Unlike Buffy? I mean, they both had issues in those areas.

BtVS:

S1 - Not much of an arc but "Prophecy Girl" ties everything together so well that it almost retroactively bends the season into an arc.

S2 - One of the best long storyline arcs in TV history. Just about perfect from the one-third mark of the season on.

S3 - Another really good arc (in the best season, per episode quality) somewhat undercut by the postponed episodes.

S4 - Terrible. WTF was Adam doing anyway?

S5 - Bleh.

S6 - Pretty great arc, actually. Some missteps with Willow's addiction to magic, but 50,000 Buffista fans yelling "Giles!" can't be wrong.

S7 - Good on paper, poor in execution. Maybe too arc focused in some respects, as they sacrificed a lot of shows to move the arc but the individual episodes weren't nearly as good.

Now I'm going backwards, and watching The Wish. It's SO fucked-up. Mmmmm.

My best season finale vote goes to Graduation Day. I liked the go down fighting end of Angel, but it was undercut by my irritation at the "Oh, by the way, this whole season has been leading up to an apocalypse" set up and the fact that I discovered that there could be something more annoying than living Fred and that was dying Fred.

I could not stand Fred, and yet her death tore my heart out.

I grew to like Fred, but I didn't like the Fred romantic drama - if that makes any sense.

The Fred death was a bit too much. It was like Bobby Simone's death on NYPD Blue. So much drama and drawn out. I kept looking for a Greek chorus.

I started out liking Fred (blood hand! how much did that rock?) but the repetition of "Handsome man! Saved me from the monsters!" in the previews unfairly eroded my liking of her. And then her character was erratically written. But she had moments.

"Fredless" was pretty effective at killing any positive feelings I had for the character, though I liked her in her first few episodes.

"Prophecy Girl" is both my favorite finale and my favorite hour of television, ever.

I liked Chosen just because it ends with Buffy happy and relieved. I wanted that for her. But otherwise it was weak. Not Fade Away actively pisses me off. I wish I weren't one of those canon-ignoring people, but Home is the finale I wanted Angel to have. Love S4, lovelovelove.

I liked Pylea; it had great Wes, Angel, and Cordy stuff, and gave us Fred. No bad there for me, as I love Fred in every little way.

Becoming for me. I've rarely been that powerfully affected by a TV episode. I agree with Hec - Buffy S2 and S3 are my favourites, in that order - S2 wins on the arc, S3 on individual ep quality.

I didn't like Pylea at the time (I agree with ita - too much whiplash from the rest of S2), though it's grown on me.

I liked Fred, was royally pissed off when they killed her off, and just ignore Fredless. The only good to come of either of those was setting up Wesley suffer all over again in The Girl in Question.

"Handsome man! Saved me from the monsters!"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAaaaaa

...ah.

Sorry. Still it burns.

And I know it's unfair to blame the show for the previouslies. But I had to endure them and SOMEONE MUST PAY.

S6 - Pretty great arc, actually.

How so? For me, it's the problem where the parts that are original aren't good, and the parts that are good aren't original. And... overall: meh. Whedon could have said something interesting about how the villains were exactly the same sort of people who would have been the heroes in the early seasons... but he didn't. The whole season is an interesting might-have-been for me. There's a lot of stuff in play that could be really juicy, and at every stage they took the easy way out. So it all feels very sour and cheap.

It's interesting people keep mentioning Fredless. Because to me, yeah, it's bad, but it's not notably bad in retrospect. All of the sidekick-delving episodes of Angel are kind of horrid, honestly, but I think Supersymmetry is much more egregious, and we won't even get into Gunn's truck. Or TFWITW.