What are your Top 10 favourite episodes?

BtVS:
1. Surprise/Innocence
2. Becoming
3. Passion
4. I Only Have Eyes for You
5. Angel
6. Amends
7. The Prom
8. Graduation Day
9. Bad Girls/Consequences
10. Prophecy Girl

AtS:
1. Not Fade Away
2. Sleep Tight/Forgiving
3. Lullaby
4. Reunion
5. Reprise
6. Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been?
7. Darla
8. Five by Five/Sanctuary
9. Deep Down
10. A Hole in the World/Shells

I really have to rewatch Angel. I could swear that I've watched it straight through at least twice, but I can never remember it well enough.

Er, no, he wasn't lying. He was being cheeky with hinting what he was, but being quite truthful that he was different from the others. A vampire that doesn't bite in the sense that he's not one that hunts and feeds on humans. He was quite truthful there. He's hinting at being ensouled, not saying he isn't a vampire.

Likewise, there's the whole "Bite me." exchange in NKaBotFD. Another one was in The Harvest when he said that the vampires down in the tunnels don't like him, hinting at his souled status making him an outcast. The writers made it pretty unsubtle right from the first scenes. Angel's "I'll be damned." in The Harvest is very much his dry sense of self-deprecating humor seen early on and the sort seen later in Kate's "...and you can go to hell." exchange where he replies "Been there, done that." Angel also broadcasts another hint when Buffy unknowingly invites him into her house where he states the rule. He also hints it again when he says his family was murdered a long time ago and Buffy guesses vampires. He changes the subject there. There was also him brushing off his arm injury as not a big deal and the fact that he didn't need his jacket, even though Buffy was visibly cold. He does the same when he says he's had worse than being slashed in the ribs. His advanced healing factor with his blasé attitude towards the sorts of injuries that would be permanent scars or really painful for a human were big hints. He hints at his age several times, not just during the family murder dialog, but also when he states it's been a long time since anyone was in the position to tell him if he snored or not.

But no, he gave numerous anvils before the reveal, right from some of his first words. And he had real reason to hide it, given that he was clearly worried that she'd stake him before he even told her about the gypsy curse and the fact that he didn't want her to hate him or be afraid of him (note that her first reaction to learning what he is is to scream at him and her noblewoman Halloween self did the exact same thing--she screamed) because he already loved her (Darla taunts him). His fear that she'd hate him if she found out was because it had happened the last time he thought he had made a friend in Judy Kovacs in 1952, only for the smoking gun being her having seen his blood in his hotel room before they even met. He had reason to think that he could only help someone (and at this stage, he was trying to keep it purely business as the mysterious messenger who disappears with no personal feelings getting in the way) if they didn't know. From his perspective, he knew he had to tell her somehow, but he appeared afraid of having to do it. And it's not even clear if Angel just lost control of his emotions (and thus his game face emerged accidentally--his stated discomfort at Buffy or even his friends seeing his game face, no matter how reassuring they are, is well-established in What's My Line? and Sense and Sensitivity--his shyness about feeding in front of Buffy or friends also occurs--Cordy tries to push him out of that) or he had let it get too far and had to let her know before it went any further than it already had.

Remember, Angel (and even Angelus) had been convinced that Slayers were the big scary monsters there only to kill things like him in a way that was very dehumanized. Before Angel saw Buffy being called, struggling to stake her first vampire and then crying about it and her parents' marriage falling apart, he really thought that Slayers would be "...bigger or muscles and all that." Besides that being humor/amusement at Buffy's particularly tiny size (numerous characters joke about her being so itty-bitty--Jenny also has a line about it), it also lines up with Angel's surprise at what a Slayer really is (the very humanized side of it he saw) and Angelus' comments to Spike.

