Characterization: Great-Awesome
Plot: Great
The first season of James Cameron's Dark Angel is a gripping season full of action, great world-building, and some great characters that the viewer can easily emphasize with. Even the main villains have great characterization and add to the experience. I've watched this show several times and having just recently re-watched it I decided to give it a review.
The main character, Max, is a genetically engineered "supersoldier" who escaped, along with twelve others, when she was a child. The show starts off by showing us the events of the night of the escape and then skips to show us her life in a post-apocalypse Seattle, where she is trying to fit in with everyone else, evade recapture, and find her fellow escapees who she sees as brothers and sisters. Despite all this, she's not a Mary-Sue, she has flaws that we see from the very first episode. On the moral side she is prepared to steal to pay the private investigator that's helping her locate the other escapees. On the physical side, she might be a genetically engineered superhero who can preform amazing feats, but there are also side-effects. Her body isn't able to produce the right amounts of a neurotransmitter, so if she doesn't take a supplement she has shaking fits and becomes almost helpless.
The world building is great, because it merges science fiction elements with elements of social commentary. Shortly after Max's escape from Manticore (the secret facility where the genetically enineered soldiers were kept) the Us was attacked with an electromagnetic weapon (usually referred to in the show as "the pulse") which changed the society and caused a lot of social problems. There's a lot more homelessness and poverty, shortages in many essential goods, and corruption runs rampant through the city. I won't go on for too long about this, but suffice it to say that this backdrop and the detail that's provided in the show makes for excellent world-building!
Most of the episodes have a new problem or bad guy that Max has to face, but the season also has an overarching plot related to Max's continued struggle against Manticore.
The final piece of awesomeness that I want to comment on is the wealth of interesting characters in the show. Max's friends don't work for everybody, but they definitely worked for me. I appreciated the variety of characters presented in the show and the fact that each character was given some room to develop, even when they were only there for one or two episodes they were well-written.
There wasn't really an episode that I didn't like in this series. Some awkward moments for sure, like the mirror scene between Max and Logan, but it's hard to complain about that when the rest of the show is so good. Some of the episodes I found a little bit spine-chilling, like the episodes with the red series soldiers and the one with Diamond, but I absolutely loved them for it! (I just avoided watching them at night, lol).
I would highly recommend watching this first series of Dark Angel to all lovers of speculative fiction!
No comments:
Post a Comment