An early twist on this is the character Five, who as a teenage girl is clearly not one of the original crew. She also ends up with the memories of the others jumbled in her head, without a guide as to who it is that the memories relate. This aspect was initially used to reveal, mostly through flashback, curious facts about the six, and how they became to be in the crew.

Most of the early episodes rotate around self-discovery, though on several occasions either the memories Five holds or other information provide an entirely misleading perspective. Gnawing away at what cohesion is forming between the six is the knowledge that one of them probably sabotaged the sleep pods. Just as they do start to find common ground, cleverly things happen that undermine what trust they have, and even their understanding of who they are.

Being on the Syfy channel, I didn’t really hold out much hope for Dark Matter on first viewing. It used a simple idea, and worked around it familiar tropes mostly from western movies, but also some well-worn sci-fi notions. An early story was a version of The Magnificent Seven, and then there was a zombies-in-the derelict-starship plot, and in another they needed to rely on the Android to take a spacewalk to fix the ship. Seen all this before? These weren’t bad stories, though they didn’t really break away from the initial derivative feel that anyone coming to Dark Matter cold might rapidly assume.

And then, slowly something really strange started to happen, because the more the show’s characters learn about who they were, the less the crew seem to like about themselves or their ship mates.

As a long term Star Trek fan, I can recognize the value of discord. Because, and I’m sure lots of people will disagree with me on this, that’s what made Deep Space Nine really interesting. On all the other Trek shows, the characters generally got on very well, pulling towards a common objective. That wasn’t always the case in DS9, and it made for a much more exciting character dynamic. After a short while, Dark Matter started to exhibit exactly that sort of friction.