Hacker Cinema
Dark Matter
2015 · TV series · 43 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Joseph Mallozzi, Paul Mullie
The six-person crew of a derelict spaceship awakens from stasis in the farthest reaches of space. Their memories wiped clean, they have no recollection of who they are or how they got on board. The only clue to their identities is a cargo bay full of weaponry and a destination: a remote mining colony that is about to become a war zone. With no idea whose side they are on, they face a deadly decision. Will these amnesiacs turn their backs on history, or will their pasts catch up with them?
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13 comments on Hacker News
Okay so a little bit of out of universe trivia on Dollhouse: It was planned for 5 seasons. With the risk of cancellation, the second season and the two Epitaph episodes were a severely compressed telling of 4 seasons of plans. And, personally I think it worked well. Something similar happened to Babylon 5, Manifest, Jericho (IIRC), Firefly (Serenity was the original ending that would have played out over multiple seasons), and the Escaflowne anime: the main plots towards the end got compressed to create a faster pace at the climax while ensuring the story could be finished (though I wasn't a fan of how Manifest ended).
My concern about original writers being involved in reboots is if they want to fill out the story they couldn't tell the first time around and end up with a more standard pacing that's less exciting, and end up getting cancelled before finishing. Then we end up with things like Tru Calling and Dark Matter, which had planned plots they couldn't finish.
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
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But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
Dark Matter was really good. I hope there's a season 2.
We've cancelled our Netflix, and loading up our Jellyfin server with all those classics (legally... naturally!). And we're in S02E08 of X-Files, because it really was that good. We're also watching Julia Child, and a few other shows.
We were some of the first on Netflix's DVD library, and went to streaming as soon as they offered it. And early on, it was the best of the best. Now, it's throw-away B movie garbage you wouldn't even pay $1.99 in the Walmart's dvd bin, and riddled with shows that were great but naturally cancelled on a cliffhanger. I'm still sour about "Dark Matter". Bought from SyFy to Netflix, and summarily canceled.
I'll just wait until/if the shows are complete. And then I will acquire them. I've been done for a while, after paying waay too much and being jerked around by the media companies. Back to Yo Ho Ho. That means I can afford expensive rum :)
Fringe, Stargate, Stargate Atlantis (though Rodney's constant yelling gets annoying, sort of like Scott Bakula's of Enterprise; neither are great actors). Dark Matter is good too, but it ends abruptly after 3 seasons without an ending.
Fringe gets a little lame/silly when the alternate universe starts getting featured in the later seasons, but at least it does have an actual ending.
I really hate that aspect of the new TV programming models: studios don't even have the courtesy to write a few "wrap up" episodes at the end. Instead, they show a preview of the next season, then have no problem with just canceling it.
I think it's the novelty of it. Friends with kids report losing their minds after sitting through the nth replay of a Disney movie. To the kid, everything in it is new and they enjoy seeing new details each time. The adult can guess their way through any new Disney movie because they all stick close to a formula anyone with a passing interest in writing can recite.
I did the same rewatching all the Star Treks, Stargates, and other '90s sci-fi TV several times. Now it's kind of...dull. It's all too familiar. Now I'm more impressed with newer scifi that tries to evolve the genre without being too different. Like: The Expanse, Farscape, Dark Matter, Another Life.
Checked some episodes from some shows I had available, first seasons, DVD or Bluray source:
Miami Vice (1984): 48m
Homicide Life On The Streets (1993): 47m
TekWar (1994): 45m
Nowhere Man (1995): 45m
Battlestar Galactica (2003): 44m
Dark Matter (2015): 43m
12 Monkeys (2015): 43m
Lucifer (2015): 43m
There are exceptions though. Legion (2017) episodes are around 50m, and several of the newer "made for streaming" shows have 50-60m episodes.
The Marvel TV shows, obviously... ;)
More seriously I liked the big bang theory, the expanse, firefly, and dark matter. I haven't watched game of thrones yet.
Really? I saw season 1 and loved it. Then eventually found out there was a second one and was happy. Had no idead it got canceled too. I tried to see the first and second episode of expanse and didn't like it one bit. Dark matter pleased me plently. Made me remember a little of Firefly mixed with something else like stargate or something.
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
The closest successor to Firefly, Dark Matter (minus the cowboy thing) only just made it to season 2 but is now renewed for season 3 by reducing production costs and selling older seasons to Netflix.
The new way people are watching TV is on-demand rather than on-air which is dramatically cutting ad-based income for traditional networks. If networks can partner or sell to streaming companies like Netflix it might help long tail shows like Firefly to survive in the future. Another great Syfy show, The Expanse, will hopefully survive that way whereas back in 2003 it would have been axed by now.
I didn't like Dark Matter initially, but it won me over by the end of the first season. I think it felt more Sci-Fi as the show went on.
I will fully admit that if there was any other legit Sci-Fi on TV I might not care as much about Dark Matter, but since there is slim pickings in that genre I await season 2.
I'm not a hardcore fan either I watched TNG, DS9 and Voyager as just another Scifi show back when MGM, Paramount and 20cent Fox still wanted to make television we had Stargate, Babylon 5, Star Trek, then Scifi was pretty much left to in the hands of syndicated TV productions and basic cable which resulted in well meh.
Shows like BSG are pretty much unicorn's these days no one seems to want to make serious scifi the best we can hope for is for the random Canadian show to be picked up by SyFy and not being shredded (Continuum was good, Dark Matter seems interesting but very goofy).
SyFy is also trying to get of their asses together I'm still hoping that they'll pick up Ascension it's backdoor pilot / mini-series was one of the most interesting Scifi concepts of late and if they don't screw up 'Childhoods End' (which from the trailer looks like an HBO show which is great) I might actually believe that they still can produce something besides fake reality shows and wrestlemania.