Cold Comfort (Max and Zack reunite with Brinn, but are they too late?)

Nitcentral's Bulletin Brash Reflections: Dark Angel: Season 1: Cold Comfort (Max and Zack reunite with Brinn, but are they too late?)
"She was designed to be the perfect soldier. She was trained as a weapon. But then she escaped. They came after her, and she knew they would never stop looking. She was lucky...a few months later, terrorists set off an electro-magnetic pulse that fried all the computers. The U.S. went from superpower to third-world country overnight. It was easy to disappear. Now she has an unlikely ally. Logan Cale, underground cyber-journalist and crusader. He wants to save the world, or what's left of it. She just wants to find the others like her. Together...who knows?"

Zack risks his life to tell Max that Lydecker's men have kidnapped Brinn, a fellow Chimera from Manticore. Max decides to save her, so she kidnaps Lydecker. Lydecker tells Max and Zack that he doesn't know who has Brinn. Logan uses his contacts and finds out that Lydecker is telling the truth. Major Jake Sanders, commander of Fort Xavier, is striking a black-market deal with the Chinese underground for Brinn's genetic code. Max and Zack take Lydecker to the fort, but he betrays them for a percent of Sanders' deal. When Max and Zack arrive at their cells, they find Brinn dying from a genetic anomaly that stimulates rapid aging. When Lydecker demands 50% of the sale, Sanders tries to kill him, but Lydecker kills Sanders first. Lydecker has his men invade the base, but Max and Zack are able to escape with Brinn. However, because Manticore is the only way to save Brinn's life, Max and Zack decide that the best thing to do is to leave her with Lydecker. As the episode ends, Brinn is healed, and Lydecker now knows what Max and Zack look like.

THOUGHTS
-Great episode, lots of info, great continuity and foreshadowing. Love it!

-Yeah, the Jam Pony plot was fun too!

-Great scene where Lydecker breaks his own finger to prove that Zack can't get information by torturing him.

FAVORITE QUOTE
"Oh, the sweet sound of gunfire. You guys go ahead and duke it out. We've got to split."
-Max to the soldiers.

NITS
-Why didn't Sanders' men get Zack at the same time as Brinn?

-What was the point of Max's little sexual mind games in her cell? They didn't work!

-Why does it seem like all the Chimeras are in Seattle? Shouldn't they be spread out over the U.S. ...even the world?

-Those soldiers in the cells must be deaf. They disobeyed a DIRECT ORDER from Lydecker. Plus, they take FOREVER to react when Max beats up the ones in the cell!

-How did Max survive the hanging in her cell? Even if she has a high endurance, she should've still passed out from the lack of blood to her brain.

*
-Brinn is dying of old age. She has wrinkles, gray hair, and arthritis. Then, at the end of the episode, we see that she's cured. But now she looks young again! I realize that there may have been a cure for her infected gene, and she could still be alive, but she should still be old, right? So...it looks like Lydecker's men have found the way to reverse aging! Perhaps that explains why Lydecker looks the same as he did in 2009?
By Brian Lombard on Wednesday, November 29, 2000 - 8:07 am:

Kudos to continuity. I was wondering if Lydecker would recognize Max's voice from the previous episode, and sure enough he did. Good job Lydecker. That speech he gave at the AA meeting was also pretty funny.


By D.W. March on Wednesday, November 29, 2000 - 12:45 pm:

I thought this was a pretty good episode. I found a few nits though.

Would a knife in the heart cause INSTANT death?

Obviously things change between now and then but I'm pretty sure that rogue US military units are impossible.

Lydecker's old buddy calls him a spook. He's not a spook. Special Operations would be about the closest thing to what he does.

When Max and Zack escape from the military base they also manage to get their coats back. Wasn't it nice of the bad guys to leave them nearby?

I missed the explanation for this one, if there was one: Lydecker goes to AA meetings just to tell people off?

I got the sense of some foreshadowing as well. I would imagine we haven't seen the last of Brinn.


