A/N It has been noted that a competent Council should have been keeping an eye on Wolfram and Hart, otherwise known as Evil. Inc, just as they should have been keeping on eye on Sunnydale and it's active Hellmouth. On season 5 of Angel we discover Wolfram and Hart has their own Hellmouth that leads to the realm were the pan dimensional demons known as the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart live and the not so friendly ghost that haunts the Los Angeles branch is feeding the souls of anyone who dies in the building to it to keep from being sucked in himself.
It's also been suggested that what's nicknamed Sunnydale Syndrome was a magical somebody else's problem field and Wolfram and Hart likely had their own version.
Which would explain why the Council didn't seem to know what Richard Wilkins or Wolfram and Hart were up to.
But Angel dealt with them repeatedly, why? Because Cordelia had visions from a so-called higher power that were supposedly directing him on a mission of redemption for crimes he didn't actually commit. It would take something more powerful to push through the Magic Wolfram and Hart used if you didn't know the field was there in the first place. And aiming Angel at Wolfram and Hart was a great distraction so he didn't realize he was being manipulated, a stooge for the higher power, who's real mission was to keep Cordelia safe until the forced visions had done enough damage that Jasmine could move in and begin altering her body so she could create a vessel that could hold Jasmine's power. (First coma)
In hindsight everything about the Angel show screams set up. Cordelia has a vision that leads Angel to sneak into Wolfram and Hart where he's mystically drawn to a scroll with two prophecies they think are about him, the Shanshu and the father will kill the son. The same scroll used to supposedly save Cordelia after the visions went into overdrive. If they were really messages from a higher power, how did she end up with thousands of them at one time? The Oracles told Angel her mind had been opened, a clue he missed.
Darla and Holtz were manipulated so Connor could be born, kidnapped and raised to an age where he could be the father of the vessel Cordelia's body was used to create.
Cordelia's ascending was just so Jasmine could go from manipulating Cordelia while altering her body to full control over her.
In hindsight maybe Joss didn't deconstruct Cordelia's character with the Jasmine arc because he was mad at Charisma Carpenter, maybe it was planned all along. He did hate the whole 'vampire with a soul' he was forced to write and he did believe the spin off would fail. And season 5 was a very last minute decision on the network's part. ;)
So a competent Council is going to at least try to keep an eye on them but if you don't know there's a somebody else's problem field around Wolfram and Hart they might miss a few things. Just like they seemed to have missed Sunnydale and what's going on there. They can't be everywhere and they can't see everything, they're not perfect and they do have to rely on the people actually in the field and they might miss something. None of them are perfect after all.
BMS, season 3 and season 4 did have lazy storytelling, the Fluke, which made no sense despite fans trying to justify it, Faith, Cordelia's money being seized by the IRS along with her father's, which they shouldn't have been able to do and the Initiative and the handling of the military say not enough research was done.
But both seasons had to be rewritten because the audience put pressure on the network, who put pressure on Joss, the writers and the cast. So maybe the lack of research came down to time constraints or maybe just annoyance that they weren't being allowed to tell the story they wanted to tell. ;)
While setting up for the Angel show, which by then they knew had been greenlighted.
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Michael Fischer had worked for the Watchers Council for more than half his life, starting when he was in his early twenties. He'd been recruited after witnessing a demon attack and refusing to stop investigating it. Learning there was more to the world than he'd ever known had rocked his world and he'd agreed to be trained as a Research Watcher, his job was to keep an eye on the doings of the, among other things, law firm known as Wolfram and Hart. An organization run by corrupt humans who served demons from another dimension. He was hopefully the front line on knowing if they attempted anything world ending, there wasn't really anything the Watchers Council could do about them being a corrupting influence on people but maybe they could keep them from ending the world.
So he was understandably a bit annoyed when he was asked to take a short break from watching them and check up on another Watcher, one who'd been a Research Watcher as well before being tasked with being a Field Watcher for Buffy Summers. All the reports said he was actually doing well at a job he hadn't been trained for but than something happened that made his superiors question just how well he was doing and had reviewed the reports he'd filed. More questions had come up and now they wanted Micheal to check up on him personally since they had no one else available who could do it. Micheal just hoped Wolfram and Hart didn't try to end the world while he checked on a Field Watcher guiding a Slayer on an inactive Hellmouth.
It didn't take Michael too long to realize after he arrived, Sunnydale's Hellmouth wasn't inactive. The large number of vampires in the town was a huge clue.
Now how come the Council didn't know it was active?
