Season 2 ended on a really high note. Lots of reasons to love it:
(Contains Spoilers for Season 2 & Later Seasons)
1) Spike as the Big Bad when he was actually cool before he became a bit of a punching bag for jokes later on
2) Boreanaz at the top of his game, Angel goes from star-crossed lover and heroic anti-vampire to full-on evil incarnate villain. Since he was a former good guy and lover it makes the betrayal all the more meaningful.
3) Angel for a long time was the only villain to actually kill one of the main scoob’s, letting you know he’s not all bark.
4) THE SEASON FINALE. It one-up’s Shakespeare. Really. Blew my mind and it’s what made me a die-hard fan.
5) Principal Snyder (& the occasional reference/foreshadowing to the Mayor). This guy was just hilarious every time he’s on screen. Great writing, and the delivery is dead on every time. Yes he was introduced in S1, but only near the end. He has a lot of great moments in this season.
6) Introduction of Seth Green’s Oz (and also Jonathon in a very minor role). Gotta love Oz. (“Yeah, I think he just goes by Brandon now.”)
7) Fleshing out the other characters—Cordelia, Giles, Angel, and Jenny. Cordelia is no longer just a one-dimensional clique brat intended to stand in for ”the other students at the school.” She is this really interesting, complex character who is actually quite lonely on the inside, despite having lots of vacuous “friends,” because hey, it’s better to be surrounded by people and lonely than being lonely by yourself. A really great deep theme that is true to life, exhibiting that complexity in character dynamics that makes Buffy such a compelling show.
Giles is not just the watcher, doting father figure, and stiff librarian but also has a colored history. He was once a rebellious youth with a sordid past. Again, there’s a sense of irony here since you wouldn’t expect this kind of dichotomy, and yet it works perfectly because people change over time in real life, and it makes a lot of sense that someone who lived too closely to the edge and nearly fell over would later decide to stay as far away from it as possible. It gives Giles some interesting depth and complexity. I always find it a bit ridiculous when tv characters are supposedly the same people they were 10, 20, 30 years ago in a flashback, because in real life nobody’s like that. Whedon avoided that pitfall, for sure. Jenny also becomes a bit more relevant to the plot being related to that gypsy curse.
And of course, Angel‘s past is revealed early in the season, in the fantastic episode Lie to Me. Like Giles and Cordelia, his dark past reveals an ironic dichotomy, a complexity in the character. He was not only a brutal murderer, but also a sadistic demon who took deep pleasure in psychological manipulation. It gives him a real reason to need redemption, a reason to be the anti-villain/hero he has become, and it gives him a past relationship with Jenny’s people, Spike, and Drusilla, which sets up the big plot events later on.
—————————
All that said, despite how great the second season is, there is a lot of set up going on early on in the season, and personally for me a lot of the teen drama romance didn’t really appeal to me that much at first. I was more into the gothic/demonic stuff the first season had going for it (not that the teen drama wasn’t there from the beginning).
Also the episode where there’s a big scary ‘end of the world’ type demon, and she just blows it up with a rocket launcher that Xander conveniently steals because he was kind of a soldier that one time and an army guy is really easily fooled—yeah that was pretty stupid. But other than that, stellar season.
