Is One Really Dead in Dark Matter? What the Season 2 Premiere Settled

Is One really dead in Dark Matter? The short answer, explained

The first two episodes of Dark Matter's second season, “Welcome to Your New Home” and “Kill Them All,” aired on Syfy on July 1 and July 8, 2016, and they changed the show by removing a member of its core cast. One, whose real name turns out to be Derrick Moss, does not survive the premiere. The question viewers asked was a fair one for a genre series, where a character who is declared dead can come back, but this time the evidence points to a genuine death.

The premiere was written by Paul Mullie and directed by Amanda Tapping. It opens with the crew in trouble: Two, Three and Four are imprisoned at the Hyperion-8 facility after Six sold them out to the Galactic Authority, while One and Five are held in the staff wing. Six reveals that he is really Lieutenant Kal Varrik, an agent of the Galactic Authority. One, meanwhile, is released.

The reason is the central irony of his storyline. One is not the criminal Jace Corso, despite the face he is wearing, and he is the heir to a major corporation, his father's company, which means he has the kind of lawyers that get a man out of a cell. At the end of the episode he is paranoid and worried that the acting head of that company wants him dead. He tells Six that the experience has made him realize the danger of being too trusting.

What happens to One

The line is a classic piece of foreshadowing. One says he is going to find out what really happened in the murder of his wife, and that he will be more skeptical of the people around him. Then he opens the door of his rental room and finds Jace Corso inside, there for revenge. Corso shoots him. The episode ends on One's body, and the series has lost a main character in its first hour back.

Syfy marked the death on its own site soon afterward with a tribute titled “Remembering One: A Tribute to Derrick Moss,” which described Moss as confirmed dead and noted that he had been shot by Jace Corso, the man whose identity he had taken in order to get aboard the Raza. A studio that publishes an obituary is not planning a quick resurrection.

The scene also carries the best argument against the survival theories. It is played as an ending, with no cutaway and no hint of a trick, and the episodes that follow treat the loss as real for the audience even though the characters do not yet know.

What the showrunner said

Co-creator and showrunner Joseph Mallozzi was asked about it directly in a premiere-week interview. Asked whether a gunshot wound to the head was as final as it looked, and whether One, at least as the audience knew him, had died, he confirmed it. He also said it would take roughly four more episodes for the crew to learn what had happened: they would need to find out that One is dead, then how it happened and who did it, and then go after that person, all within the season.

That timeline is useful, since it tells viewers the death is not a one-episode shock but a plot engine for the season. Mallozzi has also talked publicly about the reasoning behind the decision, saying in an interview that the season's theme is that the past catches up with you.

Episode two: “Kill Them All”

The second episode, written by Mallozzi and directed by Bruce McDonald, is the escape. The Traugott Corporation orders the warden of Hyperion-8 to kill the crew, and Commander Truffault, played by Torri Higginson, helps them by sending the prison's layout. Two takes control of the control room during a riot, and the crew reaches a shuttle. Six is critically wounded after shooting the guard Anders.

Everything in the episode is built on the idea that the crew is a team again, and none of it addresses One. His absence is the hole in the story. The audience knows what the characters do not, and the dramatic irony gives the hour a weight that its action would not carry alone.

The theories, and why they fall short

Fans had reason to be careful. Television has a long habit of confirming a death and then reversing it, and Game of Thrones had spent months denying that Jon Snow was gone before he returned in 2016. So the possibilities for One deserve a look.

The first theory is a clone. Cloning exists in the world of Dark Matter, and viewers had seen Six's clone die in season 1, episode 8, when it collapsed into a pile of glittering dust. But One's body does not do that, and the show has given no sign that long-lived clones are available. A clone would also need to have been prepared in advance, and nothing in the premiere suggests that One had any such plan.

The second theory is a swap. Could One have tricked Corso into breaking into his room, killed him and then taken his place as Corso to escape the corporation that wanted him dead? It would require quick thinking and a plan, neither of which has been One's strong suit. The man who is shot is wearing the same clothes as the One in the preceding scene and acting the way One normally acts. The simplest reading is that the body belongs to One.

What it means for the crew

By the end of the second episode, the crew has escaped imprisonment and picked up new members, including Nyx, played by Melanie Liburd, and Devon Taltherd, played by Shaun Sipos. But they do not yet know that One is dead. Six, who is the only person who could have called Corso's bluff, is critically wounded in the escape from the prison and ends up in stasis, which keeps the truth from the crew for the moment.

That setup makes Corso a likely villain for the season. The only person who could prove that he is not One is asleep, and the rest of the crew has no reason to doubt the man on the ship. It also puts weight on Three, who has the most complicated history with One of anyone on board. Inverse's recap of season 2, episode 5 noted that viewers hoping for a miraculous resurrection should probably stop hoping, which settles the question for good.

One's death in short

• Character: One, real name Derrick Moss, played by Marc Bendavid.
• Episode: Season 2, Episode 1, “Welcome to Your New Home,” aired July 1, 2016.
• Killer: Jace Corso, also played by Bendavid.
• Confirmed by: showrunner Joseph Mallozzi and a Syfy tribute post.
• Open question at the time: how the crew would learn of it, and what Six's stasis would delay.

Verdict: the death is real

The evidence all points one way. The shot is final, the showrunner confirmed it, the network treated it as a loss and later recaps told viewers to give up on a comeback. The better question, and the more interesting one, is what a show does with a death it means.

Dark Matter handles it as plot and not as spectacle. One's absence puts Two in charge, gives Three a reason to look at his own history and turns Jace Corso into a threat the crew does not yet know about. If you were skeptical because of what other shows have done with character deaths, this is the kind of removal that reshapes a series.

One was never the crew's favorite. His whining was a running complaint among viewers, and his feud with Three was a source of frustration as well as drama. But the show's strongest argument for the death is that it gets more from the character gone than it did from him present.

A death like this also changes how the earlier episodes read. One's anxious trust issues, his insistence on finding his wife's killer and his wariness of the corporation all look like a setup for a payoff he never gets to collect. That, more than any twist, is why the question of whether Dark Matter's One is really dead keeps coming back.

If you are catching up, the answer to the question in the title is simple, and it is worth watching the first two episodes with it in mind. The premiere's final scene reads very differently when you know that nothing in it is a trick.

Sources

• Dark Matter (2015 TV series), Wikipedia — cast, characters and episode details