Headscratchers / Dark Angel

• Why did Lydecker not recognize Max in "Prodigy" when Sam was still working for Manticore?
  • It could be that Lydecker didn't have access to the twins. Which is backed up by him being absent in Alec's flashback. Also, Sam's mission started around the time the series did IIRC, so she wasn't hanging around Manticore all the time for him to see anyway.
    • But Sandoval worked with Alec, and he was subordinate to Lydecker. Also, it was originally going to be Lydecker in those flashbacks if the actor had been available, Lydecker was in charge of the twins assigned to the Phoenix project in The Eyes Only Dossier, and Alec recognized him in After the Dark. Even discounting these, it would be stupid of Manticore not to give pictures of the escapees' twins to Lydecker as they aged so that he would know what the escapees would look like. That's why this belongs in Just Bugs Me, because if it's not a continuity error, it's the result of stupidity.
    • Because the second series just isn't as good as the first. When you're throwing everything - including the kitchen sink - into the plot, you're bound to forget some important things.

• How did Alec manage to keep Rachel's locket?
  • Maybe Manticore doesn't do cavity searches when its soldiers come back from an assignment.
    • You're forgetting this was when he was brought in by force. He never had the locket before that.
  • Or the writers just don't give a shit about these details.
  • Knowing Manticore and their love for mind games, it's possible someone was aware that he took the locket and just let him keep it as an ever present reminder of what happens when he defies protocol.
  • Knowing the way Alec worked the system when he was in Manticore, maybe he traded some of his hoarded 'vitamins' for it.

• Why did Max recognize Jace in "Female Trouble" but not Zack in "411 on the DL"?
  • Generally speaking, male faces (and voices) change more through puberty than females, so it's possibly that. Or it might have simply been attitude. Zack presented himself as a cringing lackey when he first showed up in that episode, while Jace didn't.

• What happened to Max's seizures and heat cycle in Season Two? If Manticore fixed those, it should have been stated onscreen. The heat cycle at least might not be something that always happens once or twice a year despite recurring like that in Season One, but the seizures were always a potential threat.
  • Either the seizures and heat happened off-screen, the "fixing" was done off-screen, or more likely, the writers decided it wasn't interesting anymore and gave up on the ideas.
    • The novel Skin Game mentions that Max still struggles with going into heat twice a year and still needs tryptophan, but that leads to different Just Bugs Mes. It would be a prime storytelling opportunity to have Max go into heat around Alec, since a male X5 would probably be ultra-receptive to a female X5 in heat. One is reminded of the largely dropped love triangle idea, and wonders what the original storyboard of "Radar Love" might have been like. It would also be a prime storytelling opportunity to see Alec have seizures, exposing a vulnerability beneath the devil-may-care facade.
  • In a somewhat related note, how does the whole tryptophan thing work? If you can't make serotonin because you don't have the enzymes, overloading your system should just make you sleepy.
    • I'm sure they wouldn't be alive if they couldn't make serotonin, all that's been stated is that they're deficient.
    • I don't know exactly what the mechanism is, but if you google tryptophan and seizures then you can see that there is some scientific basis for it, which surprised me given the loose treatment of science.
• It makes no sense for Alec to tell Max "you're just a girl" in "Fuhgeddaboudit", because he's trained with female X5s his whole life, in a gender-undifferentiated environment, and knows they're just as dangerous as the males. Not to mention having faced Max twice before this. I think this is a case of the episode writer forgetting that the character does not have a typical background.
  • Max and Alec are always mocking each other, not so surprising he'd do it when fighting her in front of a crowd.
    • But it doesn't make sense as something he'd even think to say.
    • He has been trained in psychological tactics at Manticore, he will know the basics of what makes people angry, and what the crowd expects. He's there to put on a show, after all.

• If Manticore can resurrect Zack after he put a bullet in his brainpan, why is Ben's snapped neck going to stop them?
  • Who says it did? Why do you think Lydecker was so adamant to leave Max for them to take? They'd done it before.

