DARK ANGEL SEASON 1 PROFESSIONAL

Zack’s gone, his memory wiped and living in the countryside most of the X5’s are either dead or gone, the second season moving onto Alec (the twin of season one’s murder-y X5, and a typical Swaggerific Pretty Boy), X7’s (hive minds!), and the “freaks” of Sandeman’s and Manticore’s experiments, half-animal creatures that only made Dark Angel feel more like silly camp, than one of television’s finest action shows. In a move that feels pulled right out of a cheap Buffy knockoff, suddenly Max’s partner is young Kevin Durand in a dog mask, the first creature created by a man we didn’t know existed for the entire first season. Season two? Not so much: all of a sudden, Dark Angel becomes a show about a woman being hunted by nefarious men (Ames White in season two, after John Savage was poorly written off the show to cut costs), and the key to some evolutionary puzzle the “Sandeman” was trying to solve.

DARK ANGEL SEASON 1 PROFESSIONAL

It had it all lots of awesomely over-the-top John Savage, a fun occasional sidekick/big brother in Zack, a romantic story between the two leads that wasn’t totally unbelievable, Jam Pony characters like Herbal Thought… the first two dozen episodes of Dark Angel tell a very succinct story of cat and chase between Lyedecker and Max, exploring what it’s like to have possibly the worst family ever, a group of potentially violent brothers and sisters, led by a patriarch whose conflicting professional interests and personal affection for his “children” made him as unstable as the teenagers he’s chasing around throughout the entire first season.

Throughout its first season, Dark Angel was a show concerned with setting and characters however clumsy they may be at adding to the show’s mythology and world, the first season utilizes Logan as Eyes Only to create this undercurrent of social justice, a government weapon fighting back against the post-pulse government that created her. Given how different they are, some might consider it unfair to determine which one is a “better” season of television – but I don’t, and the first season of Dark Angel kicks the second’s butt… and it’s not even close. Dark Angelis very much a tale of two different shows during its short run (which I’m writing about at Geeks Unleashed right now, I might add): the self-contained first season, which told the story of Manticore, and Max and her fellow X5’s dealing with real teenage life, and the second, which was a much more oddball, supernatural show, one with magic viruses, dog-people, and a whole lot of clues that Max is important (without giving us a lot of solid reason as to why).

Dark angel season 1