That was what the episode felt like to me, too. It was really poorly explained, and maybe the writers actually *did* intend the curse to have genuinely been “temporarily broken.” Hard to say.

But with the previous lore of the show, what this episode *felt* like to me was that it’s not the soul itself fundamentally changing his personality and thoughts like an on-off switch or anything like that. It’s the guilt and empathy that it lets him feel that makes the difference to his behavior, and if he’s feeling blissful, he’s not thinking about others and he’s not going to regret his actions.

Angel feeling both actively gleeful and uninhibited (drugs) and angry (betrayal, and a ‘selfish’ uneducated request that fundamentally misunderstands everything about his existence) at the same time is *terrifying*... and this episode almost seems to indicate that that’s true with or without a human soul. That feels like a more nuanced story to me, at least—so I’m choosing to believe it, heh.