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Editor’s Note: If I ever want to hear your spoilers Spike… come to think of it, I’ll never want to hear your spoilers.

Well, I certainly didn’t see that coming. I probably should have, given how similarly weighty events have recently played out in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but what the hell. We’ll get to that in a minute.

We’ve spent sixteen issues watching Angel and Faith off in England, trying to work out how to bring Giles back from the dead. And during that time we’ve met some interesting new characters and we’ve come across some old familiar ones, and some weird shit has gone down, but that first statement has been our core mission: Angel and Faith are trying to resurrect Giles. And that has made Angel and Faith, to me, more compelling than the core Buffy Season Nine title, because of what that mission entails: doing some dark shit, shit that the Buffy TV show, in Season Six, showed us was difficult on a good day, impossible on a bad one, and dangerous, ill-advised and rife with bad, bad unintended circumstances on every day. And this story has worked for me because if anyone knows the dangers behind raising the dead, it’s members of Buffy’s Scooby Gang, and yet they were doing it anyway. And the promise has been that we will eventually see them on the precipice of darkness, with Giles’s body and some magical McGuffins, and having to make the conscious decision as to whether to proceed or not, and face those consequences.

Well, that’s over now. While the conclusion of Angel & Faith #16 delivers one hell of a twist and teases a possible big bad for Faith and Angel that I didn’t really see coming and which could well wind up with an emotional and affecting climax. However, by taking that course, writer Christos Gage has let the air out of the story so far. He trades the weird, sick momentum of the story so far for a twist and an “oh shit!” moment. And while that moment has some promise, it doesn’t trade even in my ledger.