Dark Matter, SyFy's new space show, premieres June 12th
- Thread starter Quinton O'Connor
- Start date
I'm not as thrilled about this show's renewal as I am about Killjoys, but at least they'll have the chance to finish telling the half-story they padded out into the finale. Hopefully the season premiere will provide the explanations they didn't provide in Episode 13. And hopefully they can get their act together and flesh out the world better in their sophomore year.
Agreed. They pushed the whole "ship-based" part of their concept pretty hard, but I still found it a nice break from the current norm in sci-fi. I'd like to see more planetside action and more of the corporate universe in which they're trapped, but of which we've seen so little except for what they needed to know for a given mission - not wholly unrealistic, but to echo the opening episode, I'd like to be SHOWN instead of just told about this world.
That said, I did enjoy this show more than I did Killjoys, but am glad we'll be seeing more of both next year. In DM, every one of the main characters have had an arc set up that I would like to see further explored (even One); it just remains to be seen if the writers make it interesting enough (looking forward to Four and Six most), and if their actors are able to carry it off convincingly (looking back at One).
Not worried about production values, but I hope they'll shake it up a bit more next year. Unlike Killjoys (brick walls on the spaceship, heck yeah!) they MOSTLY kept things adequately disguised for my taste, though for some reason I'm not fully convinced that Toronto has enough architecture to supply the spaceships and stations they need. IMO I prefer a cardboard set over brick and mortar, and Stargate did that very well for years.
Mark
That said, I did enjoy this show more than I did Killjoys, but am glad we'll be seeing more of both next year. In DM, every one of the main characters have had an arc set up that I would like to see further explored (even One); it just remains to be seen if the writers make it interesting enough (looking forward to Four and Six most), and if their actors are able to carry it off convincingly (looking back at One).
Not worried about production values, but I hope they'll shake it up a bit more next year. Unlike Killjoys (brick walls on the spaceship, heck yeah!) they MOSTLY kept things adequately disguised for my taste, though for some reason I'm not fully convinced that Toronto has enough architecture to supply the spaceships and stations they need. IMO I prefer a cardboard set over brick and mortar, and Stargate did that very well for years.
Mark
I'm fine with focusing more on space stations than planets; I'm of the opinion that an advanced starfaring civilization would limit itself needlessly by sticking to planets as its primary living spaces, instead of building artificial megastructures that can be more precisely tailored to their needs and are far more efficient uses of material. But unless this show gets a much bigger budget, I doubt we'll be seeing a lot of O'Neill cylinders or similar megastructures.
If they wanted to make Four interesting, they'd have to stop treating him as the Noble Warrior King of Orientalist Stereotype Land and make him an actual, individual human being with a plausible culture behind him.
Maybe the two shows should pool their budgets, rent a soundstage or warehouse for their shared use, and construct a series of generic standing sets that can be redressed to represent various types of spaceships, stations, and other outer-space settings. Or maybe take more of a Babylon 5 approach and build a bunch of wall flats and set pieces that can be quickly assembled into sets of various configurations.
I thought of one thing that kind of bugged me. We had a whole bunch of different arcs going on, but they all felt completely separate from each other. One thing I liked about how Killjoys ended was how they kind tied a whole bunch of the arcs together, but here it feels like each of the arcs could be on a completely separate show and it wouldn't have any effect on anything else.
Yeah, there is that too. The six of them all have their separate quests and backgrounds that don't really seem to go together. Heck, Four isn't even from the same genre as the others. He's an exile from a samurai movie that somehow got shoehorned into a space opera. And I thought that Six's backstory tied into the whole evil-corporate-rule arc, but when I checked the show's wiki, it said that the Procyon Insurrection was fighting the Galactic Authority, not the corporations. And the corporation that made Two doesn't even seem to be one of the big multiplanetary corporations that were established as the main players. One/Derrick Moss's company, CoreLactic, apparently is one of the multi-corps, according to the article seen in Episode 8, but it hasn't been mentioned in connection to anything other than Moss and his wife's murder. It's all just unconnected threads.
Now, in principle, there's nothing wrong with the idea of a show that throws together seven people from very different backgrounds on a single ship -- say, a first mate, a skipper too, a millionaire and his wife, a movie star, a professor, and a farm girl.
But at least those characters come from a world we're familiar with and so we can see how they fit into it.
As a fan rooted in anime like Gundam et. al., I'm totally aboard with seeing more space stations too - I'm more worried about their budget's ability to carry it off. Since I'm wondering if both Killjoys and DM have a crossover in their futures (I'm totally considering that Syfy has purposefully tinkered with scripts so that their finer details of their universes like FTL travel, etc. don't interfere with each other too much), it would make a certain amount of sense for them to work together more in making their worlds more detailed and believeable while still enjoyable separately. Not like that many people watched only one of SG-1 and Atlantis, but here there is probably less of a shared audience. Also, Class-M worlds may ACTUALLY be really tough to find out there, so who knows - in some regions of space, stations and colonies is all you get.
Four's story is interesting to me not intrinsically because of its stereotype, but that it represents a lot of potential in terms of a world building and how our heroes will inevitably get involved. This is arguably closest in nature to how Trek explored the Klingon hierarchy and warrior culture in TNG and DS9 (mostly), and as they step out of the "I WATCHED LOTS OF ANIME AND LOVE JAPANESE CULTURE" mindset that likely created this (Joseph Mallozzi is a known fan of both), I hope to see more details.
