Angel Delight

Part One of Dreamwatch

James Cameron's DARK ANGEL is the first science fiction series to seriously kick ass in the US television ratings since STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION ended its seven-year run back in 1994, and now it's set to do the same on Sky One...

-- Jeff Bond sets the scene

The super-powered female has a long and successful tradition in series television, from the early karate-chopping days of HONEY WEST and Emma Peel on THE AVENGERS to the seventies heydays of CHARLIE'S ANGELS, THE BIONIC WOMAN and WONDER WOMAN. Such shows are win-win situations for viewers; woman can revel in their empowering visions of females on top, while men can ogle fabulous
babes in what often appears to be advanced fetish-gear.

After the Sarah Connors and Ellen Ripleys of the eighties, the nineties weren't so kind to the superwoman format -- XENA, WARRIOR PRINCESS excepted. But it's a new millennium now, and while CHARLIE'S ANGELS and CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON are kicking up a storm on movie screens, it's been down to James Cameron to bring empowered female warriors back to television screens. And tellingly, Cameron has done it by mixing the sober feminism of his TERMINATOR and ALIENS characters with the sexed-up Girl Power of a Britney Spears concert.

The result is DARK ANGEL, a weekly action series that's burning up the ratings on America's Fox Network and has recently premiered in the UK. Set in 2019, the show posits a future in which America has
been rendered an instant Third World country by an electromagnetic pulse set off in space by terrorists (hey, thanks for the idea, Jim!). "The Pulse" effectively wipes out all computer memory banks, destroying the economy and disrupting society. Now everyone seemingly has crappy jobs delivering mail and running errands, although communications systems like television and Orwellian snooping devices are operating just fine.

DELIVERY GIRL
In the series opener our heroine, Max escapes from a holding centre with a number of other genetically-engineered children. Years later she's a bike-mounted delivery girl working with a lot of other losers who occasionally take time out from their work regimen to view subversive "Eyes Only"
updates from an idealistic cyberjournalist - kind of like a rogue version of 60 MINUTES. The repressive government and this ghost in the machine rebellion owe a whole lot to the short-lived eighties series MAX HEADROOM.

DARK ANGEL trades heavily on Jessica Alba's panting sex appeal, dressing her up in tight black catsuits and lingering mercilessly on her seemingly inflatable, glossy red lips. Her undercover duties frequently require her to dress like a hooker, but she also gets to beat the stuffing out of numerous
linebacker-sized security guards and hit men, making her the modern equivalent of a feminist hero.

While not delivering packages Max does favours for friends and strangers delivering her own special brand of ass-kicking justice. Her motivation is ostensibly a search for the surviving genetically engineered children who are her brothers and sisters, but the real issue is that Max is just a superpowered saint.

Michael Weatherly plays the "idealistic cyberjournalist: Logan Cale, whose status as a paraplegic never once interferes with his dazzling good looks. Cale immediately cottons on to Max's secret status as a government experiment. Max is also being hunted by government agent Lydecker (John Savage), the man behind the "Manticore Program" that developed the genetically-enhanced tots from which Max originated.
Savage lets his cavernous, immobile face do the talking.which is just as well since, vocally, he seems capable only of doing a weak Martin Sheen impression.

In upcoming episodes, his obsession with the capture of Max intensifies and a more complex relationship between the two emerges. A chief playing card between the two opponents is Max's genetic brother,
Zack, who seeks out Max.

Realistic Notions
Max's nine to five job is one of the more realistic notions at work in DARK ANGEL (particularly when characters on SF shows like VOYAGER often seem to have nothing but leisure time.) although viewers may find it is a chore putting up with Max's colourful co-workers, including Original Cindy (Valarie
Rae Miller), a saucy lesbian who never lets the audience forget that she dates women - even though we never actually see her dating women; Herbal Thought (Alimi Ballard), a philosophical Jamaican; Sketchy (Richard Gunn), a goofball skateboarder; and dour boss Normal (J C MacKenzie).

If you've already sensed from the pilot that subletly wasn't the watchword when delineating these standards characters, you guessed right, although MacKenzie gets endless comic mileage out of his character's penny-pinching pettiness.

Of course, the key to the show is Jessica Alba's pneumatic, pouting sex appeal, and that's both DARK ANGEL's ace in the hole and its Achilles Heel. The show has taken off in the US almost entirely based on Alba's star power, and the sight of her drop-kicking thugs in black spandex and leaping up walls still packs a punch.

Interesting Foibles
Cameron and Charles Eglee (a veteran of ST ELSEWHERE and MURDER ONE) have taken pains to deepen the character with interesting foibles, from an addictive need for the amino acid triptophan (she gets the shakes when she gets low on the stuff) to strains of cat DNA that gives her both her SPIDER-MAN-like wall-walking ability and the tendency to go into heat.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take a media critic to note the show's tendency to find any excuse to get Alba tarted up like a $100-a-night hooker. And while Cameron and Eglee practically swooned over Alba's thespic capabilities in recent interviews, she has yet to prove she can give Max the edges she
needs to be more than just another Lynda Carter.

Not helping matters is the ongoing "will they/won't they?" romantic flirtation between Max and Logan Cale, which has resulted in some of the show's most egregiously corny and predictable moments.

DARK ANGEL's futuristic world at least makes a stab at believability with characters who exist in an economic Third World, but for all its attempts at detail, the show's predictions of urban fashions and slang (as well as its musical underscore by Joel McNeely) are painfully tied up in current hip
hop culture, meaning DARK ANGEL may wind up looking as dated as THE MONKEES a few years down the line.

For now, the show balances nicely against the blunt, realistic settings of THE X-FILES and FIRST WAVE and the more fanciful universes of FARSCAPE and VOYAGER. The show recently won a US People's Choice Award for Favourite New Dramatic Series and Fox has purchased a full season's worth of episodes, and prospects for renewal of the show for a second season look promising.

Whether Jessica Alba's Max is going to replace XENA as genre viewer's female star of choice, or whether the gritty, urban milieu of DARK ANGEL is doomed to eventually turn the viewers off in droves, remains to be seen...