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

[Cyrus]

Pushing the reset button after introducing 2 new characters was disappointing.

They don't make the adriods very robust. A sword can severe their limb or heads rather easily.

Since Three/Marcus Boone turns out to be a nice guy deep down, then maybe he is the farmboy Titch after all.

 

[Aragorn]

The big twist will be that Titch is actually Two... or Android.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I loved this episode! I'm surprised no one else liked it. And this was despite the episode, to my great shock, containing Ruby Rose who I loathe. Though she was 10 times better than she was in Orange acting wise I cannot stand her and her godawful overwrought accent. She sounds like an extra in an 80's Paul Hogan Aus tourism commercial marketed to the yanks. Please do not talk Ruby Rose, it's deeply disturbing.

I was hoping we would see One be the one (lulz) to flush his fleshlight out the airlock. That would have been full of bad imagery people could argue about.

The Jayne gun naming scene needed a boot up the ass. No, just don't.

But otherwise I thought it a romp and I was pleased that there was no mysterious artifact behind the door but rather the BOOTY that everyone failed to find when they first searched the ship. There may be some cool stuff in there still, personal stuff even.

The Android is adorable, I like her very much.

 

[Star Wolf]

This one was written by Stargate's Robert C. Cooper, and I believe it's his first contribution to the show. And it didn't work too well for me. The attempts to advance the Two-One romance were clunkily written. Their first scene together was awkward and strange (and both characters seemed to have forgotten the conversation they already had in an earlier episode about Two's liaisons with Three), and there was no real motivation for why Two broke it off with Three or why she went from pushing One away at the beginning to sleeping with him at the end, beyond the plot requiring it. Also, while it was nice to see Three get some fleshing out, the emotional plot involving Three/Marcus's dying love interest was undermined by having to share an episode with the cheesier evil-sexbot plotline.

And the whole thing was a mass of gendered cliches that didn't serve the distaff side at all well: the cliche of the sexy woman with no body modesty casually stripping in front of the male lead, the cliche of the submissive female "entertainment" droid, the cliche of jealousy and cattiness between two female characters (the androids) who have every reason to bond, and the cliche of the female love interest whose life and death are solely there to advance a male regular's arc (and indeed she was rather literally "fridged" at the end). Plus the non-gendered but still tiresome cliche of "We're on course directly for the sun!"

Granted, Ruby Rose (Wendy) was quite stunning, although she had a weak voice; it was often hard to make out what she was saying (no, not because of her accent, but because she didn't project or enunciate well). She really needs some voice training. Conversely, Zoie Palmer did a terrific job bouncing between accents. A couple of them were probably exaggerated, but the Scottish one sounded much more convincing than the usual North American attempts at Scottish accents. They should've let the Android keep that one.

Just face it the Trek fans and porn fans have been among the first adopters of many technologies. The killer app being something that leads to a man orgasm since VCR tapes started renting and being among the first widespread adopters of traded floppy disc and DVDs. I happened to watch Humans the morning before this episode and what happen? A man's wife wasn't in the mood so his domestic synth Anita lays on her back for the primary user concurrently with a bunch of teen-aged boys at a party getting ready to "rape" a synth since she resisted as they were not the primary user.

When you get down to it since there is no real reason for her to be built like a human, that can't actually pass for one like a Terminator can and not like a Star Wars droid or one of Gene Simmons robots in Runaway a bang bot to use the Almost Human slang would be one of the first plots hit. I remember saying on that show why were the officer assistants in human form as they were just detached gunships. On Almost Human they even played the episodes out of order to move the bang bot episode forward and even the mighty Star Trek TNG wasted no time telling us that Data was fully functional

 

[Christopher]

Beyond all that though, this episode was just a blatant ripoff of Firefly's - Our Mrs. Reynolds except with a entertainment/sex/assassinbot in place of Safron but offering all the same temptations to win over key personnel on the ship, complete with people being locked in different rooms while Safronbot takes over the ship and sets it on a collision course with certain doom.

Why is everyone so determined to compare this show to Firefly? Stories about seductive femmes fatales with evil hidden agendas have been around for millennia, and there have been plenty of stories about murderous sexbots (e.g. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, and even -- ugh -- Austin Powers). And the crew weren't locked in different rooms; four (?) of them were locked in one room and the others were free to move about. So you're really, really reaching for the FF comparison here.

