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DARK ANGEL |
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Season Overview
Max - Jessica Alba Logan Cale - Michael Weatherly Lydecker - John Savage Sindy - Valarie Rae Millar Alec - Jensen Ackles Joshua - Kevin Durand 
OTHER DARK ANGEL SEASONS Season 1 OTHER ENHANCED PEOPLE SHOWS Now and Again Kyle XY Bionic Woman The Champions OTHER POST APOCALYPSE SHOWS Survivors (2008) Dark Angel Cleopatra 2525 Jericho The Last Train Logan's Run Planet of the Apes 
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Season OverviewSeason Two of DARK ANGEL goes off in a radically different direction from the first season by having genetically engineered super soldier on the run Max bring down the military organisation that created her and release all her fellow mutants out into the world. As many of them are specifically designed for certain theatres of warfare they don't look human and find it much harder than Max to fit into the post-pulse world. Into this new mix there is the addition of a new covert agency for Max to worry about. This time it's an ancient breeding cult who have created their own superpeople through generations of directed breeding. They have a plan that doesn't include transgenics and Agent Ames White is in charge of the operation to exterminate them. This means that he is in direct opposition to Max. It's one agency swapped for another, but it does have a better backstory, to the point that Max emerges as being some sort of chosen one needed to save the world. The products of the breeding cult are also fast and strong, giving Max people who are more of a challenge for her to beat up. There are also, however, the other transgenics. Admittedly, the second season's secret weapon is Joshua, played by Kevin Durand, a transgenic with canine DNA and the face to match, but who quickly becomes the most likeable character in the whole show. Also new is Alec, played by Jensen Ackles, who is back courtesy of being the twin brother of the character killed in Season 1. He's there to look good for the ladies, clearly after feedback from the first season. Jessica Alba returns int he lead role of Max and continues to be unconvincing as a total hard case. Easy on the eyes she might be, but a realistic super soldier she ain't. Her on-off relationship with Logan is kept mainly off by having her infected by a disease that will kill him should they ever actually touch. Unfortunately, this leads to far more moping around than is actually necessary. DARK ANGEL never got to season 3 and the reason is a total lack of consistency and sense in this the second season. It's occasionally dull, often merely average and never exceptional. TopDesignate ThisMax is back in the hands of Manticore, the government agency that made her the soldier that she refuses to be. Whilst they try to bend her to their will, she is looking for a way out. In the basement she meets the survivors of failed experiments and when she finally escapes she finds that even that can be manipulated to Manticore's benefit. It's time to fight back. That difficult second season starts and there are immediately some changes. The on-off relationship between Max and Logan is kept off by making her deadly to him through Manticore DNA manipulating, the facility is destroyed to release X5s, X8s and a whole bunch of Dr Moreau man-beasts onto the streets whilst Max has a new quest to follow up, locating the Doctor who might explain why everyone is after her. There's more action in this opening episode and it's clearly there to hook us back in. Unfortunately, the man-beast thing takes the whole show in a cartoony direction that really it could do without. Still, the new format is up and running and so let's see where it takes us. TopBag 'EmFollowing the meltdown of Manticore, the inmates are scattering far and wide and the hunt is on for them. When she finds out that the troops are using a morse code signal off a satellite to lure the escaped kids into ambushes, Max hooks up with the latest targets and determines to save them, even if it costs her own freedom. Help is at hand from a surprising source. Barely has Max said hello to her previous life than she's off again in search of the kids that she set free. She finds them pretty quick and the military find them and then there's some fairly nondescript action in which she is captured. A rescue is mounted with some nondescript action and she's free again. One thing that's upped the game in DARK ANGEL is the presence of Jensen Ackles (SUPERNATURAL) as Alec, an amoral X5 only out for himself, but who comes good at the end and who happens to be twin brother of Ben, an X5 that Max had to deal with in Pollo Loco. At least he comes good with bad grace and a certain amount of eye rolling at the wholly unnecessary sentimentality that creeps in and goes into overdrive at the last post sounds towards the end over sepia-tinted flashbacks of 'soldiers who didn't make it'. Ugh. He's a fun character and Ackles is clearly having a good time playing him. He certainly helps the fun factor. TopProof of PurchaseAlec manages to get himself captured by the bad guys, but then manages to cut a deal. If he kills them three of his own kind then he gets to stop the tiny bomb that is set to blow off his brain stem in less than 24 hours. He has only to supply the barcode from the back of their necks as proof. With time running out, his best targets are Max and Joshua. There's a lot more plot in this episode, making it a more satisfying one. Apart from Alec's need to kill his own kind and the will he/won't he dilemma there is Joshua the man-beast's search