Hm. Wikipedia said it was a boy. I wonder why.
Dark Matter, SyFy's new space show, premieres June 12th
- Thread starter Quinton O'Connor
- Start date
Hm. Wikipedia said it was a boy. I wonder why.
The character has more of a tomboy look than she does in the series - but the scene when they're debating what to do with the weapons, and whether or not to allow Five to have a vote specifically states that Five is female.
No idea why the wikipedia article would state otherwise.
No idea why the wikipedia article would state otherwise.
I don't know about SyFy but on the Space channel in Canada it was heavily promoted. Commercials during every show for the past month, interviews with the cast on Inner Space, the works.
Of course, that does pale in comparison to the stuff they're doing for Killjoys, which is even highlighted in their commercial for general programming. But then, Killjoys actually is a Space co-production.
Dark Matter was pretty much promoted in tandem with Killjoys on SyFy, Nothing quiet about it.
It's been heavily promoted on Syfy for months now, and there was a series of io9 articles leading up to it (their reviewer also quite likes it, while admitting it's predictable).
After all, this is the start of the network's effort to return to its roots -- more space shows and a Friday lineup devoted to scripted dramas instead of wrestling. They wouldn't want to downplay that.
I meant in regards to billboards, online ads, or commercials on other networks. I don't watch SyFy and had no idea it was premiering. I would've thought they'd push beyond their network but it could always be a money issue, too.
Oh hey, this thread kind of exploded a little bit while I was gone. I guess actually premiering will have that kind of impact on post count! 
Look, straight-up: this is my stance in a nutshell, y'all. It wasn't very good, but it's possible it'll get better. What's more, I'm a firm believer that networks need to see that there's an audience for space shows if we're ever to get better fare back on television, including a little thing called Star Trek. To that end, I'm going to promote the heck out of whatever the networks crank out, because 2014-15 is actually showing signs of execs giving things a cautious nudge again and I don't want another six or more years without a peep.
Dark Matter's premiere ratings probably won't be very high, though. The advertising was so thoroughly insular. If you weren't already watching Syfy, you were probably not going to hear about it.
Meanwhile, I have higher hopes that The Expanse will get a bigger marketing budget. There are some hints it's already been approved for a second season, even, and at six months away I'm running into far more people on the net who have heard of it than with Dark Matter just days before its debut. It's possible Syfy is just being pick-and-choose on where it puts its dollars and wasn't overly fond of what Dark Matter and next week's Killjoys were offering.
Look, straight-up: this is my stance in a nutshell, y'all. It wasn't very good, but it's possible it'll get better. What's more, I'm a firm believer that networks need to see that there's an audience for space shows if we're ever to get better fare back on television, including a little thing called Star Trek. To that end, I'm going to promote the heck out of whatever the networks crank out, because 2014-15 is actually showing signs of execs giving things a cautious nudge again and I don't want another six or more years without a peep.
Dark Matter's premiere ratings probably won't be very high, though. The advertising was so thoroughly insular. If you weren't already watching Syfy, you were probably not going to hear about it.
Meanwhile, I have higher hopes that The Expanse will get a bigger marketing budget. There are some hints it's already been approved for a second season, even, and at six months away I'm running into far more people on the net who have heard of it than with Dark Matter just days before its debut. It's possible Syfy is just being pick-and-choose on where it puts its dollars and wasn't overly fond of what Dark Matter and next week's Killjoys were offering.
Well so far there's literally just the one, and it hasn't been well received based on its pilot ep.
Different spelling. The porn star was Porsche Lynn.
As I said, the io9 website, which is apparently a fairly major genre-news outlet, has been promoting the show heavily for the past couple of weeks at least. Although I looked around for coverage of the show on other major media sites, and the only other one that's been reporting on it heavily is Blastr, Syfy's affiliated news site. So, granted, maybe it hasn't gotten a huge media push, but is that so unusual for Syfy shows?
By the way, one tidbit I came across is that Amanda Tapping is directing the fourth episode.
Yeah, it does seem SyFy is trying to once again replicate their Friday night events, which really haven't been the same since a decade ago when they had the two Stargates and BSG.
Meh, to be honest, I rarely see that kind of promotion done for any shows, in general. Okay, Killjoys does have a lot of online ads, even here on this forum and over on YouTube, but that seems more an exception to me other than the rule.
