I'm only going by what Joss says in the commentary for the first episode of Angel, on the DVD set. He says that when he first made Buffy, he wanted to put Xander's friend Jessie in the opening credits so that people would be surprised when he died so quickly. But that would have meant making two versions of the credits, and they didn't have the budget for it. So when he started Angel, he made two versions of the credits so that he could kill off a main character and keep people on their toes.

It's possible there were other issues that he didn't talk about, but he made it sound as if it was a planned move.



From what I've heard, Carpenter kept her pregnancy a secret from Joss and the cast until it couldn't be hid any longer, and then the writers were forced to do a series of last-minute changes to the season arc to incorporate the pregnancy, ultimately leading to the out-of-left-field sequence that ended the season. I don't think Joss did anything or said anything against her publicly, but all of a sudden she was removed from the show, and only brought back for the closure episode for the fans' sake. Her romance with Angel had been fairly unpopular with fans too, so it's possible they couldn't think of anything good to do with her character at that point either.

Fred's death broke my heart when I first saw it. I think it was Joss swinging to an "all male" show for the last bit so that it had a dark feel with all the sacrifice and such. Illyria wasn't male of course, but she had a male sort of energy with her accent and her violence and her presence.



Poor Tara. :( It was definitely done for Willow's character development though. But Joss certainly did go for the sudden, brutal, unexpected impact, same as he did with Wash. At least Fred got a whole episode for us to hope they would save her at the last minute.