[DRK] Gill Girl

TV Programme: Dark Angel
Season: 2
Episode: 8
Date I watched this episode: 26/12/2009
Time since I last watched this programme: 3 months, 26 days.

Moving on with my programme catch-up, I thought Dark Angel would be next as I wanted to save the "good stuff" for the end. However I was pleasantly surprised as this was an absolutely stunning episode and quite possibly the best episode of the season so far. Once again I'm glad to not see Joshua, who can pretty much ruin an episode. But that's not all - there were plenty of great things about this one.

It actually started off quite badly though. The "misdirection" with Logan being ransacked by his niece, was all a bit silly, and when I first saw the gill girl, I thought it looked like a very tacky special effect reminiscent of some of the other weird creatures we've seen this season. But after that, things did pick up.

Ames White is finally back in his first appearance since "Radar Love", an episode I watched back in 2008. His character is great in just the way he speaks about the Manticore escapees...using the neutral tense and so on, as if they were just machines. I suppose this is how he compartmentalises his emotions about the whole thing. We see him in one scene in the episode chatting cheerfully to his wife and son on the phone while the gill girl is in agony in the cage. He is quite a complex and interesting character.

The twist that the guy in the club was actually a "gill boy" and not one of White's men was a really unexpected one. I didn't see that one coming and was genuinely taken aback - which is a rarity for me these days as I tend to read so many spoilers. It also helped me to really feel for Max that she had just assaulted an innocent man.

The best sequence of the episode, unsurprisingly, was at White's base, which was cool in itself. Seeing Max and Alec working together for a change, scampering around the outside, and gill boy swimming through the vents, was just really smooth. Then when the alarms went off and things got chaotic, the quick reactions of these trained soldiers and what they chose to do was also cool - and they were always one step ahead of both me and Ames White.

Alec seemed a bit out-of-character in this episode. Previously he's only done things when there has been financial gain in sight. Here he proceeded on even though it was pretty clear that he had no chance of sleeping with the gill girl. Maybe he's just doing it for the thrill - this would seem to make sense but still it feels a bit strange.

The whole virus side-story seemed a bit pointless, but maybe it will be developed upon? All the stuff with the chapel and Max and her emotions was just irrelevant, but maybe I'm just not giving the show enough slack. Also the whole "eggs" scene was pretty pointless and we could have got that information in other ways.

In general though it was just a cool concept, well-written and well-executed. Seeing Max and Alec doing different things at the start of the episode and then teaming up was quite natural and the story flowed well, seeming generally natural without being predictable. Like I said, one of my favourite episodes of this season.