Dark Matter, SyFy's new space show, premieres June 12th

[Christopher]

My only real complaint about the alot of the current rise in space sci-fi is the lack of aliens. One of my favorite aspects of things like Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Farscape and Doctor Who are all of the cool aliens. I really wish we could get that in more of the current space shows.

I think part of the reason for that is that audiences got tired of TV "aliens" who were just humans with funny bits stuck on their foreheads or ears. Human-only universes allow avoiding that cliche.

The last thing Syfy did that had a lot of aliens in it was Defiance, and most of its alien designs were like something out of the '60s. A couple were just humans covered in weird-colored makeup and wigs, one had a bit of a forehead/nose appliance and contact lenses, one was bald with oddly textured skin, but not much that had any real alienness to it, aside from a couple of minor species we rarely saw much of. The alien designs on that show were as lacking in imagination as the ship and station designs on Dark Matter.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Shows like Eureka, Warehouse 13, The X-Files, Fringe, and Torchwood were deeply fanciful. Ditto for Buffy/Angel and Lost Girl. I don't see anything grounded or realistic about them. And there's nothing intrinsically fanciful about outer space. It's a physically real place -- heck, it's most of the universe. Plenty of fiction set in outer space is scientifically plausible and realistic -- including my own original SF, but just limiting it to recent screen works, you've got things like Gravity, Europa Report, Interstellar, The Martian, and The Expanse on TV.

Maybe "fanciful" was the wrong word. Perhaps I should have said "exotic." I'm just saying I like spaceships. And after 18 continuous years of new Star Trek being on the air, it felt weird to suddenly look around and see that most sci-fi TV was set in a bunch of dark warehouses & back alleys.

So I'm glad to see that outer space is making a comeback! And I look forward to when Dark Matter & Killjoys come out on DVD so that I can judge them for myself.

 

[Christopher]

And after 18 continuous years of new Star Trek being on the air, it felt weird to suddenly look around and see that most sci-fi TV was set in a bunch of dark warehouses & back alleys.

So I'm glad to see that outer space is making a comeback! And I look forward to when Dark Matter & Killjoys come out on DVD so that I can judge them for myself.

Well... Actually they both spend a lot of time in dark warehouses and back alleys. Just ones on alien planets and space stations. (Seriously, though, Killjoys is a pretty good show, and Dark Matter is... well, I find it deeply flawed though moderately watchable, but some people like it a lot.)

 

[WiredPlanet]

Look its Wil Wheaton
...so Dark Matter has no aliens or do we just assume it has no aliens...as I recall the Joseph Mallozzi comic book its losely based on is pretty small

 

[JD]

I can't remember for sure, but I think either this or Killjoys shows made a vague reference that almost seemed to imply the existence of aliens, but that might have just been me misinterpreting something.

I think part of the reason for that is that audiences got tired of TV "aliens" who were just humans with funny bits stuck on their foreheads or ears. Human-only universes allow avoiding that cliche.

The last thing Syfy did that had a lot of aliens in it was Defiance, and most of its alien designs were like something out of the '60s. A couple were just humans covered in weird-colored makeup and wigs, one had a bit of a forehead/nose appliance and contact lenses, one was bald with oddly textured skin, but not much that had any real alienness to it, aside from a couple of minor species we rarely saw much of. The alien designs on that show were as lacking in imagination as the ship and station designs on Dark Matter.

I loved the aliens in Defiance. The designs weren't all that interesting, but the cultures and history built up around them was really cool.
While I love unique designs for aliens, I'm more interested in the world building aspects, like their culture and history and how they relate to humans and each other.
I know some of the current shows are giving us that with some of the different planets, especially Killjoys and The Expanse, but I still find it more interesting when we are dealing with totally different species.
The only time I was really disappointed in alien designs was the aliens on Earth show on The CW a couple years ago, but even that still managed to do some interesting stuff with it's aliens.

 

[IndyMac]

I can't remember for sure, but I think either this or Killjoys shows made a vague reference that almost seemed to imply the existence of aliens, but that might have just been me misinterpreting something.

In the first episode of Dark Matter, the colonist think the Raza are an alien species.

 

[Christopher]

I can't remember for sure, but I think either this or Killjoys shows made a vague reference that almost seemed to imply the existence of aliens, but that might have just been me misinterpreting something.

