Dark Matter - 'We Were Family'

"So, you made me the man I was last week?"

During a simple repair stopover, things get complicated for many members of the Raza's crew.

Five seems like she might be developing a little crush on nice-guy prison doc, Devon, but although he successfully operates on Six we also learn that he is concealing a drug addiction, and maybe more. Meanwhile Four learns that Nyx has an almost unnatural facility in combat, able to predict her opponents' moves enough to match him despite a lack of formal training. Like Two, her skill is almost more than human, and I'm wondering if she might be psychic, especially given that she then joins Two to try to trace a building from the memory she and Five experienced, where Nyx displays a similar knack for improvisation and emotional manipulation, seeming to know just what to say to grease the wheels. A travel agent identifies the building as one on Terra Prime; Eath. Arax, however, is only human. Tasked by enigmatic posh bird to retrieve a thing, he steals the Macguffin that caused all of Five's troubles, but she has not only set up cameras to catch him, she then pickpockets it back from the former king of the prison.

But then Five is all sorts of awesome, even charging Three compound interest on a loan since she was the only one to successfully hide any loot before the GA stripped the ship. A chance to pay her back appears when he is contacted by Marcus Boone's old crew, whose leader, Larcan Tanner, claims to have rescued Boone after his parents were murdered. When the job turns out to include murder and child kidnapping, however, Three opts out, taking out the rest of the crew, including Tanner. It's then Five who, recognising that the happy memories she almost got lost in once were his, assures him that he was loved as a child.

"I just wish you could remember."
"Me too, kid. Me too."

I really hope she doesn't end up too naturalistic.

In the main B-plot, the Android asks to accompany Five and Devon, and winds up in the company of Victor, the smooth-talking leader of a group of free androids, who takes her shopping, asks to kiss her, and gives her an 'upgrade' which will let her blend in with humans by smoothing out her mannerisms and concealing her bar code. He tells her that the 'flaw' which makes her emotional was in fact a deliberate design feature.

Dark Matter continues to run strong, and it's the character work that does it. The space opera and action trimmings are decent, but what's important about them is that they don't glaringly detract from a set of superb performances, Anthony Lemke giving Zoie Palmer a run for her money this week, as Three's grumpy loner personality was deconstructed. In terms of ongoing plot, the hints at Two's origins were joined by news reports mentioning a 'person of interest' in One's murder, something that the crew might take personally.