Set in 2019, the series chronicles the life of Max Guevara (Alba), a runaway genetically enhanced supersoldier who escapes from a covert military facility as a child.

In a dystopian near-future Seattle, she tries to lead a normal life while eluding capture by government agents and searching for her brothers and sisters scattered in the aftermath of their escape.

Dark Angel is considered to be part of a wave of shows in the late 1990s and early 2000s that feature strong female characters, alongside Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, La Femme Nikita, and Alias.

[1] In February 2009, a genetically enhanced nine-year-old female supersoldier designated as X5-452 (Geneva Locke) escapes along with eleven others from a secret U.S. government institution code-named Manticore, where they were born, raised, and trained to be soldiers and assassins.

On June 1, 2009, months after the twelve X5s' escape, terrorists detonate an electromagnetic pulse weapon in the atmosphere over the U.S., which destroys the vast majority of computer and communication systems, throwing the country into chaos.

Logan Cale (Michael Weatherly), an underground cyber-journalist with the alias Eyes Only, attempts to recruit her to help fight corruption in the post-Pulse world.

While assisting Cale, Max also makes a living as a bicycle messenger at Jam Pony, a courier company, along with her friends Original Cindy (Valarie Rae Miller), Herbal Thought (Alimi Ballard), and Sketchy (Richard Gunn).

When a strange message written in Max's genetic code makes an appearance on her skin it is revealed that Sandeman is a renegade from the breeding cult and Ames White is his son.

Believing that the special sequences Sandeman buried in Max's DNA are a threat to the breeding cult's plans for the extinction of normal humanity, they attempt to kill her, but she escapes to Terminal City, an abandoned part of Seattle where hundreds of outcast transgenics have been hiding.

The series ends with the military surrounding Terminal City as the residents raise their newly designed flag from one of the buildings, and wait for a possible invasion.

The first season introduced Jessica Alba as the main character Max Guevara (X5-452), a genetically enhanced transgenic super-soldier who escaped from a government facility named Manticore.

[3] Main roles were given to several of the couriers at Jam Pony, including Valarie Rae Miller as Cynthia "Original Cindy" McEachin,[2] Richard Gunn as Calvin "Sketchy" Theodore, and Alimi Ballard as Herbal Thought.

[4] It also brings back Jensen Ackles as Alec McDowell (X5-494), who is an identical twin of Ben (X5-493), one of the original 12 escapees from Manticore, and introduces Ashley Scott as Asha Barlow, a resistance fighter who has a romantic interest in Cale.

[6] Martin Cummins portrayed the season's main antagonist Ames White,[4] a National Security Agency agent tasked with destroying the Manticore escapees.

[8] Following his success with the film Titanic, director James Cameron teamed up with Charles H. Eglee with whom he had previously worked on projects including Piranha II: The Spawning.

Cameron said "it's a win/win situation" as "women respond to characters who appear strong and capable" and young male audiences "want to see girls kick ass".

The season would reveal that thousands of years ago, Earth passed through a comet's tail which deposited viral material that killed 97% of the human race.

[32] McNeely returned to score the entire series, making frequent use of "grumbling timpani rolls, bass drum beats and shrill brass and violin crescendos that familiarly sketch the action arcs of the narrative.

[1][29] Writing in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, Lorna Jowett considered Dark Angel to be a "hybrid of science fiction, Gothic, and action" which incorporated forms and themes from all three genres.

She states that Max fits the model of a Gothic heroine who "ostensibly appear[s] to be conforming to their accepted role within the patriarchy but who actually subvert the father's power at every possible occasion.

"[41] In her book Post-feminist Impasses in Popular Heroine Television, Alison Horbury theorizes that Dark Angel, along with the shows Alias, La Femme Nikita, and Dollhouse have themes of abduction, physical and symbolic rape, motherlessness, and the discovery of a sister.

[42] Several academics have considered Dark Angel to be part of a wave of shows in the late 90s and early 2000s including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, and La Femme Nikita that feature strong female characters.

[1] Writing in Science Fiction Film & Television, Clarice Butkus noted Max has been considered to be a "distinctly millennial post-third-wave feminist warrior.

[47] People ran a negative review of the Pilot episode in October 2000,[49] though in December they listed Alba's portrayal of Max as among the "breakthrough" performances of 2000.

Fox chose to debut Dark Angel instead of airing the first presidential debate, a move which TV analyst Marc Berman praised, saying: "The people who watch the debates aren't the people who'll tune into Dark Angel anyway", though he predicted that the premiere's high ratings would not hold up as the show competed against more varied competition in subsequent weeks.

[56] Writing in his book The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television, John Kenneth Muir said it was necessary for Cameron to set Dark Angel in the future because the prosperity of the U.S. in 2000 "offered little possibility for crime, squalor and other societal problems".

While criticizing certain plot elements in the second season as contributing to the show's downfall, Muir said that larger factors in ratings dropping were the September 11 attacks, the Enron scandal, and the depletion of the U.S. government's surplus, which changed Dark Angel's "futuristic vision of recession in a Third-World America" from an interesting, far-fetched premise to a "depressing reminder that things could still get worse".

[59] In 2015, Kayti Burt of Den of Geek included Dark Angel at the top of her list of "10 Sci-Fi Shows That Don't Get Enough Love".

[92] The companion book, Dark Angel: The Eyes Only Dossier, begins with a letter written by Logan Cale during the stand-off at Terminal City.

It is addressed to Detective Matt Sung, a recurring character from the series who aides Logan, instructing him that the package he is sending him contains documents pertaining to the four most critical Eyes Only investigations.