Dark Matter: Season 1

Apparently now I only watch TV shows of books I read. Or read books of movies that I haven’t yet seen. In the case of Dark Matter, I read the Blake Crouch novel on which the show is based back in 2016. It was admittedly a fun read. And I don’t say that often. So it was with some interest that I tuned in to this wacky sci-fi drama series. Also my fake girlfriend circa 1991, Jennifer Connelly. However… were we really ready for yet another multiverse tale? It feels like there have been so many of these in the past few years, but perhaps it’s just Marvel universe hangover from the nonsensical — and, frankly, unsuccessful — multiverse mayhem that has driven the burnout.There are no superheroes in this one. No tights. No capes. Thank god.

What we do have is a pretty high-concept, sci-fi tale that involves quantum superposition. Right. I’m not even going to explain that to you. You know, because I totally get it. The show explains it in terms of the whole Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. You know the one. Where a cat inside a box rigged with a poison trigger is both alive and dead before you lift the lid. Essentially it’s the theory that a thing can be in multiple states simultaneously until it’s observed to be in one position. Or something. Ultimately that theorem is fundamental to the science of the show, but understanding it isn’t essential to your enjoyment of the show. Because, like most of these shows, it’s only important until the writers start to fudge the rules in order to make things either easier to understand because of laziness or expediency.

How this comes to be is that a physicist, Jason Dessen (Edgerton), builds what amounts to a large version of the aforementioned cat box, shoots himself up with a fake drug that puts him in superposition, and gives himself access to every branch of every decision tree in his lifetime. Represented by an endless hallway of doors that he can walk out of into a varied version of the universe he came from. Sometimes the world is on fire. Sometimes it’s under water. Sometimes it’s very similar to his home universe, but he’s not married to who he’s married to — who happens to be my lady, Jennifer. The thing is, Jason 1 is our Jason. And he, unlike Jason 2, is just a lowly physics professor at a middling college in Chicago. He has no idea this whole box thing exists. Sure, he theorized about it, but he never built a working thing. He’s busy hanging with Jen and his son, Charlie (Oakes Fegley). Until, that is, Jason 2 shows up in his universe, kidnaps him, throws him in the box and hijacks his seemingly perfect life as a husband and father. Which, of course, is not perfect. But Jason 2 doesn’t care.

The remainder of the series is us watching Jason 1 trying to get back to his family in his universe. He witnesses the fire worlds. And ice worlds. And slightly off-kilter-from-his-own-reality worlds. All the while, Jason 2 is bedding his wife, trying to buy off the son with a car and generally failing — at least to our eyes — to pretend to be someone he isn’t. Despite having Edgerton’s face. Which — and this was something I bumped on and found incredibly distracting — feels oddly like Kevin Spacey’s face to me. I couldn’t get past it. Someone in the room who shall remain unnamed went a little further and called his face “punchable.” His accent is also… not Chicago. Unless stilted Australian is Chicago. I’ll stop now. But I do feel there could have been someone else to play this part who would have been much, much better. You know what, I’ll just get it all out now. This dude is a middle-aged sedentary physics professor, though he is somehow a dude who can fight like an MMA champ. I think we’re supposed to feel for this dude. I don’t. There are a multitude of continuity errors, which I imagine were tough to keep track of with Edgerton playing two versions of himself. But there is one marker for us to be able to tell Jason 1 from Jason 2, and the creators fuck it up at least a couple times. Which is problematic when you’re specifically using the cut on his nose to distinguish the two and you have a scene where the marker is missing and it totally confuses what’s going on. Be better. There’s also the drug one has to take to make the box work. Sometimes they shoot it into their arm. Sometimes they drink it. And that’s fine, I guess. But it also seems to last longer or shorter depending on the edit of the scene. And we’re told specifically that’s it’s disorienting and sickening at least the first time or times you take it, but several characters shoot it up and seem to have no ill effect at all. Stuff like that.

I won’t even go into the inconsistency of the science and how the doors work. But they do introduce this whole magical thinking thing at one point — meaning that your mood and thoughts can affect the world you walk into. Ok… that’s odd. How is this scientific? It’s not. It’s a way to say that amongst an infinite amount of doors, there is a way to choose the right one somehow to get back to your door if you just hope hard enough. No, not picking the right physical door (though the doors, to be fair, aren’t actually physical, but a projection of their brain), but just kind of The Secret-ing it. Seems like a cop out. Ok, now I’m done. But also, I’m flummoxed why people like to watch Joel Edgerton. There, I’m done.

That all aside, this is a fun, relatively propulsive sci-fi series for those who like that type of thing. It does feel oddly insular, as if it was a peak COVID production. Though I don’t think it was. Scenes often have one or two people in them. Sometimes up to three, but mostly a minimal number of individuals in any given scene. Normally I’d think it was a savings thing, but this is Apple, after all. Money is like sand to them. Instead it really magnifies the Jason 1 character’s loneliness. And, to some extent, Jason 2’s isolation, as he tries to live a life that isn’t his. A life that started the minute he exited the box without the normal memories that would come with a life well lived. Now, how his wife is snowed by this dude — which mostly seems to work for the first while because he’s horny for her and does the stuff young people do at the beginning of relationships — is a little beyond me. But when it starts to unwind, it makes you think about when your spouse cooks you the meal you love that perhaps she exited a giant quantum box in the bowels of an industrial complex. Overall the message about not taking your life for granted, and that all your choices have consequences is a pretty simplistic one. But I don’t watch shows to learn lessons; I watch them to be entertained. And on this front, I got almost all the way there.