> I've watched Dark Angel a number of times and, while I like a lot of
things
> about it, it just doesn't grab me at the gut level. Maybe it's because
the
> backdrop story seems kind of flat- a vaguely authoritarian government with
> the required secret conspiracy of evil scientists doing their experiments.
>
> Maybe I admire the pure absolute moral backdrop underlying the Buffy/Angel
> battles, much as Xena has the whole backdrop of pagan & Christian myths to
> play against.
>
Don't like DA as much as Will N Grace (natch), but I still like it. One of the things that's appealing to me about Buffy is precisely the goofy, ironic element to it all. High school as gothic horror makes it much easier to play off the contrivance of it all. Some of the pretentious post-apocalyptic stuff in DA needs an ironic element.
DA has the virtue of representing a heroine who is sorta involved with a guy (he can't get it up symbolically or literally, b/c he's paraplegic) and sorta committed to a girl (Original Cindy); a few weeks ago, Angel had this little "coming out" scent to Cin, in which she confessed to being a genetic mutant with superpowers and a bar code on her neck (the allegorical reversals here were pretty heavy, but okay). Angel asked Cin if it changed anything; Cin says it changes everything. And then says she says she's committed to her for life. "You're my boo . . . " Cin says. It was cool. It was nice to think of all my presumably hetero male students all getting hardons without quite knowing why. (Jessica Alba as TV lesbian . . . who still likes boys.) But then, that's my fantasy . . .
Christian