DEM

Here is a funny video from Joseph Mallozzi showing how he revealed to the cast the identity of the mole. He said something I found odd. He said they'd been building to this reveal since Episode One. Really? I thought they'd been building to the identity of the memory wiper. I guess I understand his comment if we assume that the memory wipe was done because Six was a mole (from the outset), and that would explain why the reveal of who did the memory wipe was sort of buried, but that story structure feels wonky to me. Like more time should have been devoted to the Five reveal in order to let that point breathe.

I yelled at the teevee so many times during this ep. First at Krista: Don't break confidentiality! Don't do it!! Then at Elliot when he visited demon!Joanna: Run away! Run away! Next at Angela: Grab the bag! For the love of Zod, get the bag! (that was horrific). Finally at the end: Please don't be BD Wong! Please don't be BD Wong! This ep was intense. I need to take some time.

Dark Matter S1 is one of those strange cases for me where the whole truly did exceed the sum of its parts. The show falls down in myriad ways, yet I find myself engaged with it and have re-watched the episodes many times over. I do wish the show had been more psychological -- or at least better at it. They sort of went through the motions of "what is my history" and "I don't trust you" but there was very little day-to-day or intrapersonal exploration of what it would be like for someone to have absolute, total autobiographical amnesia. There also could have been little details here and there, like David Hewlett noticing that the crew dynamics seemed weird. Two's personality makes little psychological sense, and given my interests and preferences that should put me off, yet she has emerged as my favourite character. I long for a writer who will do something new and different and challenging with the "AI/android vs. emotions" trope, and although Dark Matter is going down the same well-trod ("computers are people, too!") path, I'm very intrigued and entertained by Zoie Palmer's Android. Going forward, I'd like to see more world-building and more mixing-and-matching of the characters. I'd also like for everything to feel more like it's 200+ years in the future, particularly the characters.

Zach. No child-character has worked my nerves as hard as that boy. The icing this ep, though, was when Eph took Nora aside and said, "Zach is showing symptoms of childhood psychosis" and her response was some tangential nonsense about mixed-messages that had nothing to do with the Kelly situation. I think Zach has infected Nora with sour mind-grapes.

Funny you should mention that! I've been re-watching episodes, and I finished ep9. Two and Four had a heart-to-heart in Two's quarters after the team rescued Four. Interestingly, Four called the crew his 'true family' -- making him the first person to use that word to describe them. Looking back on that scene with the benefit of hindsight gives it even more (or a different kind of) oomph than it had the first time around. Is there any interest in a 'season as a whole' thread?

HoloDroid could insist all it wanted but, at the end of the day, it had no power to make Android do anything. It could only present findings and advice. In Episode Ten, the agreement was that Android would talk to the crew if HoloDroid discovered a problem. Android also stated that she was reluctant to restore factory settings because of her consultation with the crew, so I don't see her as one who would go off deleting parts of herself half-cocked and without further consultation. If Android is sentient and has certain rights/abilities to self-determination -- including self-reflection and self-examination -- then IMO her self-initiated exam protocols shouldn't be deleted just because Five is pissy and wants 'people' to behave the way SHE wants them to. Bottom Line: The hologram was not Five's to delete.

Mallozzi sat for a post-finale interview with thetvjunkies. He confirmed that we should take the scene between Five & Six at face value: Five wiped the crew's memories. Furthermore, as Android said in ep3, the original intent likely was not to wipe everyone's memories, but because the code was crude shit happened. Frankly, I hope Five's erasure of Android's back-up/analysis projection blows up in her face in S2. The implications of Five erasing everyone's memories seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. (There's a great irony in Five arguing all season long for respect and a right to self-determination.) I'm still intrigued by the question of why Android went on the attack in ep1, especially now that JM suggested in his interview that Two and Four were targeting either One or Six. Given that he omitted Three and given that Three was the first person Android attacked (Six wasn't yet in the room), I have to wonder whether Android had experienced persistent glitches that Two hadn't been able to correct, so the crew stored Android away.

Five has seemed sketchy to me since Episode One. Heh. MissLucas almost convinced me that she wasn't as needy and emotionally impulsive as I believed her to be, but I have been vindicated! But yeah, deleting the back-up without even bothering to ask whether she had seen who zapped Android did come across very shady. By the way, the Galactic Authority officer walking beside Six was the same guy Six!Clone met in the bunker in Episode Eight. Perhaps Six was recruited then? I had wondered at the time where that guy disappeared to.

Two was talking to Four in the recording (hence my 'hardcore' comment). The big question is the identity of their target. Going back to ep12: This highlighted and confirmed a problem I have with Two's characterisation. When Wil Wheaton said that Two killed 43 people upon awakening in order to make her escape, that made perfect sense to me. Empathy, remorse, and other prosocial emotions and behaviour have to be shaped. Sure, the seeds are there, but anyone who's spent any time around developing children know those inclinations have to be nurtured and reinforced. Birthing a full-grown adult in captivity is just begging for trouble. In any case, if that's the way Two behaved upon waking, there should have been no "nice person" to fall back on when her memories were erased. For the most part, the personalities of the rest of the crew matched what we learned about them pre-wipe.

