DARK MATTER: Friday 10PM on Syfy
Previously… on DARK MATTER: A half-dozen people (plus an android) wake up in deep space, and find their memories wiped out. However, their bodies retain sense memories of serious fighting, piloting and other skills. They discover that before they were put into hypersleep, they were vicious mercenaries, working on behalf of intergalactic corporate interests against the innocent inhabitants of a planet the company wanted to conquer.
Episode 2: The second hour of Dark Matter was actually the back half of what was intended to be a 2-hour pilot, so naturally it picked up just where last week had left off, with the group’s discovery that they were in fact the bad guys in the story of the mining planet. Predictably, they soon decided with varying degrees of enthusiasm to provide some help to the settlers, with the menfolk going back down to the planet to hand over half their weapons cache, while the girls stayed at home on the spacecraft. What followed was that the guys of course found themselves compelled into becoming freedom fighters, while Two (Melissa O’Neil) appeared to skip out on them, but was actually just zipping off to find another mining conglomerate out of nowhere with whom she could make an instantaneous deal, saving the miners by signing a 99-year lease for their planet on her own unilateral authority. It wasn’t clear why this mining conglomerate was any less awful than the other, but whatever.
This was quite a mixture of terrible writing (by series co-creator Joseph Mallozzi) with direction (by TJ Scott) utterly unable to cover for the paltry budget at his disposal. (The “planet” consisted of interiors of the same abandoned factory set that’s been the location for B-movie action sequences for about the last 30 years.) Dark Matter is so much a twin of its Friday Syfy Canadian content partner Killjoys that the same supporting actor (Rob Stewart) showed up in the pilots for both, but of the two, Killjoys is by far the class act. Although it’s possible to distinguish between the characters if one works at it (there’s the one who knows how to fly the shuttle, there’s the swordfighter, there’s the girl who’s apparently the only one without a criminal background), all of them speak the same flat, inflectionless dialogue that one would say makes them seem like the android, except that the script tries to squeeze comedy out of the android by giving her the futuristic technology equivalent of sitcom “Well, I never” reaction shots. The actors appear powerless against the grim suction of their material.
The ratings were bad for the premiere of Dark Matter last week, but they were better than the numbers for the much more expensive Defiance that preceded it. Utterly basic genre pieces like this have an audience, and perhaps Dark Matter is at the price-point where that’s enough. Its substance suggests that even so, Syfy isn’t getting a bargain.
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