Dark Matter Season 3

[JD]

Syfy's Dark Matter returns for it's third season with a two episode premiere tonight.
I was just able to get caught up on Season 2 yesterday, and I can't wait to see where things pick after that crazy cliffhanger.
Here's the latest trailer that just came out Monday:

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I'm especially curious to see what's going to happen with Ryo, I can't think of many shows where one of the heroes has ended up a big bad like this. I know we've had a few shows like Buffy where something turned one of the characters against the others for a couple episodes, but even that wasn't quite at this level.
Titles and descriptions from TV Guide:

Being Better Is So Much Harder; It Doesn't Have to Be Like This
In the Season 3 premiere, the scattered survivors of EOS-7 battle to regroup amidst the backdrop of corporate war. Ryo Ishida, now emperor of Zairon, makes an enemy of his former allies, while the past comes back to haunt the crew of the Raza.

 

[Forbin]

Wasn't Angel an evil mass-murdering vampire for a whole season?

 

[JD]

Oh, right I forgot about Angel(us).

 

[Christopher]

I'm especially curious to see what's going to happen with Ryo, I can't think of many shows where one of the heroes has ended up a big bad like this.

I can think of some examples, which I'll spoiler-box just in case:

Spoiler: Heroes turned villains permanently

Londo on Babylon 5 (kind of -- a reluctant villain and a puppet of the real baddies, but still culpable for much of the evils of the show)

Grant Ward on Agents of SHIELD

Morgana on Merlin

Tyr on Andromeda, eventually

Of course, Lex Luthor on Smallville, though we always knew it would happen.

 

[JD]

I can't believe I forgot about the second and third ones, those are two of my favorite shows, and I'd rank the second as one of my all time favorite TV twists.
I guess it's not as uncommon as I thought,

 

[JD]

I found a couple of Season 3 interviews from SyfyWire (Syfy's general SFF news site) one with Anthony Lemke, the actor who plays Three, and one with co-creator Joseph Mallozzi.
The Mallozzi interview does have some interesting tid-bits:
He reveals the premise for episode 9, which sounds like it should be a blast:

Spoiler: Episode 9

The crew travels back in time and has to go undercover as a suburban family in 2017 Wisconsin.

Episode four will also be a lighter more comedic episode.
Truffault will be back this season. Fun fact: She was originally supposed to die in her third episode back in Season 1.
We'll be getting several new characters, although the first one isn't real clear thanks to a typo in the article, it has two names Mishka Thébaud and Adrian Maro, but I'm not sure which is the actor and which is the character, either way he's David Hewett's character, Talbor Calchek's assistant who ends up on the Raza. He has a bodyguard named Solara Shockley, who's played by Ayisha Issa,. Teku Fonsei, played by Andrew Moodie was Ryo's imprisoned former mentor, who is freed and becomes one advisors.
As you could probably guess from the end of last season, the Raza crew's conflict with Ryo will be a major focus.
We will be getting the full scale corporate war, but it sounds like that actually be more of a background thing through the season.
Ryo will be revealing new information about stuff the Raza crew did before the memory wipes and not all of it is good.

 

[cylkoth]

Thoughts...
I'm missing Nix already. Was hoping for some cliched last minute save...hey we found some magic nanites to inject her with! She's fine now! Both season 2 companions gone...wasn't expecting that to stick.
The reveal of Five's secret literally came out of nowhere. When could she possibly have saved a backup of ______? How in blazes are they going handle this?
Delaying the Six/Anders reunion for later it appears, but was strange that Six wasn't curious about the friend that nearly killed him. Part of me (had always) hoped that their gunfight was staged during the prison break, but Anders aimed with lethal intent making it unlikely.

Second episode...happy the Blink drive is out of commission, at least for the moment. Not really crazy about it or the name.

 

[Riverside2233]

I'm impressed with the ability to set up season 3 with all of the fallout from S2 and the Eos 7 Incident. The writers certainly know how to advance the story and give themselves room to play. The crew versus Four and everyone vying for the Blink Drive is a solid base for the entire season. I am curious to see what Five does with the backup.

From the beginning of this show I felt like there was a lot of unique material and characterization to get through and maybe they were moving too fast in season 1 to hook viewers, but the middle to end of last season and these first two episodes have really drawn me in more.

 

[Christopher]

I'm really disappointed that Nyx is gone, especially since they gave us that teasing confirmation that the sexual tension I sensed between Two and Nyx was not just wishful thinking on my part. But then, this show has always been tentative and clumsy in its handling of romantic or sexual relationships among the cast.

