Welcome back to the ship of your friendly neighborhood space bandits! This week, we’ve got visions of the future, involuntary bonding time, and much more. Here’s what happened in Dark Matter: We Should Have Seen This Coming.
“I cannot allow myself to be satisfied by one small act of revenge…Because so many more are necessary.” | Episode 6 opens on Four/Ryo (Alex Mallari, Jr.) and Nyx (Melanie Liburd) sparring again. After their bout is over, Nyx goes to her room, closes her eyes, and…
We see Nyx being dragged down a ship’s hallway in a flashback. One of the men dragging her says, “I know this is hard on you. It’s hard on everyone. But it’s our responsibility to use the gift we’ve been given. We are changing things for the better. Not just for us, but for everyone.” Nyx focuses and sees into the future, hearing an announcement over the intercom and fighting free of the people around her. She snaps back into the present time (of the flashback), hears the same announcement, and fights free. Nyx then straps herself into an escape pod and launches just as the ship jumps to FTL.
“You just want to be yourself.” | Back in the present, Android (Zoie Palmer) tells Two/Portia (Melissa O’Neil) that she has found evidence that Arax (Mike Dopud) used the subspace link, and while he had deleted the com logs, she had been able to recover a picture of the woman he was communicating with. Two comments on Android’s new look, which is similar to her original one, and notices that she is no longer using the upgrade that allows her to pass as human. Android says that the ability to pass as human could be useful in the future, so she’s retained the upgrade, but while she’s on the ship- “You just want to be yourself,” Two finishes for her. Android agrees, then tells Two that the woman who Arax had been communicating with was named Alycia Reynaud (Inga Cadranel).
“A good old-fashioned heist.” | Two tells the crew that Alycia is on the boards of half a dozen companies, all of which are at least partially owned by Ferris Corporation. Five/Emily (Jodelle Ferland) wonders if she’s who had her friends killed over the metal plate she stole, and Three/Marcus (Anthony Lemke) suggests they go and make Alycia tell them what it is. Android tells them that her headquarters is out of the range of their current fuel reserves, so the crew decides to pull a heist in order to restock. Nyx tells them of a freighter she had hitched a ride on before getting nabbed by the GA. It carries valuable cargo—Shadow, a synthetic hallucinogenic.
The crew, especially Five and Six/Kal (Roger Cross), aren’t keen on the idea of trafficking illegal drugs, but they need a quick, easy, high-paying heist, so they decide to do it. Once Two, Three, Four, and Nyx are inside the freighter, we see that it is the ship from Nyx’s flashback. Nyx sends Three and Four down a hallway toward the storage rooms, and she and Two head toward the infirmary. Nyx leads Two into a room with stasis pods, and opens one, saying, “This is my brother.”
“Either shoot me or help me.” | Three and Four find the drugs, and start loading up as much as they can haul. Meanwhile, Two is holding Nyx at gunpoint, demanding answers. Nyx says she’ll explain everything once they get back to the Marauder, but that she couldn’t have told them the truth for fear they wouldn’t have come. Two relents and helps Nyx help her brother, named Milo (Mpho Koaho), back to the Marauder. They make it back to the Raza and escape by the skin of their teeth.
On the Raza, Nyx explains that when she and Milo were children, they were taken from their home planet, along with over 100 of their people. On the ship, They were made part of an experiment that linked their minds to see if the collective human consciousness could solve problems better than computers. The experiment was initially run by a corporation called Electus, but a group of the experiment’s subjects rose up, killed the crew, and took the ship. The leader of the rebellion convinced them that their survival depended on continuing the experiment, so Nyx escaped, as shown in the flashback, and had been trying to figure out a way to rescue her brother ever since.
Devon runs some scans on Milo, and finds that he is addicted to Shadow, from months, or even years of being pumped full of it. Milo and Nyx explain that the experiment’s subjects, or seers, are given Shadow to help them cope with being part of the vast collective consciousness, as well as to help them access their subconscious minds.
“Giving out shares to liars.” | Devon (Shaun Sipos) sneaks onto the Marauder and steals a few vials of Shadow, which we assume must be what he’s been injecting himself with, but is caught by Five. He tells her that it’s for Milo, to wean him off, but Five doesn’t look entirely convinced.
