The one thing that would make me want to throw things at the screen more than Darla staking herself so Connor could be born would be Tim Minear's original idea of Angel doing it. Apart from my personal issues with pregnancy and lethal complications I think my big problem is that the whole thing is written as Angel's story not Darla's. Buffy death scene in The Gift makes me uneasy because I can see the similarities to Darla's (otherwise it's standard epic narrative made infinitely more interesting by S6) but Buffy *is* the protagonist which makes it bearable and Dawn isn't asked to carry the burden of her parent's hopes the world can forgive them but to just to live in it.