Loving science fiction can mean many different things. The genre has an infinite number of modes, ranging from the smallest of speculative changes to space-faring epics in worlds we hardly recognize, and creatives can use that framework to tell any kind of story. Even if someone appreciates the full range, everyone has an ideal mode; not just the nature of the story, but the way it’s told, and the kinds of questions it explores. Their sci-fi happy place. Dark Matter hits that spot for me.
It’s heady and thoughtful, structured like a thriller but unafraid to sometimes challenge the audience. It has a knack for asking the right questions about the subjects it wants to explore, and is more interested in teasing them out than providing easy answers. It embraces the means of its medium to explore its themes, and treats the actors like its greatest special effect. The scope of its story is intellectually grand but dramatically quite personal. It comes closest to the feeling of watching Dark as anything I’ve seen since.
Dark Matter is based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Blake Crouch, who is also the showrunner – he himself has claimed this adaptation is better than the source material. I haven’t read it, and so can’t comment. But I can say, having seen the full, nine-episode season, that I came away convinced that TV was the ideal way to tell this story.
Staying limited to what’s been revealed so far, the premise is as follows: Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) begins the show with a what if? moment. He teaches physics at a local university, but when his old friend Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) continues his rise to prominence by winning a prestigious science prize, we get the sense he could’ve been much more. Instead, his priority has been his loving marriage to Daniela (Jennifer Connolly) and home life with their teenage son, Charlie (Oakes Fegley). He might not be unhappy, exactly, but we’ve caught Jason at a time of wondering what might’ve been.
Then he gets abducted. After a strange sequence of events and an even stranger conversation with his masked assailant, he is drugged unconscious. When he wakes, he’s in some facility he doesn’t recognize, surrounded by people he’s never met or hasn’t seen in years acting like they have shared history. What they say about his life isn’t what he remembers to be true. Meanwhile, his assailant walks unmasked into Jason’s home and is greeted with recognition. He is another Jason – one who reached his what if? moment earlier and had the scientific means to do something about it.
Jason2 discovered a way to traverse the infinite number of parallel realities that branch each time we make a decision, and found a world where he didn’t let Daniela go to pursue his research. He then forced upon Jason1 an opportunity to trade lives. Only, the abductee gets to experience the world where he’s a successful scientist as a dissociative nightmare. Dark Matter then follows two separate plotlines: Jason1’s desperate struggle to find out what happened and return home, and Jason2’s delicate performance of a life he hasn’t lived, where the smallest mistake could turn trust into suspicion.
This structure is its genius. Dark Matter plays out like two different kinds of thriller, one propulsive and mysterious, the other insidious and paranoid. Information of all kinds is treated as a precious commodity, doled out to us slowly. We have time to mull over what each new wrinkle in the mechanics of the multiverse means, both narratively and thematically. When a new difference between the Jasons is revealed, it both sheds light on the show’s exploration of identity and foreshadows trouble for the impostor.
Confusion is similarly wielded as a tool. While the show isn’t overly opaque, close guarding of information sometimes means we don’t fully understand what we’re seeing when we see it. This uncertainty is very clearly intentional. Crouch’s show is as interested in the impact of its ideas on its characters as in the intellectual concepts themselves, and the same is true for the audience’s experience. To feel confused is, sometimes, to empathize with a certain character, even from our more privileged perspective. And in Dark Matter, empathy is the path to understanding.
That’s what makes this story so perfect for the screen – as much as prose can drop us in a character’s mind, there’s nothing that generates empathy quite like the human face. This series features excellent performances across the board, but Edgerton, especially, is doing something special with his dual role. Jason1 and Jason2 aren’t played with an exaggerated difference, and can’t be for this particular meditation on identity to work. We have to wonder, as our hero does, whether they’re really the same person. And, if so, whether that means he has the same potential for darkness.
Edgerton has a talent for holding friendliness and malice in tension with just an expression. His scenes in movies like The Green Knight and The Gift (which he also directed) derive tension solely from our inability to read his intentions with clarity; he achieves, to borrow Dark Matter‘s crucial physics term, a kind of emotional superposition. Jason2 is directly in this lineage, and much of the intrigue in Jason1’s arc stems from him occasionally having that same illegible gleam in his eye. He’s a better person than his double, but can he survive this without losing who he is?
The rest of the cast pull off a similar trick in smaller doses. Each of them must balance how they are perceived by Jason, i.e. the role they play in his life (and in the narrative), with a more complex reality that won’t always fit this image. Connolly is luminous as the woman of Jason’s dreams, but Daniela, as Jason2 discovers, won’t be shoved into so small a box. Amanda (Alice Braga), a psychiatrist and the partner Jason2 left behind, has an arc worthy of her own show that could almost go unnoticed.
Which brings me to the feature of Dark Matter that perhaps defines my sci-fi happy place: This show rewards close attention. As is often the case in multiverse narratives, there is plenty more to tease out beyond the story being told on its surface. How much you get out of it will depend on how much you put in.
Considering these nine episodes exhaust the source material, I don’t know if Crouch and Apple TV+ plan to make more seasons. But I certainly hope so. I’m not quite ready to leave this storyworld behind.