On a whim, I decided to give a rewatch a show I sporadically watched on the TV when I was young, Dark Angel. It is not a transcendental show that will deeply alter your life, watch DS9 for that. And you might tell me that it’s not a 90’s show. Well, you should note that being released in 2000, it is according to the archaic calendar we use, it’s indeed a 90’s show, and that makes that unrelated reference of a title valid. If you weep at this absurdity, please know that we tried but we can’t have nice things, as any passing interest in history can prove.

Back to that show, it’s not really that good despite an interesting premise (EMP goes boom, economy goes boom, also chimeras lol) but it is a perfect expression of a kind of feeling that is hard to articulate. I am however going to try very hard as the existence of this article can attest. Decades leak onto each other, what I call 90’s is an amalgamation of late 80’s to the early 00’s.

I will allow myself a brief digression, as this is my blag and I’m in a quite indulging mood as I write those words, and talk about the episodic series format. I apologize in advance to my editor (this is my editor’s response: >:( ) for this rant, to which I have subjected her time and time again. I am an avid fan of the loosely-to-strongly connected series of independent episodes. On top of allowing for failures of individual episodes in an otherwise great season/show, it bring forth an incisive time limitation on stories while the length of a season (or series if you’re ambitious and well-funded) can let you weave complex narrative into your show. It is, to me, more pleasant by a significant order of magnitude than the dozen hour-long movies we’ve been getting lately. I must be getting old as the investment into those seem to yield less and less of a dividend as time passes.

Now, for that sweet turn of the millennium feeling. The 90’s are in: music, clothing, pop-culture – it’s like traveling back in time. Our television shows are even dark and moody, except not really. Due to my love of that now mostly-dead format, I’ve been gravitating towards older series over the years, and let me tell you something, all that cold, desperate, end-of-the-world cynicism of that time is nowhere near as depressing that the truly crushing vision that we have of our future. All those free-will erasing conspiracies, à la X-files, those feared apocalypses, those cyberpunk worries for an age of technology that would destroy what we are, as species, as a society, they do not reach on any comparable scale how hopeless our modern outlook on the future is.

As horrific are the dystopias of those cyberpunk societies (Read Neuromancer if you want an amazing example of the genre by the way), the failures of transhumanism, or our inability to prevent our own doom, they pale in today’s interpretation of those challenges. We’re reaching those dystopias, and we didn’t get the neon or sci-fi. With our improved understanding of technology and its corporate exploitation leads to horrors whose banality makes them frightening beyond what my sensitivity allows me to bear.

As someone that has been spared from oblivion multiple times by the incredible progress of technology and science, and in turn has always been fascinated by transhumanism and its potential to expand our possibilities, I have found its practical realities seem truly bleak compared to even the darkest horrors we could imagine, because they’re not science fiction anymore. Want to become blind at a corporation’s whim? Worried about who might have access to your brain? Thinking about how new classes of people to be discriminated can be born? Well, it’s in the present you should be looking. The fiction we birth into the world today no longer builds the promise of optimistic or potentially treacherous possibility, only destruction and pain. Technology cannot free us anymore, it can only be our chains.

What about those promised apocalypses of the turn of the millennium? Well, they didn’t come to pass. Our inaction in spite of our environment collapse, the rise of geopolitical tensions that does make the cold war truly feel cold in comparison, or the rise of Fascism that is a lot more reminiscent of the 1930s that I’m comfortable with, now those are truly real apocalypses that taint our media.

In comparison of all that, that feeling of those older shows, their themes, hopes and fears, resonate with me in ways I cannot allow the product of our time to affect me, lest I lose myself in sorrow.