Dark Matter Season 3 Episode 7 Review: Wish I Could Believe You
Kathleen Wiedel
at
.
Ooh, the evils of perspective! Dark Matter Season 3 Episode 7 opened with an unusual first-person perspective, showing events from Six's point of view as he discovered all the corpses of the colonists.
This left the door wide open for the wacky fun this story had with the unfortunate Six, playing mind games as the Ferrous scientists attempted to extract information from him.
Six made a very welcome return to the Raza, though he perhaps appeared a bit too casual about the horrible, gruesome deaths of all the colonists he'd been hanging out with for the past few weeks.
It's a tad convenient that Ferrous Corp just happened to choose his planet to test out Agent Zero, their deadly new neurotoxin to get rid of people while leaving infrastructure intact.
However, he's a main character on a television series, so let's just chalk this one up to suspension of disbelief, since the universe revolves around the crew of the Raza.
While I caught on right away to the fact that Six was being interrogated for information (specifically, the location of the Secret Meeting of Rebels), "Wish I Could Believe You" still made for a fun hour of television.
It reminded me quite keenly of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 6, Episode 21, "Frame of Mind," in which Commander Riker faced a rather similar set of circumstances.
As Riker in "Frame of Mind," Six effected his own escape after fighting his way through multiple layers of false realities. While the Next Gen episode certainly beat this story in the creepiness category, Six managed some genuine character development here.
Does the discovery that Six had a wife and son change anything? Maybe not, but it does inform his character. Plus, there's the growing (re-growing?) trust and friendship with Lt. Anders, too.
Anders actually escorted Six to see his ex and kid from afar at the end in a yank-the-heartstrings moment before Six returned "home"... to the Raza. Well played, guys. Well played.
(Naturally, the fact that I actually like Anders probably means he's going to end up dead by season's end, but...)
Character development has, from day one, been a very important part of the series. Dark Matter, while obviously episodic in nature, does not maintain the status quo.
Dark Matter isn't afraid to shake things up, from the micro scale to the macro. The state of the whole galaxy has been upset, and this has a direct impact on the plot and characters of the series.
In this case, obviously, Ferrous Corp's war actually reunited Six with the Raza and unintentionally allowed him to recover a few of his previously locked-away memories.
I enjoyed how Six slowly put together the clues and realized that nothing was real, from the unintelligible text on the med screen and pill bottle to the crew's persistent demands for the coordinates of the secret meeting.
Hallucination Three: We’re just tryin’ to help those people.
Six: You? Trying to help people out of the goodness of your heart? That *alone* should’ve set off the alarm bells!
It also provided entertainment when Secondary Hallucination Three got to punch Six in the face to prove how real he was. Too bad, Six ended up figuring it out anyway.
The truly brilliant part came when Six utterly turned the tables on his captors and used their own technology to save himself. Beware the nice ones, indeed!
Apparently, there is a fate worse than death, and it’s Commander Nieman of Ferrous Corp.
Six
There were a ton of great lines throughout this episode, so be sure to stop by our Dark Matter quotes page for a rundown of some of them!
Meanwhile, the situation with Digital Consciousness Sarah continued to grow more ominous as she confessed to missing basic casual human interaction.
I might point out that this seems obvious to me; when you stop and think about it, she's in solitary confinement with only occasional visitors. It begs the question: how can one maintain one's sanity in such a situation.
Better question: has she actually done so? And was the Android's odd "sleepwalking" behavior linked to Sarah, or something else entirely?
(I suspect that her gun-pointing may be related to one of the flash-forwards from Dark Matter Season 3 Episode 4, "All the Time in the World," specifically the one with Three shooting her.)
The whole Sarah subplot mostly just depressed me, since there is pretty much no way I can see a happy ending here. Losing Sarah again would likely not help Three's emotional state, either.
Don't forget you can watch Dark Matter online! And tune in for Dark Matter Season 3 Episode 8, "Hot Chocolate," when it airs on Friday, July 21, 2017 at 9/8c on Syfy.
What did you think of "Wish I Could Believe You"? Did you enjoy the psychological roller coaster of Six tripping through reality? Were you surprised to discover he had a family? Let us know in the comments section below!
