The Story Structure of Dark Matter Is Its Most Clever Choice
Limiting ourselves to what has thus far been revealed, the argument is as follows: Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) begins the show with a what if? moment. He teaches physics at a nearby university, but we get the impression he could have been much more as his old friend Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) is becoming more and more well-known for winning a famous science prize. Instead, his priority has been his loving marriage to Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and home life with their teenage son, Charlie (Oakes Fegley). Though he might not be dissatisfied exactly, we have seen Jason wondering what might have been at one point.
He then is kidnapped. He is drugged unconscious following an odd series of events and an even more unusual talk with his masked assailant. When he wakes up, he finds himself in some facility he does not know surrounded by individuals he has never met or seen in years behaving as they had 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 arrived at his what-if moment early and with the scientific tools to intervene.
The Acting is Everything in Dark Matter.
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. Like our hero does, we have to question whether they are truly the same person. If so, then his potential for darkness is the same.
Edgerton is naturally gifted at balancing friendship with hatred 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 line, and much of the mystery of Jason 1's storyline results from his sporadic having that same little glitter in his eye. Though he is a better guy than his counterpart, can he survive this without losing who he is?
Dark Matter Review: Joel Edgerton Was The Best Decision Apple TV+’s Heady Sci-Fi Show Could’ve Made
Loving science fiction might indicate several 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 values the whole spectrum, everyone has an ideal mode; not only does the story's form matter, but also the kinds of questions it probes. Their Sci-Fi happy place. Dark Matter hits that spot for me.
Based on his novel of the same name, Dark Matter is a sci-fi drama-thriller television series created for Apple TV+ by Blake Crouch. The series follows a physicist who is kidnapped and thrown into an alternate reality where he witnesses one potential path his life could have taken. However, he learns that the lives of his family are in jeopardy by an alternate version of himself.
Dark Matter’s Scope is Intellectually Grand But Dramatically Personal. It Comes Closest to the Feeling of Watching Dark as Anything I’ve Seen Since.
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.
Confusion is Similarly Wielded as a Tool
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.
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.
Apple TV+ Is Known for Its Incredible Original Shows, Especially in the Sci-Fi Genre. Here is the Ranking of Every Apple TV+ Sci-Fi Original Series.
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.
