Dark Matter/Firefly Comparison Rant

Firefly was a hollow shell of a show with spotty production values and virtually no substance. It offered the audience zero satisfaction or anything more than unanswered promises. It’s very likely to have been a copy of an anime and every positive quality about it was probably ripped straight from what it was, “based”, on. Despite all that, a sizable number of people insist that the show has more to it than you would be led to believe by simply watching it. Apparently Firefly's following was large enough to spawn its own knock off. So what happens when you make a copy of an empty shell? To put a long story short, if Firefly is like receiving a dry, half-hearted handjob, Dark Matter is like if you rubbed the severed foot of a month old corpse on your genitals. Both are terribly mediocre, but while one is mildly enjoyable, the other is hard to sit through.

Setting: Firefly has a weird sort of western thing going on. Even their spaceship is practically a barn. While at first this is pretty jarring for a sci-fi show, it does a good job of selling it by having all of the aspects of the show fit the motif. The show recognizes its own limitations, allowing it to create a unique atmosphere. This what properly compensating looks like. Dark Matter is practically the exact opposite in this respect. It tries as hard as possible to pull off the generic sci-fi look. Sterile environments and over designed set pieces all around However, instead of being breathtaking like these design choices are supposed to be, it's suffocating. Not only does  is it not do anything new, but it doesn’t even do it serviceably. Nearly the entire show takes place in claustrophobic, tiny rooms because filming in outside locations is just too hard apparently. The coldness and suffocation perfectly matches the rest of the show, sure, but it certainly doesn’t make for an enjoyable experience. Whenever the crew of Dark Matter do bother to step outside of their rat cage, it’s almost always for the same reason, supplies. Okay we get it, you need shit in space, but some variety would be nice. Every set outside of the ship is painfully unimpressive. I kept thinking, “it’s just a normal building”. When the crew went to steal shit from a hospital, a hospital that exists in a universe where interstellar travel is common, it was just a regular fucking hospital. If the producers didn’t have the resources to sell the futuristic  setting, maybe they shouldn’t have had one?

Characters: Both shows miss the mark when it comes to creating engaging and multi-faceted characters. The key difference though it that you can actually tell Firefly’s apart from each other. Firefly blatantly uses archetypes and does nothing with them. I don’t remember any of them significantly changing from the starting point to the end. Okay, one of them starts off by being a traumatized, spacey, and ill-adapt at interacting with others to being slightly less traumatized, spacey and anti-social. I’ll give credit where credit is due; there’s slightly compelling inter-character relationships with more depth than liking or disliking between them. Some do also have what kind of looks like an arc from a yard away when you squint your eyes. Those, “arcs”, don’t finish, sure, but at least they exist. Dark Matter has a few characters that are one-dimensional templates and a few with no personality whatsoever. The emotionless robot with hints of humanity, the gun-loving, abrasive wild-card anti-hero, the naive and innocent child. The other two, or three maybe?  Draw blanks from my hazy memory of this abomination. Inter-character dynamics amount to one love interest for the main character(the blandest one by the way), maybe. You can’t have any kind of chemistry when both flasks are empty.

All of the characters in Dark Matter have the same problem and the same goal too. They all lost their memories and now have an inner-conflict between accepting themselves and trying to be better people. The show eliminated this problem for one of the characters by giving them their memories back, just to move the plot along by an inch. This rendered them totally unable to potentially get the audience to care about the dimly-lit, grey images flashing on their screen. Not that they would have done that anyway, but it makes every scene with them beforehand feel like an even bigger waste of time. The spaceship in Firefly is more fleshed out and well-rounded than the entire cast of Dark Matter combined.

Dialogue: Every joke. Literally every joke in Dark Matter trips and falls flat on its stupid face. The script is what makes Dark Matter actually painful. The puppet-like delivery of the, “banter”, between characters will make you want to stop watching immediately. It’s not quite bad enough to be funny, so it’s more like somebody shoving fist-fulls of sand up your ears. Firefly also has a lot of bad jokes, but the delivery is miles ahead and overall, the dialogue does its job fine.

Story: Neither of these shows know where the fuck they’re going. Firefly gives a pleasant, if aimless drive, and Dark Matter swerves drunkenly into every passing mailbox before crashing into a tree. Firefly has an episodic format with a very loose overarching plot that crawls on the floor at a snail's pace. Every episode does do a good job of world building and every character does get something to do. The show ultimately doesn’t resolve its plot. I think it sort of does in an unsatisfying way in the movie I didn’t bother to watch. There’s way too much unanswered, loose threads to be neatly tied up in a single film anyway. The last episode, another one off that was really anticlimactic, is actually the best solely because of the antagonist introduced. Dark Matter rips its corrupt government and overbearing mega-crop and rebellious outer-world schtick straight from Firefly. Very little is done to affect the dynamic of this system. Firefly doesn’t do that either, but it doesn’t treat that part of the show like the centerpiece. Firefly handles this concept in a mature and somewhat believable way while Dark Matter opts for an extremely ham-fisited and cheesy approach à la Total Recall, except not on a tiny planet where it kind of makes sense, but in all of space.

Apparently the  mega-corps are so technologically advanced that they somehow maintain an iron-grip on both the space government and the entirety of space itself, at least the part we get to see. The comically evil portrayal of these corporations totally breaks my suspension of disbelief. Instead of the bureaucrats you would expect to be running that kind of show, it’s Bond villains. Pit-stops do lead to some boring shit happening and being immediately resolved, but that’s practically side-lined in favor of dicking around, This show does not even know what pacing is, let alone how to focus on important things by skipping pointless shit. Or maybe it just doesn’t want to? Filler saves money after all. The concept of creating proxy bodies that can be killed with no ill-effect to the person apart from losing the memories made while inhabiting the copy, completely removes all tension from many parts of the show. Whenever anything dangerous could happen, presto, all stakes vanish into thin air. Every episode of Dark Matter is a mess of contrivances, predictable developments, and fan-fiction tier bullshit. It’s amateurish.

Conclusion: You shouldn’t watch either of these two shows, but if somebody put a gun to your head and forced you to pick one, the choice is obvious.