Dark Spaces: Wildfire
Crew 513 is a brigade of thirty female prisoners who are part of a special group that have been trained to help put out forest fires. “Wildfire” focuses on a group of four, Sawyer, Zinn, Ramos, and Brooks, and their C.O. Ruby Ma Ning – “Ma” to her crew – as they fight against the Arroyo blaze. It’s hard work, but they know what they’re doing and what to expect. That is, until Brooks, doing time for her role in an investment firm’s ponzi scheme, recognizes that they’re close to one of her bosses’ mansions. A mansion filled with all sorts of goodies, and servers housing a fortune in cryptocurrency. It would be the easiest thing for them to slip in, grab the crypto, and then take off to parts unknown. Provided none of them are burned in the process – literally or figuratively.
This is a good setup for a suspense story and writer Scott Snyder and artist Hayden Sherman do a good job early on in getting us invested in the women’s stories. Ma is our point of view character and while she has her misgivings about this, what we learn about her history makes it easy to understand why she’d go along with a risky plan like this. The other members of the crew have similar hard-luck stories and are well-realized by Sherman’s art. It’s a perfectly good-looking book all around as the artist gets a wide variety of stuff to draw and keeps the story moving swiftly.
The problem is that “Wildfire” flickers out in a couple key places, with the first being that the story itself is very predictable. While I did care about what happened to the cast, anyone with a basic level of familiarity in genre storytelling will likely be able to see the twists before they come. The other, bigger, issue is the ending which felt way too pat and moral for my tastes. Snyder makes a good argument for how these women could use the take from this heist to go live better lives than the ones they’ve been dealt. However, the Power of Friendship and Doing the Right Thing are far better things to have in the end.
It’s not that these aren’t honorable things to believe in. It’s that “Wildfire” doesn’t do a good job illustrating why they’re better than digging yourself out of a bad situation via the opportunity presented here. You get the feeling that Snyder and Sherman are trying to make an argument for believing in the greater good over selfishness, but it winds up feeling like they’re advocating for disadvantaged people to stick to the status quo and not to rock the boat. I can’t believe in that kind of message, and that’s why I was left feeling burned rather than fired up by this miniseries.