Photo: Apple TV+
Beware the plague! Beware the locusts! Beware the plagues of locusts! In interdimensional trespassing as in showbiz, Nobody Knows Anything. Though Jason B knows more than anyone else. The learning curve is steep, as the pre-title scene of Dark Matter’s series-midpoint hump day episode demonstrates again when Jason A insists to his fellow dimensional refugee Amanda that he’s feeling “safe and happy and warm” and ready to go home — just before he opens the door and the Box floods like a third-class cabin aboard the Titanic, sinking to the bottom of Lake Michigan.
I don’t know how Jason A and Amanda managed to muscle that door shut again or why the Box drains as soon as it does. Nobody Knows Anything.
As the very attractive fortysomething actors Joel Edgerton and Alice Braga strip down to allow their clothes to dry, Jason A admits that despite his insistence to the contrary, he was, in fact, feeling overwhelmed when he opened that door, inviting the deluge. To Amanda that means they must wait until their emotions settle. Jason A protests that sitting around doing nothing would be a waste of “two ampules” of Lavender Fairy, the psychoactive drug that prevents “decoherence,” wherein our unidimensional brains simply negate the possibility of the multiverse. But Amanda, who is a psychiatrist after all, insists that neither of them are chill enough to be certain they won’t subconsciously sabotage their attempt to right the ship. By which I mean the Box.
“You can’t lie to this thing,” she says. “It knows.”
It evidently hasn’t occurred to Amanda that the fact she and Jason A are from different universes might mess with the navigation of the Box. It occurred to me.
Jason asks her who else from Velocity went into the Box. The first volunteer, Amanda says, was Blair. We know from the prior episode that this is — sorry, we’re just going to have to keep doing this — Blair B, because the Chicago Police of Amanda’s home universe were investigating the disappearance of one Blair Caplan. But the Blair Caplan of Jason A’s homeworld is a lawyer who’s friends with Daniela. Amanda also mentions that the other two volunteers who went into the Box were called Selam and Alex. We’ve not heard their names before, but I’ll bet you a fortune in crypto we’ll hear them again.
Sometime later, Jason A and Amanda wake from a nap. The interior of the Box is now merely that. It no longer appears as an endless black corridor, which means the Lavender Fairy has worn off, and they’re no longer in superposition. Both report having slept deeply and absent any troubling dreams — and they’re starving. So they agree to risk opening the door again.
They find themselves back in one of the subterranean levels of the Velocity compound they fled at the end of episode three. The place is deserted and the power is out. It’s all creepy enough before they find a desiccated corpse in a bedroom. They agree to try another universe, but as they try to make their way back to the Box, someone confronts them with a shotgun. “No fucking way,” the shotgunner says, recognizing the two intruders caught in the beam of her flashlight.
It’s Blair Caplan B herself, who’s been missing from Amanda’s homeworld for as long as Jason B was until a few days ago. “You came looking for me!” she says, overcome. Well, not consciously.
It’s clear from the mess around Velocity Labs that Blair B, their sole occupant, has been sleeping rough. She does her guests the courtesy of heating up some foil-bagged rations for them before showing them a year-old surveillance video indicating what a Book of Revelations-style hellscape they’ve all found: On video, we see the Box unleash a swarm of pigeon-sized carnivorous insects, who instantly consume another version of Blair. Blair B explains that whatever these things are, they devour everything and “multiply exponentially.” Blair B has been living in the basement for three months, making occasional supply runs to the surface armored in multiple layers of protective clothing. Amanda asks Blair B why she hasn’t tried her luck in another universe. Blair still has some Lavender Fairy left. She’s just too afraid to leave.
Blair B waits until Jason A has left the room to ask Amanda why she got into the Box in the first place. It was an instinctive response, not a decision — Amanda and Jason were running for their lives. Blair warns her friend she is not merely homeless but worldless, and that she must start thinking about where she wants to end her journey. She can’t worry about Jason A — he’s from another universe, one where there is, in all likelihood, another Amanda. Blair says the reason she hasn’t yet left this nightmare world is because she was beginning to crack under the strain of all that dimension-hopping. The same could happen to Amanda.
Amanda asks Blair to come with them again, but Blair will not be moved. She gives the pair her field journal, where she’s documented the lessons of her travels. She tells them what they’re already discovered — steering the Box requires a daunting amount of focus. “Everything intrudes,” Blair says.
There’s that lighter-flick sound cue again, and we’re back in the universe where Jason B has usurped Jason A’s identity. Jason B is taking Leighton A, his new benefactor, on a series of training cruises to teach him to navigate the Box on his own. One of the Chicagos they visit has a series of overpasses in between Lake Michigan and the skyline; in this one, the Box appears to be situated right in the middle of Lake Shore Drive. Look both ways before exiting the Box, I guess. Another Chicago boasts a screensaver-y lineup of skyscrapers that are even taller than the ones in real Chicago. Here, Leighton A and Jason B contemplate a conspicuously greenscreened-in sunset.
“See what I mean?” Jason B asks Leighton. “It’s all about keeping your thoughts and your subconscious intentions aligned.” But like so many impatient Padawans before him, Leighton resists his instructor’s pleas of patience, saying he has an idea for “another world [he] want to visit” before their current Lavender Fairy doses wear off. Jason B tells him that after one more training sesh, he’s going to leave Leighton A with ten ampules. Leighton tells Jason B he’ll pay him $1 million for every hit of Lavender Fairy he can source.
Taking a lesson — or at least a notebook — from Blair B, Jason A elects to write down his intentions before he and Amanda emerge from the Box again, reasoning that one cannot write one thing while thinking another. When they step outside, the experiment appears to have worked. Jason A recognizes this as the industrial space where Jason B drugged him in the first episode. “This is my world,” Jason A says.