In the med bay, Milo tells Nyx that he can’t stay on the Raza, explaining that the powers of the seers have grown, and he’s putting the Raza in danger. Just then, the seer ship drops out of FTL next to the Raza and opens fire. Three and Six are in the Marauder, heading to a rendezvous point with a buyer for their Shadow, but the Raza’s shields are still too damaged from their last encounter with the seer ship to wait for the Marauder to return. Six decides that they’ll head down to the planet below, which should make them untraceable to the other ship, while the Raza escapes until it’s safe to return.
“Do you ever get tired of being wrong?” | While Three and Six are having a nice bonding session in the Marauder on a planet with a toxic atmosphere, Nyx and Milo explain more about the experiment. The Electus corporation had discovered that some people on their planet had a genetic mutation that resulted in a high level of what they called CPA—Cognitive Predictive Ability. The seers go into the “Machine,” the room with the stasis pods that link consciousness, and are fed data. If they analyze enough data, and calculate probability, they can predict the future.
“You’re anything but predictable.” | Android determines that the Marauder will only be able to withstand the acidic, toxic nature of the planet’s atmosphere for 24 hours. The crew of the Raza try to decide what their next course of action should be, guessing and second-guessing what the seer ship will think they’ll do. While they’re still debating, we see the captain of the seer ship telling his crew that the Raza’s next action has been determined.
We then see Devon pacing and eying the Shadow he stole, trying to resist the pull of the drug, but he is unable to, and injects himself.
Four tells Milo that Nyx wants them to fight the seer ship, but Milo says that it would be unwise. Four then asks Milo if he can predict what will happen on the ship, based on what data he’s already taken in about them. Milo says that one of the crew members will betray the others soon, and that he’s not talking about Six having done that in the past.
“I’m not buying this ‘tough guy, always in it for himself’ routine.” | Meanwhile, on the planet, a lightning strike has knocked out the Marauder’s power, so Six and Three get to spend some more quality time together trying to fix it from inside. Three is angry at Six for choosing to land the Marauder instead of trying to dock with the Raza, but Six thinks that if Three had been piloting the Marauder, he would have made the same call, and just wants a reason to be angry at him. Three points out that he already has a good reason to be mad at Six, and Six apologizes for handing Three and the rest of the crew over to the GA, and says that he knows now that it was the wrong choice. They finally get the lights working again, and realize that the hull is taking damage from the acid atmosphere faster than they’d thought, so Six asks Three to make the call on whether they shoud stay down there and wait to die, or to take their chances out in space.
“You’d be surprised what people can get used to.” | Five asks Milo’s advice on what to do next, saying that she wants to make a difference, but doesn’t know if they can. He tells her that all their predictive models suggest that a major paradigm shift is coming, and that the most likely scenario is all-out corporate war within the next 6 months. He adds that in times like these, when long-standing patterns are disrupted, a small group of people, or even one person, can change the course of history.
Three decides that he and Six should take their chances out in space, and just as the Marauder clears the planet’s atmosphere, the Raza drops out of FTL to pick them up. As Six and Three are heading toward the Raza, Three tells Six that he’s never going to really forgive him for what he did, and that he doesn’t trust that Six is actually one of them, but that he’s willing to give him a shot to prove that he is.
Just then, the seer ship joins the party and opens fire on the Raza. Two has Android contact the seer ship, and tells them to leave the Raza alone, or she’ll kill Milo. However, the captain of the seer ship calls her bluff, knowing that she won’t shoot Milo. Milo decides to go back to the seer ship, so that the rest of them can live. He tells the crew that since he is able to manipulate the data and feed the other seers false conclusions, and might be able to start another uprising, he can help them from inside the seer ship.
“No outcome is a certainty, but however small the odds are, we have to try.” | Before Milo returns to the seer ship, Four realizes that Milo doesn’t really think he’ll be able to start an uprising, and that it’s more likely that the seers will sway him to their side. Four tells Milo that there is another way, and once Milo is alone in a room on the seer ship, he slits his own throat.
Back on the Raza, Nyx thanks Four for taking the time to get to know her brother, and the two spar again.
The last shot of the episode shows Two developing a concerning tremor in her hand, which causes her to drop a cup and grab her wrist.
Well, that was quite an episode! What do you think will set the predicted corporate war in motion? Will we see the seers again? And what’s going on with Two?
Dark Matter airs Fridays at 10pm on Syfy.
