Michael Weatherly is back in the NCIS fold, reuniting with Cote de Pablo for NCIS: Tony & Ziva. It’s a welcome return for the fan-favorite character, who left the flagship show in 2016. But Weatherly made his mark just prior to his debut as Tony DiNozzo in the JAG two-episode special that served as the backdoor pilot for NCIS, in a series that also launched the career of Jessica Alba: Dark Angel. It’s bizarre, it’s mysterious, it’s sci-fi, and it’s created by James Cameron. And Weatherly’s performance in the series earned well-deserved plaudits all around.
James Cameron Follows Up His Massive Hit ‘Titanic’ With ‘Dark Angel’
The success of Titanic proved that James Cameron was not to be underestimated, making a mockery of naysayers who proclaimed that the budget overruns and delayed release dates would make the film a bigger disaster than the 1912 sinking of the Titanic itself. So the world was anxious to see how Cameron would follow up what was the biggest box office success of all time. They didn’t have to wait for long, with Cameron announcing his next project would be Dark Angel, a science-fiction television series produced by Cameron/Eglee Productions, the company he formed with Charles H. Eglee.
The series, influenced by the manga Alita: Battle Angel, was centered around the idea of a genetic construct, Max, who “looked normal on the outside but was different on the cellular, genetic level.” Max would be another in Cameron’s long line of strong female characters, alongside the likes of Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, and Cameron and Eglee expanded the show’s concept from there. It evolved into a series set in the (then) future of 2019, in a dystopian Seattle where a genetically enhanced runaway supersoldier, Max, who escaped from a covert military facility, tries to keep under the radar to elude government agents by taking on the guise of a normal young woman. With a basic premise in mind, the search was on for a young actress to play Max, and, after considering over a thousand actresses for the role, they landed on Jessica Alba.
James Cameron’s Twisted Sci-Fi Series ‘Dark Angel’ Takes Shape
With their Max cast, Cameron and Eglee fleshed out the mythos of Dark Angel, starting the series off in 2009, where the supersoldier they conceived is a nine-year-old named X5-452 (Geneva Locke) who escapes from Manticore, a secret U.S. government institution where she and a handful of others were trained from birth to be soldiers and assassins, along with eleven other X5s. Flash forward to 2019, where X5-452, who has taken to calling herself Max Guevara, searches for the other eleven Manticore escapees in a dystopian United States, dramatically weakened by an electromagnetic pulse weapon set off by terrorists on June 1, 2009 that destroyed most of America’s computer and communication systems.
Also on the search for those escapees is Manticore. They’re desperate to recover their lost assets, a task they entrust to Colonel Donald Lydecker (John Savage), forcing Max to undertake her own search on the down-low. But she gains an ally in Michael Weatherly’s Logan Cale, a wealthy cyber-journalist who, under the alias Eyes Only, aims to fight and expose the corruption that has run rampant post-Pulse. He needs her help to fight his noble battle, and she needs his help in finding her Manticore brothers and sisters. Dark Angel takes off from there, following Max and Logan as they fight crime and find other X5s week after week.
‘Dark Angel’ Succeeds on the Strength of Michael Weatherly and Jessica Alba
Fox heavily promoted the pilot and was rewarded with a whopping 17.4 million viewers, making it the second most-watched new show of the week (aided by its launch as counter-programming to presidential debates the same night). The first season, which was largely episodic stories detailing Max and Logan’s fight against various forms of government corruption (and Lydecker’s borderline-obsessive search for his “children”), may not have held on to those numbers, but still fared well, ending the season with an average of 10.4 million viewers, good enough to land the number 59 spot on Entertainment Weekly’s rundown of the year’s top 150.
The relatively straightforward nature of the first season helped, with viewers able to drop in with a general knowledge of the premise without getting lost, and the series was embraced by the coveted 18 to 24 demographic. But the steady decline in viewership from that initial high prompted the questionable decision to move the series to a new time slot, Friday nights; and bizarrely retool the series by killing off Lydecker, replacing him with an ancient secret society, convinced that Max is part of their prophecies, and introducing a Manticore-bred horde of animal-human hybrid super-soldiers. The second season tanked, but, nevertheless, a third season was approved by Fox, only for the network to reverse their decision and cancel Dark Angel only two days later. As noted in Science Fiction Television Series: 1990-2004: Histories, Casts, And Credits For 58 Shows, James Cameron said: “I was pissed!”
However, through the ups and downs of both seasons, the work of both Alba and Weatherly serves as the series’ strength. Together, the pair play off one another well, a will they/won’t they chemistry that is off the charts, undoubtedly bolstered by their ill-fated romance offscreen. It’s a dynamic that works, almost well enough to overlook the absurdity of the second season (and, to their credit, Alba and Weatherly are committed to it). Ironically, that dynamic is one of the reasons why the series doesn’t work, especially in that second season. Because so much was made of the sex appeal of both Alba and Weatherly and their chemistry, there’s an inherent laziness in the writing, seemingly banking on it to gloss over weaknesses in the script and to sell the outlandish plot devices.
But that chemistry only works in the first place thanks to their individual performances, and, arguably, Weatherly has the harder go of it. Yet he plays the lead perfectly, ceding to the breakout star of the series when needed and stepping up when it’s his turn to shine. So if you want to see where Weatherly pulls his heroics as Tony DiNozzo from, you would be wise to check out his work as a wheelchair-bound hero in a dystopian future in Dark Angel – and stick around for Alba, too.