If not for Android, the episode would have been a total loss. She was a delight with the envy of the new robot's flavor of the month status with the crew. Cool to see she's developing emotions.

I'm surprised people think she didn't have them already. She's always had a dry wit and a degree of pride in her accomplishments.

They don't make the adriods very robust. A sword can severe their limb or heads rather easily.

Well, we saw at the start that there's a natural seam between her head and her body; One commented on how the skin sealed to hide the seams. So Four just struck her at that existing seam and broke the seal between the head and torso components. (Also, presumably his swords are ultra-sharp fantasy swords that can cut through anything with no effort. Everything else about him is a stereotype out of a samurai movie, so why should this be any different?)

And if you think about it, from a product-safety standpoint, you wouldn't really want an android designed for intimate physical interaction with humans to be stronger than a human. Heck, people occasionally get hurt having sex with other humans. All these fictional sexbots that have ten times human strength and durability are lawsuits waiting to happen.

And since the android technology in the Dark Matter universe is self-repairing, with the parts able to function independently even when detached (as we saw here), then there isn't really any need to make them exceptionally resistant to breakage. To prevent human injury, you'd want to design the androids' bodies to give way or come apart more easily than a human would, and then simply repair themselves afterward.

Hmm... now I'm wondering, if the Android got stranded on a planet, could she pull off a hand, attach one of her eyes to it, and send it crawling back to the ship? (Why, yes, I am binge-rewatching Red Dwarf, how did you know?)

 

[Star Wolf]

Beyond all that though, this episode was just a blatant ripoff of Firefly's - Our Mrs. Reynolds except with a entertainment/sex/assassinbot in place of Safron but offering all the same temptations to win over key personnel on the ship, complete with people being locked in different rooms while Safronbot takes over the ship and sets it on a collision course with certain doom.

Why is everyone so determined to compare this show to Firefly? Stories about seductive femmes fatales with evil hidden agendas have been around for millennia, and there have been plenty of stories about murderous sexbots (e.g. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, and even -- ugh -- Austin Powers). And the crew weren't locked in different rooms; four (?) of them were locked in one room and the others were free to move about. So you're really, really reaching for the FF comparison here.

More like the show in general as opposed to any particular episode? I personally got a Blake's 7 vibe from the first scenes of the show but I can also see Firefly with Three being a clone of Jane, Four being Book, Six as Zoe/Wash, Five as a Firefly River and Two showing signs of Mal and a Serenity River. But then like there are only 12 musical notes there are only so many character types and I could see some Firefly in Musketeers.

 

[Christopher]

I've seen people comparing Dark Matter to all sorts of things -- Stargate, Firefly, Blake's 7, Farscape, you name it. Which tells me that it isn't really like any one of those things; it has its own identity, and people are just projecting their expectations onto it because it's new to them. Heck, as I mentioned, I'm seeing some Red Dwarf comparisons myself, because that's what I happen to be rewatching lately. Tropes recur. That's why they're tropes. Just because two shows have them in common, that doesn't prove that one is copying the other. It just proves they're both drawing on the same common vocabulary of tropes. Which is pretty much the definition of a genre.

Three as Jayne, sure, I've seen that myself -- except Three is a lot smarter than Jayne and has more of a heart. But none of your other comparisons work at all. Four is nothing like Book; he's not a wise, spiritual elder, he hasn't turned his back on his violent past, and he has no sense of humor at all. He's more like Teal'c or Worf, though he's mainly just a really, really lazy samurai stereotype. Six is basically a more easygoing version of Travis, Roger Cross's previous regular character from Continuum; his backstory is remarkably similar. Five is not even remotely the same as River; she isn't mentally ill or a torture/brainwashing victim or a superfighter, she's just a vulnerable if tech-savvy kid who's had a lot of information dumped into her head. She's more like Wesley Crusher if anything, or maybe like he would've been if they'd stuck with the original idea of the character as a girl named Leslie Crusher. Two is nothing like Mal; she's neither a defeated rebel or a jokey cynic. The only remote comparison is that they're both leaders, but their styles couldn't be more different. If any FF character fits Two, it's Zoe. But you could just as easily compare her to Aeryn Sun or numerous other tough female leads.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Beyond all that though, this episode was just a blatant ripoff of Firefly's - Our Mrs. Reynolds except with a entertainment/sex/assassinbot in place of Safron but offering all the same temptations to win over key personnel on the ship, complete with people being locked in different rooms while Safronbot takes over the ship and sets it on a collision course with certain doom.

