Headscratchers / Dark Matter (2015)

New entries on the bottom.

Five's age

• So how old is Five supposed to be? I mean, she looks late teens or early twenties, but the rest of the crew seem to be treating her like a 12-year-old. Her homeless upbringing (plus memory loss) could have resulted in her being off socially, but she acts almost like Newt from Aliens.
  • Jodelle Ferland was 21 at the time of filming, so we can probably call that the maximum. But between the fact that she's the most innocent and smallest of the crew and that what few memories she's been able to recover indicate little more than "street kid," it's understandable that she's treated like a helpless little kid. Plus, there are no records of her anywhere that the crew could find. She's probably at least eighteen, but her exact age isn't really important in the long run. She's going to be treated as the kid of the crew even if she stays with them for twenty years.
  • She does mention she doesn't know. No birth records, exactly.
  • She posted on Tumblr that she thought Five was supposed to be 15-17.
  • Word of God confirms it: showrunner Joseph Mallozzi wanted someone that age, but industry requirements for underage actors were too costly, making Dawson Casting necessary.
• Confirmed in season two to be sixteen years old in-show.
  • Which puts her at 15 years old in at least most of season 1, since when the crew lose their new memories and get the old ones back they repeatedly mention the time gap being 14 months.
    • 14 months ago was when they made the neural imprints. After that, some time passed before the events of the pilot, since they took on Jace Corso, Emily Colburn, and Griffin Jones (actually Lt. Kal Varrik) as crewmembers. Then they had their memories wiped. There is no precise time given in-universe for how long it's been since the pilot episode, but it's definitely less than the 14 months.
• A later episode reveals that she is 16.

Corso and the Raza

• So I'm watching S2E5, and Corso and Two are talking, and from the dialog, it appears that Corso was never a member of the crew of the Raza, and they'd never met. But I thought that he was a member from before, and that's how One was able to impersonate him? Or am I just getting muddled up? It's been a while since I've seen the earlier episodes admittedly.
  • Jace Corso had been invited to join the Raza (based on his reputation, sight unseen) for a single mission, but had to go into hiding when the meetup was to take place. Derrick Moss, disguised as Corso, went in his place. This is why Moss's ruse worked; the crew of the Raza had never met Corso face-to-face, so they couldn't tell anything was off about him.

Alternate Reality Confusion

• Was the Jace Corso on the Alt!Raza the real Jace Corso? Or was that Derrick Moss pretending to be Corso? Did his impersonation plot not take place in this reality?
  • We can't know for sure, but his willingness to kill people strongly implies that it was Jace Corso, not Derrick Moss.

The Show's Timeframe

• Freezing on a scene with three of the crews rap-sheets, you can see what appears to be a date of birth, but the numbering system is far different from our standard one (2 has 24-18-011, 4 has 15-92-007, and Nyx's is 70-22-017. Have they ever stated when the show is set? And if the haven't, how does the date system work?
  • The Ishida dynasty has ruled Zairon for over 400 years, meaning that the show cannot take place earlier than the 25th century AD, assuming the earliest possible date for the settlement of Zairon in the late 21st century AD. A more likely date would put it in the 26th century onwards.
  • When the Blink Drive activates a hidden recall program and goes back in time, the Android calculates they have gone back 600 years. When they travel to Earth in this time to resupply, the century is identified as 21st. That means the show is set in the 27th century, likely the late 2610s. Which means the Ishida dynasty has ruled Zairon since the 22nd or 23rd century.

T.J.

• Why did Das (Five pre-memory-loss) never go back to T.J., the injured boy that snuck onto the Raza with her? In a flashback in Episode Six, we see that Das left him in a storage room while she went to look for medical supplies to treat him, then got caught by Boone, and finally got voted in as a new crewmember. We know that after that, Das helped reprogram the Android and later sabotaged the stasis pods. Meanwhile, T.J. bled out from his injuries, died, and his corpse simply sat in the cold storage room until it was found by the crew post-memory-wipe in Episode Three. Das never checked in on him nor told any of the crew about him — What gives?
  • It may have been in the very early stages of her stowing away when she was being actively pursued and Three was going to toss her out an airlock. In that case all she might have been able to do was put him in cold storage. Out-of-verse it is a definite continuity problem that Word of God may help sort out.

Misaki

• So are Ryo and Misaki siblings or cousins? It's not made very clear in-verse what their relationship is.
  • Unlucky Childhood Friend.

Five learning a new info from a memory

• At the end of episode s03e02, Five learns about her sister from her memory of the old guy who takes care of her. But she herself points out it's just a memory - it logically cannot contain anything outside of what she remembers. So how could she learn something she never knew?
  • Despite its interactivity, the memory is presumably playing out the same way with a few liberties. Five was probably told of her sister, but this time around she didn't get the whole story.

The Time Machine from 3x 04

• How is it that it provides Mental Time Travel to both humans and androids? A human's squishy neural synapses and an android's silicon-based conditional logic and algebraic processing aren't even remotely alike, and yet this one device is able to send both through time flawlessly? Was it just designed with the notion that service androids could theoretically want to travel in time, despite not actually having emotions or agency of their own? What was the thinking that went into programming these two very separate types of consciousness projection into it side-by-side?
  • The Android of the future builds it, creating a Stable Time Loop.

The Alt-Raza crew after Season 2

• Season 3 reveals that (almost) the whole alternate-universe Raza crew followed the prime crew back into their universe in Season 2. Why would they, as a group, do that?—abandoning a perfectly good Raza in their own universe for a small shuttle in a potentially unfamiliar one, and not even attempting to take over the prime Raza once they got there (despite having a crew large enough to have a chance of succeeding).
  • It is most likely because they aren't very liked in their AU, so decided to jump realities to a universe with better opportunities. Simply put, everyone hates them and is very likely trying to kill them as well. AU Boone even references this, mentioning how odd it is that Truffault is friendly with AU Portia while she is impersonating Two.
    • I mean, it's not like they're that well-liked in the prime universe either....
    • And in their own universe, shouldn't they be able to rely on Ryo's protection, since they helped him become emperor?

The second Blink Drive from 3x 09

While the main universe ends up with a Stable Time Loop after the second Blink Drive is taken back to the present, what happens to the AU where the Raza doesn't have a Blink Drive, the AU crew hitched a ride to the main universe and so, the second copy of the drive is still stuck in the past? That would tear the timeline something fierce...

• That presumes the timelines are the same, which they're not. In AU timeline, the Raza doesn't go back, so FTL was inspired some other way.

Four knowing Misaki's name

How did Four know Misaki's name when she came to escort him back home when he was on Hyperion-8?

• He didn't. She said, "It's me. Misaki." and then he said, "Misaki?"