By Brian Lombard on Wednesday, November 29, 2000 - 1:22 pm:

Lydecker's a recovering alcoholic. He went cold turkey, and thinks the 12-step program is a bunch of bull. He said it made him feel good about himself to see how small other people could be when faced with the same problem.


By ScottN on Wednesday, November 29, 2000 - 4:34 pm:

Would a knife in the heart cause INSTANT death?

IANAD (I am not a doctor), but it would cause massive bleeding, possibly cause major arhythmia, fibrillation, etc... He'd bleed out into his chest cavity in an EXTREMELY short time.

Oh, and Lydecker is a spook. He is definitely NOT special ops. Take it from someone who knows what Special Ops is and does.


By D.W. March on Wednesday, November 29, 2000 - 7:22 pm:

I'll take your word for it but Lydecker's job seems like a strange one. I don't know much about the chain of command in the US Military (and I learned most of what I know from Tom Clancy) but Lydecker seems to be in a very weird position. He's apparently still in charge of the program that created Max and the others. He can order other soldiers around, even if they're not his to order! He goes to conferences to secretly represent US military interests (I think) and he has the power to call in troops, helicopters, et cetera. He also seems to have plenty of training himself. That suggests some sort of Special Ops guy rather than a spy. After all, James Bond is a fiction of the media. AFAIK, real spies, whether they're military or not, don't go around blowing people away. So what exactly is Lydecker?
On the knife in the heart thing, I remember seeing a TV show once that was amusing in a perverse sort of way. It was one of those Rescue 911 shows and it had a segment about a guy who was stabbed in the heart and survived. He had to be transported to the hospital with the knife still stuck in his chest. Perhaps it's just television's tendency to hurry things up (like people getting strangled, which invariable kills within 30 seconds on TV) and in reality the bad general should have sat there suffering for several horrible minutes before dying. OTOH, it's an opportunity for Dark Angel's producers to bring the guy back because a knife in the heart isn't necessarily fatal. Then again, perhaps Lydecker carries a supply of poisoned knives around with him...


By ScottN on Wednesday, November 29, 2000 - 9:26 pm:

There are certain things I'm not allowed to discuss, but from what I can say...

Special Ops does get to play around with the latest in tech. But, SO wouldn't be doing anything hare-brained like Manticore. That's why I'm saying that he isn't SO.


By trekkerxphile on Friday, December 08, 2000 - 12:17 am:

Out of curiosity, and since we're on the subject of Lydecker, after 12 odd kids escaped, including Max, Zach, Brynne, how did he retain control? Did he kiss some major butt, blame it on a subordinate, or has he spent the last ten years working up from his demotion? Or was he the only one qualified? Or have I completely missed something?I need to watch the pilot again, but if one of you can save me the trouble: Didn't somebody say, of the 12 that ran away, 3 died, 7 were wounded and captured, 2 unaccounted for? As in, Max and Zach were the only ones who made it out? So where did Brynne come from? What did I miss or not remember correctly?The Zach/Logan exchanges in this ep were marvelous.


By Merat on Thursday, February 15, 2001 - 8:11 pm:

I think it was that 22 ran away, 3 died, and 7 were wounded and captured. So 12 GOT away.


By trekkerxphile on Friday, February 16, 2001 - 12:36 pm:

Y'know, that would make a LOT more sense! Thanks. (That message up there should have paragraphing; it's the spell-checker's fault.)


By Art Vandelay on Thursday, March 01, 2001 - 12:13 pm:

This is the second week in a row where the other bikers have had nothing to do with the main plot or the main characters. They just seem to be there as time filler.


By Anonymous on Tuesday, February 12, 2002 - 1:58 pm:

What says that Lydecker couldn´t have a history within in the SpecOps (his capablities suggests something like that anyway).
Problably has he been put at Manticore because of his age, to old to be active on the field, but perfect to lead the creation and training of supersoldiers.


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