In essence Dark Angel viewers are given a vitalistic world informed by the discourses and technologies of the body, by Foucauldian bio-power. The truth is in the genes. The series provides a metaphor for the way we perceive human and other biology at this particular cultural moment, as a "re-birth of the clinic." Ultimately it is a metaphor for the present fragility of the self, which biology, psychology, and cybernetics increasingly pronounce an illusion. At the same time, this tenuous, enhanced notion of the body provides a new arena for self-definition as the body "opens-up" and is projected as an erotically charged fantastic space. Max constitutes a representation of the cyber-body phenomenon from a feminist angle. "Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an "it" to be animated, worshiped, and dominated. The machine is us, our process, an aspect of our embodiment" (Donna Haraway).

The posthuman condition is appropriated by Donna Haraway for her gender re-defining project, the argument being that "the boundary between science-fiction and social reality is an optical illusion…the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us." For Haraway the figure of the "cyborg" is a mechanism to shatter the construct of gender, and fundamentally engage in a "reinvention of nature" such that a complete series of relationships can develop between the human figure and the world. A cyborg is described in Haraway's book Simians Cyborgs and Women (1991) as "a hybrid of machine and organism," and this is a condition to be desired, especially when it comes to women. "The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world," Haraway states.

By the late 20th century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.
~~ Donna Haraway

With regard to gender the cyborg concept becomes animated – it opens up the possibility of "re-crafting" bodies to become cyborg, creatures that undermine the power structures on which gender inequality has been based. The cyborg is a type of dissembled and reassembled posthuman collective and personal self. This is a self the female can re-code. "Cyborgism" therefore holds new promise for the feminine construct – breaking down the clear distinctions between organism and machine and the similar distinctions that have structured the Western self. We can re-conceive ourselves as open-ended projects rather than completed entities, actively seeking new forms and new ways of being in order to subvert the cultural norms of our times.

Haraway insists that the dualism of self and other is challenged by high-tech culture, where it is no longer clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. Initially three features are apparent: firstly Max inhabits a posthuman body, that is to say an artificially reconstructed body. The body in question here is far from a biological essence; it is a crossroads of intensive forces; it is a surface of inscriptions of social codes. This reconfigured non-essentialized embodied self implies a loss of ontological security accompanying the decline of the naturalistic paradigm. The disappearance of the body is the apex of the historical process of its de-naturalisation.

In consequence it is now more appropriate to speak of the body in terms of embodiment, that is to say of multiple bodies or sets of embodied positions. Embodiment means that this is a situated subject, capable of performing sets of (inter) actions, which are discontinuous in space and time. Embodied subjectivity is thus a paradox that rests simultaneously on the historical decline of mind/body distinctions and the proliferation of discourses about the body. This may be reformulated in terms of the paradox of simultaneous disappearance and over-exposure of the body. Although technology makes the paradox manifest and in some ways perfectly exemplifies it, it is not however wholly responsible for such a shift in the paradigm.

Dark Angel explores the body as fantastic inner space and a new frontier, opened up by Marie-Francois-Xavier Bichat's practice of pathology/anatomy in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. According to Michel Foucault, Bichet created the "medical perspective". That "opaque mass in which secrets, invisible lesions, and the very mystery of origins lie hidden" is revealed (Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic). The clinical experience opened up a new conceptual "inner" space that was at once deep and visible, solid and enclosed, vital and accessible – in which a posthuman vitalism could be "born". What Foucault calls "the birth of the clinic" also alienated the subject from the body, producing a view of the body as fantastic. The clinic placed a new emphasis on seeing, and it was here that Foucault discerned the power-wielding, manipulative "gaze". The emphasis on visualization and surgical manipulation of the body led to what Foucault would term our contemporary "technologies of the body" a discourse of bio-power, whose terms were bodily fluids, organs, and parts and identification of the human with the machine.

Re-mythologized, biological innerspace becomes thoroughly "fantastic". The fantastic denotes a liminal zone occupied by the embodied subject, an entire world in which things manifest a captive, agonised thought both fragmented and entrapped, that can never manage to express itself purely.

Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre extended the "fantastic" to refer to a literary mode of hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations, as experienced by the situated, embodied subject. Grounded in Western psychology and neurobiology, Dark Angel sustains a Todorovian hesitation between the physical and the metaphysical that takes on an openly dialogic form. Essentially Dark Angel projects a fantastic space in which Todorovian hesitation can be prolonged indefinitely. Throughout Dark Angel the body of Max in this enhanced, fantastic sense is the site of truth. We are presented with a projection vision of the body "opened up" since the birth of the clinic, a new "inner" fantasy space in which a new myth, at once vitalistic and necrophilic, is trying to be born. The "look" is gothic and posthuman, clinically detached and erotically charged.