…except the streets are empty. A stray black cat rummages through an unattended coffee shop. “Something is very wrong here,” Amanda says. No shit. Jason finds a car with the keys left in the ignition and drives them both to his home. And here begins the most powerful eight-minute chunk of Dark Matter to date, not only because this section finds art imitating recent life to an unsettling degree.
The Daniela who answers the door has black hemmoraghes in her eyes. “They carried you out,” she tells her husband. She won’t let him get too close to her. Jason A asks where their son it. “He’s still up in his room,” Daniela answers. “No one’s come to take him yet.”
Amanda yells for Jason to join her as a humvee rolls up and a soldier with a plastic shield over his face demands to know what the two of them are doing outside. As Jason stammers that his wife is sick and his son is dead, the soldier glances at the front of the house and observes that they “have the colors properly displayed.” Two doctors emerge from the humvee; one tells the other to perform a “rapid test” while she goes inside to look at Daniela. There’s no 15-minute wait for the pink line to appear; after they each get a prick on the wrist, Jason and Amanda are determined within seconds to be negative. “For what?” Jason demands.
No one answers his question. The doctor who’s just been inside his house for a few seconds tells Jason that Daniela hasn’t long to live and that “I’d rather die at home than on a cot in a FEMA tent.” Seeing Jason’s horror, the doctor tells Jason, “The virus spreads through bodily fluids.” She then gives him five doses of morphine, saying that if he administers them all to Daniela at once, she’ll slip away. “Don’t wait,” the doctor tells him. “The last eight hours are brutal.”
As clunky and expository as Dark Matter often is, you’d have to have ice in your veins not to be moved by this scene, wherein the doomed Daniela gets a visit from the healthy-looking doppelganger of the husband she already saw die horribly, now returned to comfort her in her final moments.
A familiar photo from a Dessen family vacation to Yellowstone hangs on her wall — we saw a version of it in episode two, taken by Daniela B, of the waterfall minus the family, because in her timeline, she and Jason went their separate ways. In this world, where some plague has turned the Windy City into a ghost town, the day captured in that picture of her with her son and husband was “a perfect day.”
“They all were,” Jason tells her.
Then she takes the first of the five syringes of morphine out of the package.
I’m wrecked. Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly are spectacular here, and for once, their considerable skills aren’t papering over deficiencies in the material.
This would seem to be climax enough for one episode, but there are 15 minutes left! Back in the Box, Amanda complains that she’s sore all over. Jason A reassures her, “The test is negative.” Evidently the same merciful military doctor who gave him the morphine for Daniela also gave him another couple of rapid tests so he could make sure he and Amanda did not become interdimensional vectors, like whomever brought those carnivorous locusts from one world to another.
Amanda points out to the bereft Jason that he must’ve brought “baggage” with him through the door. He asks why he would’ve sought out a world where he’d have to experience what he just did. Amanda goes all Dr. Drew on him, speculating that he’s still trying to heal some trauma from his childhood — the death of his mom from cancer, maybe. “I think that world taught us a lot about how the Box works,” Amanda says.
That makes one of us, Doc. Again, I’m finding the sort of Solaris idea that the Box can be steered by the subconscious of any user who’s tripping on Lavender Fairy to be more difficult to swallow than the idea of an interdimensional Box. I cannot reconcile this.
The next Chicago they emerge into has people on the sidewalks and cars on the roads. Encouraging! But the episode cheats here, cutting to Daniela and Jason B at home, with no Zippo-flick sound to indicate this is a different universe. So we believe that Jason A and Amanda are approaching the same house on the same street in the same universe where Daniela is telling Jason B how hurt she was that he didn’t discuss any of the recent big decisions he’s made with her — quitting his job, buying Charlie a car. Downstairs, Jason A lets himself into the house and takes a knife from the kitchen, arming himself for a showdown with Jason B.
Upon seeing Jason A, this Daniela — Daniela C, I guess — dials 911 and says her husband, who is supposed to be in prison, just showed up at her home with a knife. This world’s Charlie, who wears his hair slicked back to signal that he’s the tough son of a gun, tackles Jason A and tells him to get out of the house.
With the police looking for him, Jason A tells Amanda they need an ally to help them find their way back to the Box. Amanda brings them to her mother’s horse. The woman is just as alarmed to see Amanda as this world’s Daniela was to see Jason A. Jason finds a memorial to Amanda on a table surrounded by candles. This is the second scene in 15 minutes of someone receiving a visit from a loved one they’d already seen die. Amanda gives her mom a few words of comfort in Portuguese before they make off with the woman’s keys. “You gave her hope,” Jason reflects as the drive back Boxward. “Then you stole her car.”
Then, we get a Zippo-flick sound as we return to the universe of Jason B. An alarm at Velocity Labs goes off as Jason B emerges from the Box, helping himself to 50 doses of Lavender Fairy. A staffer who recognizes him asks what it’s like in there. “It’s hell,” he tells her.
• In the universe where Jason is supposed to be in prison, he and Amanda walk past the historic Logan Theatre. The marquee advertises The Fugitive 2 and My Best Friend’s Divorce, two never-made (in our world) sequels to beloved Chicago-set hits from the ‘90s. A decent one-second visual gag, but one that raises the troubling likelihood that the creators of Dark Matter have forgotten all about U.S. Marshals, the 1998 follow-up to The Fugitive for which Harrison Ford declined to return — so Tommy Lee Jones pursues a different wanted man who’s actually innocent of the crimes of which he’s been accused, played by Wesley Snipes. The cast also includes a low-billed Robert Downey, Jr., who a decade before the release of Iron Man, had been reduced to taking supporting parts in sequels everyone forgot about. Justice for U.S. Marshals!
