Image: David Johnson / Science Channel
If you liked Science Channel’s always bizarre and often morbid science history show Dark Matters: Twisted But True when it aired last summer, you’ll be happy to know it’s back for another six-episode season.
Sticking with the three-weird-stories-an-hour format it established last summer, Dark Matters‘ season two premiere airs at 10pm this Saturday, July 14, still narrated by John Noble from Fringe and Lord of the Rings .
The second season opener explores Charles Lindbergh’s interest in eugenics and longevity, a song that supposedly sparked a wave of suicides in 1930s Hungary, and William Beaumont‘s open-wound study of Alexis St. Martin’s digestive system. (Science Channel provided us with a copy of this episode to review.) My daughter and I thought the Lindbergh and “Gloomy Sunday” segments were so-so, but the Beaumont/St. Martin tale — which I remembered reading a Ripley’s Believe It or Not blurb about as a kid — was really engrossing.
Subjects of other upcoming episodes include Louis Slotin, Hedy Lamarr, and the Stanford prison experiment.
As with the first season, you can expect plenty of highly dramatized re-enactments, voice-over and speculation, although this episode didn’t suffer from the repetition of CGI sequences as the first season pilot did. Also, as before, the show’s subject matter and storytelling style earn it the TV-14 rating.
Science Channel gave us the following air dates and episode titles for the remaining five episodes of season two. (All of which also air at 10pm Eastern Time)
- July 21 – Resurrection Row, CIA Gone Mental, Rabid Roulette
- July 28 – Dr. Lobotomy, Voodoo RX, Killed by Kindness
- August 4 – Amnesiac, Party Pooper, Demon Core
- August 11 – Positively Poisonous, Medusa’s Heroin, Beauty and Brains
- August 19 – Lucifer Effect, Killing Yourself for Science, Bat Bomb
