Damon Dark
Damon Dark is Australia's answer to Doctor Who, a cult independent science fiction adventure series from Australia, created by and starring Adrian Sherlock and first broadcast on local community television station Channel 31 Melbourne in 1999. Adrian Sherlock is a professional actor as well as a fan of Doctor Who and Gerry and Sylvia Anderson TV series. Adrian Sherlock has recently stated that Damon Dark is "proudly Australian" and wants to make it a show which "is for the people and belongs to the people".
While the central character of Damon Dark echoes Straker from the Anderson's "UFO" series,(which inspired the creation of Damon Dark and led Adrian Sherlock to write to actor Ed Bishop AbOUT appearing in Damon Dark), the Damon Dark series and its sequels have followed the style of the Doctor Who serials, including the narrative style, cliffhangers and villains and the homages of other SF and Horror series of the past.
"Damon Dark" told the adventures of Damon Dark, an agent working for Department Six which was a secret service branch which looks into "fringe cases". This was a cover, hiding the true purpose of Department Six: To investigate alien incursions on Earth. One SF fan noted that this was similar to Dr.Who's U.N.I.T, probably more so than "UFO" and it's S.H.A.D.O organisation.
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. He also meets a group of masked Mummy-like creatures controlled by a computer called Zanadon, whose people apparently resided in pyramids on a planet in the Cygnus system. 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 series screened from September to October 1999 on Channel 31 at 11.PM Thursdays.
Ed Bishop initially agreed to appear as "Ed", an ageing UFO expert in Damon Dark: Shadofall, but funding fell through. It was eventually made into an audio play by Adrian Sherlock. The script was modified after feedback from Ed Bishop who felt that "Ed should be a bum on skid-row, washing dishes in a restaurant" when Damon meets him, because "nothing runs down hill faster than a thoroughbred".
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, whose name is revealed as "The Collective", a non-physical group-mind from planet Cygnus 12, in search of alien races to use as physical "host" bodies.
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.
Damon Dark has also been published in novel form, with the first book, Damon Dark: Biodome 1.
Episode guide
(Of these, the 1999 series consisted of only the first three episodes, with Maddox appearing as a three-part story. Subsequent episodes have been straight-to-DVD releases.)
'''1. "Time-slip." By Adrian Sherlock. 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 identicle twin from another time-zone!
2. "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.
3. "Mother." (A.K.A IT'S AFTER ME). 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.
4. "Shadowfall." The Coordinator of Department Six appoints Agent Damon Dark as UFO Case Officer and tells him to find a man called Ed. Damon remembers him well...
5. "The Dark Reflection.". Damon faces the dark side of himself when an alien bio-computer called Zanadon, from the Cygnus system, creates a copy of Damon to use against Department Six. His own people subject him to ruthless interrogation when they suspect that he, rather than the copy, is the alien spy. He struggles to prove his innocence as Zanadon plots to pave the way for the survival sleepers who wait in cryosleep inside giant pyramids on his home planet.
6. "The Bomb." 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!
7. "The Clones." (A.K.A)"The Human Host." Damon discovers that the aliens have kept Gary's mind alive in a UFO and are growing clone duplicates of him. Gary is ultimately returned to Damon and to D-6.
8. "Time as a Weapon" Damon lets the clone of Gary move in with him and Gary has to save Damon when he's turned into a baby in a mysterious crystal. Then the pair venture into space to destroy an alien tractor beam which is attracting a Black Hole toward Earth!
9. "The Time Entity." 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.
10. "Night of Terror.". 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.
11. "The Dark Planet News Broadcast." Mock-documentary style story, with 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.
12. "The Ghost." 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.