For all that Mallozzi talked in the interview about planning everything well in advance, this show continues to feel to me like they're making it up as they go. The story structure is weird, with characters and threads being set up and then arbitrarily dropped, such as Devin confessing his drug addiction, then randomly getting killed and the show basically forgetting about him from then on. The mystery behind the murder of One's wife, and then One, seems to have been cut off without resolution when they killed off Corso. And then there are these weird twists the episodes sometimes take in the final minutes, like that random sidebar about the blobby monster thing that possessed Three in the final minutes of the Rook space-station episode, which didn't seem to serve any purpose beyond padding out a short episode. And now we get this weird sidebar with Five's memory fugues from the neural link, which seemed like the setup for the next episode dealing with the ongoing degeneration and the risky operation she'd need to undergo, but then they just wrap up the whole thing in the last two minutes and it's all just about the twist that Five has a sister. And we got that random glimpse of Sarah at the beginning and then nothing. What the hell? This is very clumsy story structure.

I barely remembered who Anders is, but I get the impression he's taking over Kierken's role as the recurring GA adversary who might turn out to be sympathetic to the crew. But then, that's another example of the clumsy plotting. They were setting up Kierken for that arc, but then in the season 2 finale they just abandoned it and had him be a closed-minded hardass who got himself killed, and all the work they did setting up the character over the course of season 2 was for nothing. I have to wonder if there's something going on behind the scenes that leads to actors walking away from the show or the producers deciding to write them out, so that the planned story arcs with those actors get dropped and replaced.

 

[Dark Gilligan]

Ultimately these first couple of episodes feel like a massive reset to me. The two new crew members from season 2 (both of whom I liked) are dead and the blink drive is off the table for now. Aside from the loss of One and Four going to the dark side, in many ways we've gone backward. And as Christopher said, clumsily at that. I do like the show and wish good things for it, but these nits are adding up. Did anyone notice the change in Android's demeanor? Usually she's wide-eyed with a goofy smile, but here she seemed quite melancholy throughout.

 

[Christopher]

Did anyone notice the change in Android's demeanor? Usually she's wide-eyed with a goofy smile, but here she seemed quite melancholy throughout.

Of course. She's in mourning for Nyx. I thought Zoie Palmer did a good job of playing that internalized grief and anger, as well as guilt at being unable to save her.

 

[NOVE9]

I enjoyed these 2 episodes, I agree the story telling and characterization is always all over the place with this show and it has bugged me to the point of questioning why I watch it but for some reason I didn't mind it this time round. Whether I'm just used to it now or it's improved I don't know.

I am really perplexed by the way they ended the season 2 characters though. They almost seem pointless to have even introduced them.

 

[Christopher]

I am really perplexed by the way they ended the season 2 characters though. They almost seem pointless to have even introduced them.

Sometimes I suspect that Devin was only introduced because some network suit somewhere insisted that there weren't enough white men in the cast with One gone, and that the producers never really wanted him anyway. After all, they barely did anything with him at first, then gave him a half-hearted drug-addiction arc, then just dumped him at the earliest opportunity and pretty much ignored him from then on.

As for Nyx, I guess with the Seers killed off, her storyline was pretty much done. This is a show about characters who are shaped by their pasts, and there was nothing left from Nyx's past to shape her -- though I guess they could've added something more to her history if they'd wanted, maybe something from her years as a criminal renegade.

Also, we didn't see all the Seers killed, just the few who were on Zairon. Their ship is presumably still out there somewhere, even without their leader. So there could've been more Nyx-related stories to tell there, perhaps the surviving Seers coming to her to seek her leadership, or maybe to seek revenge. So it's not like they couldn't have done more with her past.

 

[Marc]

. I do like the show and wish good things for it, but these nits are adding up. Did anyone notice the change in Android's demeanor? Usually she's wide-eyed with a goofy smile, but here she seemed quite melancholy throughout.

Maybe she's been affected by the death of Nixx both in not being able to stop Ryo and co storming the Reza and then finding the body. It's the first time she's lost some-one aboard the ship. Add to that what's happening with Five and you've got an unhappy Android.

 

[Anwar]

Wasn't Angel an evil mass-murdering vampire for a whole season?

Just half of Season 2, actually. Maybe not even that.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Separated at birth?

 

[sojourner]

What you guys call "clumsy" I call "refreshing". It's nice not to beable to see what's coming from a mile away because of our expectations of how the stories "should" go based on past experiences with TV show plotting.

Episode 3 based on the teaser for next week looks to be the requisite Ground Hog Day episode so common to sci-fi shows lately. Let's hope they find a clever way to turn that on it's ear.

 

[Forbin]

Episode 3 based on the teaser for next week looks to be the requisite Ground Hog Day episode so common to sci-fi shows lately. Let's hope they find a clever way to turn that on it's ear.

It'll be tough to beat the way Xena handled it.

 

[kirk55555]

I love groundhog day style stories. If Episode 3 ends up being one, I might have to watch it even though I dropped the show at around episode 9 of Season 2 (or whatever number the filler episode to refill 2's nanobots was).

 

[Tom]

I for one, like this show, looking forward to the rest of season 3!