DARK MATTER – Season 2 Episode 10 – SPOILERS

The Android has her first dream. She dreams about Victor (the guy who gave her the upgrade chip and her first kiss back in episode 2.4). They are about to have sex when her charging cycle ends and she wakes up.

She speaks to Two about the dream (without offering specifics), then activates the dreaded doppleganger diagnostic tool and the two of them tell the crew that she made an error a few episodes back when landing the ship. No damage resulted, but she worries that her next error might be more serious. The Android is deactivated and returned to her charging station pending an investigation by The Tool, who reports back, blaming The Android for everything, and suggesting she be killed.

Here’s what happened in the meanwhile. Four lost a swordfight with an imaginary Misaki. Nyx floored Two with three punches, because Two was strangling Six thinking he was one of Rook’s men come to kill her. Six saved Three’s life one more time by bursting into his room and knocking the gun from his hands. (A vision of Three’s dead ex-girlfriend had almost persuaded him to kill himself.) Since Five, Six, and Nyx had not uploaded their neural imprints to the ship’s medical database, the virus could not have any effect on them.

Four’s visitation exploits his guilt about abandoning his home planet in time of crisis. (At episode’s end he seems to be mulling the option of restoring his memories and returning there.) Three’s visitor exploits his guilt over the death
of Sarah, but Two’s experience seems rooted in sheer terror.

Two dispatches Three, Four, and Nyx to destroy The Android. All of them are reluctant, and it is interesting that Three is the one to actually point a weapon at The Android’s head and try to convince himself to pull the trigger. Was that a residual effect of his recent near suicide? If none of them wanted personal blame for the execution, a firing squad approach might have worked better. Just as Three seemed about to shoot, Two tells him to stop. Three may be expressing displeasure about more than immediate events when he complains to Two about it. “I’m this close to pulling the trigger,” he says, and you pull me off. You just leave me hanging there.”

Five, the only crew member who never lost faith in The Android, proved that the Android’s diagnostic tool was responsible for the virus (which Five theorizes was planted by alt-Truffault when she had control of the ship in episode 2.8). The doppleganger responds to being revealed as the culprit by releasing toxic coolant into the ship’s atmosphere, and the crew, except for Two, flees to The Marauder. The Android, in the midst of another dream (this one of a cocktail party) finds out from a TV news broadcast that The Raza is under attack. She wonders aloud why she would dream that and wakes herself up. On orders from Two, The Android pulls the computer core and saves the ship, flashing her evil double a very angry look in the process.

The visions experienced by the crew seem more like dreams than hallucinations. Four’s swordfight with Misaki (Ellen Wong) ends when she runs him through. Two wakes up when Nyx knocks her on her ass. Three comes to his senses (still a little disoriented) when Six tackles him from behind. Hallucinations don’t usually end that way. Dreams do. This is an indication that the virus is what caused The Android to dream.

On the other hand, The Android’s first dream occurred before the diagnostic tool was activated. Also, the GNN anchor (Anne Mrozkowski) who appears in her second dream and “reports” that The Raza is under attack was not the anchor we saw when The Raza was in the alternate universe. These are signs that her dreams might not have come from the virus, but from her upgrade chip.

Data did some dreaming on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, both in Season six and Season seven. His dreams were more abstract than those of The Android. Data never had a sex dream, but he did (at least once) have sex.

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NOTES

The next two episodes of DARK MATTER, “Wish I’d Spaced You When I Had the Chance” and ” Sometimes in Life You Don’t Get to Choose”, will air back to back on 9 September starting at 10pm on SyFy (US) and at 7pm on Space Channel in Canada (all times Eastern).

Natalie Brown (Sarah) will be Jessica Yolan in all six first season episodes of CHANNEL ZERO, a horror anthology series filmed in and around Winnipeg that will premiere on SyFy (US) on 27 September. Season One is based on the popular creepypasta Candle Cove which is about one man’s obsessive recollections of a mysterious children’s television program from the 80’s. Brown will also be Natalie Heath in THE BEQUEST, a psychological thriller, written and directed by Jeff Kopas, that follows Jenibel Heath (Shenae Grimes) as she returns (ten years after her mother’s mysterious suicide) to her family’s secluded island lodge to help care for her dying father. Filmed last October on a private island in Georgian Bay, the film will be in Canadian theatres sometime in early 2017.

Ellen Wong (Misaki) will be Hope, a twenty-six year old singer-songwriter who returns to Cambodia to visit her mother in the third chapter of IN THE LIFE OF MUSIC, a film which describes how one song, “Champa Battambang,” (made famous by Sinn Sisamouth, the King of Khmer Music), plays a role in the lives of three different generations. It is a narrative told in three chapters, each set in a different decade, and it depicts the lives of people whose world was transformed by the emergence of the Khmer Rouge regime. IN THE LIFE OF MUSIC is a powerful inter-generational tale that weaves through 37 years of Cambodian history. The film is scheduled for release sometime next year.

DARK MATTER has been renewed for a third season
by SyFy (US) and The Space Channel.