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Spoilers Dark Matter - Season 2

So originally there were 6 crew members who were named after the numerical order they woke up. Then they reactivated the android. Now there are apparently two new permanent crew members. Doesn't this make the android 7 of 9?

I can't possibly be the first to notice this.
 
What about the third new person? They don't "count"?

Apparently Melanie Liburd and Shaun Sipos are regulars and Mike Dopud is a guest star. Given that Arax was revealed last week as a spy, I assume he won't be a permanent member of the crew.
 
Maybe not, but he could decide he likes freedom more than spying. I still think the android is more 7 of 10 at this point.
 
It's weird that Marcus/Titch's mother addressed him as "Three" in the opening flashback. At first I thought it was supposed to be some partial memory that he (or Five) experienced, mentally superimposing the "Three" name onto the reality, but it was never presented as a dream or memory, just as an omniscient-observer flashback, so substituting the name made no sense. It was also a spoiler about just who Titch was, although I guessed that from the way the opening recap was edited. (Plus One and Three were the only candidates, and One's gone.)

Nice to see the Android getting some character growth, but I feel this show does tend to fall back on cliched ideas a lot, like androids normally lacking emotion and being subject to prejudice and all these tropes we've seen before. The early first-season episodes didn't even treat the Android having emotions as an oddity or a problem; that was an idea retconned in later, apparently. And I don't like the idea that her personal growth was the result of a potential programmed into her for some mysterious reason, rather than simply an emergent property of her neural net's development or something. I'm also worried about that chip that will let her emulate human speech and behavior. I like her mannerisms just fine the way they are.

Speaking of which, I was amused by how quickly the Android said her trademark "Okay" when the handsome stubbly android asked to kiss her.

So it seems Nyx has a superpower of her own, instantly picking up physical skills, like Marvel's Taskmaster or Monica from Heroes. Is she another synthetic person like Two, or genetically enhanced? Anyway, I'd much rather see her fight-flirting with Two than Four. As for Devin, of course he has to be screwed-up too, and it turns out he's a junkie with shaky hands. Which seemed kind of a gratuitous thing to introduce, because it had zero effect on his ability operate on Six. It also feels a bit repetitive, since we went through this with Pawter on Killjoys last season (and it actually was plot-relevant there). As for Arax, I guess he's off the crew now, as I expected. And I totally guessed that Five was picking his pocket when she hugged him unexpectedly.
 
Since the Android could successfully imitate an Aussie accent, among others, why would she need an extra chip to fully mimmick human speech?

I'm a little tired of the "fake out, que flashback" thing. Yeah, we could guess that Five picked Ajax's pocket to retrieve the key, did we really need to see a recap of her doing it while viewing the hidden cam footage?

Agreeing with Christopher, re Devon's shocking secret. He had to have been arrested for something pretty serious to warrant getting locked up in a Super Max prison, hopefully there is more to it than simple drug addiction.

Good that Six's fridging wasn't dragged out. Though disappointed that he only got to interact with Two. Guess they'll hold off on how Three and Four deal with their issues with him until next week. I'm wondering just how the GA will handle him...will they presume he's dead (that is, if the corridor security cameras didn't go on the fritz during the escape), or will his friend who'll also turn out not to have died, come hunting for them?

Tons of new set pieces again, giving this station a bit more energy than our last 2 stopovers from season 1.
 
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Since the Android could successfully imitate an Aussie accent, among others, why would she need an extra chip to fully mimmick human speech?

I'm a little tired of the "fake out, que flashback" thing. Yeah, we could guess that Five picked Ajax's pocket to retrieve the key, did we really need to see a recap of her doing it while viewing the hidden cam footage?

Agreeing with Christopher, re Devon's shocking secret. He had to have been arrested for something pretty serious to warrant getting locked up in a Super Max prison, hopefully there is more to it than simple drug addiction.

Good that Six's fridging wasn't dragged out. Though disappointed that he only got to interact with Two.
It's not about mimicking human speech, Android can indeed do that. It's about social interactions in a way that is normal for humans, so that she can pass as a human if she (it?) wants to.

As for surveillance camera footage, the point of that scene was that Five told the others what was going on. IIRC they didn't know about the "key" before, and in one stroke they are also aware Arax is working for someone who wants the "key".

I'm pretty sure we will get an episode (or a good chunk of one, at least) to get Devon's backstory.

I really like Two's conversation with Six. Considering what he did in the last ep of last season (Two especially got played badly there, even being manipulated in seeing One as a threat), her forgiving attitude was nice. I guess that Two, probably more than anyone else on the ship, wants to give (and receive) second chances.

I'm not wild about everything in the episode though; while Three's general attitude and interactions with Five were fun, the story about his "family" went too quickly from setup to the outcome (which was predictable). It's not 100% clear to me why Boone was involved in claiming a ransom, the leader of the group could have expected that Boone would doubt his story when he realised that they kidnap young boys. I get that Bennet's character was proud of raising Boone and that he'd been a willing accomplice for a long time, but he was smart enough to realise he needed to lie about what happened to his parents.