In the premiere episode of Dark Matter, some of the colonists believed the Raza were a race of rampaging aliens, but of course they turned out to be the show's lead characters. I took the colonists' belief in aliens as being akin to belief in Bigfoot or UFOs today. There will always be superstitions and conspiracy theories.

I loved the aliens in Defiance. The designs weren't all that interesting, but the cultures and history built up around them was really cool.

They didn't do much for me. The Castithans were basically just a male chauvinist space Mafia, nothing we haven't seen plenty of in human history. And the, what were they called, Irathients? They were basically your stock "Indians" in the post-apocalyptic Western setting of the series -- the kind of warrior-mystic civilization we've seen plenty of times before.

The only time I was really disappointed in alien designs was the aliens on Earth show on The CW a couple years ago, but even that still managed to do some interesting stuff with it's aliens.

You mean Star-Crossed? Yeah, they were just humans with skin mottling, basically. But they got more interesting world-building than the Defiance races, I felt. Although that show kind of went off the rails, because it was so enamored of its arc-driven alien-conspiracy storyline that it basically ended up saying that the bigoted, paranoid anti-alien fanatics were absolutely right in everything they claimed, which is one hell of a troubling direction to take a premise that's an allegory for racism. I don't think the writers really thought that through.

 

[Wouter]

I like Dark Matter far better than Killjoys. And the show isn't primarily about flashy space stations or ships (though I like the Raza, a ship that is well-realised thanks to the extensive sets used for it and an exterior design that happens to support the in-universe notion that this ship is very manoevrable compared to most of its peers); it is about the main characters and the way they relate to each other and to their pasts. The show-runner claims he has a 5-season arc planned and that he already knows (in broad strokes, at least) how each season will culminate. Since I think the first season was well structured (the twist at the end didn't come from nothing), it breeds confidence that the show has a defined direction.

As for the comparison with Killjoys, both shows had an episode in which the protagonists explore a derelict space ship. Most commenters I have seen rate the Killjoys version higher, but I greatly prefer the DM episode. In Killjoys, it was very weird that they are all cheery at the beginning (yay, we get to loot it while stepping over the dead bodies we are quite likely to encounter!) and right away they setup they will blow up the ship after they left (I wonder how the owner of the thing feels about that? What kind of salvage mission wants to blow up the ship that should be salvaged?). Then the twist comes, but I thought the torture story was very convoluted; why the heck would "the military" (unclear if this is the same "military" that D'Avin was part of) torture its own personnel in order to find out stuff about the Rack?

The DM episode may look pedestrian by comparison, but the reasons to board the ship were logical, the tension was there, the decision at the end to blow the ship up was a natural consequence of what happened (and one of few cheer-worthy moments during the season) and in the season arc it developed two's story a lot. I didn't mind the zombies; they were well done and three's handling of them was nice.

 

[Anwar]

I found Star-Crossed was basically like if District 9 was a teen romance, but that's just me.

I did like the Defiance aliens, brought me back to Farscape a bit...and let's be fair here, if they hadn't used the spectacular puppetry of the Henson Shop would we think very highly of the Farscape aliens?

 

[Christopher]

As for the comparison with Killjoys, both shows had an episode in which the protagonists explore a derelict space ship. Most commenters I have seen rate the Killjoys version higher, but I greatly prefer the DM episode. In Killjoys, it was very weird that they are all cheery at the beginning (yay, we get to loot it while stepping over the dead bodies we are quite likely to encounter!) and right away they setup they will blow up the ship after they left (I wonder how the owner of the thing feels about that? What kind of salvage mission wants to blow up the ship that should be salvaged?). Then the twist comes, but I thought the torture story was very convoluted; why the heck would "the military" (unclear if this is the same "military" that D'Avin was part of) torture its own personnel in order to find out stuff about the Rack?

There are mysteries behind that storyline that haven't been explained yet. I'm sure it will become clear in time.

And they weren't salvaging the ship, just anything valuable they could take off of it. As for the rest, I don't recall.

The DM episode may look pedestrian by comparison, but the reasons to board the ship were logical, the tension was there, the decision at the end to blow the ship up was a natural consequence of what happened (and one of few cheer-worthy moments during the season) and in the season arc it developed two's story a lot. I didn't mind the zombies; they were well done and three's handling of them was nice.

I'm just so tired of rage-zombie stories. Or any kind of zombie stories, really, except iZombie, which keeps the whole mindless-shambling-hordes thing as a background threat and treats its "zombies" more like TV vampires, intelligent and functional beings who can pass for normal but who have certain predatory needs and superpowers.

