Buffy the Vampire Slayer starred Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers, the teenage chosen one given supernatural abilities to fight the forces of darkness. The cult phenomenon ran for seven seasons before it ended in 2003. Its spinoff, Angel, ran for another year after Buffy ended.

Buffy’s big first love was Angel, the 240-year-old vampire with a soul. Buffy and Angel were star-crossed lovers. While the attraction was immediate, a vampire and the slayer dating was never going to be easy. They did their best to resist and deny their feelings for each other, but in the end, love won out. For a while, anyway.

Buffy and Angel Share Their First Kiss in Season One

When Angel first pops up in Buffy’s path to warn her about the Harvest and the Master’s plan, Buffy finds him to be “dark, gorgeous in an annoying sort of way.” Angel began the series more blunt and flippant, with a wry sense of humor. Mostly showing up to warn Buffy of the latest doom and gloom, Angel tried to help Buffy while keeping his distance. In “Angel,” he gets wounded. He and Buffy head back to her house, where she invites him inside. Once upstairs, romantic tensions get the best of them and Buffy and Angel kiss for the first time. Angel vamps out, revealing his true nature to Buffy. She screams and he absconds out the window.

Buffy struggles with her feelings for Angel and the fact that he’s a vampire. Angel stays away from her, secretly helping Giles decipher the upcoming apocalypse. In “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” Angel saves Willow, Xander, and Giles from gas poisoning in the boiler room and asks them not to tell Buffy he was there. When Giles learns that Buffy is meant to face the Master and die, he and Angel try to find a way around it. When Buffy goes into the sewers, led by the Anointed One, Angel and Xander, both in love with her, can’t stand around waiting for her to die. They follow her to help however they can.

In the season finale, Buffy fights the Master and loses. He bites her and drops her face first in a pool of water. Xander and Angel find her dead and drowned. Xander performs CPR to revive her and the trio storm the high school ready for round two with the Master. In season one, Buffy and Angel had their first kiss but resisted getting together. The relationship was as doomed as they come, so they tried to do the smart thing, but their love for each other would win out in season two.

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Buffy and Angel Get Together in Season Two

At the beginning of season two of Buffy, Angel shows up to help Buffy when she’s on the job. He even admits to being jealous of Xander at one point. In “Reptile Boy,” Buffy’s feelings for Angel push their way to the surface, and she musters up the courage to ask him for coffee. It doesn’t go well. Angel condescendingly and intensely tells Buffy it will never work. The less-than-stellar meeting, coupled with Giles working Buffy nonstop, leads her to lie to everyone and go to a frat party with Cordelia. When Angel finds out, he’s jealous, but Willow puts him in place, yelling, “I mean you’re gonna live forever, you don’t have time for a cup of coffee?” The episode ends with Angel asking Buffy out for coffee. While that’s what Buffy has been hoping for, she doesn’t let Angel off the hook that easily. She says yes but not when, telling him she’ll let him know.

Buffy and Angel attempt to have their first date in “Halloween.” Buffy shows up late to the Bronze and is disheveled after fighting a vampire in a pumpkin patch. Feeling inferior to the dolled-up Cordelia, Buffy calls off the date and heads home. The pair get to have their first official date when they go ice skating in “What’s My Line? Pt. 1.” Even though the date gets off to a rough start when Buffy is attacked by an assassin, they have a romantic and meaningful moment after the fight. Angel doesn’t want Buffy to touch him with his vampire face, but Buffy gently caresses his face and tells him she didn’t even notice. Angel has never been touched like that before and they share a heart-stopping kiss.

The romance between Buffy and Angel reaches a new level in “Surprise.” After a night of close calls, Buffy and Angel recover at his apartment. He tells her that he loves her for the first time, and they make love. Unfortunately, this gifts Angel with a moment of true happiness where he is unburdened by the atrocities of his past, and it costs him his soul. For the rest of season two, Angel terrorizes Buffy, killing her classmates and attacking the people she loves. In the tear-jerking season finale, Angel and Drusilla mean to end the world. Buffy and Angel have an epic swordfight as Acathala begins to wake. Willow performs the ritual to return Angel’s soul, but it’s too late, and Buffy has to kill him to save the world.

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Angel Leaves Sunnydale and Buffy in Season Three

After his heart-breaking death in season two, Angel is mysteriously resurrected at the end of “Faith, Hope & Trick.” Buffy finds Angel and spends a few episodes nursing him back to health and keeping his return a secret from her friends. When they find out, they are understandably peeved, but Angel earns some goodwill by saving Willow’s life. He slowly starts to help out Buffy and the Scooby gang with the slaying. Buffy and Angel resist their ever-present romantic feelings for each other and try to be friends, but when a heartbroken Spike hears that, he says, “You’re not friends. You’ll never be friends. You’ll be in love till it kills you both.” They know he’s right and Buffy tells Angel that she’s going to stay away from him, saying, “What I want from you, I can never have.”

In “Amends,” The First Evil spends a few days convincing Angel to take his own life, telling him that he will drink Buffy, and it’s only a matter of time. Angel decides to end his life with the sunrise. Buffy tries to talk him off the ledge, and when a snowstorm hits Sunnydale, blocking out the sun, Buffy and Angel walk hand in hand down the street and take it as a sign to get back together. They date—mostly happily—for a stretch, until “Choices,” when Mayor Wilkins points out that they have no future together. Angel takes it to heart and makes the difficult decision to break up with Buffy.

To distract the slayer from his nefarious plans, Mayor Wilkins sends Faith to poison Angel. It’s a special poison that targets vampires and can only be cured by drinking the blood of a slayer. Buffy tries to bring Angel Faith, but Faith eludes capture. Buffy forces Angel to drink her blood to heal himself in an epic, emotionally fraught scene. Angel only drinks enough to cure the poison and takes Buffy to the hospital. After the ascension and defeating the Mayor, Angel says a silent goodbye before he disappears into the fog, leaving Buffy and Sunnydale for his spinoff series.

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Buffy and Angel Crossover Episodes Had Some Good Moments for the Couple

After Angel left Buffy the Vampire Slayer for his own show, Angel, there were still a few notable Buffy and Angel moments in the crossover episodes. In Angel’s season one episode, “I Will Remember You,” Buffy comes to Los Angeles to confront Angel about him coming to Sunnydale and hiding it from her. Just as Buffy is about to leave, they get attacked by a demon whose blood turns Angel mortal. Buffy and Angel get back together and spend the day doing everything they couldn’t do when he was a vampire. Unable to let go of his calling to help people and fight demons, vampires, and other things that go bump in the night, Angel has the day reset to before he becomes mortal. Buffy would forget their day of bliss, but he would remember it.

In Buffy’s series finale, Angel brings Buffy an amulet to be worn by a champion. He intends to wear it himself and fight by her side, but she sends him back to LA as a second frontline in case she fails. They share a sweet moment together where Angel tells Buffy that he still loves her and she tells him that she’s not planning that far ahead, but implies they could get together sometime in the future.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Release Date

1997 – 2003

Network

The WB

Showrunner

Joss Whedon

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  Sarah Michelle Gellar

  Buffy Summers

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  Nicholas Brendon

  Alexander Harris

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