Why is everyone so determined to compare this show to Firefly? Stories about seductive femmes fatales with evil hidden agendas have been around for millennia, and there have been plenty of stories about murderous sexbots (e.g. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, and even -- ugh -- Austin Powers). And the crew weren't locked in different rooms; four (?) of them were locked in one room and the others were free to move about. So you're really, really reaching for the FF comparison here.

First off, I didn't compare the entire show to Firefly, I compared the plot of this episode to the plot of a specific episode of Firefly. So speaking of projecting, stop projecting your irritation with prior arguments you've had on the subject of comparing this entire show to Firefly onto my post.

Second, if someone else wants to compare this show to Firefly, that's a perfectly reasonable, fair, and not insulting to Dark Matter in the slightest comparison to make, and just because you had the epiphany that different people are shockingly comparing the show to different things, and therefore it's not like any of those things and they're just projecting, doesn't make it THREAD LAW. Just because you said something doesn't mean everyone else has to get on board with it. You do this all the time, saying "Again, I already said..." or repeating the same point over and over again like everyone is supposed to fall in line when Christopher makes his grand declaration about the way things will be discussed from now on.

Third, I was mostly just making a half-joking/half-serious throwaway comment comparing this episode to Our Mrs. Reynolds, but since any commentary thread where you're participating requires other posters to be prepared to be cross-examined like a hostile witness at any moment, I shall expand on my point:

- Character's memory loss makes them unsure of how this new person/android came to be in their midst (Mal's and others drunkenness/crew's amnesia)
- Saffron/Sexbot wins hearts and minds with exceptional cooking skills
- Saffron/Sexbot wins hearts and libidos with exceptional temptress skills
- Character undresses in front of clearly uncomfortable potential suitor (Saffron/Mal and Two/One)
- One character is envious of all the attention the new character is getting from the crew (Inara/Android)
- Crew gets locked in a room(s) while the new character set the ship on a course to oblivion
- The envious character (Inara/Android) is the last one standing in the sexbot's way so she has to try and take her out before she can execute her plan
- The upbeat teenage waif/mechanical genius (Das/Kaylee) has to sneak onto the bridge to try and save the ship from its collision course
- The crew's safety is only guaranteed once the tough guys on the team use their conventional weapons to short out the enemy threat

You may now return to making multiple posts complaining about people comparing this show to Firefly even though that's not what I was doing outside a single paragraph about this single episode and it's similarities to another single episode.

If not for Android, the episode would have been a total loss. She was a delight with the envy of the new robot's flavor of the month status with the crew. Cool to see she's developing emotions.

I'm surprised people think she didn't have them already. She's always had a dry wit and a degree of pride in her accomplishments.

Her prior behavior all seemed within the realm of very sophisticated programming (once you accept the premise of such a humanlike AI to begin with) and was mostly done for the benefit of her human counterparts. I could see her programmers giving her a bit of a sarcastic wit and pridefulness either as a reflection of themselves or to make her seem more human to her crew, much like the robots in Insterstellar had adjustable humor and honesty and other personality settings.

This was different though, IMO. This was deep personal concern over her own utility with the crew, expressed both in private and in public, and showing more facial expression and vocal inflection than she usually does. This was performing unnecessary tasks outside her normal operating parameters strictly in order to demonstrate her usefulness in the face of the new flavor of the month. She even exhibited some sexuality with the pulling down of the zipper on her top and the flirting.

 

[Cyrus]

It was interesting that Two told Three and Six to space Wendy's body and they totally ignored that. It ended up getting their ass kicked. If Wendy's head and body are still on board I wonder if she may get re-activated somehow and cause more trouble.

 

[cylkoth]

Three and Six didn't ignore the spacing order, the airlock door couldn't be opened due to the computers being offline. After the crisis was over, we can assume they got rid of her. The script just didn't show it onscreen.

 

[Anwar]

About the door...the idea that it was their storage room for all their booty really isn't all that disappointing. Makes a lot of sense, really.