It was their acquisition of wrestling that led to the elimination of "Sci-Fi Fridays," because the wrestling show had been on Fridays on its previous network and its producers insisted on keeping it there. Which was a mistake for Sci-Fi/Syfy. The wrestling fans would've followed the show to any night, so it didn't matter when it aired, but removing original scripted dramas from Fridays and scattering them elsewhere around the schedule cost the network in the ratings. Or so I've read. Anyway, now they're trying to recapture that "event night" of original programming, and though I wish the shows they had to offer were stronger (I gave up on Defiance after the first year), I hope the experiment succeeds.
The Expanse is supposed to be a mini series. A little early for hints of going beyond a first installment, but if that's the case, Syfy must really like what they've seen. That's encouraging.
Battlestar Galactica started as a miniseries, remember. Lots of Syfy's miniseries are backdoor pilots for ongoing series. Ascension last year certainly was, though it was poorly enough received that it won't be going to series.
Mini-series? I thought The Expanse will be ten episodes, which certainly seems to be the norm for a season these days?
Normally depictions of FTL space seem to be confined tubes (Star Wars, Andromeda), or wide-open spaces (Star Trek). This seemed to me like it tried to combine the two - it was wide open in the X and Y dimensions, but constrained pretty close to the ship in the Z dimension.
Doesn't make much sense, but it at least gave a bit of a different feel to me.
Later Atlantis may have been "safe and unimaginative", but it was still more fun than Universe (which they weren't the showrunners for).
I don't know where all these reviews talking about the "humor" are getting it from - I didn't see that in the first episode. I'm willing to keep watching, but I can't recommend it to the SG-1 fans I know unless/until it lightens up a bit.
They were the showrunners for Atlantis during the end of its first season and for all of its last season.
To me, it's just more swooshy blue clouds. Hardly any different from hyperspace in Stargate or Babylon 5 (though that was red) or other space shows. It's all just variations on the theme of "go forward real fast," which is an understandable way to convey the concept of high speed to a TV/movie audience, but is a complete misunderstanding of how any kind of FTL travel would actually work. It's not really moving at all, it's altering the geometry of spacetime around you to reach a distant point that would take far longer to reach by actually moving there. That's why I'd like to see something more like Interstellar for a change.
Or at least, if the FTL were based on travel through hyperspace, I wish there'd be some kind of visual distortion to give the impression of a hyperspace, a realm of higher dimensions and bizarre geometry. Not just an ordinary 3-dimensional environment that happens to have swirly lights swooshing by.
Case in point: You remember how Interstellar explained the spherical wormhole mouth by making an analogy with a hole in a flat sheet and adding a dimension? You can take that farther to consider the interior of the wormhole. In the 2D analogy, if space is a flat sheet and a wormhole is a cylindrical tunnel connecting two parts of it, an object sliding through the wormhole would pass through the sides of the cylinder, not the middle. And that means that the light sent out from the ship would circle around the cylinder and hit the ship from the other side. Extrapolate that to three dimensions and a ship passing through a wormhole would see itself surrounded by a ring-shaped image of itself -- look outward from anywhere along the side of the ship and you'd see the other side. Like passing through a reflective glass tube, except with the reflection rotated 180 degrees. (I believe I used this idea in my description of the Axis of Time in Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations -- Watching the Clock.) That would be a pretty interesting and unusual visual effect, as well as being scientifically authentic.
I think I've seen one or two other productions in the past that tried to depict an other-dimensional space with strange distortions; I think The Twilight Zone's "Little Girl Lost" might've been one case. When I was younger and had daydreams of making special-effects movies of my own, I imagined depicting hyperspace as a blurry, distorted realm, maybe shooting the ship models through distortion filters or fisheye lenses or some such thing. There are so many possibilities that nobody's trying because they're just recycling the same old conventions.
Three got a number of humorous moments. "I vote she doesn't get a vote" has been singled out as a particularly funny moment in at least one review I've seen, as has the slapstick bit where he shot at the big door and got knocked down. And there was One's "I guess that's a yes" when Four turned out to be really, really good with the swords. And as I mentioned before, I quite liked the Android's "Do you want me to show you?" about the evasive maneuvers. It's mostly understated humor, but it is present.