I mentioned in my review of Dark Angel's Second Season that the tone of the show changed a lot between seasons. I want to go into that in a bit more detail here. Be warned, though, spoilers abound, so if you haven't watched the show proceed at your own risk!
SPOILERS
Summary
Both seasons of this show are excellent, but they are very different in tone and focus.
Season 1 focused on Max's struggle to survive in Seattle without being caught. She was also searching for her fellow escapees and helping them stay out of Manticore's clutches. So it was really a personal journey. Max's friends were diverse and the show often took time to show us their own struggles and weave their stories in with Max's story. Logan's eyes only work also featured prominently in season 1 with almost every episode containing a job for eyes only or a cable hack.
Season 2 shifted focus onto the transgenics and their role in society. In this way Max's struggle and her story arc became a lot less personal and a lot bigger and more "save the world" style. Unfortunately, the focus shift also served to sideline a lot of the eyes only work and even when that was present it tended to be all about the transgenics and Manticore. Her friends also lost their prominence and instead of spending time with the jam pony crew we often found ourselves spending that time with Joshua and Alec instead. I like Joshua and Alec, I'm just saying it was different.
I think it was an excellent move to shift focus and change the status quo when it comes to Manticore, because otherwise the show could have become repetitive, and I think the way they connected the two seasons with the season 1 finale and then the first episode of season 2 was excellent. The things I regret most about the shift between the two seasons is that we spent less time exploring the really interesting consequences of the transgenics on the loose (the ones that were explored brilliantly in season 2's finale) and more time exploring pointless things like the goo-spitting lizard in Borrowed time and the vampire blood bank guy and so on. Below is my detailed comparison of the two seasons:
Max's "Normal" Friends
Season 1
Original Cindy
Sketchy
Herbal Thought
Kendra
Theo's Family
Private Detective - Voglesang
Season 2
Original Cindy
Sketchy
As you can see the list of Max's normal non-manticore related friends dwindled quite sadly. With the loss of Kendra and Herbal and Theo's family we lost a lot of the diversity that was present on the show. Also, in season 2 while OC and Sketchy were still there and featured prominently we spent less time with them and we didn't get to see them doing anything of their own, anything that didn't involve Max or another transgenic.
Eyes Only Work
Eyes Only is present and active in both seasons, but the shift changes from season 1, where he's fighting crime in general and going after many bad guys to season 2 where he just uses it all to help Max and the transgenics. Here's a list of the eyes only work that doesn't relate to Manticore from both seasons:
Season 1
Cordodiazepine Crisis
Named Bad Guys: Edgar Sonrisa, Mayor Steckler and Bruno Anselmo
Eyes Only protected a woman and her daughter so she could stand as witness against Sonrisa.
Logan worked with Bruno, the guy who shot him and put him in the wheelchair, in order to bring Mayor Steckler to justice as well.
Immigrant Smugglers
A ship's captain is taking people's money in exchange for smuggling them over the border into Canada, but instead of actually getting them there he throws them overboard!
Herrero
Logan finds an old journalist friend who has disappeared as a favor to the man's daughter. He tries to convince him to come back out of hiding/feels betrayed that the man abandoned his humanitarian missions for a quiet life. The journalist ends up dying and he sends Logan some evidence he'd been sitting on about some bad guys.
Hostage Crisis
Logan's journalist connections give him some weight with a millitant/terrorist group holding some hostages (Max included) at a genetics conference. Logan talks the leader into letting the women free and puts his own life at risk trading himself in for them.
City Riots - Police Brutality
Logan investigates the police shooting of several unarmed prisoners who had been arrested for protesting against police brutality after the pulse.
Human Smuggling - Kidnapping
Logan and Max investigate a smuggler who turns out to be kidnapping girls off the street and sending them overseas to be sold into prostitution.
Weapons Smuggler Pierpont Lemkin
Eyes only investigates a weapons smuggler Pierpont Lemkin and gets Max to steal some discs with info/evidehnce.
Synthedine
Max and Logan discover and bring down Synthedine, a pharmaceutical company that uses prisoners to experiment with diseases by tricking the prisoners into thinking they have cancer and then getting their permission to try experimental meds on them.
