Wednesday, 19 August 2015

Dark Matter - Episode 8 and Episode 9

The resistance only meet in yellow filters.
Two episodes that might be grouped together as 'The Revengers' Tragedies'.

In episode 8, Six goes off the reservation in pursuit of the General, leader of his resistance group and the man who duped him into an act which led to the deaths of 10,000 innocents. He does this via transfer travel - his consciousness is copied into a cloned body at a distant location, giving him a short time to complete his business and return to the TT booth in order to have his new memories copied back to the original. Concerned, the crew send Four and One after him, which leads to Four seeing One's original face, which is decidedly not Jace Corso. In the end, One's secret is out and Six is robbed of his revenge, but One is able to find his real identity from the TT records and determine that he is on the Raza in order to assassinate Three, prime suspect in the murders of his wife and child.

Samurai Rangers! Victory is ours!
In episode 9, it's Four's turn to go awol, arranging a tete a tete with his stepbrother. When his mentor arrives instead and arrests him, they spend most of the episode walking and bonding, before the rest of the crew turn up to rescue him from the mentor's reinforcements. Then Four kills his mentor to send a message to his brother, which is... frankly a little out of nowhere. Also out of nowhere is the fact that having cracked the riddle of his identity, Four seems able to remember everything about himself, from the name of his mentor to events in his childhood. Maybe he's just blagging well, but it seems odd.

Between these episodes, we now have half of the crew defining themselves by the vengeance that belongs to the old them:

  • One gives serious thought to offing Three for the deaths of a family he never knew and can not prove that pre-Three even killed. He tells Two that some people become bad, but others are born bad, implying that Three is the latter, but I still suspect that Three will turn out to have been that happy boy in the stables from Five's dreaming. 
  • Six clearly feels the blood of innocents on his hands, and whatever brought him to a ruthless mercenary crew like the Raza, it is clear that as Six he can barely live with himself, stating that hating the General is the only thing that keeps him from being consumed by self-loathing, although by reconnecting with Five he asserts some of the warmer side of his personality.
  • Four seems devoted to getting his throne back, but again one has to wonder what brought him to the ship in the first place and why the throne feels so important to him if he has no memory. If he has no memory.
These two are adorable, and yeah, I know, I'm a sucker for a father-daughter
dynamic.
For all except Four, a crisis of identity is looming; Four however seems pretty sure of who he is, and as I mention, this seems odd. He knows a few key facts about his past, but the rest of his knowledge is almost prescient. Three hints that some of his memories might be on the verge of returning, but Four displays much more than that.

Oh, and we end on a cliffhanger, as a squadron of ships sent by We Hate You Corp emerge from FTL and cripple the Raza's drives.

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