for his 'father', Logan's search for a cure to the virus that means he and Max can never touch and Lydecker's discovery of more information about Max's background and what it is in her DNA that makes her so important to the powers that be. Unfortunately, none of it is particularly believable. Logan's been cured of the virus so shouldn't he have antibodies by now? There's never any real doubt as to which way Alec is going to go and Joshua just requires more suspension of disbelief than the show can manage. TopRadar LoveIn Chinatown, people are dying a horrible death from a mystery disease. A disfigured transgenic has also been spotted in the area. Logan tries to enlist Max's aid in finding him, but she refuses to believe that he is necessarily the cause of the plague and it turns out that there might be darker forces at work after all. This turns out to be a rather nasty little episode with emphasis on a disfigured Manticore cast off and the horrible effects of the killer virus. The 'freak-show' nature of this second season with its failed Manticore experiments is constantly teetering on the brink of exploiting the ick factor of the creations that it is lecturing against hating just because they are different. It's double standards if ever there were. On the other hand, the plot is nowhere near enough to fill out the running time and so we are stuck with Max and Logan's complicated love lives and some really tedious directorial flourishes that are there purely to get the thing stretched out to the hour running time. TopBooIt's Hallowe'en, but Max still won't let Joshua go out of his hiding place despite everyone thinking his face is a mask. She has to relent, however, when another Transgenic from Manticore loses his head, literrally. The body runs away, intent on carrying out its assassination mission whilst Max and a bunch of other Transgenics have to hunt it down and reunite it with the head. This is a very difficult episode insofar as it starts off OK, gets wierd, turns even wierder and is so far beyond belief that the audience almost switches it off because it is so far beyond believeable that it is just rubbish. There is a reason for this, of course, and one which is easily guessed at, but which undermines the whole thing because of a lack of originality to the point of banality. TopTooPolice officers are being attacked in the city and the perpetrator bears a remarkable resemblance to Max's friend Joshua. Logan and Alec go in search of the killer whilst Max learns that her dog-dna'd pal has a brother, a brother that he is not going to allow anyone to stop. Joshua is becoming the most likeable character in the whole show, but it still doesn't help the believability of the series that there are dog-men wandering around causing problems. The return of Alec (Jensen Ackles) back into Max's life is good for the female audience, but the plot is so obvious that everyone will see through it in the first few seconds and be able to predict everything that follows. TopSome Assembly RequiredThe steelhead punks that Alec got into trouble with a while back turn out to have a new member, Zack. Rebuilt with cybernetic implants and his natural repair mechanisms suppressed by drugs, he is working as a remote controlled thug, but Max rescues him, reawakens his humanity and starts the repair of his memories. Unfortunately, the partly-reconstructed memories lead him to believe that he and Max were in love and that Logan is a rival to be removed. Zack blew his brains out point blank and had his heart removed and yet he's back. Only a couple of hours in Max's company and he's back to almost perfect health and fitness. When someone can come back from that kind of damage then pretty much all the threat is removed from the show. When Zack killed himself for Max it was a shock plot twist, but that is completely undermined and the show drops another notch down the quality scale. TopGill GirlMax and Alec go to the help of some Manticore experiments in underwater combat. A girl is brought out of the sea by a trawler and proves to have gills. She is put on display in a nightclub in town and it is from there that they need to rescue her, but who is the man showing more interest in her than he should? This is an odd episode. It seems to be two stories stitched together with Hans Christian Andersen's story of the Little Mermaid being the only, and somewhat tenuous, link. When Logan gets sick it looks like it is the virus that Max carries in her body, but that gets transmuted into chicken pox, apparently by miracle. This has nothing to do with the story of the gill girl and the operation to get her out of custody. That makes it patchy and pretty much filler material. TopMedium is the MessageJoshua accidentally discovers the joy of painting and unexpectedly becomes the toast of the art world. When his latest oeuvre happens to contain the vital notes of the doctor trying to solve the Logan/Max virus problem he is forced to come out of hiding to get it back. Max and Logan, on the other hand, take on the case of their enemy's missing son only to find that he is part of a giant conspiracy dating back thousands of years and has a team of people that even Max's skills can't beat. So, the show comes up with an ancient cabal of selectively bred humans as the first really viable foes for Max to battle with. They are stronger, faster and don't have dna twisted all over the place. Exactly what their goals are and their involvement with Manticore remains a mystery, but one that will surely become unravelled over the rest of the series. Joshua, our favourite character, gets a fun but ultimately frivolous story with