And before you say it... His less-than-courageous, scared behavior in season 1 where he's not yet a hero makes perfect sense with his later growth into a hero. He was coming out of 98 years of social isolation, the last 20 years of which were at "a rat once a month" starvation levels. Notice the hospital I.V. bags in his fridge and him knowing about hospital delivery night with Buffy's disapproval (it's only after this that he moves to pig's blood) and we know how badly he reacts around humans when he has human blood in his diet or is having bad cravings (see City of..., The Shroud of Rahmon and Sleep Tight). Angel modeled himself on Buffy, but was far from coming out of his shell (he gets guilt-tripped into becoming more sociable over several early season 2 episodes by Buffy and Willow) or molded into a superhero when he first introduces himself to Buffy. And their visit in the mausoleum where Buffy recognizes their mutual understanding of what its like to not have a friend (she had just been dumped by all of her fake friends, lost her Watcher and had been expelled from Hemery) is where they seem to really connect on an empathetic level, though Angel had seen a lot of himself in Buffy when her entire world collapsed on her before his eyes and she was suddenly the only one of her kind in all of the world, just like he was.

I've written a few big metas on this very subject, some of which I've saved over at nileqt87.tumblr.com. I think Angel's characterization is grossly misunderstood in season 1/early season 2, but all the hints are there and what we learn later in flashbacks has it all make perfect sense. Getting a soul didn't make him a hero, so much as it shattered him completely and he was merely neutral until he met Buffy (having been hanged in the Hyperion the last time he tried to help anyone). People seem to think it's a fault of the writing or like a rewrite of the character that he didn't start out acting like the fully-grown superhero AtS!Angel from the start, despite the fact that we saw it was a gradual arc of his humanization and being brought into the human world. Angel gets no credit for actually having an arc where he grows and changes a lot (some viewers seem convinced that he doesn't change at all and that garbage even got spouted in the comics, despite it being demonstrably FALSE).

No, no! I knew you weren't being serious in that way, but there are a lot of people that misinterpret a lot of his behavior in those very early episodes and there are actually a lot of subtle developments in his arc in those episodes that get overlooked. Interestingly, it's in The Harvest where the real Angel first really shows up where his false projection of confidence drops when Buffy picks up on the fact that he doesn't know what it's like to have a friend. And that scene is also where Buffy seems to completely reassess who he is.

One of the more overlooked developments is that Angel broadcasts his desire for family in Bad Eggs, The Prom and War Zone and that he's bothered by his inability to have that, yet a lot of people are much more focused on viewing those BtVS scenes from Buffy's side and don't realize that they're saying even more about Angel and his issues than they are about Buffy. Though Nikki/Robin seems to make her rethink a bit about Slayers having been mothers before and she brings it up to Angel in Chosen--and that's just after he's given up his son. He's very focused on what he can't have when he discusses what Buffy is giving up by being with him. And he was bringing these things up even before they slept together/he lost his soul. Neither Riley or Spike ever really had these sort of discussions about the future that Buffy and Angel did. Buffy, of course, was always so focused in these discussions on the fact that Slayers don't live long and don't ever make it past 25.

And yeah, Angel does have an advantage compared to most characters in that his backstory is very developed (he's in the most episodes of any character at 167... Willow has 147 and Buffy has 146). Faith definitely suffers from a lack of screen time, though enough comments are woven through dialog that some of it starts to crystallize (she talks about her mother, for example, and her desire for a father figure in the Mayor ultimately gets transferred to how she gloms onto Angel as his replacement). Darla and Drusilla are similarly lacking in episode amounts, though Darla and Faith benefit from many of their episodes being strong centrics. Darla actually has a lot of backstory for a character who isn't in terribly many episodes. Lindsey, for example, has a really revealing scene in Blind Date that suddenly separates him from all the other lawyers at Wolfram & Hart in that he has humble origins (and we even get a bit of a reveal that Liam's father was a middle class linen/silk merchant). Lilah likewise is a character that seemingly doesn't have much of a history and yet we learn her mother has Alzheimer's and she's humanized through the fact that Wesley cares about her and she cares about Wesley. And we learn about Wesley's father issues years and years before a robot showed up that Wesley completely believed as he killed him. Fredless has an interesting scene that points out that Fred is the only one there with parents who are a positive influence and still in any of their lives.