Hoverdrone Shootings
Logan investigates dead parolees who have been shot several times in the chest. The trail leads him back to his own family and the hoverdrones they manufacture and he gives up his fortune to do the right thing.
Season 2
S1W
The series starts off with Logan and Asha doing a job to get VAs their ration cards back from corrupt officials. Although Logan was doing this for the S1W it turns out he also wanted to get info about Manticore...
In a later episode a whole bunch of S1W members, including Asha get captured and Max has to save them with the help of another Transgenic.
China Town Deaths
Logan investigates deaths in China town as a favor to Matt Sung, but it's not long before Transgenics and Manticore come into it anyway.
Sector Police Murders
Logan investigates the violent murders of a bunch of sector police. Again, it soon becomes clear that a transgenic is involved in it.
Kidnapped Boy
Logan is helping a woman track down her missing son. It's not his usual type of work, but she's promised to make a donation to eyes only and he needs the money. It should come as no surprise that the whole thing ends up being related to White, Manticore, and the weird breeding cult that White's involved in.
Steelheads
We get brief hints that Logan is trying to investigate the steelheads "Eddy and his crew" who have been smuggling transplant organs out of the country, however, this soon becomes a story about Zack and there is no follow up or eyes only hack or anything.
As you can see from this list Season 1 is a lot richer in terms of Eyes Only missions. There are actually bad guys with names that have nothing to do with Manticore. There are also things that Logan investigates as a way of alleviating the suffering of the people and bringing them justice. In Season 2 it's all about Max and the Transgenics and even on the rare occasion that it isn't it ends up being sidelined or having something to do with the underdeveloped S1W.
Characters involved with Eyes Only
Season 1
Bodyguard in Pilot
Detective Matt Seung
Dr Beverly Shankar
Sebastian
Bling
Season 2
Detective Matt Seung
Dr. Beverly Shankar
Asha/S1W
As you can see from this list in Season 1 we were introduced to a new Eyes Only informant every few episodes, but in the second season not only did we not get many new informants, we also lost some of the characters that had been informants in season 1. Bling and Sebastian were great in season 1 because they were part of the show's wonderful diversity, but in Season 2 they were gone without explanation. It shows how little importance was given to eyes only in Season 2.
Max's Focus
Season 1
Avoiding Recapture
Finding Her Fellow Escapees
Finding Hannah - the woman who helped on the night of her her escape from Manticore
Finding out about her birth Mother (never resolved)
Helping Eyes Only
Season 2
Helping the Transgenics she let loose in the world
Helping Eyes Only (rarely)
Discovering her "destiny" and why people keep saying she's special
I think this is the biggest difference between the two seasons. Max went from being just a person who was trying to come to terms with her identity and survive in a post-pulse world to some kind of hero that had this big mysterious destiny she had to fulfill.
Re-Used Ideas
A few ideas from season 1 were reused in season 2. For example, the episode Two in season 2 has Joshua go through the exact same thing Max went through in Pollo Loco. Just like Max Joshua discovers his brother is killing people and ends up having to kill him to save lives/stop him from killing.
What's even worse is the reusing of the same plotline again and again in season 2. In the middle of the season it becomes almost a monster of the week kind of thing where Max finds a Transgenic being bad, has to save the world, angsts about the virus, rehash, repeat. It starts getting good again near the end when the Cult plot gets going, but it's sad that the third season was never made so all that foreshadowing and getting our interests and hopes up was for nothing. It would have been much better if they'd dispensed with some of the monster of the week episodes and moved the cult story along faster so we could have some resolution by the end of the season, but I can't really fault them for this since they thought they'd get a third season!
As you can tell from my ramblings above, I did like many things about season 1 more, but don't take this to mean I disliked Season 2. For all its faults and shortcomings when compared with season 1 it's still an amazing show that I've watched again and again and will hopefully continue to re-watch. I just noticed that there were many differences and wanted to analyze them a bit.
What did you think? If you read up to this point there must be something I said you don't quite agree with or something that you do agree with so let me know. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
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