Photo: Apple TV+
Let the record show that I have, for five long episodes, heroically resisted the cliché of observing that Jason Dessen, who is in his various multidimensional guises as both the protagonist and the antagonist of Dark Matter, is his own worst enemy. That admirable display of restraint and literary discipline ends here. I held out as long as I could. Because two-thirds of the way through the series, Jason B — inventor of the Box and the author of a conspiracy to nonconsensually swap lives with his less outwardly successful but happier-in-love interdimensional alter ego — isn’t just fucking up Jason A’s shit. He’s now fucking up his own through a series of unforced errors that, before the end of this installment, will have alienated not-his-wife, Daniela, and almost killed not-his-son, Charlie.
Perhaps that’s the inevitable consequence of so egregiously violating one of the Ten Commandments. He’s violated several, but the most salient one would be “Thou shalt not covet thy alternate self’s wife, or servant, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to thine alternate self.”
The episode begins with Daniela at work in her studio, having accepted her strange-behaving husband’s suggestion that she try painting again. Charlie’s looking for a lift to the skate park — curious, since his dad just gave him his own set of wheels as a 16th-birthday gift — so Jason B says he’ll take him. Jason B rides shotgun, so maybe Charlie is still driving with a learner’s permit, which would explain why he needed to be escorted. Brooke, the girl Charlie is crushing on, will be there, and it seems like Jason B’s bedside manner has improved slightly: Instead of sticking with the loner’s credo of “whoever speaks first loses” — sound business advice, maybe, but poor relationship coaching — like he told Charlie in episode two, he just tells his son that the nervousness he’s feeling “isn’t a bad thing.”
After dropping off Charlie, Jason B meets Leighton A at the Box to hand off the 50 ampules of Lavender Fairy Leighton has purchased for the life-altering sum of $50 million. Leighton correctly guesses that Danielle is the reason Jason B is choosing to become a permanent resident of this world. Jason B tells his college pal, “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” and splits. This would seem to be a brief errand, so it’s unclear why Charlie tells Jason B he’s late when he collects not-his-son from the skate park in the next scene.
Jason B has brought Charlie a pint of ice cream as though he knew the boy might be in need of a pick-me-up. Charlie’s in a sour mood because he’s been cockblocked by Drew, a rival for Brooke’s affections. He can’t possibly imagine the depth of experience from which Jason B is speaking when he tells him, “You’re going to have to do something about that.” And he probably doesn’t spend much time contemplating it because his throat begins to close up as soon as he tucks into his ice cream. We know from the episode where Jason A and Amanda were discussing their favorite candy while killing time in the Box that Charlie is deathly allergic to nuts — that’s why Jason A can’t risk having peanut M&Ms in the house.
Jason B has already examined Charlie’s birth records, but it’s possible there was no medical documentation of his allergy in the family papers that Jason B studied. It’s more likely, however, that Jason B had learned of Charlie’s allergy and simply forgot. That’s what he tells Daniela when she arrives at the emergency room in the next scene: After assuring her Charlie will be fine, he says, “It’s my fault,” claiming that he failed to notice there were nuts in the ice cream he’d given their son. This was foreshadowed in the first episode when Jason B first enters Jason A’s home, where Daniela has been waiting for her husband to return for several hours: He tried to placate her with ice cream, and her reaction seemed to indicate he’d simply chosen a flavor she dislikes. We can now surmise he chose one that violated their household prohibition on nuts.
After a Zippo-flick sound cue signaling a shift in dimensions, we hop over to a sylvan, wooded Chicago, from which Jason A and Amanda launch a few attempts, conveyed in montage, to home in on his home universe. Small details stymie him: First, he gets the sign of the Village Tap wrong, then he forgets that a wine bar, not a coffee shop, sits across the street from the real-life Logan Square watering hole where his nightmare began. I’ve lived in my Washington, D.C., neighborhood for 19 years, and if finding my way home from an interdimensional walkabout ever came down to me remembering not just what business was where but what color the sign is, I’d be even more well and truly fucked than Jason A is now.
