"A Glitch in the System" was the best one yet. A creepy and imaginative premise, perhaps the most science-fictional idea we've had yet on this show, and one that gave us some deeper insights into Dav. I'm not crazy about the overuse of torture as a plot device, but this one could be taken as an allegorical commentary on the intrinsic uselessness and self-serving nature of torture, the way that the information allegedly being sought is nothing but an empty excuse for arbitrary cruelty. And the surviving guard who blindly went along with the pointless torture represented the people who allow the evil to be perpetuated by blindly following orders and placing obedience and duty over morality. It's actually rather deep.
The characters were oddly naive about nanotechnology, though. It was instantly clear to me that the cloud was made of nanites that were damaging and repairing Dav from within, but the characters needed it explained to them. You'd think a society advanced enough to spread so widely across space (the Quad is explicitly "in a galaxy far, far away" according to
the official site) would take such things for granted. (Unless maybe this is a sign of the poverty on Westerley and other corporate-ruled worlds, that their citizens aren't given a proper education?) But then, as I remarked in the
Dark Matter thread, the tech on
Killjoys seems less advanced overall.
I'm also getting tired of the low budgets on both shows, the way they keep trying to pass off buildings and warehouses as the interiors of spaceships. It's not very convincing.
Also, bad science in this one. It perpetuated the myth that exposure to vacuum will make "your blood boil" (no -- the blood is safely inside the body and thus retains its pressure) and "your skin freeze" (no -- vacuum is an insulator, like in a thermos bottle, so you'd lose heat far more slowly than you would in air). At least it got the radiation right, but the effect wouldn't be as instantaneous as suggested. Really, given that the Internet exists now, there's no excuse for not doing two minutes of research to find these things out.
