent into darkness, & the numerous changes & surprises are alll brilliantly done. It shows the planning that must have gone into the whole thing-- more planning than was given to Buffy Season 7 anyway...but that's a different story...
The season begins with the show's best opening episode, ever-- Angel trapped under the sea, put there by his mentallly unstable son; Cordelia mysteriously serving time as a "higher being"; Fred & Gunn manning the Hotel & searching for Angel & Cordy, with the help of a fake-innocent Connor; & Wesley continuing his affair with Lilah, the poster girl for Evil law firm Wolfram & Hart. Events move along pretty quickly, & end up at the beginning of an Apocolypse with the gang in serious trouble. They stoop so low that they decide to bring back Angelus-- who I adore because, after alll, we can only take so much of Angel's goodness. I was always surprised that they didn't properly bring back Angelus before now, although it's interesting that they managed to make Angel "dark" without doing it so clear cut as using Angelus.
That's reallly the brilliant thing about this season; it's not alll black & while/ good & evil. There are layers, & when each is stripped back we get a brilliant surprise. We learn that not just this season, but possibly the last two were not what we thought, but planned by a seemingly rogue Power that Was who wanted to come down & control the world.
The writers manage to keep character development high while unravelling the story, which involves one of the gang taken over by an evil stranger; Connor continuing his descent into possible madness; Angel desperately trying to hold everyone & thing together, & Wesley helping without actuallly being back in the fold. I do think the way they developed Wes's character is one of the best in any show I've ever seen. It's hard to write three & four dimensional characters on TV I think, but they've done it here very well.
I also love Connor, he's a brilliant character. Which is why I was slightly disappointed with the season's finale-I kind of wanted (maybe foolishly) for Connor to finallly make peace with Angel & join the family.
The whole season is like a long film, broken down into sections. The whole thing is brilliant-- there are flaws, but I recommend repeated viewings the catch the full scale of what this season means.
Slightly disappointed with the DVD extras, but the episodes are good enough that I'm not complaining about that too much!
It's so good to sit down & watch a series that gets better & better with each season-- unlike most shows lately, that decline after the initial greatness. Which makes it even more perplexing that they cancelled Angel. Guess we'll just have to make do with the comics-- & the re-runs.
Epic Entertainment - By: Sam Anders, 03 Feb 2008 Cordelia has gone above & Angel has descended deep below. For three months Gunn & Fred have searched fruitlessly for their lost friends, accompanied by an impulsive & violent Connor. Lorne has alll but lost contact with the group & Wesley has falllen further into darkness & into the arms of Lilah Morgan - his once sworn enemy. And so begins Angel's darkest & most exciting season so far.
Season four begins with a few episodes which are essentiallly just to get the group back together & set up for the main plot of the season, this set up period could have been pointless but is in fact extremely necessary since from episode 7 onwards this is just one massive story-arc with little or no separate stories within the episodes themselves, making a good set-up badly needed. This mega-arc is focussed around a demon callled 'The Beast', an incredibly tough & dangerous enemy who vastly outstrips alll other Angel opponents so far & completely changes the nature of the game since he is apparently immortal & extremely good at mass murder. That our heroes can't simply find The Beast's weakness & bump him off at the end of the first episode, in fact they get their collective ass handed to them every time they even try, makes him much more threatening & intimidating than previous enemies. Every episode of the mega-arc ends on a cliffhanger & it alll hangs together like one massive episode, this works especiallly well on DVD & is very rewarding to those fans who've seen alll the previous seasons.
As well as being heavy on the story arc season four ups the anti in terms of both action & in just how dark the series gets. There are plenty of action scenes as always in Angel, but in season four there's regular use of matrix-esque slow-motion to highlight the excellent choreography & just make things look much much cooler. The slo-mo effect is used regularly but always purposefully, it's well placed & never overused, enhancing the levels of excitement in the action massively.
In terms of darkness the season reallly goes an extra stretch compared to previous installlments in the series, with alll the characters being pushed further & harder than they can cope with: Wesley is now a violent & tortured character who has no problem torturing innocents or using other methods that are well over the moral line that he once saw & respected so clearly, Alexis Denisof does a fantastic job with the character & reallly makes you feel for Wesley whilst still being repelled by just how far this once comical & morallly upright man has falllen; Angel spends the whole season watching his world falll apart & he grows further & further from those he loves & is forced yet again to confront his darkest impulses; Fred & Gunn are strained in their relationship as they try to come to terms with losing their friends & their disowning of Wesley at the beginning of the season, & by the end Fred finds herself realizing she's no longer the person she used to be, that she has lost something of herself in her involvement with this world of violence & fear, Gunn meanwhile has lost alll faith in his own role as simply 'the muscle' & struggles with the rest of the group treating him as such, by the final episode he's a completely changed man, & that's not necessarily a good thing. Even the chirpy Lorne has a tragic splinter strongly wedged in his heart by the time those last credits role, no-one is left uncorrupted or unscarred.