I'm interested in seeing Four's extended family (his half brother is half-Asian, so I'm wondering if that will play a significant role on its own since we haven't seen that guy's father), and more about that world - they've used obviously Anglo-Saxon architecture for their "castle" with Asian-inspired set dressing vomited all over it, which isn't a bad thing IMO.
As for Six, he's likewise got a backstory in a more involving conflict as with Four, as opposed to a more personal arc as the others have. This thus creates more opportunities for fantastical world building and exploration and is why I'm more interested in seeing it.
Mark
Four's story is interesting to me not intrinsically because of its stereotype, but that it represents a lot of potential in terms of a world building and how our heroes will inevitably get involved. This is arguably closest in nature to how Trek explored the Klingon hierarchy and warrior culture in TNG and DS9 (mostly), and as they step out of the "I WATCHED LOTS OF ANIME AND LOVE JAPANESE CULTURE" mindset that likely created this (Joseph Mallozzi is a known fan of both), I hope to see more details.
I'm interested in seeing Four's extended family (his half brother is half-Asian, so I'm wondering if that will play a significant role on its own since we haven't seen that guy's father), and more about that world - they've used obviously Anglo-Saxon architecture for their "castle" with Asian-inspired set dressing vomited all over it, which isn't a bad thing IMO.
As for Six, he's likewise got a backstory in a more involving conflict as with Four, as opposed to a more personal arc as the others have. This thus creates more opportunities for fantastical world building and exploration and is why I'm more interested in seeing it.
Mark
You really need to take a break from your crusade.
I view it as an interesting attempt to make the future non-uniform. (Or would you prefer it if everybody looked the same and acted the same?) Perhaps not the most successful attempt, but for what little we've gotten of worldbuilding on this show, a decent attempt nonetheless.
A perusal of my published science fiction should be sufficient to answer that question.
I would naturally love to see a plausible portrayal of an alien empire based on a non-Western culture, but that's exactly why I hate the dumbed-down version we're getting, reducing Japanese culture to nothing but a bunch of antiquated samurai stereotypes. Lazy stereotyping is hardly a desirable alternative to uniformity.
Even though I did have some issues with the show, I still enjoyed it overall and do look forward to seeing more. It's one of those weird situations where the individual pieces, the episodes in this case, are good individually, but when you look at them as a whole season then the issues start to become apparent.
I feel kind of the opposite -- there were a number of weak episodes (notably the pleasure-droid episode and the finale), but the things I find worthwhile are more global. Although, yes, there are definitely some weaknesses evident when you take it as a whole. It's a very, very flawed show that has the potential to be better.
But then, Stargate SG-1's first season pretty much sucked. I didn't much like Warehouse 13's first season either. So there's always hope.
I thought Four's Half Brother shared the same Father, and it's their mothers that are different? Hence, why the Half Brother was next in line? I certainly didn't get the impression the Half Brother's mother was Four's mother, since she referred to the Half Brother as "My" son.
Regarding Dark Matter and Killjoys sharing resources, isn't one of the shows a Canadian/SyFy joint Production, while the other is exclusively a Canadian Production? Would they be able to share resources?
Regarding Dark Matter and Killjoys sharing resources, isn't one of the shows a Canadian/SyFy joint Production, while the other is exclusively a Canadian Production? Would they be able to share resources?
That's right. Ryo and Hiro are both the late emperor's sons, to different mothers. The current empress is Ryo's stepmother and Hiro's biological mother. That's why she murdered the emperor and framed Ryo -- to get the rightful heir out of the way so that her son could become emperor instead. After all, if Hiro weren't the emperor's son, he couldn't have succeeded him as he has.
Which does make it odd that Hiro looks more biracial than either of his biological parents. It's probably just due to the vagaries of casting and isn't meant to be meaningful in-story.
Well, they've already shared at least one actor (Rob Stewart) and probably a location or two. And different production companies have shared resources before; for instance, Desilu stayed in business in the early '60s mostly by renting its studios and facilities out to other production companies. Paramount rented a soundstage at Sony Studios to hold the Enterprise sets in Star Trek Into Darkness. And CBS and Warner Bros. are co-owners of The CW Network. So it's theoretically possible that Killjoys's Temple Street Productions and Dark Matter's Prodigy Pictures could pool their resources to build or rent a facility that would benefit them both. I have no reason to believe that it actually would happen, and it's more just idle conjecture than anything else, but if the will were there, I think it theoretically could be done.
I actually memorized the rotoscoped motion scenes that Filmation reused in shows like Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and He-Man and acted out the moves myself when I played.
Still, the stock rotoscoped action scenes were an improvement on the more static character animation in earlier shows like Star Trek. I think they had, like, that one stiffly animated shot of a character from the waist up as he ran toward the camera, and a stock sideways run cycle for the male characters and a more girly run cycle for Uhura. TAS's animation would've been improved significantly by a few rotoscope sequences, even just the same ones over and over for different characters. But Filmation didn't start using them until a few years later.
Cost of the International Space Station for a crew of 6: $150,000,000,000
Cost for a 4 bedroom house, custom build: $200,000