I found Star-Crossed was basically like if District 9 was a teen romance, but that's just me.

I would've said it was like if Alien Nation was a teen romance, but then, District 9 was basically a darker, more over-the-top Alien Nation.

I did like the Defiance aliens, brought me back to Farscape a bit...and let's be fair here, if they hadn't used the spectacular puppetry of the Henson Shop would we think very highly of the Farscape aliens?

Well, surely the point is that they did use the Creature Shop. They made the effort to bring radically imaginative design to the aliens instead of just slapping a bit of paint and rubber onto human faces. Granted, the only reason that was affordable on a TV budget was because Henson was willing to accept losing money on the production in exchange for using it as advertising for their skills in order to attract work in commercials and industrial films and the like. I wouldn't expect every cable show to be able to pull that off. But surely there's a middle ground somewhere. Stargate managed to do some pretty effective aliens from time to time, and at least they justified most of their humanoid aliens as seeded humans.

 

[Wouter]

And they weren't salvaging the ship, just anything valuable they could take off of it. As for the rest, I don't recall.


I'm just so tired of rage-zombie stories. Or any kind of zombie stories, really, except iZombie, which keeps the whole mindless-shambling-hordes thing as a background threat and treats its "zombies" more like TV vampires, intelligent and functional beings who can pass for normal but who have certain predatory needs and superpowers.

The ship encountered by the Killjoys was still working. It didn't need to be destroyed; presumably its owner ("the military", however ill-defined that is in their universe; whose military, and who is the potential or actual enemy that makes a military necessary?) would want it back. The Killjoys act as enforcers for a very bad corporate system, not unlike Kiera in Continuum or the armed wings of the corporations in Dark Matter, but they are so cheery and oblivious about it. The behaviour in this particular episode (let's quickly board it before anybody else finds it, let's take what's valuable and then we blow it up! Oh, and I got first dibs on the best loot!) was that of space pirates. The Dark Matter crew was also thinking about looting parts of their ship, but given their situation it made far more sense.

As for the zombies, it seems to me that DM gets the bill for what other shows and/or movies have been doing. I didn't mind; I haven't been following any of the zombie shows and the version on DM made some sense and they weren't overpowerd (two fights one zombie off and three defeated a whole roomfull of them). And the episode ended up having consequences that were followed up on, later in the season.

Having a random psychopath on board killing everyone has also been done before, I'm sure!

 

[Christopher]

The ship encountered by the Killjoys was still working. It didn't need to be destroyed; presumably its owner ("the military", however ill-defined that is in their universe; whose military, and who is the potential or actual enemy that makes a military necessary?) would want it back.

I'd have to watch the episode again to remind myself of the specifics, but it occurs to me that the Quad has a lot of different factions in it, and the military might prefer to see one of its ships destroyed than to leave it to fall into one of many sets of wrong hands.

The Killjoys act as enforcers for a very bad corporate system, not unlike Kiera in Continuum or the armed wings of the corporations in Dark Matter, but they are so cheery and oblivious about it.

Well, so was Kiera at the start. Heck, it took her over two and a half seasons to begin to question the morality of her system. Killjoys is clearly setting up a similar kind of arc, with numerous characters over the season urging the main characters to realize that sooner or later they'll have to take a side. And I think they did step up and take a side in the season finale.

Anyway, I'm not interested in pitting shows against each other. Building one thing up doesn't require tearing another thing down. Personally I think Dark Matter is the weaker of the two shows, but I want them both to succeed. After all, they aired side by side on the same network and fans have been linking them together from the start (as seen in all the speculation about crossover/shared universe possibilities), so what's good for one show is good for the other. And the success of either show will be beneficial to space-based SFTV in general. Both shows have room for improvement, and I hope they both manage to improve, for the good of both shows, Syfy, and the genre as a whole. (Plus I talked to Roger Cross at the Shore Leave convention last year and he seemed like a really nice guy. So I want his show to get better.)

 

[Wouter]

I'd have to watch the episode again to remind myself of the specifics, but it occurs to me that the Quad has a lot of different factions in it, and the military might prefer to see one of its ships destroyed than to leave it to fall into one of many sets of wrong hands.

Well, so was Kiera at the start. Heck, it took her over two and a half seasons to begin to question the morality of her system. Killjoys is clearly setting up a similar kind of arc, with numerous characters over the season urging the main characters to realize that sooner or later they'll have to take a side. And I think they did step up and take a side in the season finale.