One of the things with Angel is that, even on BtVS, the show was very reliant on using him and his history to introduce a lot of people who were in relation to him and catalyze much of the plot. The Master, Darla, Spike and Dru were all HIS family. And when they were introduced, initially that was one of the most interesting things about them. We would first learn about all of them in relation to Angel. Darla went from being a nameless vampire girl to being fleshed out as Angel's sire and ex-lover. The Master isn't half as interesting without his relationships with Angel and Darla. Drusilla was fleshed out by the reveal of what Angelus had done to her. The Mayor's most humanizing moment was sharing an experience he shared with Angel (Edna May and the price of immortality). Angel was likewise the one who related to Faith in a way that Buffy wasn't able to and actually got through to her.

Buffy in and of herself was actually quite limited with how much could really be pulled out of her own character or backstory. The show tried to pull a bit out of Giles, but there was only so much there with Ripper. The introduction of characters with extensive history (especially Angel) was where the show really first became actually interesting and brought in plotlines that were a lot more than high school kids fighting generic monsters that one doesn't really have any investment in. Angel was the original 'good demon' gray area on the show. AtS, of course, continued chugging right along with pulling most of its plots out of Angel's own history and personality traits. Buffy was more likely to have things happen to people around her and react to more unrelated foes or foes more connected to another person in her life (Riley with the Initiative/Adam, Dawn with Glory and Willow), whereas Angel was facing Darla, Holtz, Connor and a Power that Be (Jasmine), making his foes much more about HIM. That's why that once Angel left BtVS, BtVS had worse growing pains figuring out what to do now that they lost the plot catalyst and endless history they had been so reliant on and the character they often used to humanize the villains. AtS had no such growing pains with that. BtVS fumbled with trying to do with Riley what they used to do with Angel, except he wasn't half as good at it. Spike ultimately came to the rescue for the BtVS writers. Buffy herself couldn't be used the same way Angel could when it came to pulling endless personal plotline out of a character, which is why her best villains were ones she managed to have a truly personal connection with, yet only Angelus really fit that bill. It ended up being Xander who was used to go up against Willow, because Buffy didn't have half the history and connection with her that he did. Glory was a pretty mwahaha-type villain if it weren't for Dawn being threatened. The Master and the Mayor were pretty reliant on connections to Angel, Darla and Faith to give them any character. Buffy really only had Angelus on that deep personal level. Dawn, Joyce and Spike were ultimately her personal later plots, but not strictly antagonists (through Spike was to a certain extent, along with her own self-destruction).

The First Evil was supposed to be a plot that was all about exploring being a Slayer and what that mythology was, but it just devolved into irritating Potentials, Andrew seriously lacking remorse and propping up Spike at the cost of the Scoobies. Anya (a character whose humor as a human was often to talk about making men cannibalize themselves and such) finally being faced with the fact that she's a worse serial killer than Angelus and Spike combined (did it with a soul!) is one of the few things season 7 finally got around to dealing with properly. Get It Done made two catastrophic errors in having Buffy accuse the Shadow Men of rape for the same action she performs in Chosen and have her not give any of the same care and help she gave Angel after he came back from hell when she told Spike to stop crying on shoulders and act like a soulless demon wrapped up in the coat of a dead Slayer again instead of an ensouled being suffering massive guilt. And in Lies My Parents Told Me, we have Spike victim-blaming Nikki for caring more about the mission than her son (contrast that with Angel apologizing to Holtz, despite him having stolen his son). W&H (and/or Lindsey's plan to f- with Angel by bringing in Spike to make him doubt himself) defeating the First Evil like swatting a fly with their shiny deus ex machina bauble really was icing on the cake. LMAO. Bad sign when the heroine didn't even have a plan other than let the baddies maybe kill her, sacrifice friends and let her ex deal with the second front. The Slayer spell did bupkis in the Hellmouth, while the villains of another show took care of her final battle.

