Reception
This episode was rated as one of the series' top five episodes in a poll done by Angel Magazine. TV Guide praised Charisma Carpenter's "blithe comic delivery"; the BBC noted that Carpenter's return elevated the script from "merely great to something close to awesome," but griped because the show's tight budget left Lindsey's activation of the fail-safe an "unfulfilled promise."
Reaction to the death of long-time character Cordelia was generally positive. After being disgusted by Cordelia's fourth season arc, which she claims "destroyed Cordy's character and viewer trust", author Jennifer Crusie applauds this episode. "The writers play fair," she says, "foreshadowing the Gotcha to come" - Cordelia is in a private room, yet hastily draws the curtains around a bed-ridden roommate, and remarks to Angel that she understands why Doyle used his "last breath to make sure kept fighting." Rather than undercutting the emotional impact of the story, the twist of Cordelia's tragic ending reinforces and honors her character. "She is...our Cordy again," Crusie says. Cordelia exits the series "needed, loved, and wanted"; her final words are "You're welcome," Janine R. Harrison argues, because "she knows her worth."
Read more about this topic: You're Welcome (Angel)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)