Dark Matter - 'She's One of Them Now'

"Sure is handy they built this doodad into a briefcase.

This week, the crew is troubled by matters serial.

Season 2 is getting increasingly serialised, and in 'She's One of Them Now', the crew of the Raza once more set out to deal with the repercussions of a previous episode, while another episode's consequences come back to bite them. Having identified the woman who wants the tech that Five stole way back when, they decide to pay her a visit, hacking her transfer travel system to do so. This is a mechanism intoduced last season, which allows a traveler to send their consciousness into a short-lived clone body far, far away, and then retrieve its memories by reversing the transfer, although there is no live feed. If the clone is killed outside a transfer pod, the memories are lost.

Three, Four and Five copy in and identify the card as part of a 'blink drive'; an experimental (and highly stolen) instantaneous transfer system, which they decide to nick. Clone Three and Clone Four let themselves be captured so that Five can get away with the gizmo, but she comes back for them, only to kill them in order to return them to their bodies with no memories. This means that they don't know that Reynaud has a device that can send a lethal pulse back along the transfer connection to kill their bodies. She sends one such pulse, but hits a now-empty pod, and despite realising that Five is loose with her tech does not fry her brain, even when it is clear she has escaped.

Oh Devon, we hardly knew ye, and cared even less.

Elsewhere, Nyx gets some words of comfort from the Android, and tries to bond with Devon, who admits that he once killed a twelve year old girl because he was too high during surgery. While the rest of the crew decide to try out the blink drive - which shockingly goes awry - she arranges to meet him for a drink, but he gets bushwhacked by the Seers, who stab him when he claims he can't give Nyx up. This would be more of a punch if we had any real reason to care about Devon, but he's had so little to do it just feels like they're clearing out a spare who was only there to fix Six, or perhaps like Nyx won the final phone vote after Arax was knocked out last round.

The heist A plot, showcasing Five's mad skills and courage, was good, soured only by that odd failure to use the kill-shot. I'm not disappointed that no-one really died, but it felt odd to try to set up Reynaud as a ruthless antagonist and then have her fail to follow through on that threat.  The Android was once more lovely, both comforting Nyx and babysitting the team's former fixer. The B plot was less successful, more or less coming down to Nyx and Devon doing a PSA on drug use. It was underwritten and failed to set up sympathy for when Devon got stabbed.  Season 1's great strength was in its characters, and so far the Season 2 newbies have not matched the core crew's arcs.