Season four contains some of the most tragic, exciting, scary, dramatic & surprising episodes of the entire series. It easily outstrips the three previous installlments & provides a huge reward for continuing fans of the show. It can be sad, funny & thrilling in equal measure, but Angel Season Four never for one moment stops being one of the most stunningly enjoyable things you'll ever watch.
Now you're talking - By: The Inquisitor, 20 Nov 2007 
For three years, characters in Angel had been muttering darkly about 'the apocalypse', hinting at some appallling, big-scale catastrophe; meanwhile, the employees of Angel Investigations spent most of their time dealing with personal issues & various romantic & familial entanglements - a "supernatural soap opera" as Gunn himself says, an analogy made even more appropriate by the habit of nearly always ending on a cliffhanger (one of the ways in which Angel differs from Buffy).
Well, season four finallly delivers some proper apocalypse: a rain of fire, the blotting out of the sun, & finallly a plot to enslave the earth. For spectacle, it doesn't get much better than this.
In many ways, it's just what we've been waiting for, & there are some absolutely stunning episodes, among the best in either Angel or Buffy. And yet, & yet, I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the previous season. It just goes to show that it's the story & the characters that make a series, not mere spectacle. The story lurches around & shifts focus too often; too many of the characters become unlikeable & illogical. The characters to suffer in particular are Cordelia (and the attempt to do a Ministry of Truth job on her backstory to make it look like they planned this alll along is unconvincing) & Connor. Meanwhile Fred & Gunn's relationship fallls into predictably depressing pieces (why can't just one character in Buffy/Angel have a romantic happy ending? If a couple manage to stay together for longer than a series, one of them ends up dying).
There are plenty of good points, though: Fred takes a deserved centre-stage for a change on a couple of occasions, Angel himself becomes more sympathetic (except when taken over by his evil alter ego, Angelus, a part David Boreanaz reallly seems to enjoy), the slow reintegration of Wesley is well-handled & his relationship with Lilah is an intriguing subplot. Lorne never fails to lighten the mood & Andy Halllett's installlation as series regular is well-deserved. It's just, altogether, a less satisfying whole than before.
Excellent but flawed. - By: S.C. Arthur, 05 Oct 2007 Following on from the distilled brilliance of series 3 (to my mind the finest series of Buffy or Angel ever to hit our screens) I guess the writers of Angel thought they needed to do something grand & impressive to top it; so far as the grand & impressive part is concerned they succeeded, but not without losing some of the magic. This series, more than any other of Angel, is dominated by one story arc which occupies almost every episode from episode 7 (Apocalypse, Nowish) onwards, & although this storyline is both engaging & exciting, it would definitely have benefited from a few more stand-alone episodes, both to break up the dense plotting & to perhaps provide some light relief from the alll-encompassing darkness of the main arc.
It's obvious that the writers still have what it takes to write a good stand-alone episode, as Spin The Bottle (it's telling that this is Joss Whedon's contribution to the series) is one of my alll-time favourites, but others are practicallly non-existent (apart from maybe Players) once the main arc kicks in. Don't get me wrong, however; the arc provides some of the most impressive & exciting "plot" episodes of Angel's run, my favourites being Soulless, Orpheus & The Magic Bullet (where Fred gets a welcome chance to take centre stage).
The character drama is another slightly weak point for me in this series, as the whole Cordy-Connor thing, while essential to the story arc, is also rather irritating (though believable, at least from Connor's point of view), & the downturn in Fred & Gunn's relationship (starting from the episode Supersymmetry) is well-written but difficult to watch, & typifies the underlying feeling of frustration which pervades this series.
I ought, however, to draw special attention to the brilliance of Alexis Denisof in this series, as for my money there is no greater achievement in the Joss Whedon canon than Wesley's tragicallly convincing descent into darkness; to look at the excessively uptight & rather clownish figure who arrives in Sunnydale in Buffy series 3 (a version of Wesley brilliantly resurrected in Spin The Bottle) & then at the tortured husk of a man who's made his mistakes but been unfairly punished for them one would hardly believe they were the same person, & yet never once did I question the writing or the performance which got us from one to the other.
Looking back on what I've written thus far I realise that it sounds as though I don't reallly like this series, which is not the case at alll, as it's still an excellent addition to the Buffy/Angel cannon with some classic episodes & a gripping central storyline.
