Stranger Things introduced the world to Eleven, a powerful, enigmatic girl with special abilities. But we already met her on Dark Angel, when her name was Max.
This article contains spoilers for the first season of Stranger Things.
Everyone’s obsessed with Netflix’s Stranger Things, a binge-worthy paranormal drama set in the ’80s and starring Those Boys from every ’80s movie ever.
It also stars Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven, a mysterious girl with supernatural abilities who appears in a diner, disoriented and monosyllabic, after having escaped from a military facility.
Over the course of the series we learn more about her horrific experiences in captivity: It turns out that she was stolen from her biological mother and raised to be a weapon, her special abilities coaxed out of her by her ‘Papa’ (Matthew Modine). They used her to access the ‘Upside-Down’, where she unwittingly released a monster into the real world.
While I acknowledge that there are just as obvious comparisons to be made between both E.T. (as the showrunners have done) and Akira, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of similarities between this girl and the lead character on an old, little-known sci-fi series called Dark Angel.
Credit: Imagination Rules the World
Starring Jessica Alba, Michael Weatherly and Jensen Ackles, Dark Angel came from the mind of James Cameron and Charles H. Eglee, and aired on Fox between 2000-2002. It followed a genetically engineered super-soldier, who was hiding from the secret government facility that she escaped from as a child, working as a bike messenger/art thief in a post-apocalyptic Seattle. It was awesome.
And, sure, it wasn’t perfect (its flaws might account for why this show isn’t the cult hit it deserves to be, whatever), but that doesn’t change the fact that Dark Angel had a genius premise with engaging characters; it was confident in its feminist message, diverse in all the right ways, and featured a hell of a kickass leading lady.
That leading lady was Max Guevara, and Eleven from Stranger Things is basically Max 2.0.
As an adult, Max was played by Jessica Alba. But through the series’ copious flashbacks we also spent a lot with her younger self, played by Geneva Locke.
In these flashbacks we learned that Max was born and raised in a government facility called Manticore, where she was trained with other children like her. We witnessed her escape, and her first years on the run.
While there are obvious differences (like the fact that Eleven was seemingly raised alone, despite the number on her wrist indicating that there were 10 before her), the general backstories and behaviors of these two characters are so strikingly similar, I can’t imagine I’m the only one who’s noticed — unless I’m literally the only person left who bothers to think about Dark Angel, which I hope isn’t the case!
Here are seven reasons why Max and Eleven are basically the same person:
1. They look and act exactly alike
Let’s start with the obvious: These two girls are practically identical, and not just because of their military-regimented buzz-cut hairstyles.
They have the same facial expressions, the same wide-eyed, open-mouthed wonder at the world, and the same tendency to gaze blankly in the face of direct questions.
2. They don’t talk much
Although she’s a gabber as an adult, the teenaged Max Guevara didn’t speak much, to the point where it seemed like she was mute. This made sense for her character: The genetically engineered children were raised to be super-soldiers, meaning that they communicated mainly through hand signals and by reading each other’s body language. They did speak, however, when the guards couldn’t hear, telling comforting stories and giving each other real names.
Eleven, on the other hand, appears to have been scared out of speaking; she clearly can speak, and has no problem enunciating, she simply doesn’t do it much or easily. Even when plot questions could easily be cleared up with a word from her, she holds silent, and she seems to be mentally struggling with herself every time she opens her mouth.
Once out of the government facility and in the real world, Max and Eleven’s speech patterns (or lack of same) are identical. They rarely speak, even when spoken to, and even when they can tell it aggravates the person speaking to them that they don’t get a reply. They prefer to observe and learn about ‘normal’ human behavior, being very self-conscious about their own lack of experience in this regard.
3. They’re both military experiments
Obviously the main thing that unifies these two girls is their status as military test subjects: Both Max and Eleven were raised from birth as military property, raised to serve a specific purpose with very limited knowledge of the outside world.
In Dark Angel, the government hired surrogate mothers to carry the genetically engineered fetuses to term, although we learned in the episode “Heat” that Max’s mother didn’t want to give her up to Manticore. In Stranger Things, Eleven’s mother was allegedly pregnant while undergoing government experiments, and they took the baby away as soon as it was born.
Both Eleven and Max’s mothers are still out there somewhere, although Dark Angel was canceled before Max could reunite with hers.
4. They both have special abilities
Where Eleven has telekinesis, Max has super strength and other ‘perks’ like the ability to remember long sequences of numbers and hold her breath under water, and night vision. (Some of Max’s fellow super-soldiers have skills more similar to Eleven’s, however.)
Max is technically a human-animal hybrid, having been infused with feline DNA and designed to look and behave a certain way. Who knows how Eleven got her abilities — were they caused by the experiments the government conducted on her pregnant mother, or would she have been born with them anyway? Maybe Stranger Things season 2 will answer that question.
5. They both have identifying tattoos
Where Eleven simply has ’11’ printed on her wrist, Max has a full barcode on the back of her neck, marking her as government property.
Max’s moniker is X5-452 (why do I still remember this?), which was technically her ‘name’ (she was nicknamed Max by another kid in her group, similarly to how Eleven was nicknamed El).
The ‘X5’ indicates that she’s part of the fifth generation of genetically engineered kids: Some of the previous generations weren’t engineered quite right, while the ones that came after had most of their free will removed.
Whether Eleven’s number holds any significance remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we learned that there were 10 children with special abilities before her. Maybe one of them is even the monster.
6. They both have a scary white-haired ‘father figure’
Behind every supernatural little girl is a creepy older fake dad, right?
In Stranger Things, Eleven calls her captor ‘Papa,’ taking every scrap of affection he bestows on her because she is so starved for love.
In Dark Angel, Manticore boss Donald Lydecker (John Savage) considers himself the father of all the X-Series kids, although Max was — of course — his favorite.
Creepily, we also later learn that he designed her in the image of his dead wife, although the second season explores the possibility that Max was in fact the product of an ancient prophecy (hey, I said the show wasn’t perfect).
7. They’re both compliant, but quietly rebellious
Eleven’s arc over the course of Stranger Things‘ first season is very similar to Max’s in the Dark Angel flashbacks: She escapes the military facility, and hides from the old father figure and his soldiers as they search for her. She finds solace with kind strangers, while she slowly gets over the shock of the ‘real world.’
She learns to use her abilities, first to protect herself and the people she cares about and later to, slowly, do good. But it doesn’t come easily to her, having been used to an existence where you either complied without question, or paid early for your insubordinance.
Tellingly, both Max and Eleven appeared to be the ‘good little soldier’ for most of their time in captivity. They stayed quiet and went along with most of what they were being told to do, simply as a survival tactic.
But still they found quiet ways to rebel. For Eleven, it was by refusing to kill the cat. For Max, it was by protecting her ‘siblings’ when they fell sick, and would be taken away by the guards if they were discovered.
Of course where Max grows up to become a bike messenger searching for her siblings, Eleven uses her powers to defeat the Demogorgon and is (presumably) sucked into the Upside-Down, so their stories will likely diverge from here on out.
So there you have it. If you liked Stranger Things, I highly recommend Dark Angel. It was super diverse and progressive for its time, and its protagonist Max is probably a good indication of what Eleven could potentially grow up to be.