This week on SyFy Friday: Dark Matter - it's not just starship fuel!
Dark Matter S03E01: In terms of time passed, this episode immediately picks up from where the season 2 finale left off. But as the writers seem to have neatly put away most of the pieces from S2 in the station-ending explosion, I'm not sure this helps S2's closure at all.
Instead, the writers are immediately setting up the pieces for S3. Though we don't get to really see it, the Corporate War has started, despite our anti-heroes' best efforts, as Ryo's stunt pushed things to motion even after the Ferrous Corp bomb was taken care of. So I expect that to be the backdrop for a lot of this season. Which if it gets us more Torri Higginson, I'm all for. Truffault is fun in her cold hearted bitchiness, and it's good to see Higginson on screen after the screwjob that was Stargate Atlantis. Having her, Five, and the Android all defending the ship was meant to be a bit of fan service, I suspect, but it was plenty amusing.
Otherwise, this episode has an interesting structure. Everyone is scattered in the aftermath of the explosion; Five & Truffault have the Raza, Two and Six have the Marauder, and poor Three gets to play prisoner. I was tempted to subtitle this week as "Russian Roulette: let's see who dies", because everyone was placed in mortal danger in a different way. And yet they all lived.
I'm not sure this counts as an especially action-heavy episode, but I enjoyed the chatter in the downtime. Especially Two and Six, and again with Two and Truffault. The underlying theme of the show is who these people are now that they don't have their memories, and sometimes the show handles that topic in a very diffused sort of way. So I like that portions of this episode addressed the subject more directly. Ryo is no longer Four, and the others have become better people, even if it means playing life on hard mode. Having Two doubt her past decisions came a bit out of nowhere, perhaps, but it worked well. Especially with Truffault telling her not to second-guess herself. That's a good use of both the actress and the character.
Finally, there's the elephant in the room: the death of Nyx. I said last season I would stop watching the show if they killed off any more main characters, and while time heals all wounds, I'm still not very pleased with the situation. This show is unplesantly flippant about how it kills off Raza crew members. One, Devon, and now Nyx are just dead. They never get a proper send-off. Though this episode comes as close as the series has even gotten, with Two's hallucination of Nyx. But it's not a proper funeral or the like. Good characters are dying at much too high of a rate.
Digging through IMDB, I see the actress is a regular on a Netflix show. So I can only imagine that her fate at the end of season 2 was because the writers didn't know if they'd get her back for season 3, allowing them to kill her off for good. I can understand the situation, but it still doesn't make it okay. If you have to kill off a character because they won't (or can't) commit, then at least let them go out in style. Nyx got none of that.
But on a lighter note, I liked the "family" moment near the end. The Android wearing an apron over her techmo-futuristic body suit is an amusing touch, and after all the strife of the last season, it's nice to see all of the (remaining) characters together as a single, cohesive unit. (Complete with aprons and completely impractical but adorable hats). However I'm left to wonder if this really is the entirety of the crew for the rest of the season/series. We're down to 4 humans and a Android, which for an ensemble show can be limiting in telling stories.
Dark Matter S03E02: This is unquestionably a Five episode. Which is great, because the actress is fantastic, she has an interesting backstory, and how can you not love the green hair?
Between the first episode and this episode, there can be no doubt that Ryo has gone too far and become a full-on villain. His treatment of his own subjects is absolutely terrible, and while he doesn't actively try to kill the Raza crew, his repeated efforts to screw them over is doing him no favors. But perhaps more interesting is that he seems to be in way over his head on the home front, and doesn't even know it. His efforts to duplicate the Blink Drive have ultimately failed, and meanwhile Misaki has killed the woman he cares about, in violation of his orders. The Corporate War may buy him some time to win the war, but as the intro to this episode not so subtly laid out, there's more to being the Emperor than wars and technology. Before he went on the lam in the first place, it was his inability to manage and work with the Court that led to his downfall, and he seems to be following the same trajectory once again. Mark my words: someone's going to kill him (and we have plenty of options at this point), or he's going to have to get his Ryo memories wiped once again. He won't last as Emperor.
Meanwhile it's great to get a bit more backstory on Five. It's unfortunate that it's somewhat sad (though admittedly, that's been the case for all of the crew), but it's still enlightening. She's clearly always been capable of more than being a street urchin, and now we see that someone recognized that in her before the events of the series. An honest-to-goodness father figure, too, one that could have helped her become a proper engineer (and better than him). In fact in light of what we saw, I'm a bit confused as to why she left him in the first place; we were looking at a memory, so we know he didn't rat her out or anything. So why leave? This is probably the weakest point of writing for the episode, as it seems very contrived in order for the next mystery to be delivered by memory yet never accessible again. The obvious question now is who her sister is. Creepy Lady (Alicia Reynaud) from S2 is still out there, and given her familiarity with Five, that seems the obvious answer.
And it may be typecasting Ellen Wong, but damn if she doesn't play the crazy (ex) girlfriend role perfectly. I'm still not entirely sure what her underlying dysfunction is, but she's making it a point to backstab or threaten people who she thinks are in Ryo's way.
Oh, and of course we have the Blink Drive. The MacGuffin of MacGuffins, it can either be the item someone is on a quest for that makes up an episode's plot, or it can be the negative space wedgie that kicks off the plot to begin with. Or in the case of this episode, it's both. Having everyone stuck on a station in a collapsing part of space was a neat idea, and I'm glad that the Raza crew has their precious MacGuffin back. Though I think it's interesting that the writers are putting it away for now, as while it was borderline overpowered, it wasn't ridiculously so in the Raza's hands. It was nice that they had an advantage, since otherwise they're pretty much alone in the universe, with everyone having it out for them for one reason or another.
Finally, the conclusion to this episode is a bit weird. The neural probe hasn't been a plot point for a bit now, and I don't think bringing it back was handled very well. It was a clever way to figure out where the Blink Drive was, but I get the impression that the writers felt like they had created too powerful of a plot device? So having Five's other memories permanently segregated off at the very end like that came off as being a haphazard solution. Perhaps if the episode wasn't trying to do quite so many things at once, it could have let that plot point bloom a bit more.