Anywho, I'm starting to get the vibe that there never was one Corporate Death Squad in the first place. I think that the Corporation hires a different group of Mercs for every mission and just puts them on the Raza as a terror tactic.

So when it came to these guys, the Hiring Manager just thought they were brutal Mercs from the false reputations they'd gotten. Most of them said yes for the money but weren't going to go ahead with whatever kill command they were given in the first place.

 

[Christopher]

About the door...the idea that it was their storage room for all their booty really isn't all that disappointing. Makes a lot of sense, really.

Yeah, but the way they built it up implied it was much more. If they didn't intend it to be some big important secret, they shouldn't have devoted six weeks to playing it up as some big important secret.

 

[Reverend]

I have to say I'm not a fan of this show's fumbling attempts at being racy and "mature" with all the puppy dog eyed crushing, random off-screen one-nighters and "hey my eyes are up here" jiggery pokery, it comes off as juvenile IMO.

It sort of reminds me of the way Torchwood would try to be more "grown up" and "edgy" than it's parent show, but more often than not it was just puerile. The narrative equivalent of two pubescent school boys giggling at fart jokes and drawing cartoons of human reproductive anatomy in the back of their exercise books.

Oh and the assassin-fembot sub plot was just awfully derivative. I appreciate that it's probably only really there to introduce this Cyrus person who I'm assuming will show up in person down the line, but again, the execution was *horribly* clichéd and hackneyed.

That seems to be the recurring problem with this show for me. Interesting concepts: botched with ham-fisted execution. Take the aforementioned murder-droid: suddenly giving her an attitude and super-villaining (new word?) up the joint was the obvious thing to do. Seen it a million times. Boring.
But for the sake of argument (and just off the top of my head) what if they had her maintain her friendly, easy-going persona while committing acts of sabotage and murder? It would at least have been an interesting choice and given the actress (who I know for a fact is a good actor) something more to do than strut around dispensing put-downs.

The really annoying thing is that you can tell (most) of the actors are *really* trying but the material just isn't there. They're making the best of it, but the writing is seriously letting them down.

 

[Dark Gilligan]

I've seen people comparing Dark Matter to all sorts of things -- Stargate, Firefly, Blake's 7, Farscape, you name it. Which tells me that it isn't really like any one of those things.

This. It's often referred to as Second Artist Syndrome. The first artist paints a landscape, then the second artist paints a picture inspired by the first artist's painting, not an actual landscape itself. He's copied, not created. Firefly is itself a secondary painting, the first being Whedon's mercenary ship "Betty" and its crew from Alien Resurrection. The artist copying himself.

Now that I look at it more closely, the "Raza" crewmembers have much more direct counterparts with the crew of the "Betty" than they do with Firefly.

 

[Admiral2]

I've seen people comparing Dark Matter to all sorts of things -- Stargate, Firefly, Blake's 7, Farscape, you name it. Which tells me that it isn't really like any one of those things;

No, it's like all of them. The show's a sci-fi trope omelet, and this latest episode is just the latest example. Of course people see other shows in it. One is a criminal version of Wesley Crusher, Two is Motoko Kusanagi, Three is Jayne Cobb, Four is Storm Shadow, Five is Jubilee, and Six is Teal'c, and the Android is just the Caitlin Jenner version of Data. (Which is probably why I like her best. Data was always my favorite TNG character.)

They woke up with no memories (Pandorum, Ark), helped a planet they were supposed to screw over, been attacked by a clone, at an orbital version of Mos Eisley, fought zombies, got attacked by a fembot, had somebody die of a space illness and got thrown into a sun.

Yes, it has it's own identity: Cliché Thief Extraordinaire.

That said, I side with the "Yeas" on the entertainment value of episode 7, mainly because Android is relentlessly cute while being ruthlessly efficient. I was glad to see Fembot get decapitated.

 

[Christopher]

Now that I look at it more closely, the "Raza" crewmembers have much more direct counterparts with the crew of the "Betty" than they do with Firefly.

Joe Mallozzi himself made a blog post (which I probably already linked to earlier in the thread) comparing all the characters to equivalents from the Stargate franchise, though some of the comparisons were pretty tenuous.