Even we’re relieved when Amanda declares that they’re going to stay the night in whatever Chicago they’re in. Neither of them belongs there, but it’s not a world afflicted by lethal sandstorms or menaced by flesh-eating insects the size of baseballs, so why not? They check into Logan Square’s Milshire Hotel, treat themselves to an indulgent meal of oysters and ribs, and even get up to dance when “Raspberry Beret” starts playing. (Naturally, I wondered if Prince was still alive in this dimension.)
They’ve both desperately needed some relief from the nightmare they’ve been living. That night finds them sharing a bed (though they booked a room that has two), evidently chastely, as they’re both clothed. They’re bathed in the red-neon glow of the Milshire’s sign as Jason A half-wakes and spoons the woman that his alter ego was living with before he split, then withdraws as though catching himself. Amanda says she feels her world vanishing — after all, they’ve been trying to find their way back to his old life, not hers. Changing the subject, Amanda says she’ll move to the other bed if he wants her to. “I don’t want you to,” Jason A says. “I just think I need you to.”
The next scene is a reveal of sorts: Jason B has engaged the services of a therapist, who turns out to be the Amanda of the world he’s invaded, which means we must now refer to her as Amanda A. (It seems a little unfair to affix a “B” to the Amanda we’ve been spending all this time with, but it’s the least confusing option.) Even in the context of all the chaos he’s introduced already, it seems perverse of Jason B to have sought out this dimension’s version of his former lover. He tells her about giving Charlie the ice cream and that he feels he needs to prove to Daniela that he’s paying attention. When he informs her of his plan to do this via a “big, romantic gesture,” Amanda A asks if that’s the sort of thing she likes, allowing that she and her own partner sometimes differ on their notions of romance.
Daniela, meanwhile, is consulting a different sounding board whose interdimensional analog we’ve already met: It’s her friend Blair, the “bioethics lawyer,” not the shotgun-wielding locust avoider. Blair isn’t particularly concerned by Daniela’s disclosure that her husband has inexplicably become hornier, tidier, and better dressed. Then Daniela mentions the track marks on his arms. “You really buried the lede there,” Blair says. She advises Daniela not to confront Jason B about her concerns because he’ll just lie, she says, but to follow him during one of his frequent nocturnal absences. Daniela isn’t ready to take that step. But Jason deflects her attempt to discuss his strange behavior upon her return home …
… by having selected a black dress for her to wear on a surprise evening out. There will be dinner, he promises, but not until he’s escorted her, in a blindfold, to what turns out to be her own gallery. The horribly misjudged “romantic gesture” he’s concocted is to have the self-portrait she was working on in the opening scene displayed as part of the charity auction Daniela had been helping to organize. Daniela is mortified, demanding to be taken home immediately. In the car, she tells Jason B through tears how humiliated and enraged she is that he would take her unfinished painting without her consent and instruct her colleagues to hang it as part of the show. He lets slip with a damning admission — “Maybe you’re not the person I thought you were!” — before backpedaling. “I just want you to be happy,” he protests.
“You want you to be happy,” Daniela retorts.
He drops Daniela at home and drives off, but instead of going inside, Daniela takes Blair’s advice and tails him. She’s puzzled to find him visiting a storage unit she’d known nothing of. With the garage-style door locked, she can raise it only a couple of inches, but it’s enough space for her to reach beneath the door with a long piece of a metal shelving unit and withdraw something that’s fallen to the floor — which we recognize as an ampule of Lavender Fairy. In the next scene, Daniela, still in her black evening dress, is showing the ampule to Ryan — making his first appearance in several episodes — and asking him to analyze its contents to find out what the hell her husband has been shooting up.
Meanwhile, in yet another alternate Chicago, Jason A and Amanda B agree to spend a day apart. Jason A tracks down this world’s Daniela at a gallery. She’s blonde now and seems intrigued when Jason correctly identifies one of her paintings as an autumnal scene of Juneway Beach. He makes a clumsy effort to ask her out, and she deflects him gently, albeit not without seeming to consider his invitation for a moment.