Damn, Six. Damn. For a while, I thought Five had figured out that Six was the culprit and she was playing along. I honestly didn't believe that she believed "their" Two would harm the crew. Five deleted Android's back-up. That was so juvenile. I don't understand how she has the authority -- let alone the moral-ethical right -- to do that. That whole sequence where Two and Three suspected that One had taken down Four made no sense. Three was sitting outside One's room the entire time! Original Two and Four were hardcore. Like, extra-hardcore. Next season I want more of Two & Four and Two & Android. The rescue/escape in ep 12 was a season highlight and instant-replay event for me. (Zoie Palmer has fantastic body control!) I am a bit confused about who exactly did the memory wipe. Was it actually Five or was Six trying to convince her to cover his tracks? I think it WAS Five, and the deletion of back-up Android was a sort of foreshadowing of her adolescent, impetuous decision-making. The two situations were very similar: Don't like people not getting along? Write a code to fix them!

Joe Mallozzi (the showrunner) is running a contest on his blog for an annotated copy of the Episode 13 script. I'm putting this here because the poll questions themselves might be considered somewhat spoilery. In the season finale, who makes known their intention to go their own way? Who wiped the crew's memories? Who should the crew fear in the season finale? Which crew member will NOT survive the shocking season one finale?

I tacked on the spiritual awakening idea somewhat cheekily, partly in an attempt to reconcile Two's warmth toward Five. To me nothing in her scant history suggests that Two would be that warm and protective from the moment they woke up. Six I can understand because he started out as a freedom fighter (who I suppose became jaded after the insurrection plot); i.e., he has a concern for people underneath it all. But Two...? So, the idea is that she started to feel fondly toward the stowaway, so how bad the life was, and went about solving the problem in her bioengineered-agent way. Those warm feelings survived the memory wipe similar to how Four remembered the puzzle box. I've been re-watching episodes and listening to podcasts, and my suspicion of Two has increased. She has a lot of knowledge about ship's systems and jury rigging said systems. Then again we never saw Three wake up, and he was conveniently armed. In the final analysis, only Four and Six would surprise me. ETA: Yes, there was a ST:TNG episode! The solution involved hacking Data.

This seems the most appropriate thread to ask this: Going into the season finale, who do you think did the memory wipe and why? My ranked guesses are: 1. Five because she wants everyone to love her and for everyone to get along. 2. One because he realised most/all of the crew were poor, misunderstood woobies who needed a second chance. 3. Two because the crew found out her secret and threatened to mutiny and/or she had a spiritual awakening and wanted to rebirth them all. 4. All of them; i.e., it was a group decision. 5. Three because he was paid to do it. Two things seem important, but I don't know how. 1) That the crew were all in appropriate stasis pod attire (unlike Sarah who wore regular clothing), so it doesn't look like they were just thrown in there, willy-nilly. 2) That Android went into attack mode immediately upon awakening. Did the saboteur program/command her to put down anyone who awakened early?

Re: the first, it came across as "girl power" because of One randomly inserting gender into his rouse-the-troops speech. This was Two's story, and at this point, it's a given that Five is going to be everywhere in every story, so she's more like a mathematical constant than a young woman. Re: the second, I had intrusive flashbacks to ep 6 and Five acting out Four's story, but I talked myself down by remembering that next week is the 2-ep finale, so Two telling her own story will come soon.

This is the question I've had ever since we learned she had super-healing. The rules for the amnesia are a bit dodgy, but as we saw in the "dream" episode, memory is still a neurological process in this universe. Thus their amnesia is fundamentally a result of neurological trauma. Therefore I don't understand how Two could have been affected. OTOH, she doesn't seem to be faking it.

As many of us surmised, Two is a genetically-engineered super-soldier-something. I read an interview with Mallozzi earlier this week in which he said Two had withheld that information from the crew because she knew it would disrupt crew functioning. True to his word, the guys all got twitchy about it. But... I don't get that. I don't understand why they all would react that way. There's an odd sort of "1990's people dropped into 23rd+ (?) century space travel" feel to these characters. I want to go back and review Android's interactions with Two. IIRC, the first indication that Android gave that she knew Two was different was in the "malfunctioning coupling" episode. If Two were fully comfortable with her abilities, she probably could have blasted Baldy before he had a chance to blink. I fear now that we may have to endure Five's angst about taking a life.

To be clear: There are multiple forms of dissociative disorder. Dissociative Identity Disorder is but one specific form. Elliot sort of displays the gamut, which is why I didn't specify. Elliot absolutely loses time. He has indicated in voiceover on two occasions (IIRC) that he's confused about where he's been or what he's been doing. "Mr Robot Dad" is an alternate personality; Elliot interacts with people (e.g., Romero, Wellick, and Darlene) as Mr Robot Dad. I haven't done a careful study of the exact circumstances under which Elliot relies on the Mr Robot Dad identity, but my sense has been that it's when he's under greater stress. His wholesale forgetting of Darlene is dissociative amnesia. His failure to perceive the rest of his family in that family photo is the result of dissociation. He also has described feelings of derealization ("Is anyone else seeing this? Is this happening? Is this real?"). However, yes, it's the way in which Elliot interacts with Mr Robot Dad that makes his dissociation drift into psychosis territory (along with some other details). That is precisely the issue!