I hope the Android keeps her mannerisms; they make the character interesting.
 
I like the android's sweet and rather innocent nature. Choosing a toothbrush as a gift was a very android type of reasoning. I want to see her presenting her gift.
 
I guess that Two, probably more than anyone else on the ship, wants to give (and receive) second chances.

How fitting. (Emphasis added.)


I'm not wild about everything in the episode though; while Three's general attitude and interactions with Five were fun, the story about his "family" went too quickly from setup to the outcome (which was predictable).

The Sarah story had the same problem. Three just can't manage to hold onto a past relationship for more than a single episode. Maybe they should change his designation to One -- and Done.
 
It's weird that Marcus/Titch's mother addressed him as "Three" in the opening flashback.

Nice to see the Android getting some character growth, but I feel this show does tend to fall back on cliched ideas a lot, like androids normally lacking emotion and being subject to prejudice and all these tropes we've seen before. The early first-season episodes didn't even treat the Android having emotions as an oddity or a problem; that was an idea retconned in later, apparently. And I don't like the idea that her personal growth was the result of a potential programmed into her for some mysterious reason, rather than simply an emergent property of her neural net's development or something. I'm also worried about that chip that will let her emulate human speech and behavior. I like her mannerisms just fine the way they are.
I totally missed Marcus' mother addressing him as "Three". Weird, maybe the scene was intended as a repressed memory and it got changed or wasn't made clear?

The Android having emotions - of a sort - was not seen as a problem, but it was remarked quite a few times that she was odd. Even right from the start, we see her talking back at Two with the cynical "do you want me to show you" while missiles are flying.

The emotion thing, such as it is (without Data's emotion chip knock-off), may still be a property of her neural net. What the humanlike Android said does not exclude that possibility, if her neural net was designed that way his statement would be accurate. Also, he could be varnishing the truth a bit: he doesn't want her to "repair" herself, so he puts her at ease that there is no malfunction.
 
The emotion thing, such as it is (without Data's emotion chip knock-off), may still be a property of her neural net. What the humanlike Android said does not exclude that possibility, if her neural net was designed that way his statement would be accurate. Also, he could be varnishing the truth a bit: he doesn't want her to "repair" herself, so he puts her at ease that there is no malfunction.

I'm just so sick of the fictional cliche that AIs wouldn't or couldn't have emotion because it's some uniquely human thing or is too complicated to build into a machine. That's crap. Emotion is far simpler than intelligence. Animals have emotions -- fear, desire, aggression, lust -- very simple drives that they act on directly and straightforwardly. Emotion basically is programming -- it's a set of hardwired responses built into the brain, rather than something learned or chosen. So emotional response should be far, far easier to build into an AI than actual conscious thought. It's thought and intelligence that make emotion complicated, because it gives us the ability to resist our emotions or be conflicted between different needs, rather than just impulsively acting on emotion like animals do.

Not to mention that it's impossible for any sentient mind to function without emotion. Sapience is essentially the ability to choose, to make decisions rather than just acting on instinct and reflex. And making a decision requires an incentive to prefer one choice over another. With no emotion, no ability to favor one choice or disapprove of another, there's no motivation to make any decisions at all. Studies have shown that even the most coldly logical decisions, like solving math problems, engage the emotional centers of the brain, because there's a desire to select the right answer. So the idea that intellect and emotion are fundamentally separate things is just wrong. Emotion is an inseparable aspect of intellect. Any sapient mind would have emotion in some form. Otherwise it'd just sit there and never have a reason to make a choice beyond programmed reflex.
 
I didn't hear Marcus/Titch's mother say "Three". It sounded like "Sweetie" to me.

Hmm, could be. I can't always trust my hearing. At the end of Lucifer's season finale, when he dropped the bombshell about his "Mum," I could've sworn he said "Blum," so I totally missed the significance of it.
 
I've said it before. the android's my favorite character on this whole show, and I like her even more with her Data emotion chip installed. i hope she gets to keep it.

And I'm glad she's getting her former castmates guest spots on the show. Here's hoping Anna Silk shows up eventually.
 
Christopher, you can be in love with Siri, but Siri will never be in love with you.
The issue with adding emotions to AI is not a "cliché", it is a factual reality. This story, along with numerous previous stories from other franchises, is not based on fiction, it is based on present fact. We cannot program emotions, we can only program logic. Maybe someday, but not now. Dark Matter, and various shows and movies before this, are basing their stories on a possible advancement from what we have now. I'm sorry you don't see this.
 
Found this one pretty meh. Lots of running around in caves and standard trapped-in-cave beats, and a really cursory handling of the whole "get Corso" thing. I guess this reinforces my suspicion that they really did just want to write out Marc Bendavid. For one thing, he was just as bland as Corso as he was as One, so it seems the problem was the actor, not the character. For another, it actually would've been more logical for Two to keep Corso around long enough to find out what he knows. If plot considerations alone had driven things, he might've stuck around longer. (Or not. Maybe keeping him around would've revealed the answers too soon.)

While it was interesting to see the Android experiment with being more human, I miss her standard persona. I hope this change isn't permanent.
 
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