A Canadian series hitting Syfy on Friday, “Dark Matter” comes to us from longtime TV writers Joseph Mallozzi & Paul Mullie -- who wrote many, many episodes of “Stargate SG-1,” “Stargate Atlantis” and “SGU: Stargate Universe.”
Based on Mallozzi & Mullie’s Dark Horse comic book series, “Dark Matter” follows six people with amnesia who wake up on a spaceship full of firearms and headed for a war zone.
That premise reminds me a little of the excellent fifth-season “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “Conundrum,” which wiped the crew’s memories (and a lot of personnel data on the ship’s computer) so that an alien ship could plant a new executive officer among the Enterprise’s bridge crew. As a consequence of the mass amnesia we learned Ro Laren and Will Riker really want to bone each other.
Syfy is pretty good about forwarding screeners for its upcoming shows (I got tonight’s episode of “Defiance” for example), but I could not find a copy of the “Dark Matter” pilot among my stack of DVDs. Also, I could find only five critics who’ve seen it (even media giants like the New York Times and USA Today have not generated reviews, though I suppose that could change in a matter of hours).
... as the introductory installment to this 13-episode SyFy channel series unfolds (only the pilot was made available for review), interest quickly wanes. … It’s all standard space opera stuff, none of it given any particular charge beyond some atmospheric production design by Ian Brock that allows for an occasional visual flourish (especially in the cavernous ship’s hold) that makes the series seem like the series might actually have money to spend. Otherwise, Dark Matter is a dud …
... uses a tantalizing mystery to achieve liftoff, then does a pretty nifty job of establishing its characters to bring the audience along for the ride. Essentially the Calvin Klein ad version of “Lost in Space” … just to put it in the terms of its no-name crew, on a scale of One to Six, this one rates about a Four. …
… Kids who love dark sci-fi will enjoy the show, but others may find it a bit of a yawn. …
... a remarkably generic piece of early-21st-century TV science fiction. … falls almost exactly midway between thrilling and boring. … since nearly everything on the show is equally derivative, nothing stands out as egregiously bad or egregiously good. “Dark Matter” doesn’t matter.
... thanks to Dark Matter‘s dramatically preposterous mishandling of both its “adult” themes and that elusive grittiness, Syfy is even further away from the quality programming it so eagerly wants to recapture. … all mill about with such little awe-struck agency concerning their mind-numbingly terrifying predicament that you’d swear they were hanging out at their favorite bar. There’s just no truth to anything happening on screen, no cause to care about the outcome. …
10 p.m. Friday. Syfy.
