What We Do Matters: Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in 2018 | TV/Streaming

And finally, there's that ever-present burden of feeling like a hostile alien in your own teenage skin. Would seeing a group of misfits make a family, a home for each other, alleviate some of that terrible loneliness in my adolescence? Would it have felt like there might be a place for me, even an imaginary one? Or would I have rejected the show when it went on to underline in its last two seasons the one foe Buffy could not defeat, adulthood? Would I have been grateful for the honesty of a genre show asking what happens to a Chosen One when she has to consider the costs of replacing coffee tables smashed in monster fights? Or would I have been angry the fantasy had been taken away?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. But I’m very grateful I finally got around to “Buffy” and “Angel” and waited so long to do so. It is a terrible time in the world, and it feels like the Apocalypse has never been able to live tweet itself before like it does now. So I need things like the fragile, pragmatic hope offered in the “Angel” episode “Epiphany,” in which one character tells another “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. ‘Cause that’s all there is. What we do. Now. Today ... all I wanna do is help. I wanna help because, I don’t think people should suffer as they do. Because, if there’s no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.” 

I don’t believe anymore in the idea of ultimate justice in the universe. But I can believe that what we do matters. That, ultimately, prophecies and grand designs get scrapped, and we’re left with how we treated each other and who we helped as a measure of who we are and what gave our lives meaning. And getting that message in a musical episode that includes a chorus of backup singing demons is no mean feat.

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