a nice ending to it. TopBrainiacWhen Logan's resistance friends are sold down the river to the security forces by someone within their own ranks, Max is introduced to another of Manticore's creations, a man who can process so much data that he appears to be able to predict the future. And the future that he has predicted is Max's death. Having created the ultimate soldier, it makes sense that Manticore would try and create the ultimate intelligence operative, a man who can put everything together to give an unstoppable tactical advantage, but also be almost invisible to enemy forces. Unfortunately, in order to shoehorn in the prediction of Max's death the idea is pushed too far. That he can give clues about a getaway in a place he's never been because he's seen maps, police callout time assessments and train timetables is one thing, but his being able to predict the exact manner of her death right down to the detail of what kind of building she's walking through and how she's walking, but can't come up with something like the identity of the mole in the resistance is quite preposterous. Fortunately, there's enough going on so that this doesn't completely ruin the episode, even though the ending is somewhat...predictable. TopThe Berrisford AgendaAlec has got some psychological problems. After freaking out a dinner party given by Joshua (perfectly understandable), he is spooked by a house he is delivering to and starts to have flashbacks to a time when he was a piano teacher, fell in love and blew somebody up. His Manticore past has come back to haunt him and it might just take his life as well. An undercover man gets himself inside the enemy's organisation by getting the boss's daughter to fall for him. Unfortunately, he also falls for the daughter and all of a sudden he is questioning the mission. This is the oldest cop story going and there is nothing here that adds anything to any previous telling. The flashback structure is more annoying than interesting narrative device and in the end there is only Joshua's dinner party to find anything fun about. TopBorrowed TimeMax thinks that she has developed a cure for the virus that is keeping her and Logan apart, but it turns out to be effective for only twelve hours. Unfortunately, another Manticore experiment is on the loose and stunning victims all over the city. Max races to the rescue, hoping to get the situation over as quickly as possible. This second season of DARK ANGEL has upped the wierd factor with the Manticore experiments with the likes of Joshua the man-dog and the last episode's mermaids, but the thing they come up with in this episode is by far the wierdest. It is also, by far, the least believeable and also the downright silliest. The creature is supposed to spit a paralysing goo on its victims, but it hardly needs to bother as they would have laughed themselves into incapacity before the goo was even needed. As to why it's doing what it's doing? It has something to do with dentists, but we'd really lost all interest by that point. TopHarbor LightsMax is shot whilst saving a young child from crossfire and ends up in hospital. Her blood sets off an alarm and the CDC virologists descend on the place whilst other agencies try to kill her off. Logan attempts to get her out, but he hasn't got a lot to work with. This is a much better episode in which several groups all dance around each other, each with their own agendas and Max caught up in the middle. You would have thought that Max might have quite liked the CDC taking a look at her blood to see if they could sort out the viral thing between her and Logan, but there is a nice scene with a killer nurse and then a game of cat and mouse in the abandoned upper floor. TopLove in VeinWhen a bunch of punks with barcodes start carrying out high profile robberies around the city, Max gets interested. When they turn out to not be Manticore, but rather kids with new tattoos, she gets confused. When she learns that one of Manticore's experiments has created a cult with these kids addicted to his blood like vampires, she gets angry. There is a lot of talk in this episode, which is clearly a story about the evils of drugs and how it enslaves the addicts to the suppliers. It's not a subtle subtext and it's not a subtle story either. For the most part it's not all that interesting either. The subplot with Joshua going out as a Jampony delivery rider with his face obscured by a cycle helmet is the most fun, but ultimately proves to be pointless. Much like the rest of the episode. TopFuhgeddabouditEyes Only gets a lead on the boss of the biggest crime family in the city, a boss that nobody has ever seen and who only goes out in disguise. Max's attempts to find out his identity are derailed by a woman from Manticore with the power to partially control minds and wipe out memory. As Max and Eyes Only struggle with the annoying gaps in memory and odd behaviour, they start to see through the woman, but not before Max and Alec are face to face in a cage fight. There is a lot of talk in this episode, which is clearly a story about the evils of drugs and how it enslaves the addicts to the suppliers. It's not a subtle subtext and it's not a subtle story either. For the most part it's not all that interesting either. The subplot with Joshua going out as a Jampony delivery rider with his face obscured by a cycle helmet is the most fun, but ultimately proves to be pointless. Much like the rest of the episode. TopExposureLogan gets a lead on the child that they lost to the breeding cult that is now Max's greatest threat. Together, they travel to a small town where the child is being held