About.com recently caught up with Joss Whedon and asked him about the upcoming fifth series of Angel. Warning! Spoilers ahead.

In the interview Whedon explains why Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) isn't coming back:

"It came about pretty much the same way the decision to stop the Buffy run came about," he said. "In seven years, we'd sort of run through our course of character and didn't want to start just doing hollow riffs on what we'd done."

He also explained that we might have a wait before Buffy herself makes another appearance in LA:

"We've talked to Sarah and that's something we're going to hold off on until later in the season. We have a big Angel cast, and it's bigger now that we have Spike involved. We have a lot of people to service before we start falling back on the guest star syndrome."

He went on to explain just why he decided to add Spike to the mix:

"Well, that's what makes the show interesting. Those two are both vampires with souls, yet they couldn't be more different and they tend to bring out the worst in each other."

Click on the link above for the full interview.