Exactly -- during the run-up. They set things up gradually and paced them out -- the Klingon conflict dominated one season, and then the outbreak of the Dominion war was at the end of that season. They set things up for later, yes, but they didn't pile everything on at the same time. They resolved one big thing to clear the board for the next big thing.
[...]But Dark Matter has always been kind of sloppy with its storytelling, setting things up and leaving them unresolved for a long time or just abruptly tossing storylines aside as with Devin and the Seers. But this season feels like they're just randomly throwing everything at the wall, burning off all the sci-fi cliches like evil doubles and time travel and robot uprisings and alien invasions. It's too cluttered and unfocused. If it were an old-school show where every episode was a self-contained story, that sort of thing would be okay. But it's presented itself as an arc-based show, so it needs more discipline in how it develops its arcs.
I don't agree that every show needs to resolve one big thing to clear the board for next one; not only doesn't real life work that way (Kim Jong-Un didn't wait for Assad, Al-Bagdadi, Maduro etc to be finished before he turned it up to eleven, and the climate discussion has been going on in the meantime, there is domestic trouble,...), shows like Game of Thrones (and the Song of Ice and Fire books even more so) have kept many balls in the air for consecutive seasons. Is GoT bad because it had the thread of the White Walkers and Wildlings, the war of the Five kings and the movements of Daenerys Targaryen in the East run concurrently? I don't think so.
NuBSG is very popular in this forum, even though they didn't bother to finish or even address its own storylines and teases in quite a few cases.
The "possessed" Three from late S2 did come into play after all, as I always had said it would, while some here assumed this element had been dropped (I think you were the one who wrote that it was added just because the episode seemed to come in five minutes short, as opposed to a setup for a later storyline). In itself, this is a return to a storyline that was started in late S1 when Rook's intentions were already guessed (at least as a possible answer) by part of the audience.
In general, Dark Matter tends to remember it storylines and finish them, at least to the extent that external factors don't interfere. As for the storylines that were abruptly tossed aside:
-Seers: the leadership got killed, this wasn't abruptly anymore than, say, than Pawter dying on Killjoys. The rank-and-file are still out there, maybe far less of a threat now without those leaders, but they may return.
-One: in this case, it's clear Mallozzi got overruled by Firestone for reasons unknown (maybe the latter felt the character wasn't working, as One wasn't the most popular). He was planning to revisit One's storyline (his wife, etc) this season but had to scrap the planned episode and replace it with the paradox episode, because some schedules didn't work out.
-Devon: here too, dropping the storyline wasn't intentional as explained in a previous post. This was admittedly not a good storyline with such an ending.
I will also note that the main storyline isn't the corporate war, the independence of colonies, the androids or the alien invasion: those are all background for the crew to deal with and to generate conflict that involves them. It's not bad that there is variety this way; not every episode has to deal with the corporate war, it can perfectly go on without the Raza, more than enough corporate warships and troops around for that.
This story is about the crew, the impact of the memory loss and the question if the criminals can or cannot redeem themselves.
It's like "Who's the Cylon" again, only we get to play "Who's the Android",and also "Who's the Possessed Humanoid". It comes down to the nature of beings and their value. Are humans Born Of Woman the only ones of "value" in this universe? There are different kinds of sentient beings in this show and prejudice against the free androids and the type of being that Two is has already been expressed. Fear of AI is already being expressed in our world by Elon Musk and others. Makes this show more interesting to me. (sorry about all the ")
I don't think this is like BSG, in the sense that even main cast/crew could turn out to be Cylon, there (and the problem with BSG was that they didn't do anything with Boomer, after they used the character for shock value at the end of S1). In this case, only synthetic humans have the long-term capability to carry those aliens and their identities are already known to Five and co.
This probably will impact the corporations though, because now the crew of the Raza has lists of the infiltrators in their ranks (at least the synthetics).
Androids are similar in the sense that they are not hidden, but the question is which have been tampered with to free them and which are still unquestionably loyal.
What? No. It was made clear in the first Rook episode that Rebecca was a synthetic human created by Dwarf Star. Rook named her Rebecca when he made her, and he and other Dwarf Star personnel still call her Rebecca. She was still Rebecca when she escaped and lived with Dr. Shaw (recall that the android on Shaw's outpost called her Rebecca when he saw her). It was only after Shaw was dying and put into stasis that Rebecca went out into the galaxy and adopted the new identity of Portia Lin.
After all, the nanites are what give her rapid healing and let her survive vacuum, but they don't create her exceptional strength, reflexes, prowess, intelligence, etc. That's built into her biology.
I'm not sure about the latter paragraph. The nanites give the healing, but given that the second-gen nanite bodies (seen in Dwarf Star HQ, late S2) are stronger still I would think they also impact on some other parameters like strength. It's probably a combination of both factors (nanites + design) that leads to the superior abilities on all fronts.
