Princess Cordelia. The Groosalugg. Joss Whedon doing the Dance of Joy. Angel discovering he has a reflection and immediately lamenting his hair. This episode has everything. 👑

This week on Re-Watcher's Council, we're covering Angel Season 2, Episode 21: "Through the Looking Glass" — the Pylea arc's richest, most thematically dense episode and honestly one of the best of the entire season. Written and directed by Tim Minear, this one is doing a lot more than it looks like on the surface.

We dig into the episode's central theme — perception and identity. Lorne puts it best: "They start to see you a certain way, you become that image." Every character in Pylea is being reflected back differently — Cordelia as royalty, Wesley as a leader, Angel as a hero, and then as a monster — and the episode uses the looking glass of this alien world to ask hard questions about who these people really are.

Dawn is gone. Glory has won. And Buffy Summers — the Slayer, the one who always gets back up — is just... gone too.

This week on Re-Watcher's Council we're covering "The Weight of the World," the penultimate episode of Season 5, and it is a quieter kind of devastating. With Buffy catatonic from the shock of losing Dawn, Willow takes it upon herself to dive into Buffy's mind and pull her back — and what she finds there is a fascinating, heartbreaking look at the guilt eating Buffy alive. Meanwhile Spike and Xander track down Doc for information, Glory and Ben's increasingly unstable coexistence reaches a breaking point, and Giles says the thing nobody wants to hear out loud: maybe the only way to stop Glory is to kill Dawn.

We're unpacking Willow's journey through Buffy's subconscious, what the looping memory sequence tells us about Buffy's psychology, the brilliant chaos of Glory and Ben fighting for dominance, and how this episode does the incredibly hard work of setting up a finale that has to pay off an entire season's worth of grief, loss, and impossible choices.

One episode left. We are not ready. Are you?

They went through a portal to a demon dimension to rescue Cordelia. Angel can walk in the sun. He is not handling this calmly. ☀️🧛

This week on Re-Watcher's Council, we're covering Angel Season 2, Episode 20 "Over the Rainbow" — the one where the gang actually jumps through a dimensional portal to Pylea and everything gets completely, gloriously unhinged. Cordelia finds herself in a new dimension where humans are considered inferior and sold into slavery, complete with a shock collar and a very rude demon owner. Meanwhile back in LA, Angel is doing whatever it takes to get her back — including dragging a very reluctant Lorne back to the one place he swore he'd never return to.

And then they drive a car through a portal. Into Pylea. Where there are two suns. And Angel immediately sprints off to collect branches in a sunlit field like an excited golden retriever who has waited 200 years for this moment. It is one of the purest, most joyful things this show has ever given us, and we are going to talk about it at length.