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| A serial killer with a familiar signature forces Max to face the ghosts she thought she'd left behind at Manticore. |
Replay Meter
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Initial Observation
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Closer Look
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Expletives 6 (5 hell, 1 bitch) |
Violence moderate |
Audience
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| Initial Observations + Analysis | ||||||||
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You may have noticed that i haven't written a review in about a month. Seeing how i churned out the first two-thirds of season one in under three weeks, you might find that a bit odd, but there is good reason. At first i thought that it might be that i was burnt out (writing eight reviews right in a row can do that to you), but rewatching this episode several times and even focusing on other episodes didn't help. I've gradually come to realize that, while i've written some raving reviews already, the best or Dark Angel was still yet to come--in fact, it was up next--and i have no idea how to do the next five episodes justice. I saw Pollo Loco the first time it ran. It came after the high of Haven, the dubious quality of Shorties in Love, and a botched rerun of Heat. It was set before three of the greatest Dark Angel episodes of all time and another with one of the most critical plot developments of the series (well, they all had that, really). At the time i was dying to watch all the Dark Angel i could get my hands on, and yet for the life of me i could not understand this episode. Pollo Loco is one of the largest reasons i started this webpage, has influenced my ideas and intent for the High Place in ways i can't even begin to comprehend, yet even today every time i watch it if i try to analyze it i don't get it. The episode is so deep and dark and vague that it's impossible to fully understand the driving force behind Ben, and oddly enough it makes the most sense when you stop trying to think of what's going on beneath the surface and take everything at face value, because in many ways Pollo Loco is deceptively simple. What Pollo Loco is about is pain: fresh and raw after a decade, and still impossible for Ben to reconcile. Ben is lost: he was trained to be a soldier, and it's all he knows, but like many soldiers that come back from war, he was never the same because of what he saw and did. Ben was just a child: all of the X-5s reacted out of fear the night they killed the convict. The way they reacted was understandable given the training they had received but their lack of knowledge concerning the weight of such actions. And even at the end of the episode when Ben is injured in the woods you can see it in his eyes when he asks Max to kill him: everything that he has done, everything that he's been hiding, is for only one reason... Fear. What you see is not really a man but a boy who is terrified of the horrors that have haunted him his entire life. When Max tells Alec about Ben in Hello, Goodbye the thing she most remembers are the stories, his explanations for why things are the way they are. They're just ghost stories about 'Nomalies in the basement, but somehow they soothe his brothers and sisters fears and make them feel loved. I think that Ben was like Zack in a way: what he gave to the other X-5s he could somehow never receive in return. He was messed up, but he didn't know how to fix it, and he tried the best way he knew how, the only way he knew how: as a soldier. Lydecker was wrong when he called Ben an anomalie, because he wasn't. Renfro expected the X-5s to be perfect, to not have any psychological trauma, but the X-5s were always so much more. They were perfect in that they were Human, Human enough to feel pain, and fear, and guilt, and even go crazy because of the horror of what they were meant to be and were for a while. Throughout Dark Angel's run it's always been as if Max were on a quest to redeem her soul: maybe that's what Ben was trying to do, too. After all, the only thing he was interested in was completing "the mission." Max didn't want Logan to know about her past, which is completely understandable. Lydecker told him: "You have no idea what she's capable of doing," but neither did Deck. He was trying to build the perfect soldier, but we learn in the second season that they're all so much more than that (Max in particular)... They're the Human race's guardian angels, the last defense against a plague of death. Max is everyone's last hope. I wish that Ben could have found that, could have been a part of it. I wonder why he couldn't, why he couldn't get better... but i doubt that i'll ever really understand it. That's part of the reason this episode is so sad. | ||||||||
| On the Screen |
Interesting Revelations... and some Nitpicks | |||||||
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The title may be Pollo Loco, but the chicken isn't the one who's crazy. There's that top of Original Cindy's that i love. Max could have at least finished eating before she left for Logan's! (But then, i guess she probably would have gotten to the morgue after Lydecker.) How do the X-5 kids' feet make so much noise in the halls at Manticore if they're always barefoot? It would really hurt your feet to march so hard on concrete. Geneva Locke's voice sounds so much like Jessica Alba's that it's amazing. Jessica's voice was not dubbed in the flashbacks: that's Geneva! Ben killed two people in Chicago, four in Miami, and three in New York: boy does he get around. So the Blue Lady is the Lady of the Sacred Heart, but who is that? In steps Madame X and takes over Deck's office: i wonder if they were involved at one time (thus the reason she uses his nickname and he hates her so much). Logan threatens to go public with what Ben's doing: Lydecker observes that it would put Max at risk. In light of what's happening at the end of season two, i'd say that's an understatement. The show would have been totally different after that. As children the X-5s didn't have colorful posters on their classroom walls: instead they had black and white signs with subliminal messages such as "Mission," "Duty," and "Discipline." | |||||||
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Top Five Lines in "Pollo Loco" | Angelic Aptitude | |||||||
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Pollo Loco takes an interesting look at faith. This show has always had a decidedly Catholic influence when it dealt with religion, and i'm not sure why. I personally don't feel like the Catholics have their beliefs entirely straight: for instance, i don't believe that you have to confess your sins to a priest (Jesus came so we could confess them to Him) and i don't believe in praying to dead people, no matter how tight they were with God when they were alive. In fact, part of Ben's problem may be that he had it all wrong: he shouldn't have been trying to serve the Blue Lady, worshiping her as if she could keep him or the others safe (because she couldn't)... He should have been trying to serve God.
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the High Place luinel_anduril@yahoo.com
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creator of Christian Freaks
Dark Angel, Max, Logan, Jam Pony, and all the X-5s and Freaks
are the property of ce (Cameron/Eglee) Productions and 20th Century Fox.
Episode Log Lines are from Dark Angel - The Official Website.
Pictures are used courtesy of Manticore Kid Caps and D a r k A n g e l TV . c o m.
Title font is inspired by the font on the cover of
Bantam Doubleday Dell's Yearling Book
Alien Secrets by Annette Curtis Klause
and was created by Kristine Senko (a.k.a. Fire Angel).
07/22/02
Which is ultimately who he was searching for i think. I can understand his sentiment when he screamed "Why?!? What do we do wrong, we believe in you!" because i've said the same thing to God more than once. But like him i've never considered following anyone else. Sometimes things get so tough that God is the only one you can cling to, and if you give up and don't you know that you'll just be screwing yourself over more.
Maybe if that priest would have been telling Ben how to really find forgiveness (salvation through Jesus Christ) instead of telling him to believe in the Blue Lady then he wouldn't have been kidnapped by Ben. Destry did try to kill Ben, but he wasn't strong enough or fast enough: only Max or someone else like her could be. While Lydecker is telling Logan that Max and her kind are and could only be killing machines, Max is being yet another person's guardian angel. That's who she is; i guess you could say that Ben was a fallen angel in a way. I wish that he could have gone to the Good Place (but who knows? He might have been so insane that he truly couldn't understand. I guess we'll never know... like any of this is real).