Like most people, I sometimes wonder how life might have unfolded had I made, at critical junctures, a different choice. What I haven’t done is break into a parallel reality, identify a better version of myself, and force him at gunpoint to trade places. Laziness? The reader may suspect so. Then again, parting ways with the antagonist of Apple’s new series Dark Matter, I don’t have a Ph.D. in quantum theory.
If the multiverse is having a moment, it is only because “the Science” continues to have a bigger one. One might expect, observing the hard sciences’ replication crisis, a little representational modesty. How about a series in which a heroic researcher eschews p-hacking and gets the same results twice in a row? Instead, we have quantum superpositions. Scratch a popular screen production these days, and one is likely to find the well-credentialed bending time and space to their will. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2023 Oscar winner, Michelle Yeoh’s Alpha-Evelyn discovered “verse-jumping” seemingly by accident, so exceptional was her apparent brilliance. It wasn’t Mister but Doctor Strange who strode through Marvel’s “Multiverse of Madness” the previous year. It’s all nonsense, of course, but of a peculiarly triumphalist kind.
Given this context, it is no surprise to find Apple’s latest taking for granted its own narrative plausibility. Kidnapped into an alternate reality, the show’s protagonist barely asks questions, so complete is his faith in physics to achieve the impossible. Fifteen years ago, the same program might have saved its quantum gobbledygook for a late-episode “reveal,” stunning viewers with a high-theory exposition dump. The Dark Matter of today, by contrast, throws us into the deep end halfway through its pilot. With the multiverse on every tongue, there is simply no need to disguise the engine driving the show’s brazenly ridiculous plot.
Dark Matter stars Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, a physics professor at a Chicago-area community college. Married to artist Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), Jason enjoys a comfortable life and has no regrets about a long-ago decision to prioritize family over the lab. Things change when, one rainy evening, a masked man abducts our hero and injects him with a mysterious syringe. Upon waking, Jason finds himself known to all as a famous scientist and entrepreneur. Even Daniela has changed, recalling him as a one-time boyfriend but decidedly not as a husband.
If the plot I’ve summarized thus far owes much to The Twilight Zone, the similarity is often to the good. Like “The Parallel,” a fourth-season episode anticipating today’s alternate-universes obsession, Dark Matter captures well the existential terror of being the only sane man in the world. Helping matters greatly is the performance of Edgerton, who brings to his protagonist role a bruised vulnerability reminiscent of Steve Forrest’s in 1963. Who cares if the Australian roughneck is as believable a physicist as Leonardo DiCaprio would be a priest? The actor nails Jason’s panicked frustration.
To whom does one turn when one’s sense of reality matches no one else’s? The answer, for a while, is Connelly’s Daniela, who possesses, in both universes, all of the actress’s customary warmth. Later, a psychiatrist named Amanda (Alice Braga) plays an important role as our hero explores the technology responsible for his crisis. Through it all, Jason’s goal is simple: to get back to “real” life and vanquish the kidnapper who has stolen his very existence. To do so, he will have to enter “the Box,” a room-sized, steampunkish cube that holds a gateway to every possible world.
It is no spoiler to reveal that the villain being chased is Jason himself. The series shows us as much half an hour into the pilot. Brash and swaggering, this doppelganger is the very man our protagonist has been mistaken for. What he wants is a taste of married life with Daniela, an outcome he foreclosed in his own reality by choosing careerism and pecuniary success.
Is it a sign of bad morals that I found myself cheering for the false Jason? He is certainly the more interesting figure, dressing down “his” bored students one moment and seducing Daniela the next. In a plot twist that delivers much-needed emotional complexity, Connelly’s character finds herself at least temporarily impressed by her husband’s alteration. Like Beauty preferring the Beast, she wants the dangerous man, not her familiar milquetoast. Never mind that fake Jason knows nothing about their life together and can’t get through a dinner party without a who’s-who cheat sheet.
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For the most part, Dark Matter balances its dueling plotlines well, shifting between Jasons like a magician flipping a coin. Less compelling are the graspers and hangers-on who dog the real Jason in his adopted realm: Dayo Okeniyi as a fanatical corporate stooge and Jimmi Simpson as our protagonist’s apprehensive frenemy. I suppose these supporting players are necessary if the show is to fill nine hours. Then again, the program feels bloated even at its best. If ever there were a series that could have lopped off four episodes, this is it.
Still, one is tempted, coming to the end of each installment, to let the next one start up. Dark Matter is handsomely produced, reasonably intriguing, and the beneficiary of two solid leads. At least in this iteration of our universe, there are far worse shows.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
