I don’t want to know. I can’t hear you. La la la.

(This post contains some spoilers for the later seasons of Buffy and Angel. Beware if you haven’t finished watching them.)

With Season 8 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer a huge hit, this news was probably inevitable: Joss Whedon is coming back to Angel for Season Six, in comic book format. (Except Whedon isn’t exactly coming back – he’s co-writing with Brian Lynch)

While this probably makes many people very happy, I’m concerned.

For one thing, the finale to Angel was perfect. Those who like their entertainment tied up in neat and tidy packages probably hated it, but Not Fade Away capped off the series perfectly: No happy endings, and the fight goes on. The heroes face off against seemingly insurmountable odds, and who knows if they live or die. While Buffy‘s finale was perhaps a bit unsatisfying because of its attempts to resolve the entire series, Angel‘s was perfect precisely because it really didn’t end at all.

How do you follow that? I’m not sure there’s any way out of the alley that wouldn’t be a huge disappointment to me. To grossly overstate the case, it would be like making a sequel to Casablanca: Sure, you could make a movie about Rick and Louis fighting the Nazis in North Africa, but why in god’s name would you want to? I’ll admit that I could be wrong, but I fear any explanation will be either implausible or a rather heaping dose of deus ex machina.

The other problem – and this one is more of a potential problem – applies to Buffy as well: I’m slightly concerned about Joss Whedon’s newfound creative freedom. After years of banging his head against network television, he has almost complete control of the Buffyverse in comic book format. Which is probably a good thing, but there are worrying signs.

One of the major problems with comic book franchises can be the absence of change. Spider-Man is always going to be Peter Parker, and that’s that; The X-Men will tinker with their roster, but the core players will always stick around, or at least come back eventually. TV, on the other hand, forces change: Actors leave, usually taking their characters with them. Admittedly, this can lead to some lame replacements, but it can also – ideally – lead to positive growth.

The roots of the problem to back to some of Whedon’s musings. On one of the Season 7 commentaries, he mentions wanting to bring back Tara. This is quite a terrible idea: Resurrecting characters is generally a bad idea, and it’s even worse when the death was a major plot point. While she could have been used effectively in Conversations with Dead People, bringing back the character permanently would have been a mistake. Fortunately, Amber Benson was unavailable, and the show was the better for it.

Whedon expressed similar sentiments about a potential Season Six (in the more conventional television medium) of Angel: One of the stories would involve splitting Fred and Illyria, another resurrection of sorts. Not that it couldn’t work effectively, but the very possibility makes me wish for “I kinda wanna slay the dragon” to be the last I ever see of Angel. This is the sort of thing that makes Jean Grey a running gag instead of an immortal (yet dead) comic book icon.

Fortunately, so far, so good: Buffy Season 8 has been great so far, lacking in any unnecessary resurrections or gratuity (though there’s been a few pages of self-indulgence in each issue). But the prospect of a sixth season of Angel makes me very, very nervous.

(ETA: How did I have that horrible typo in the subject line for an entire day? Why didn’t anyone point out what an apparent moron I am?)