• Why is this series endorsing underage drinking? I know the legal drinking age in Canada, where the show is shot, is 18. But the series takes place in America! Max would have only turned 21 towards the very end of the show (possibly after), making it illegal for her to be drinking in (almost) EVERY EPISODE. This goes for all of her Manticore siblings, too, who were approximately the same age. I'm just going to ignore the other characters, and assume that they are slightly older.
  • Showing someone underage drinking through Fridge Logic =/= "endorsing" underage drinking. You're making a much bigger deal out of it than it should be.
  • Besides, the show takes place in a post-Pulse US a decade or so later, with sector passes and a thriving black market. Either the law could have changed by then, or the characters don't feel the need to follow every law in broken(ish) country with a semi-corrupt government. After all, Max steals for a living and squats in her apartment. It really says more about the world she lives in than about what real-life young adults should do.
    • Exactly, it would be very out of character for rebellious Max to be terribly concerned about legal drinking age. As for her being able to buy drinks at Crash - it doesn't exactly look like the most reputable bar. Her buying and the bar selling are both Truth in Television, not an endorsement.

• Why do Lydecker and Manticore have such a hard time finding the rogue X5s if their body temperature is above average and they are easily spotted using heat sensors? If it had been established early on it would make perfect sense considering all their animal DNA and high metabolism (if limiting plot possibilities), but added so late in the series just makes Manticore seem ineffectual and stupid.
  • Potentially because using heat scanners on the whole of America (the world? Who knows how far they could have got) is impractical, but once there were a huge number of transgenics on the loose and mostly concentrated in Seattle, it is worth it. The risk of arresting someone running a high fever in Season One, and then exposing Manticore, is far greater than by Season Two when the cult-controlled feds are pretty much ready to kill anyone they have to.

• This isn't about the show itself, but it Just Bugs Me: Someone wrote in the Goofs section on the IMDB page for the episode "Gill Girl" that it was an "error" for the gill people to breathe water, which would make them fish, and also echolocate, which would make them mammals (dolphins). They are Mix-and-Match Critters for crying out loud!!! They have the DNA of both fish and dolphins! At least it's been removed since then.

• Why doesn't Max tell her friends that she has a neurological disorder requiring tryptophan supplements? Don't give me any bull about how it's "maintaining her cover"; for all they'd know it's just a disease, like diabetes or something. In the episode 'Flushed' she tells her prison buddy that she's known for all of five minutes about her problem. Why not her friends? Logan tells Original Cindy about it in the same episode, no consequences. After Max had to borrow the rent money to buy pills, why not say, when confronted, "Hey, you know that disorder I have that could kill me? I needed the money to stay alive." At the very least, she should tell her friends after they've flushed her pills so they wouldn't do it again! This episode was based on such a flimsy premise; none of the events would have happened had anyone acted with reason as their motivator instead of plot.
  • Pretty much just to fuel the plot (there are weirder things not mentioned that would be really helpful) but possibly because they'd previously seen her taking supplements and assumed it was just vitamins and such: the availability of basic foodstuffs does seem sketchy at various points and they're all probably five minutes from scurvy. There would be no need to explain it further from the assumption that she's just trying to keep healthy.

• The whole breeding partner thing in the first episode of Season 2 makes no sense. Manticore could easily have extracted sperm and eggs from the X5s and combined them into embryos that would then be implanted in surrogate mothers; there was no need whatsoever to make the X5s have sex with each other and render the females unsuitable for combat due to pregnancy. The only semi-reasonable explanation I can come up with is that after the destruction of the DNA Lab, Manticore's sponsors withdrew so much of the funding that Manticore can no longer afford to hire surrogates. And that still feels like a stretch. Even then, actual sex wouldn't be required, just artificially inseminating the females with the males' sperm.
  • Possibly so much lab equipment was also destroyed that they just didn't have suitable equipment for any IVF procedures, along with the lack of surrogate mothers.
  • Maybe Renfro is just twisted and enjoyed the thought of making the X5s breed like chattel rather than using artificial insemination.
    • Sadism would also explain why she assigned Max to breed with the clone of the brother she had to mercy-kill.

• When does Logan move apartments? In several episodes, he lives in the penthouse, on the top floor. Then, on the day he decides to kill himself, water drips from the apartment above and he investigates to find his elderly neighbour there, having fallen running a bath. This miraculously restores his will to live, but the apartment is still the top floor in later episodes!

• Logan's Eyes Only broadcasts keep his identity secret by showing only his eyes - which should include his retinal patterns, which are unique to each person.

• For all that they're being hunted by a black ops division of the American government/military, it seems none of the escaped X5s got the idea that they might be safer in another country. It could be that the security at the borders and airports is much tighter post-Pulse, but still.