Damon Dark

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Damon Dark
Format	Science fiction, drama
Created by	Adrian Sherlock
Starring	Adrian Sherlock
Country of origin	Australia
Broadcast
Original channel	Channel 31 Melbourne
Original run	September, 1999 – February, 2008

Damon Dark is a cult independent science fiction adventure series from Australia, created by and starring Adrian Sherlock. The series was first broadcast on local community television station Channel 31 Melbourne from September to October 1999.

The series told the adventures of Damon Dark, an agent working for Department Six which was a secret service branch investigating "fringe cases". This was a cover, hiding the true purpose of Department Six: To investigate alien incursions on Earth. In the original TV run, the alien menace is unseen, operating through humans such as Simon Maddox, a business man reminiscent of Tobias Vaughn from the Doctor Who serial "The Invasion". Later, Damon meets a shape shifter, a disembodied force called Zaygor and a human agent called Gary Sutton, who is duplicated several times by alien intervention. Zaygor's people apparently resided in pyramids on a planet in the Cygnus system and are ultimately revealed as The Collective. The book Biodome features a one-eyed monster from the planet Venus and parasitic creatures who cling to people's faces and control their wills. The final chapter of Biodome suggests the creatures on Venus can mind-swap and their monstrous alien bodies may in fact be hosts for the Collective.

The subsequent series was made for independent release and has found an audience on YouTube, leading to webzines such as The Thunder Child and Zebra Magazine to interview Adrian Sherlock about Damon Dark. In 2007, Adrian Sherlock announced his intention to make Damon Dark into "Australia's answer to Doctor Who" in the future. Damon Dark will no longer be a "UFO hunter", but a "Transdimensional Investigator" for the unEarthly Transdimensional Control (who feature in "The Time Entity".) He will continue to fight his alien arch-enemies "The Collective", a non-physical group-mind from planet Cygnus 12, in search of alien races to use as physical "host" bodies. Since this announcement, interest in Damon Dark on YouTube has increased greatly, with the straker2 channel now having almost 80,000 video views, mostly of Damon Dark "webisodes."

Damon Dark has also become increasingly humorous since it began, moving away from the seriousness of its original pilot to the satire of Maddox (media mogul seeks mind control and world domination) and recent developments such as a comedy episode in which Damon is turned into a baby by alien time warp and introduction of Mr.Chronos, an alien who is naive about Earthly culture. The Collective's eye-like space pods have been nicknamed the Eye-Pods and like the cell phones in Maddox, they threaten to make humanity into "zombies!"

Reactions to this have included a music composer and singer on YouTube, Colin Barley, writing and performing a song about the series main character called "Damon Dark Detecting."

Since the series has opened its doors to submissions from new writers, a new season has been announced featuring an alien menace called The Shadow Men. Script writers include Robert Russell, Colin Barley, Joe Daly and Samuel Valdes Lopez. This information is current as of 2008.

Cast included: Adrian Sherlock, Robert Trott, Niobe Dean, Viv Perry, Susan Anderson, Andrew Dunn, Steve McPhail, Rob Philips, George Ivanoff.

Directors: Karl Siemon, Adrian Sherlock.