in a creepy boarding school. Max sneaks in, but is caught and held prisoner by a child who can restrain her with his mind. Mind you, she has the perfect distractions for that. The breeding cult are slowly coming out of the shadows to move more central to the plot in this second season. This story centres around their initiation ceremony, which is some old voodoo stuff with snakes' blood and painted faces. There's nothing very exciting going on and by the end of the episode when it is announced that something called 'The Coming' is, er, coming it is really hard to summon up the energy to care. TopHello, GoodbyeA brief touch puts Logan in the hospital with Max's virus. Alec can't be there to give him a blood transfusion because he's in prison for murders carried out by his twin brother Ben. Joshua steps up to save the day, and then has his day made when a blind woman appears on his doorstep and wants to be friends. Unfortunately, the breeding cult has stepped up its timetable and makes a move to expose all of the escaped mutants from Manticore. Everyone is going to have to make sacrifices to protect those that they love. There's a sense of the story coming together as the end of the season comes into view. Whilst still not quite sure what the final aim of the breeding cult is, they clearly have it in for the Manticore crowd and their move to bring the mutants out into the harsh light of day is a surprising and shocking one. Most powerful, however, is the story in which Joshua gets himself a girlfriend. The moment when he breaks up with her in order to protect her and she asks to 'see' his face with her hands and Alec steps in is one that is more moving than anything this show has produced yet thanks to the performance by Kevin Durand who shows that having a character as potentially ridiculous as a half-man half-dog mutant is not an excuse for being anything other than great. TopDawg Day AfternoonJoshua is driven to go and see his beloved blind Annie, a folly that leads to him being trapped in the sewers with her whilst the police close in on all sides. Max, Logan and Alec pitch in to try and save him, but the breeding cult have one last blow to land. This is a simple enough storyline - Joshua's in trouble, evryone tries to help. It's more focussed and more tense, without the outside distractions of Max's tortured love life, Jampony or even original Sindy. It also helps that the story revolves around Joshua, our favourite character in the show and now firmly the heart of the show. Without him we'd have stopped watching a long time ago. The sucker punch at the end isn't unexpected, but still hurts. TopShe Ain't HeavyA clone of Max, though not quite up to her spec, is recruited by White, the breeding cult's main agent, to infiltrate Max's life and capture her, something that is made all the easier as Max rejects her friends and plans to go on the run again. A second side to Max, one who has a life, husband and son. One who can teach her a few things and learn a few things from her. It's an interesting idea, so why is it such a dull episode? As we approach the end of the season we should be expecting far better than this. There isn't even much fun had with the potential misunderstandings nor the should-be-killer moment of Max fighting herself. TopLove Among the RunesThe transgenics are completely holed up now and venture out mainly to save the transgenics that they hear are under threat. A member of the breeding cult, a man driven mad by what he knows, escapes and ends up amongst them with the only clues as to why strange markings are appearing on Max's skin, markings that seem to point to her being someone very important indeed. It's the penultimate episode and as a result isn't very satisfying in itself, but sets up some kind of finale. There are still far too many answers left to find, but the word is out about Max's kind and the battle lines have been drawn. It could be an explosive finale, but this is just a damp squib. TopFreak NationJoshua and Mole are carrying out a routine pickup of a couple of transgenics, one whom is heavily pregnant, when things go pear-shaped and they are forced to take hostages in the Jam Pony headquarters. Max and Logan both break through the cordon to join them. A tense siege takes place with Ames White and the Breeding Cult deliberately escalating the situation so that they can send in a crack team of killers whose only aim is to wipe out everyone inside, transgenics and humans alike. It's an extended final episode and James Cameron comes back to direct it, which means that it's a whole lot better than most of what has gone before. Of course sieges are always a good source of tension for any TV show, but this adds in the killing team of the Breeding Cult so that the transgenics are faced with a very credible enemy. The sequence in which they move almost silently through the building towards the hiding transgenics is quality that the show hasn't been able to produce to this point. The fact that the fight that ensues descends into the WWF wrestler carrying out all trademark moves rather than indulging in a proper battle is disappointing, but it's still more, and better, action than almost all the other episodes added together. This was the last episode made and it leaves the story in a very interesting place with Max being the chosen one to save the world, the transgenics declaring themselves a separate nation by raising a flag and the whole of the police force encamped outside Terminal City, but the truth is that even this good final episode isn't enough to make us mourn its passing. Top |
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