I thought they gave up the premise a little too quickly, and some of the corporate stuff is a little confusing.
I'd say more confused than confusing. "Confusing" implies (at least to me) that it's overcomplicated, but the problem with the show's worldbuilding is just the opposite -- that it isn't deep enough. It's just a few random bits and pieces thrown together without any real connective tissue, without a larger framework to show us how it all fits together.
Killjoys, by contrast, has a really intricate and complicated world with a ton of stuff going on, but it's not that hard to follow because we can see how most of the pieces fit together.
Let's see, what do we know about
Dark Matter's universe? It seems to be set in our galaxy, probably in the Orion Arm, since it uses recognizable star names. It's not too far in the future, since they still have bits of Earth culture like
Charlotte's Web and
Star Wars. There's a government of some sort called the Galactic Authority that's supposed to maintain order, but it's basically ineffectual, and the real power lies with several major multiplanetary corporations that are battling each other for power and advantage. The main multiplanetary corps include Ferrous Corp, the Mikkei Combine, Traugott Corp, and Volkov-Rusi, and there are various smaller concerns like Dwarf Star Industries and Transfer Transit. There's a terrorist movement called the Procyon Insurrection that's fighting the Galactic Authority, calling them corrupt. There are at least two independent interstellar powers apart from the GA, both in a region called C-Sector -- the Principality of Zairon, which pretends to be a feudal Japanese monarchy for some reason, and the Republic of Pyr, with whom they are at war.
It actually sounds relatively coherent when put together that way, but it's been doled out in dribs and drabs, it's mostly just names, and there are a lot of holes in it.
Granted,
Star Trek didn't even come up with the idea of the Federation until its 22nd episode, didn't introduce the Klingons until its 27th, didn't even settle on the century until the second season and didn't explicitly state it onscreen until the movies, etc. There was definitely an improvisational quality to its worldbuilding. But that was another era. Back then, the tropes of interstellar science fiction were still relatively new to the TV audience. These days, we've seen it all so many times that just going "Look! Starships! Robots! Teleporters! Samurai planet!" doesn't bring anything fresh. It needs to add up to something bigger.
I mean, Trek aside, most space opera universes on TV have a singular defining theme or element behind them.
Battlestar Galactica had the Colonies and the fall of humanity (although the original series threw in a lot of random human colonies that didn't fit the paradigm).
Blake's 7 had the tyrannical Federation and the fight against it.
Red Dwarf had the distant-future setting where humanity was extinct but had littered space with its ruins and creations.
Stargate had the title artifacts, the seeding of humans across space by ancient aliens, and the interplay between alien civilizations and Earth mythology.
Andromeda had the after-the-Fall setting, the attempt to rebuild the lost Commonwealth (though that show also went far astray from its core concepts in later seasons).
Firefly had the 'Verse, the system with all its various core and fringe worlds and their interrelations.
Killjoys has something similar with the Quad. But
Dark Matter is more just a generic space-opera future. Its only unifying theme seems to be a vague "evil corporations run things" idea, but that's a very commonplace premise in today's shows (see also
Continuum, Killjoys, Mr. Robot, etc.), and it's thrown together with other stuff like the Galactic Authority and the independent states like Zairon, so it just feels like one piece of the jumble. DM's universe doesn't have a personality of its own yet.
