#seriously ... did they think Elizabeth Röhm was going to get bored of Law & Order and come crawling back or something?

[coraniaid]

All these years later, the biggest mystery of Angel the Series is how Kate Lockley survived her attempted suicide in Season 2's Epiphany.

I don't mean the surface level "how did Angel, a vampire, manage to get into Kate's apartment without being invited in first?" mystery the show half-heartedly tries to set up (and which it will never come back to, obviously, because this episode is Kate's very last appearance and she will be mentioned just one more time). I'm interested in that one about as much as the writers were, which is to say I don't care about it at all.

No, the real mystery is -- on a show that began with Angel and Doyle trying and failing to save City Of's ... victim-of-the-week Tina and bonding over how sad this failure made them; a show which retconned a tragically dead (but never mentioned before) younger sister for Angel himself, and also made sure to establish and then kill off a younger sister for Charles Gunn when he was first introduced; a show which abruptly killed off Lilah Morgan so that a man could be sad about it and then wrote her out of the show despite establishing she was still capable of coming back from hell to represent the wishes of the Senior Partners if they'd wanted her to stay on for another season; a show that killed off Darla (twice!) and killed off Cordelia and killed off Fred, all three women dying in ways that just happened to involve inexplicable magical pregnancies or unwanted personality changes or massive violations of their bodily autonomy (or all three) -- how on earth did the writers manage to resist the urge to have Kate die too?

Truly a puzzle for the ages.