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Alba still at the helm as ‘Angel’ starts new season
By Ian Spelling

DARK ANGEL blasted onto the scene last year with tremendous hype.

DARK ANGEL for those who don’t regularly watch, unfolds in 2019 and follows the travails of Max Guevara (played by Jessica Alba), a genetically enhanced woman who collaborates with a freedom fighter Logan Cale (Michael Weatherly). Max struggles to stay a step ahead of the government that created and trained her.

Most of the advance hoopla panned out. DARK ANGEL benefits from the post-apocolyptic touch of executive producer James Cameron, known best for THE TERMINATOR, TERMINATOR 2, and TITANIC. Max handily crushes guys twice her size. And Alba, who handily crushes guys twice her size, has graced magazine covers ranging MAXIM to STARLOG and ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY.

But that didn’t guarantee that Fox would pick up the expensive show for another season.

“There were so many reasons why it wouldn’t be renewed and so many reasons why it would,” Alba said, “It’s just politics.”

And money? “Yeah, but most of it is politics,” the 20-year old actress said.

“There’s always money. But if you have a good story, you are going to have a good show. Even if our stories aren’t so good all the time, they’re good most of the time.”

In the end, Fox decided that the pros outweighed the cons, so the second season will begin Sept 21 with “Designate This.” The episode finds Max back among her fellow x-5 experiments – at Manticore, the sinister facility where scientists engineered Max from the DNA strands of various humans, felines, and other creatures, including the wife of Lydecker (John Savage), Max’s once –relentless pursuer and current ally.

“She goes through all this training again and sort of revisits her childhood nightmare,” Alba said. “Manticore gets destroyed because of Max. She lets everyone out and not all of them are OK. A lot of them are more animal than human.

“It’s actually almost like X-MEN,” Alba said. “We’ve also got another new villain, Martin Cummins (as Ames White, a young and ruthless Manticore baddie).

“You know, the audiences isn’t stupid. They don’t’ want to be placated. They want good, edgy, crazy adventure and science-fiction stuff. They don’t want this television pretend stuff. They don’t want things to be so impossible that they can’t grasp it. Otherwise, what’s the point? Hopefully we can provide what they want.”

A major story line that DARK ANGEL will deny fans for the better part of the second season involves the complicated relationship between Max and Cale. Even though Alba and Weatherly fell in love and recently got engaged, the real romance won’t seep into the show’s goings-on.

“No, not at all,” Alba said, sounding disappointed. “Our natural chemistry is what it has always been, but they’re desperately trying to keep us as far away from each other as possible.”