From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V3 #104 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Saturday, June 16 2001 Volume 03 : Number 104 Today's Subjects: ----------------- da/synopsis [meredith ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 01:19:00 -0400 From: meredith Subject: da/synopsis Hi, Since there has been nothing but positive feedback for discussing _Dark Angel_ here, I hope nobody minds if I jump in to get things going. It looks like a quick rundown of the story so far is in order, so here we go. SPOILERS FOR SEASON ONE FOLLOW The story is set in 2019, ten years after an apocalyptic event known as "The Pulse", when terrorists set off an electromagnetic pulse in the upper atmosphere over North America which wiped every computer in the land. This crippled the entire economy, and as the opening teaser of each episode states, "America became a third world country overnight". Just before the Pulse, a group of genetically-engineered children escaped from the Wyoming facility of the government group that bred them, Manticore. The children have been built to be the perfect soldiers, with not completely human DNA. They can see farther, hear better, and run faster than anyone else. They are also much smarter, have much more stamina, and don't need to sleep. Each child is identified by a bar-code tattooed onto the back of their neck. The Pulse occurred just after their escape, and in the anarchy that followed it was easy for the children to disappear. The title character is one of these escapees, known to her peers as Max. It is ten years later, and she has found her way to Seattle, where she makes her way as a bike messenger by day, black-leather-clad cat burglar on a motorcycle at night. No one knows her past, nor what a special individual she is. She wears her hair long, to conceal the bar code on the back of her neck. Despite her efforts to find them via a private investigator, she doesn't know whether any of her brothers and sisters are, nor even if any of them survived; all she knows is that she has to remain underneath the radar so she won't be found herself. She knows that Colonel Lydecker, the Manticore operative in charge of the breeding program is after her, and she has to keep one step ahead of him at all costs. Her friends are all fellow bike messengers at Jam Pony, an outfit run by an always annoying and acerbic pencil-necked geek named Normal. Original Cindy is her closest friend (and, as the season goes on, her roommate), a black lesbian who takes no crap from anybody (and refers to herself in the third person more often than Bob Dole ever did). Sketchy is the resident dumb jock whose brain resides in the lower portion of his anatomy. Herbal is from Jamaica, and speaks with such a broad patois that it's almost impossible to understand a word he says (he's even worse than Boomhauer from _King Of The Hill_, if that reference means anything to anyone). The post-Pulse society is very dark and dank: the US is under martial law, and most people live in abject poverty, as a deep depression has overtaken what's left of the economy. Max makes a decent living only because she steals from the rich at night. She, like most everyone else squats in the ruins of a downtown high-rise, paying off the local beat cop to keep him from kicking her and her fellow residents onto the street. There are police checkpoints on every other block, and surveillance is everywhere, most obviously in the form of hovering pods that contain cameras transmitting directly back to the police. (Later on in the season, these pods gain a new enhancement: little machine guns that can conveniently take out whomever the authorities want gone.) In all of this there is one voice of freedom: an individual known only as Eyes Only, who interrupts television broadcasts to report to the masses the truth about the world they're living in. As may be surmised by his name, all you can see of him during these broadcasts are his eyes, and his voice is altered. In the pilot episode, interspersed with flashbacks showing Max's life in and escape from Manticore, cat-burglar Max breaks into the penthouse apartment of the wealthy Logan Cale. He catches her, and she discovers that he is the elusive Eyes Only. She gets out of there as soon as possible, but he tracks her down and lets her know that he has information that could help her find her siblings. She doesn't want to join his crusade, but she ends up realizing that he's the only chance she's got. He ends up getting shot in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down. Months later, he tracks down Max again to see if she'll change her mind about joining him, and when he offers her a little quid pro quo -- information on Zack, her brother who was the leader of their group -- she agrees to help him so long as he helps her put together the puzzle of her past. And then we're off to the races. Over the course of the season, a few major things occur: - -- Vogelsang, the private detective Max had hired to find her siblings gets killed by Lydecker. - -- Logan is on a constant crusade to get the use of his legs back. After an episode where he is near death and only a blood transfusion can save him, Max sneaks into his hospital room and hooks herself up to him, because all of the Manticore kids are universal donors. (The scene that follows is just ripe for Don's interpretation, so I'll leave that to him. :) A few episodes later, Logan starts to notice that he's regaining feeling in his feet. He ends up seeking out a former Manticore doctor who