Dark Matter - Episode 6

Samurai iiin spaace!

It's backstory time, as in an effort to open the vault, Five takes an electrohypnotic trip into the memories somehow stored in her brain. First she experiences Four's childhood as prince of the Ishida clan, learning that he did not in fact murder his father, but was framed by his stepmother and killed several guards while trying to escape. Then she drops into her own lost past, and we see that she was a street thief who stole a key, which all of her friends were killed for. A boy whom she found dead on the ship earlier on in the series was the last of those friends, who stowed away on the Raza with her.

Oh, I get it. Raza. Rasa. As in tabula. Fuck. Okay.

As her brain starts to seize, Six goes in to try to pull her out, but witnesses his own memory as a member of a resistance, who turned on his own and tried to kill himself when they went terrorist. Finally he finds Five in an idyllic memory of life on a farm; it is a boy's memory and they guess One's, although Three seems more the farmboy type to me. Five wants to stay in this happy place, but Six rescues her by reminding her that something bad is going to happen, even there, because clearly something bad happened to each of them.

My current speculation is that the crew are clones, and that rather than having their memories erased, they were due to be implanted with memories, but Five's presence mucked it up and she got all the uploads. Who exactly did this and when, I am less sure. It is also highly suggestive that the crew all seem to recall an inciting incident in which they were wronged, and I strongly suspect that once their pasts are revealed they will have a second chance to choose whether to embrace the evil that came over their lives or reject it.

One thing I really liked about this episode was the Ishida Empire. Although heavily modelled on Feudal Japan and with a clear strain of Japanese ancestry, it was actually not just a copy. The swords have the characteristic hilts associated with the katana, but straight, double-edged blades, and the fashions and iconography are all subtly off, as if the Ishida Empire was mimicking an older period that it only partially understood.