So, "he's just crazy." For me that would be several orders of magnitude worse. No, I don't think that's what they're doing. As I said, I do think they're primarily going for a dissociative disorder. But they're also being loose and somewhat inconsistent in the presentation of Elliot's experience as a way to hide things from the audience. For me, personally, that diminishes my understanding of Elliot. It also affects my perception of Krista Gordon.

I agree that the question of what Elliot is actually doing (as opposed to what it LOOKS like he's doing) is a bit problematic. I independently came to the same conclusion that Marcee did: That sometimes Elliot is speaking aloud and sometimes not. However, while that's a decent gloss, it's also a narrative cheat IMO, and rather a large burden to place on the audience. Moreover, it diminishes our understanding of Elliot's experience. Several episodes back I remarked that Elliot is somewhat of a psychological Mary Sue. However, I think Esmail et al. are going primarily for severe dissociative disorder, rather than schizophrenia. I don't expect teevee characters to behave like textbook teaching cases. However, once one makes mental illness a central aspect of the story and of the main character, one takes on a responsibility. There should be as much attention paid to the psychological as there is to the computer science. Mr Robot is making me twitch a bit by seeming to conflate dissociation with psychosis (I say 'seeming' because I am honestly not sure of their exact intent). That's the number one misconception every intro and abnormal psych lecturer tries to pound out of students within the first week. Those involved with the show talk a lot about the CS technical advice, but the psych advice seems to boil down to "I talked to this one friend of my friend's." I love this show and I find Elliot to be an extremely fascinating character. I applaud all writers who bring psych disorders to the forefront and don't pass them off as "s/he's just misunderstood" and don't try to cure them as if by magic (or a kiss). But. There is room for improvement IMO, both technically and narratively.

Dun dun dun! San Jose Mercury News. It's all coming true! The Milwaukee lion hasn't been spotted again, but we all know that's because it's making its way to California to participate in a summit with the wolves.

It took me a second to realise what I was seeing this week, and then I cheered. Well done, show! The scene between Elliot and Mr Robot in Elliot's apartment... I can hardly describe how painful that was to watch. I could "see" Elliot having a break even with Christian Slater as a physical presence. I want to give kudos to director Tricia Brock. What's Colby's angle with Angela, I wonder. Is E Corp trying to draw her into a lawsuit-compromising position? Is Colby trying to stick it to his former associates? Does E Corp think she's their type, so they're pouncing on the opportunity to absorb more evil? I need Elliot and Darlene and Angela all to talk with one another. Just spend a day alone hashing things out. They're all in such precarious positions right now. On a lighter note, I chuckled a bit at the Blank's Disk fire, even though the owner instantly elicited my sympathy. All I could think of was whiterose's cigarette. But won't someone please help Gideon? Dude is stuck in a grand web of ever-morphing, ever-metastasising crap.

To quote Danielle Brooks, "You're not racist: it was him!" I'm kinda bummed he's a bad dude. Now I wonder if he was hoping the Zoo Croo would all die on one of the jaunts. I decided part of the reason this show is so non-threatening is because it fails on the little things. The crew never wear any kind of protective gear -- heck, Chloe walks around in stilts and business casual -- the guys sling their backpacks over one should instead of securing them to keep their hands free, and they all stand around expositing at one another in the middle of the danger zone instead of moving to a minimum safe distance. The last one is probably a budget issue (more camera setups = more $$), but still. Surely they could try not to look completely stupid. This was Nancy Drew's week to complain about every little thing. I bet she was a spoiled child. "I want to bring down Reiden, and I want it now now NOW!" Nice to see Xander Berkley!

Those things you listed are specialties. They would be there regardless of command structure and process. I'd argue that a mercenary crew especially need a firm process in place. Mercenaries in general tend toward anarchy, and it's been dramatized and explicitly stated that the members of this crew "tend to wander off." If Mallozzi and Mullie were stronger writers, I'd assume the Raza crew's problems (which most often are due to One and Three randomly undermining Two when it suits them, and Two sighing and caving) were intentional -- a story arc to be resolved. Right now I remain open to the possibility, but I'm pessimistic about its handling.

I'm relieved to know that my confusion about the new arrival was founded. Something about his entrance last week made it seem like we (the audience) were supposed to know who he was. I'm amazed the producers are "re-doing" Quinlan, as if no one would notice. Did Stephen McHattie get a new gig?

Did Roger Cross get the Dark Matters gig right after they brought him back for this? Oops! I fail to see the point of Gus's story. My patience wears thin. Was there a super secret clue in that scene of Angel's leg being broken? Surely there must be to have spent so much time on it in two separate episodes. Why do Tandoori Mom & Dad allow this random stranger who walked in off the street and who's harassing their employee to stay? I wonder how Stoneheart got the jump on Eph & Co. Spies inside Lee's drug company? Or the National Guard guy is corrupt? I can't believe I felt bad for Eichorst for a split second.