determines that the special stem cells in Max's blood that are responsible for her superhuman healing ability are healing his severed spine. This ends up to be a false hope, but by season's end he has built (with the help of a quadriplegic gadgethead genius friend of his) a set of robot legs that allow him to get up out of his chair. - -- Max finds quite a few of her siblings, most notably Zack (played by William Gregory Lee, a.k.a. Virgil in this past season of _Xena_), who shows up in quite a few episodes. - -- We learn several interesting things about the Manticore kids, such as: -- Several, including Max have a problem linked to their ability not to sleep, which causes the level of serotonin in their brains to suddenly drop, throwing them into uncontrollable seizures. Max must constantly keep a supply of serotonin pills on hand (*very* expensive on the black market) to keep these seizures at bay. -- The bar codes cannot be removed. Even if the tattoos are lasered off, within a few days they reappear. -- In some cases, the mental conditioning the Manticore kids went through cannot be surmounted, and given the right trigger, even the most assimilated escapee can revert to a mindless killer. -- Max's enhanced vision is thanks to feline DNA spliced into her genetic sequence. An unintended side-effect of this is that, like a she-cat, she goes into heat three times a year. (Two separate episodes focused on this, and the second one was one of the funniest things I saw on TV this year. It was also one of the darkest episodes, and one of the best the series has produced to date.) -- A child produced from the union of a Manticore product and a normal human being will exhibit some of the Manticore traits, such as enhanced intelligence and memory capacity. - -- Lydecker, the Big Bad, becomes more and more sympathetic as the season goes on. In the last few episodes his boss is introduced, Madame X (played with evil glee by none other than Major Kira herself, Nana Visitor), and she makes Lydecker look like a Boy Scout. By the finale we see that she is the real villain here -- we're not entirely sure what her motives are, but it's clear that Lydecker needs to be out of the picture, and all of "his kids" with him. Suddenly, he's the only one that can keep Max and her siblings free. (Needless to say, this is hard for Max et al. to swallow.) How does it all end? Well, Max ends up back in Manticore, kept alive after a supposedly fatal gunshot wound (administered by a clone of herself that is the same age as she was when she escaped) only by Zack's heart, transplanted into her after he kills himself to save her. The only person who knows this is Madame X: Logan thinks she's dead, and is coping with her loss. Lydecker appears to think she's dead too, though we're not completely clear on that. All this caps a brilliant episode that makes you completely believe that it all ended up okay, before the horrible truth comes rushing in in the final five minutes. It's already been a long summer. :/ Overall, the writing is very solid, and the show really came together in the last half of the season. From the start they've done a great job with the world-building, though I personally have to chuckle whenever I see an outside shot that is so obviously Vancouver, when the setting is supposed to be Seattle. :) (Gee, I didn't know the Vancouver Art Museum is destined to be the Seattle headquarters of Manticore in less than 20 years! ) Fortunately for the show's producers, enough of Vancouver is under construction right now to make the clusters of post-apocalyptic high-rises believable. The acting is pretty good too -- Jessica Alba capably pulls off the different aspects of her character, from seemingly-vulnerable gorgeous girl to totally kickass superchick. Michael Weatherly is fine as the brooding Logan Cale, who is so in love with Max it's driving him crazy. The two of them have some great chemistry -- not surprising considering that Alba and Weatherly are now engaged to be married (I'm telling the cynic in me to shut up about that one :). Bringing in Nana Visitor to play Madame X was a stroke of genius on the part of the producers. She's having *so* much fun with the role of the uberbitch. I hope they make her a regular next season. I also like the action scenes. They've taken quite a few pages from the books of _Xena_ and _Buffy_, and as such there is quite a Hong Kong element to it all, though it's managed to stay on this side of the "cheeze" line thus far. They've taken pains to explain exactly how and why Max can do the things that she does, so you don't have to suspend so much of your disbelief. Jessica Alba obviously does a lot of her own stunt work, too -- heck, she only just turned 20, I'll bet she's having a lot of fun with it. There is an excellent episode guide at http://www.darkangeltheseries.com/theseries/index.htm, which goes into great detail of each plot point for every episode of the season. I would highly recommend reading that for any episodes you might miss during the reruns this summer. I haven't kept any on tape, though with the more fortuitous scheduling this coming season, I will be able to starting next season. ======================================= Meredith Tarr New Haven, CT USA mailto:meth@smoe.org http://www.smoe.org/meth "things are more beautiful when they're obscure" -- veda hille ======================================= Live At The House O'Muzak House Concert Series http://www.smoe.org/meth/muzak.html ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V3 #104 *****************************