1 List of Episodes
2 Unmade Episodes
3 The Pilot (AKA Dark Destiny)
4 Other Media
5 References
6 External links

[edit] List of Episodes

Episode	Airdate	Running Length	Summary
"Time-Slip"	1. 1999	(19'40m)	Time crashes when the past and the future meet in the first ever Damon Dark adventure. One man becomes two when a hole in the fabric of time creates temporal duplication. Damon Dark and his assistant Candy Ryan face double trouble from the evil intelligence which animates this walking cadaver and its identical twin from another time-zone.
"Maddox"/"Mother AKA It's After Me"	2. 1999	(33'10m)	A four part-story, with Maddox taking the first three parts and Mother the final instalment. In Maddox, Candy is absent from D-6 and she has been replaced for the time being by the very cool Agent Veruca Stone. Damon and Veruca discover Simon Maddox is helping the aliens to take control of the government with mind control signals. Damon's boss, the Coordinator features, turned into an alien-controlled zombie. In Mother, the alien creature who Maddox was working with uses shape-shifting powers to try to kill Damon so it can take his place. We learn about Damon's childhood fears and relationship with his mother.
"The Possessed."	3.	(42'16m)	Damon is searching for UFO evidence when he is lured into a trap by an old friend and former Agent, Gary Sutton, who wants to exact revenge for abandoning him to an alien race. Gary is a zombie with a massive doomsday bomb ready to nuke the Earth!
"The Human Host."	4.	(51'30m)	In The Human Host, Damon discovers that the aliens have programmed Gary's mind with the order "KIll DAMON DARK" from a glowing UFO and are growing clone duplicates of him. A friendly recreation of Gary is ultimately returned to Damon and to D-6.
"Time as a Weapon"	5.	(9'40m)	Damon Dark's comedy episode, as he lets the clone of Gary move in with him, and then gets turned into a baby. Gary has to work out a way to restore Damon and save the Earth from a black hole...
"The Time Entity"	6.	(19'41m)	Damon reveals that he's been dismissed from Department Six following an incident where he shot a serial killer who murdered his girlfriend. He has been recruited to act as an Earth Agent for the mysterious cosmic agency know as trans dimensional control. They send him back to face the serial killer who has been resurrected by an alien intelligence.
"Night of Terror"	7.	(8'29m)	Damon investigates when two boys lose their father on a camping trip after a meteorite came down in the area. A grim development shakes Damon Dark.
"The Dark Planet News Broadcast"	8.		Mock-documentary style AUDIO PLAY with a montage of images, in which the voice of a new reader narrating the tale of a rogue planet which is discovered approaching the Earth from deep space, causing chaos on Earth. Damon Dark is called in to investigate and he ultimately leads a space shuttle mission to take on the planet's unknown inhabitants.
"The Ghost"	9.		AUDIO PLAY with a montage of images in which Damon awakens in a haunted house with the ghost of an old man for company and discovers a time warp linking this situation to the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico.
"The Souls of Cygnus"	10.		Damon Dark returns to Earth after 10 years as an agent for Trans Dimensional Control, a force for good in the Cosmos, run by friendly aliens. He and another member of the agency, Mr.Chronos, arrive at the home of Gary Sutton via space-time wormholes. There they face the Collective, disembodied survivors of dead planet Cygnus 12, ghostly invaders in search of new bodies and the main aggressors in the Cosmic War. (In the story, the planet Cygnus 12 orbits the Black Hole Cygnus X-1) Damon must risk all to save Earth from being assimilated into the Collective's group-mind.
"END GAME 1"	11.	(8'06m)	An alien complex is discovered on the far side of the Moon and Damon Dark must get inside it and learn its secrets...
"END GAME 2"	12.	(8'12m)	The Collective have reconstituted matter and recreated their destroyed lunar city in the Australian Out Back near a town called Kangaroo Gulley. But the Galactic Alliance want the city destroyed even if Earth has to be destroyed too! Damon Dark faces a painful dilemma...
"END GAME 3"	13.	(7'20m)	Damon Dark is hauled up before Trans Dimensional Control to explain himself...
"END GAME 4."	14.	(9'28m)	The Destroyer is a Cosmic Hit Man. The Contract: ELIMINATE DAMON DARK! Now Damon must become the destroyer in order to prove his loyalty in the war against the Collective and escape this invisible killer...but at what cost? Emotions versus duty for Damon Dark...
"A New Beginning"	15.	(4'01m)	New mini-pilot for Damon Dark, in which Damon recalls back to how he was snatched from Earth to Omega Zero, legendary home of an ancient civilisation, and offered a role with Trans Dimensional Control.

[edit] Unmade Episodes

Ed Bishop initially agreed to appear as "Ed", an ageing UFO expert in Damon Dark: Shadowfall, the first story following the 1999 season. Ed Bishop's own suggestion was that "Ed should be a bum on skid-row, washing dishes in a restaurant" when Damon meets him, because "nothing runs downhill faster than a thoroughbred". Funding for the story fell through and the project was abandoned, though Shadowfall was eventually recorded as a tribute audio play in 2005. The character of Ed was a reference to Ed Straker, the UFO hunter played by Bishop in the early 1970s SF series UFO.

[edit] The Pilot (AKA Dark Destiny)

After Adrian Sherlock had completed the first two Damon Dark stories, his then-girlfriend Jennifer Douglas decided to co-produce a semi-professional version of the concept. Using a script from Sherlock that presaged the 1999 stories, sponsorship was obtained and Chris Langman and James Kalish directed the episode.

The fundamental change beyond the production values was that Douglas had decided to recast the central role, with Bruce Hughes playing Damon. Sherlock's own recollection was that This was sad for me, but I liked the actor.

In the end result, despite the increased budget, it failed to take off, and Sherlock returned to his series as an amateur production, this time on the straight to DVD market.