Anyway, I'm not interested in pitting shows against each other. Building one thing up doesn't require tearing another thing down. Personally I think Dark Matter is the weaker of the two shows, but I want them both to succeed.

It's not clear to me if "the military" is part of the Quad. I suspect it's from outside the Quad; the (semi)military forces inside the Quad appear to be from the company or from the Rack. D'Avin had been in the military and outside of the Quad for years.

Kiera indeed was oblivious and brainwashed about her future and the corporate congress. However, both in flashback (from her POV) and in the present she showed ability to question moral values (like when she discovered 2077-Piron kept food back to increase prices, or in the present when she played into Liber8's hands deliberately by forcing a confession from that kidnapped corrupt CEO in S1).
Kiera was nearly always sympathetic on a week-to-week, case-by-case, decision-by-decision basis; the contrast with her eventual goal of restoring the bad future (for the first seasons) made Continuum a good show. The Killjoys, on the other hand, gleefully worked their warrants for the company, apart from not taking level 5 warrants. They seem harsh characters in a harsh world to me (the corporate future in Killjoys is even worse than in Continuum and Dark Matter, I think, the Company owns the Quad), until they finally start to see problems at the end of S1 when they begin to turn on the Rack and the Company.

The dichotomy between Kiera as a more or less sympathetic protagonist on the one hand, and the bad future she fought for on the other hand, was also an item in Continuum-discussions from the start. I have the impression this was far less the case with Killjoys, usually viewed as an enjoyable, flashy SF romp without many questions asked about the allegiances of its characters.

About Killjoys vs Dark Matter, I would like both to succeed, too. But the forums that discuss them seem to end up pitting one against the other, almost inavoidably. I am apparently in the minority, but I like DM's style of storytelling better and the characters interest me more.

 

[Christopher]

Like I said, I have no interest in pitting shows against each other. I'm done with that conversation.

 

[JD]

In the premiere episode of Dark Matter, some of the colonists believed the Raza were a race of rampaging aliens, but of course they turned out to be the show's lead characters. I took the colonists' belief in aliens as being akin to belief in Bigfoot or UFOs today. There will always be superstitions and conspiracy theories.

Yeah, that was it. I guess it just seemed to me that they seemed to accept the idea of the Raza being aliens pretty quickly and easily, but I guess them being superstitious does fit better with the rest of the show than there being aliens out there somewhere.

 

[Wouter]

Yeah, that was it. I guess it just seemed to me that they seemed to accept the idea of the Raza being aliens pretty quickly and easily, but I guess them being superstitious does fit better with the rest of the show than there being aliens out there somewhere.

Mallozi has hinted there may be aliens on the show, in the future or even already. About S1, he cryptically said that "as far as we know there weren't any".

 

[Christopher]

I guess it just seemed to me that they seemed to accept the idea of the Raza being aliens pretty quickly and easily...

As I recall, one colonist suggested they were aliens and another colonist rolled his eyes and said "Not that again" or the like. So it was not a universally accepted possibility.

 

[JD]

At first I just couldn't remember when exactly I had the thought about aliens, but now that I realize it was just from the pilot, I think it was probably just due to a lack of knowledge about the universe. I don't think there's really anything to keep them from introducing some later, but at the very least they clearly don't interact with any on a regular basis right now.

 

[Christopher]

I'd rather see a no-aliens universe than yet another one with inexplicably humanoid aliens. Although there's also the Stargate Universe approach, sort of -- the series was set in a part of the universe well beyond where the Ancients (the ancestors/seeders of all humanoids) had managed to settle, so on those few occasions when we did see indigenous aliens (as opposed to the human aliens of the Milky Way), they were CGI creations that were genuinely alien and difficult to establish communication with (even though I felt they did hew too closely to the familiar bipedal norm). They were used infrequently enough that it was affordable to do them as pure CGI. It would be okay with me if DM went that route.

 

[Wouter]

As I recall, one colonist suggested they were aliens and another colonist rolled his eyes and said "Not that again" or the like. So it was not a universally accepted possibility.

It was Khlyen from Killjoys (well, the same actor) who reacted with the eyeroll. A nice moment.

One possibility for an alien already seen in S1 (but not presented as such) of DM is the boss of Will Wheaton's character, in the penultimate episode. That sinister character was left unexplained, for now.