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Old 09-20-2020, 05:55 AM
  #251
myheadsgonenumb
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it's tricky - because there is the balance between, if it were real life then it would be different with another person there, and the fact that the writers had a story they wanted to tell and would tell it regardless.

I remember reading an interview with one of the writers and them saying they didn't really have a long term (or even short term) plan with Angel, so each season they just broke him down to see what happened. If they stuck with that, he would still need to fire all his staff and hunt down Darla; Connor would still need to be kidnapped etc.

The big difference would be Cordelia not having the visions, so it would be Doyle strapped to the bed in to Shanshu in LA, Doyle who got sucked into Pylea and made the ruler, It would have been Doyle getting attacked in That Vision Thing though they might have changed what Billy's powers were as it's not so resonant and thematic if a man was tortured to free him. I'm not sure what they would have done with Birthday - but that would have had to be completely different and then season 4 would be where the big changes happened.

I don't think they would have gone down the higher power route (it's just not believable on Doyle who has the visions in order to atone) but Tim Minear always wanted Doyle to come back as a villain, so probably Doyle would have been possessed for a large chunk of that season - in Cordy's place. If the original plan was for Cordelia to just be the big bad herself (which it was) they might have kept it the same and just had Doyle be the big bad all the way through. Or - with Charisma's real life pregnancy - they might have switched to Jasmine and had him pass the possession along.

Then I think they would either have both been kept on for season 5 or both been written out. If there was no place left for the visions in the show in season 5 (as they say there wasn't) than that means no place left for Doyle. I can't think what positions he and Cordy would hold at Wolfram and Hart, certainly Cordy wouldn't agree to go there (it's harder to say with Doyle, because we only have 9 episodes at the beginning of s1 to base his end of s4 behaviour on with no knowing what might have happened to change him in between).

But ultimately I think all the big story beats would land the same, how they got there might change a bit, there would be some different scenes - but all the big stuff that happened would still happen because that is what the writers wanted to show.
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