Black Dawn – Ep 2.

Adam finds other survivors, but as they gather together it is clear that no one knows what has happened.

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“We don’t know what tonight is going to bring. Or tomorrow.”

In true movie fashion, the beautiful girl in distress is the second character we meet. Will they get together?

This is the second episode of the series, and we see that there are, indeed, some survivors from whatever it is that killed almost everyone in L.A. The survivors huddle in a basement and get what surely must be the worst pep talk ever – a real downer followed by, “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I’m still waiting for this series to get going. I’m a sucker for science fiction, so I guess we’ll see what picks up next…

The Black Dawn – Episode 1

Day 1 – 9:27 am. A mysterious plague falls over Los Angeles, leaving death in its wake.

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Okay… and then what?

Nice premise, even if we’ve seen it before. People start dropping dead and no one knows why.

The problem is that we watch a full five minute episode and we don’t know more than that… which is to say the same things we knew going in. We don’t know anything about the main character, not his name (at least I didn’t catch it) or why we care about his story.

I don’t want the maker’s of The Black Dawn to feel like I am singling them out in order to make a point, but they have fallen into a trap very common to short form series. Your first episode is not like an opening chapter of a novel, nor is it the opening scene of a movie.It needs to tell a satisfying story, like a pilot for a TV show, only in a very short time span.

Here’s the difference. With a novel or a movie, the audience has already committed to the work as a whole. With a 5 minute episode, the story has to be compelling enough to convince someone to seek out the next installment. You can’t simply start to tell the larger story, you have to finish a smaller one. (And of course leave things hanging enough to make people care about what the storyteller has up their sleeve.)

In this episode of Black Dawn, we know going in that people are going to drop dead, and that’s what we get. I’m hoping in the next episode something else will happen. We’ll keep you posted.

Here’s a little poll. What webseries has the best first episode?