By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Modern sci-fi owes a lot to the 1967 one-season wonder, The Prisoner, a surreal masterpiece that left the viewer wondering what the hero did to be trapped in such a bizarre seaside village, why he was trapped, and how he’d get out. Referring to its hero as only Number Six, The Prisoner’s influence can be felt in countless other series, but one of the best to pull from it aired on the SyFy channel for three seasons, from 2015 through 2017: Dark Matter.
Six strangers wake up on a spaceship with no memory of who they are or how they got there. They use the order they woke up in for names and start working together to solve the mystery. Unlike The Prisoner, they eventually figure everything out, but once they have all the answers, the questions are changed.
Dark Matter Opens With A Twist
Dark Matter opens up with a dark, beat-up ship as one by one, the six passengers, four men, one woman (The Rookie’s Melissa O’Neil), and a teenage girl, wake up, each with no memory of who they are. On the ship designated Raza, they find a cache of weapons and an android, and learn that the last destination was a mining colony where the workers need protection from the Ferrous Corporation. On any other sci-fi series, this would be a no-brainer, except the first big twist of the series is revealed at the end of the pilot: the passengers are the bad guys.
Learning from the android that all of them are wanted criminals, except for Number Five, puts the recovered cache in a new light. They stole it from the group contracted to help the miners, and it’s up to them to kill the miners. It’s the first of many, many twists that Dark Matter throws at viewers during its three seasons, and as far as even the Season 1 reveals go, it’s fairly tame.
The question remains: who wiped their memories, and why? For as long as that goes unanswered, the crew is left wondering, who can they trust? Who knows more than they are letting on?
The Prisoner Influence Goes Beyond The Pilot
The universe of Dark Matter is small, as far as sci-fi universes go, with the story placing more emphasis on the characters themselves than any universe-shattering conflict. It has that too, but watching the group of bad guys grapple with their past actions, develop into better people, or fail to become better and embrace being the villain of someone else’s story, drives the story forward more than a hunt for a technological MacGuffin.
The Prisoner was significantly smaller in scale, while Dark Matter lets the passengers out into the world, and yet, they can’t escape their past. From the pilot to the final episode, who they were will always define them.
Had the Patrick McGoohan classic series been allowed to continue, that was what was going to come next. Number Six would journey across the world but always remain under close watch, control, and unable to escape his fate as a prisoner.
Dark Matter And Stargate Share The Same Creative DNA
Dark Matter is heavily influenced by another sci-fi series: Stargate. The series was created by Joseph Mallozzi, one of the most prolific writers for the other Star franchise, contributing to SG-1, Atlantis, Universe, and the upcoming Amazon series. If you’ve seen the back half of SG-1, you’ll feel right at home in the world of Dark Matter.
Like Stargate, Dark Matter was also treated unfairly by SyFy, which picked up the series but didn’t develop it, relegating it to the network’s lower-priority original programming in terms of budgets and marketing.
There’s a good chance you haven’t ever watched the series, or even heard about it. Those who have given it a chance, though, have fallen in love with the ragtag crew.
A Sleeper Hit Streaming For Free
Finding Dark Matter is both easy and surprisingly difficult. It’s streaming for free on the CW website, but try to find anything about it, and you’ll wander into the 2024 Apple TV series, Dark Matter.
It’s such a common problem that even the Reddit for the SyFy series has been overtaken by fans of the new series. Like “Redemption” or “Rise of,” it’s time for the words “Dark Matter” to be retired from Hollywood for a few decades.
Once you find it, you’ll enjoy Dark Matter. Yes, there are a lot of plot holes explained away by the memory wipe, but there are also a lot of expertly crafted character development and further twists to the story. For better or for worse, this is the type of sci-fi we always need more of: a crew, a spaceship, and morally dubious missions that may or may not save the day.
