Dark Matter: Wish I Could Believe You

July 19, 2017 7:42 PM - Season 3, Episode 7

Six recalls some memories of his past life, all while struggling to separate perception from reality.

To me, this one was a chore to watch. Right from the start, it was obvious that it was one of those sci-fi tropey episodes where a character experiences memory and perception manipulation as some sort of interrogation technique. Everything was so ham-fisted and obvious, including the "I think I'm back in reality, but oops I'm not" sequence.

Also, do you really want to pair a character named Kal with a wife named Lara? Really? Why not just call her Martha and be really obvious about mixing up the wife and the mother roles? (Sorry, I'll admit to having read too many comics over the course of a lifetime, but I just can't help but make the familial connection. I mean come on, you've called your space character Kal, so please try avoiding the rest of the Kryptonian family tree.)

Also, as I've mentioned before, I don't typically get to watch this the day it airs, so if another MeFite wants to take over posting these threads, by all means go at it and have fun! Nobody around here needs to wait for me.

posted by sardonyx (3 comments total)

Yeah, I knew Six wasn't with the crew as soon as the rest of the crew were all super focused on getting the location of the meeting. Blissfully little Four, at least.

And there's something about the geodesic-dome-as-foreign spaceship with assorted "science" nurbles that is getting a little repetitive? unimaginative? That's the plus side to having a fixed antagonist like the Goa'uld, I suppose. One Ha'tak is pretty much the same as the next, so you only need to build two, three corridors and the occasional half a room and some dude in gold bodypaint can snarl at the protagonists. In the Dark Matter universe, they haven't really established a good continuity of ship design, even if that ship design is that all ships have corridors that are mysteriously similar to the Raza.

I'm sort of curious where they take it, but it's starting to make me pine for the worldbuilding of Defiance, if nothing else.
posted by Kyol at 9:30 AM on July 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yeah, it was a tropey episode. I actually usually really like these kinds of episodes, where they can play with the concept of reality a bit, but it was so blindingly obvious (when even Five asked about the coordinates?) that Six just seemed dumb to not realize what was happening.

When he was reading the nonsense labels of the pill bottles and the screen I really wished he'd look around and realize that everything was a prop, and there were lights and cameras everywhere and he was actually in a middling Canadian SciFi television show. THAT would have been creative.

Anyway, Star Trek did it better, and Battlestar Galactica did it better.

I did like the twist that the interrogation caused some of his memories to come back, and I liked the clue that he was still "in the box" being when another memory showed up.

Not sure what's going on with Three's virtual wife, is she taking over the Android's body sometimes? And is she evil, or compromised? Maybe she was never sincerely in love with him to begin with and Five has inadvertently made a virtual copy of an enemy agent and given her access to the ship's computer. (Now THAT, at least, is a plot that was never on Star Trek.)
posted by mmoncur at 1:02 AM on July 25, 2017

Yeah, I kind of like the uncertainty with the Sarah story, although I get the impression some of that is because the writers aren't quite sure what to make of her either. Someone else who's directly wired to the ship like the Android? Just this woman's memories in virtual reality? Something to humanize Three? Someone to have available on ship that invaders aren't aware of so those "Five saves the day" plots have a narrative foil?

Hrm.
posted by Kyol at 9:07 AM on July 25, 2017