Amanda B has located this world’s version of herself, making little effort to conceal her face as she watches her doppelgänger emerge from a house across the street with a handsome husband and an adorable young son in tow. When they meet back at the Box, Amanda points out that they have only ten ampules of Lavender Fairy left — that’s five dimensional crossings if they stick together.
That night, they’re back at the Milshire, which has a blue neon sign in this world. (“In an investigation, details matter,” a great, large man once said.) Amanda B looks at the notes Jason A has made in the field journal Blair gave them, describing Daniela’s appearance in detail. The therapist’s advice to him is that he needs “to go deeper.”
Jason excuses himself, and when he returns hours later, he’s even more unnerved than before. Amanda is distraught, saying she thought he’d abandoned her — why? Jason A says he spent the entire evening tailing that world’s Jason and Daniela, spying on them as they took in dinner and a movie. He surmises that Jason B must’ve done the same to him. “I’m having some fucking crazy thoughts right now,” he says.
Amanda B observes that trying to find his home universe is like seeking out “a grain of sand on an infinite beach.” She points out that he’s now seen various iterations of Daniela get shot in the head, succumb to a horrible virus, and fail to recognize him entirely. We were not meant to endure such contradictory yet uniformly painful experiences.
Jason B is back in Amanda A’s office, telling her about his botched attempt to reconcile with Daniela after nearly killing their child. He describes his life as an endless black corridor of doors, each one leading to a different version of his life. Amanda A, interpreting this literal description of the Box’s interior, as experienced from superposition while tripping balls on Lavender Fairy, as an elaborate metaphor, diagnoses Fear of Commitment.
Outside the Dessen home, Ryan A confronts Jason B with the ampule that Daniela asked him to identify, accusing him of stealing his research. It’s the only explanation Ryan can think of, given the drug’s striking similarity to a compound that the recent Pavia Prize winner has been working on, claiming that whatever his version of Lavender Fairy might be called will offer treatment for trauma and phobias, and will provide “a whole new way of thinking about pain management.” Finally accepting Jason B’s claims of innocence, he asks Jason what the application for his mystery drug is. “How about if I just show you?” Jason B counters.
Jason B brings Ryan A to the Box. And on their first and, for Ryan, only interdimensional trip, Jason B takes care of the driving, steering them to another sort of screensavery-looking Chicago skyline bathed in the northern lights. Jason B tells Ryan that this is “a kinder and more progressive place than our world.” (Its Wrigley Field is known as “the Even Friendlier Confines,” probably.) He says he tried to imagine “the kind of place my friend would like to see.” Jason B asks Ryan for his phone, promising to take a picture.
Ryan is moved to tears by what he’s witnessing. But he quickly surmises that this isn’t just not his world; it’s not his Jason. “I won’t be a problem for you,” Ryan says, his wonder curdling into fear. But that selfish prick Jason B has made up his mind: He slams the Box shut, leaving Ryan A as stranded as he left Jason A. On the phone he’s just taken from Ryan, he sees Daniela calling.
Jason B is dozing in his car when approaching headlights wake him. It’s “Leighton’s guy,” the fixer Leighton A told Jason B had “got me out of a jam a time or two.” “Leighton’s guy” is in construction, evidently, because we see a time-lapse sequence of him and his crew building a wooden cube around the exterior of the Box and then pumping it full of concrete. Despite Jason B’s misgivings about the new life he’s stolen for himself, he’s evidently decided to stay.
• When Charlie and Jason B drive past the Logan Theater early in this episode, I naturally attempted via freeze-frame to read the marquee to see if there was a follow-up gag to the one last episode advertising imaginary sequels to beloved Chicago-set films. Although the marquee was obscured by a tree this time, it looked to me like it read “Emily Grace & the Madhatters,” which was not a reference I could decode. So I submit to you some other fake sequels to classic Chicago movies circa 1975–2018, in order of their imaginary release: Cooley U., The Blues Sisters, Riskier Business, The Retouchables, Thieves, Backdrafts, Higher Fidelity, Ferris Bueller Jr.’s Day Off, Walking Scared, Widowers, and Sixty Candles. Suggest your own in the comments!
