Dark Matter S01E07: "Episode Seven" At this point, I may as well just write these Dark Matter reviews as a place for commenters to argue over which Syfy show is better: Dark Matter or Killjoys. Based on the comments section, that still seems to be a big topic among you all. And if you're a Killjoys fan, you got some ammo from Dark Matter's "Episode Seven" (Disclaimer: I have not seen this week's Killjoys). "Episode Seven" was the kind of episode of Dark Matter that we'll all forget by Monday, a problem-of-the-week hour built around one of the dumbest revenge plots you'll ever see on television. A quick setup: Five finally remembered the code to the vault thanks to her memory vacations, and in the treasure room the crew of the Raza found guns, money, and... a disassembled, sexy pleasure bot and a woman in a stasis pod. Everyone agreed to put robot Wendy (guest star Ruby Rose) together because ROBO-SEX (but really they wanted someone to do chores and because they're bored, they'll put anything together), and she started cooking them fancy meals and had acrobatic, porno sex with One. The woman in the pod turned out to be Sarah (guest star Natalie Brown from The Strain), an old friend of Three's who was suffering from a fatal disease. She still had her memories, but her time pre-stasis with Three didn't offer up much because they didn't know each other too well. There's your setup. From there, "entertainment bot" Wendy shmoozed the crew with massages, yummy dinners, cleavage, a charming Australian accent (default settting), and sex. She was too good to be true, so obviously she was. The truth? She was planted on the ship by a man named Cyrus King, whose crew was obliterated by the Raza crew a while back. So he boxed Wendy up in a tightly locked cargo hold on the ship somehow, waited for them to find her and put her together, then had her cook for them and have sex with one of them before sending her on her real mission: lock them in the kitchen and fly the spaceship into the nearest star! I mean, as far as revenge plots go, this was very remedial movie-villain stuff. Completely convoluted, not worth the trouble, and not even close to guaranteed. How long was Cyrus waiting by the phone for word that these guys found his Trojan Deathbot? Six months? A year? This dish of revenge was served incredibly cold. I don't think I need to tell you that they killed Wendy and didn't fly into a star and die. Hooray for the good guys! Sarah's plot was pretty typical for what we can expect from Dark Matter's exploration of its characters' pasts: a thin kernel of interesting info surrounded by a lot of fat. The big news here was that Three wasn't always the awful, cocky, insensitive jerk that we love him to be. He cared for her, had romantic relations with her, and didn't even the next day. And when she first showed signs of being sick, he stayed with her, eventually hauling her onto his ship to keep her in stasis until she could get better. That's about the gist of it. Oh, and Sarah died in the end, keeping Three's pre-stasis life secret with her in heaven or wherever she ended up. I was wondering if she would be using the advantage of Three not remembering their past to her advantage and waited for the big twist, but there was none. The idea of pre-stasis romance coming back to haunt these crew members is an interesting one with lots of possibilities, but Three's time with Sarah was played straight and didn't offer a whole lot to cling on to. And because this was relegated to a very distant B-story compared to Wendy the sexy murderbot, it never took and went anywhere. "Episode Seven" was a pretty standard affair that took the series away from what it could be and what he hoped for. But at least it cleared out a room on the ship so that new characters can't just appear on the Raza anymore. That has to be worth something, right? DARK MATTERS – What's up with Two? She's just toying with One now. And no, we still don't care about this potential romance between them. – "Dunking the cosmic donut." There's your sex euphemism of the evening. – Lots of humor coming from Android! Particularly her attempt to add an accent to get attention from the rest of the crew after being jealous of Wendy. – Of course, there's no way Android would be jealous of anything since it's a very human emotion and that was totally out of character and allowed only for comedic effect. Ehh, it was pretty entertaining, but it's hard to know what the rules of the show are if they break one like this.



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