Dark Angel - Season 1

I bought this Season One DVD set of Dark Angel brand new during a sale on Amazon.com for $14.99. I simply could not pass on such a great deal for a 6-disc DVD set. I had never seen this show when it aired on television and the only thing I knew about it was that James Cameron (Aliens, Titanic, The Terminator) created it. With his name attached, I figured it had to be good.

Dark Angel is set about twenty years into the future and stars Jessica Alba as the result of a military genetic experiment who escaped from her captors. She was part of a secret government program where children were genetically modified to be superhuman fighters and they were kept like prisoners in a military training school. When the children got to be in their young teens, they rebelled against the school and made a daring escape. Only a few of them actually made it outside the compound, and Alba's character was one of them.

In the future portrayed on this show, terrorists set off an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) device that essentially wiped out all debt records and personal information. For Alba's character, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it allowed her to easily disappear. Throughout the show, the military leaders at her old school are on the hunt for her and other escapees, but the EMP attack makes that search nearly impossible for them. In this future, corruption runs rampant and the police seem like they are all on somebody's payroll. Times are tough, but a rogue underground news network regularly hacks into the government television networks to inform the people of various conspiracy theories. When Alba locates the leader (Michael Weatherly) of the network, not only does she develop a love interest, but also an excellent cohort in her plan to find out what happened to all her brothers and sisters from the training compound.

The premise of the show was fresh and original, but the show itself never got me interested enough to want to keep watching. I've owned this set for about a month now and have only seen the first four episodes, including the double length pilot. From the beginning, the pilot episode failed to get me invested in the show. It was just a too slow and uneventful. I watched three more episodes hoping that it would get better, but it never did. The main thing that failed to catch my interest was the whole sassy teenager act from Alba's character. She rarely ever smiles and walks around with a scowl through most of the show. I know she has a dark past and has plenty of reasons to be angry, but the impression I got was that she was just another teenager with too much attitude. I could not get into the character.

If anything, this series served as a launching point for Jessica Alba's career. She is drop dead gorgeous and has a unique ethnicity that gives her a very broad appeal. Alba has several big movies already lined up for the future, including Sin City and The Fantastic Four. In the future, when she becomes a big star, people will probably look back on this series the same way people look at Tom Hanks and think of his show Bosom Buddies or Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy.

James Cameron often uses strong female characters in his creations. Look at Ripley in Aliens and Sarah Connor in The Terminator. What set those roles apart was that the women were older and more credible. Cameron is credited as a writer on the pilot episode and he directed one episode, but after that I am not sure how much involvement he really had with the show. I did notice a few cheap rip-offs of his signatures, like filming feet as people climb out of vehicles or run. I think if he had a more active role in this show, the results would have been a lot better. This has, so far, been the only thing he ever created that I didn't like.

Dark Angel combines many different elements from many other superior stories. I have read that this show does get better in later episodes, but I don't have the patience to find out. I've already watched the first five hours worth of shows and it hasn't hooked me. If I had started watching this when it aired, I probably wouldn't have even sat through the entire pilot. No wonder the DVD set was on sale for so cheap.