Buffy & Angel spoilers ahoy....

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Firstly, Angel. What can I say, other than WHOA! He even fired Vision Girl! He's going to a bad place, he is. But the big question, at least for me, is what did D&D do with Lindsey? Did they spare him, did he go down with the rest, or (GASP!) do you think they might have turned him? Because if they did that would make up for all of the coolness lost when they didn't replace his hand with a hook or something cool like that. It might also make up for the bad hair he had the first half of the season. Vamp Lindsey. I'm all for that. Plus, being that he's from my home state and we both dropped out of the same university right around the same time, I've come to feel a certain sense of kinship towards Christian Kane, and I'd just really hate to see him leave the show.

Also, is there something to the fact that lawyers Lindsey and Lilah both have the initials L.M.? Or am I just paranoid and reading too much into that odd little coincidence?

And way to go Kate! Gettin' with the program! About damn time, too.

Drusilla rocks. But not as much as....

Spike. Poor, lovesick Spike, all chipped and helpless and frustrated, and yet still managing to come across as the baddest bad-ass around (next to Buffy) when anybody tries to mess with him. Well, anybody non-human, anyway, like that large vamp who tried to hassle him when he took Buffy to the brothel. He may be evil, but damn! is he ever cool. And unbelievably sexy. And did I mention downright beautiful? I'm sure I have, but it bears repeating.

Two things that bothered me: One, Riley's little joke with the plastic stake, which just was not even funny, but that's not what bothered me about it. If a stake has to be wooden to be lethal to a vampire, then somebody please explain to me how Buffy was able to dust that big vamp in last week's repeat with the horn of one of Harmony's porcelain unicorns. Continuity glitch? Or is there something I missed during the first three seasons, such as some kind of vampire immunity to plastic woodgrain?

And Xander. I just wanted to smack him (and no, not for declaring his love to Anya, that part got to me more than all of the Buffy & Riley scenes ever did and left me all farklempt, because I like Xander & Anya, dammit! And you know that this means something bad is going to happen to them, like maybe she really will get back into vengeance or something). Buffy may not have treated Riley like the love of her life, but she most certainly did not treat him like "the rebound guy." And what the hell is up with taking the side of the soon-to-be-ex boyfriend whom you haven't known very long and whom you really don't know all that well against one of your oldest and dearest friends? Riley is the guy who comes along once in a lifetime? Maybe Xander should have gone to the helicopter and declared his love to Riley instead of home to Anya. Sorry, but Captain Cardboard just ain't that special, which is why he's gone now.

That said, the ending pissed me off. It pissed me off that Buffy just suddenly decided that hey, maybe she does love Riley after all, the big galoot, and it pissed me off that she didn't get to tell him, and that if he just would have turned his head two inches to the left and looked out the freaking window he would have seen her there and at least would have known that she wanted him to stay, even if he did go to South America.

And it pissed me off that they finally introduced an interesting story for Riley, one which was rife with possibilities, and instead of exploring those possibilities they just shipped him off to South America.

It also pissed me off that the one person who finally managed to stake Spike was Riley, even if it didn't kill him. That was just adding insult to injury.

At any rate, he's gone now. I'll quietly mourn him, because I did like him, after all, but I'm glad he's out of the way, and we don't have to watch any more creepy fang-job scenes, and everybody can get on with their lives and the business of Dawn, Ben and Glory

Oh yeah, and Joyce isn't going to die. Yay Joyce.