Buffy had the Slayer mythology as the only thing she had to compete with Angel and Spike's often dominating histories and the vampire mythology that largely grew out of the needs of the writers to tell Angel's story (decisions like the retractable game face were all about making it so Buffy wouldn't know he was a vampire at first sight--same reason the Slayer PMS was dropped from the movie--and the creation of the gypsy curse soul mythology to explain why he was different because Joss Whedon hated the idea of good vampires unless there was a reason why he was the exception). The biggest difference between the 1992 Buffy movie and BtVS season 1 was not Buffy or the Scoobies... Xander/Jesse was just regurgitated Pike/Benny. The Master was pretty similar to Lothos, complete with Buffy overcoming their mind-control powers. It was the introduction of Angel that was unlike anything in the 1992 movie. Season 7 ended up repeating the Angel/Holtz storyline with Spike/Robin. And the past Slayers we saw were ones Spike killed. Even Buffy's own Slayer mythos ended up being explored through that.

One of the things often said about Liam is that he was just a womanizing drunk... But then he has a line like "I always wanted to see the world, but..." and that's exactly what Angelus and Angel spend the next several centuries doing. Then you have traits like Angel's eidetic memory (most visibly displayed in Supersymmetry), which combined with all of the comments Liam, Angelus and Angel all make about Liam's father eating with his hands (and thus not missing the silver that Liam intended to steal)/only having one servant despite using the plural, staying in the best hotels instead of the sewers like the Master and thus rejecting this second "father" (Darla's issues with having been a prostitute are also explored in that scene with what is the most upper-class dress she ever wore), various people (even victims) who were "dumb as a post" (although very Alpha with a paternalistic streak where he struggles badly to not take control as the natural leader, he very much likes and respects intelligent, strong women), his issues with humanity's inhumanity to each other (Angel mentions it in regards to Buffy restoring his love of it to the point where he becomes its champion, it's what Holland and Jasmine prey on and it also explains how Angelus' hatred of humanity made him different from other vampires), his love of fine arts (like the ballet, meeting Baudelaire and his own drawing talent), etc... It all points to someone who was far more intelligent than what was being completely seen. Angel's comments about his Catholicism are also revealing of Liam's religious background. Angel seems to care so much more about being damned, needing to be forgiven and unwanted by God than Darla or Spike, for example. Not to mention his vast collection of antiques, books (he has the lost Pergamum Codex and is seen reading often--what he spouts in Epiphany is very much related to the Sartre he was reading in Lovers' Walk) and art that seems to follow him to every home (and his homes often fluctuate between his self-flagellation in an alley all the way to a whole hotel of rooms all to himself that's even compared to a castle).

And then there's the fact that Liam and Connor mirror each other quite pointedly, with fathers who are trying to save a self-destructive son and even having to die to be reborn into a hero.

There are a lot of hints that Liam was acting out because he was not happy with his life or what was expected of him and one of the few things we see of Liam that is more indicative of who we know to be Angel is that he loved his sister Kathy. Liam doesn't have quite as sympathetic flashbacks as William does (which makes a lot of Spike fans often want to compare what we get of Liam and William and others ask how Angel can be good if Liam wasn't), yet there is material that hints there was a lot more going on that wasn't being seen in those particular flashbacks. It's often overlooked, though, because on the surface, Liam seems quite simple until you factor in that he, Angelus and Angel all share many traits and Liam/Angel are actually the same being having undergone a massive shock to the system and wake-up call.

I don't know if I need my own list -- yours works pretty well for me.   I suppose, mine would differ just a little -- I'd replace Spiral with Earshot and Chosen with Intervention.