Really, you can concoct an equivalence between any two sets of characters if you cherrypick the right attributes. Once, I responded to an attempt to compare the cast of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda to some other show (maybe one of the Star Trek series) by concocting an equally persuasive comparison to the Gilligan's Island cast. I bet I can do the same here. Let's see:

One is Gilligan, the feckless, sympathetic lead who tends to cause trouble without meaning to. Six is the Skipper, the big, easygoing, avuncular guy with a temper. Three is Mr. Howell, the scheming troublemaker who's always out for his own gain. Four is Mrs. Howell, a haughty member of the elite class who's obsessed with material possessions (his weapons, in this case). Two is Ginger, the sharp-witted and sexually uninhibited femme fatale. The Android is the Professor, the genius on whom the others all depend. And Five is Mary Ann, the sweet and innocent one.

Okay, some of those work better than others, obviously, but it's no worse than the Firefly comparisons I've been hearing. Heck, it's better, because Gilligan had only seven characters, not nine.

(I initially tried to make Two work as the Skipper, the leader who tries to keep the others together, but I couldn't make Six work as Ginger. And really, the Skipper was never really that effective as a leader; plus lately the writers seem to be more interested in Two's sex life than in her command abilities.)

 

[JD]

We finally got into the mystery room, and after all that build up, it was a big let down. I can understand it being a vault for all of their stuff, but after all of the build up I was expecting a lot more.
The whole thing with Three/Marcus and Sarah was kind of annoying. I think it actually might have worked better if they had kept her around for at least a little bit longer so her death would have had more impact. I didn't mind them humanizing him but it just seemed to me that there really wasn't enough to the story for it to really have much of an impact. It does now give Three a new personal motiviation since I'm assuming he's not going to have a grudge against the corporation that got her sick.
I noticed that they seem to be giving each of the characters a new personal motiviation as we are going on. In the memory episode we got Four/Ryo wanting to get revenge on his stepmother and Six/Griffin searching for the general. Now we have Marcus/Three probably wanting revenge against Ferrous Corporation for Sarah's death.
The whole thing with the "entertainment" android was kind of random. This kind of story has been done a million times on these kinds of shows, and Dark Matter didn't really do anything interesting with it. I don't mind these kind of cliche stories if they can manage to do something interesting with it, but IMO at least, they really didn't here. I think if might have helped some of it had been part of an ongoing arc dealing with the person who sent her, but without any background there it didn't really have any impact. I could maybe see that changing if they do run into him later, because at least then you could look back at this as set up.
The whole thing with The Android being jealous seemed to kind of come out of nowhere. I don't really remember her showing that much emotion or anything before now. The scene with the accents was pretty good though.

 

[Christopher]

The whole thing with Three/Marcus and Sarah was kind of annoying. I think it actually might have worked better if they had kept her around for at least a little bit longer so her death would have had more impact. I didn't mind them humanizing him but it just seemed to me that there really wasn't enough to the story for it to really have much of an impact.

Yeah... it was an odd and regrettable choice to put these two plotlines in the same episode. It didn't serve the Sarah plot well at all.

 

[JD]

I was thinking after I wrote my other posts, that both storylines could have actually worked better if they got individual episodes to themselves. We could have gotten more development of Sarah and her relationship with Marcus Boone, and they could have done a slower build up to Wendy turning on the crew.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

On the Vault, after thinking on it, I'm okay that it's not as epic or problem-solving as hoped. The thing is a source of plots, as expected but it's probably more plots of the week (figuring into the whole) rather than the key to get everyone's memories back or whatever.

I feel it more like if you inherited your grandpa's old cabin and found a locked safe at the back. When you finally find the keys, you find sorta what you expect to find in there - pictures from his past (and a couple of you as a kid), a rifle, and maybe his old service medals or a box of nazi gold or evidence he had another wife than mee-maw. Some of it could be mind-blowing, but lots of it would just be stuff to slowly sift through.

Two mentions that some of the stuff is still locked for now, so it's not like they'll forget the room anytime soon. It's only a little annoying to me that they've spent a few weeks since going broke that they've been complaining about the deteriorating situation, and then *poof* they find a box of plastic cash. Fixing things may not be as easy as all that, but IMO they could have had more fun pulling off a caper or job or something to earn their supper. Similarly, after the android spent the episode dealing with being jealous over Wendy, than she didn't get her revenge in some way...

Mark