Dark Matter - 'But First, We Save the Galaxy'

"That's a new look for you, right?"

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. More to the point, alas, I don't care. Season 2 of Dark Matter has been a bumpy ride. We lost One early on and now Four has gone rogue, and their 'replacements' seem to have both been killed off already, and... Yeah, struggling to care.

In 'But First We Save the Galaxy', the crew of the Raza team up with best frenemy Truffault to prevent all out corporate war by thwarting the bombing of a vital peace conference. Five goes undercover in a suit and a blonde wig and meets a cute android with the humanising hack, who turns out to be Ferris Corps walking time bomb, but she persuades him - all unwittingly - to take a walk out of an airlock. Unfortunately Inspector Kierken is on their trail and captures Six, and with the rest of the team on the station Ryu deactivates the Android with the overrides that he now remembers and steals the blink drive. In the course of this robbery, the head of the royal guard - who last episode confessed to being in love with Ryu - runs into Nyx - whom Ryu has asked to be his empress - and in the ensuing fight is able to cut her with a poisoned blade. Not that she mentions this to Ryu.

At the end of the episode, with the crew making their own ways off the doomed station, a bonus bomb brought in by Ryu blows the whole thing to hell. I am... not all that bothered. This is the result of a shaky season, and in particular the existence of Nyx and Devon, whose extraneity cried out sacrificial 'regular', and whose special snowflakeness never felt less than shoehorned in. One's murder was a shocker, but the immediate presence of 'replacements' deadened the hit and the fact that we went through the second half of the season without even touching on who hired Jace Corso to kill him has left the thread hanging too long. Four's reversion to Ishida Ryu could have been interesting, but in the end not enough time was given to the transition. Clearly Ryu has all of the cool, ruthless efficiency and loyalty of Four, but much more ambition and that loyalty is far more abstracted to cover his 'people' as a whole, rather than any person in particular.

There's a third season on order and I will probably watch it, largely in the hope that with the extra characters out of the way the makers will pull the compelling core dynamics back together.