Drastic as it was, killing off Joyce was the logical way to bring Buffy and Dawn closer together, sever Buffy's last ties to girlhood and emphasize Buffy's inability to accept the limits of her power, a recurring theme this season. (She believes, of course, that she could have saved her mother if she'd been home when Joyce was stricken with the brain aneurysm.)

And killing Buffy's mom was the right way to make the distinction between the cartoonish daily stakings Buffy doles out and the awful permanence of "real" death. In the episode's haunting final scene, Dawn sneaks into the morgue to see her mother's body and is attacked by a vampire that has just risen from the dead. Buffy bursts in to fight the vampire just a few feet away from where Joyce lies on the gurney with her eyes open poignantly wide, as if caught by surprise. After the vampire is vanquished, Buffy looks at Joyce and it finally sinks in that she's gone. "Where did she go?" murmurs Dawn, who reaches a tentative hand towards her mother's face. Vampires, the undead, zombies -- they're all just make believe. But when somebody that you care about dies, it's forever.

The "Buffy" spinoff "Angel," starring David Boreanaz as Buffy's former lover, the vampire with a soul, doesn't generate the buzz of the show that sired it. But it grows more satisfying and surprising all the time.

Created by Whedon and David Greenwalt and spun off in the fall of 1999, "Angel" moved the brooding, tongue-tied vamp from Sunnydale to Los Angeles, where the oracular "Powers That Be" directed him to his predestined calling as the owner of a supernatural detective agency. "Angel" is essentially a private-eye noir -- Whedon and Greenwalt had the inspired notion to make their depressed creature of the night into a black trench-coated avenging angel who helps evil-plagued innocents in hopes of atoning for his own centuries of blood-sucking mayhem. His reward, eventually, will be to become human.

"Buffy" cast members Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase, and Alexis Denisof, who played British Watcher Wesley Wyndham-Price, also crossed over to "Angel"; Cordelia is Angel's girl Friday and Wesley, who fancies himself a "rogue demon hunter," provides the necessary knowledge of demons and spells. (Halfway through the first season, Wesley replaced Angel's beloved, martyred original sidekick, a half-human, half-demon named Doyle.)

"Angel" seemed a little soft and unformed in its first year, but this season, everything is clicking into place. Like "Buffy," "Angel" is concerned with predestination and personal choice. Angel, Wesley and Cordelia have come to L.A., like so many others, to remake themselves into the people they wish they could be. They've all got something to be ashamed of. Cordelia, the former high school bitch/fashionista, lost everything when daddy got into trouble with the IRS. Back in Sunnydale, Wesley was a pompous, ineffectual twerp, a complete failure as Faith's (and, after he usurped Giles position, Buffy's) Watcher. But working at Angel Investigations has made a man out of Wesley. And it has given Cordelia empathy for those less fortunate -- having searingly painful clairvoyant visions of people in need of Angel's help will do that to you.

As for Angel, he's still a work in progress. He is a tortured soul; he wants to be good, wants to help people, but so much evil seems to go unpunished that, sometimes, he just can't see the point. Angel backslid into badness this season after hooking up with his old vampire love, Darla (Julie Benz), who was used here in classic noir fashion as a damaged femme fatale. On "Angel," vampirism is a metaphor for addiction, and Angel isn't ready to graduate from the 12-step program yet.

"Angel" has also made more interesting use of its Los Angeles setting this season. If Sunnydale sat atop the mouth of hell, L.A. is a sunny hell on earth -- it's an evil place, run by a bunch of demon-worshipping lawyers, and it's lousy with greed and self-interest. To emphasize Angel's status as a feared and misunderstood outsider, the writers keep linking him with other "minorities" -- he has come to the aid of the demon equivalents of battered women, illegal aliens and refugees fleeing ethnic genocide.

But recently, "Angel" has replaced its metaphoric "persons of color" with an actual one (a first in the snowy "Buffy"/"Angel" universe), bringing in a young, unflappable African-American demon chaser named Gunn (J. August Richards) to work alongside Angel, Wesley and Cordelia. "Angel" has also taken on the other issue that keeps dividing L.A. like a recurring nightmare, police brutality. In this season's most ambitious episode, "The Thin Dead Line," which aired on Feb. 13, the LAPD was chillingly portrayed as a relentless tide of zombies raised from the ranks of dead cops. Although the zombie cops were shown using excessive force on Angel, Wesley and other whites for "resisting arrest," their brutal patrolling of Gunn's part of town, and their relentless attack on Gunn and his black friends, was what stuck with you.

Not that "Angel" is all heavy, weight of the world stuff. The horror is deftly mingled with snappy one-liners in the "Buffy" mode. There's a delightful new recurring character this season, a green, horned, gay host of a demon karaoke bar (Andy Hallett) whose sarcastic rejoinders are both suave and snappy. And the beefcakey Boreanaz remains a self-deprecating good sport about giving his fans what they want -- no matter how many episodes require him to strip off his shirt and fight like a gladiator.

"Angel" doesn't quite match "Buffy" in the emotional texture of the writing, though. And, let's face it, Buffy and her Scooby Gang are just more lovable than Angel's Angels. But "Angel" distinguishes itself by its sheer stamina -- it keeps working to perfect its heartfelt vision of souls struggling uphill toward a glimmer of redemption. "Angel" is decisively its own show; although it shares themes with "Buffy," it approaches them from a darker, more plaintive, place.

On Tuesdays, at the end of "Buffy," do you have a moment, like I do, where you think, Well, what more do I need? But then you watch "Angel" and there's always something so sly or lyrical -- Darla and the mad vampire Drusilla on a "Thelma and Louise" tear, the aching moment when Angel recognizes that hell isn't a place, it's the misery in your own heart -- that it just about blows you away? Every week, "Angel" makes you glad you decided to stick around for more. And I can't think of higher praise for a spinoff than that.

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