Photo: Apple TV+
Curiouser and curiouser! Jason A and Amanda enter the fourth episode of Dark Matter under the influence of Lavender Fairy, which you will no doubt recall is the psychoactive drug that Ryan B cooked up to prevent “decoherence.” Without the Fairy, the narrative pseudoscience goes, our primitive, puny-human consciousness would simply reject the possibility of a multiverse, making the interior of the Box look like nothing more than “storage space,” as a not-yet-dosed Leighton Vance — sorry, this would be Leighton A, now — comments midway through this episode.
But with the Lavender Fairy temporarily stopping the prefrontal cortex from harshing our multidimensional mellow, the interior of the Box is an endless black corridor with a different reality behind each of its innumerable doors. “A manifestation of the mind as it attempts to visually explain something our brains haven’t fully evolved to comprehend,” Jason A tells Amanda. You can see how she found at least some iteration of this cat irresistible.
The first door they try brings them to a ruined Chicago, its streets deserted and the bare branches of the trees covered in rust-colored ash. The mighty Windy City skyline along Lake Michigan looks like it’s suffered a kaiju attack — that really does look like a giant bite mark in the side of the John Hancock Center — though the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier is still standing. Jason A and Amanda barely have time to drink in the horror before a skyscraper begins to topple, sending them running for cover inside the ruined building from which they’ve just emerged.
Back in the un-destroyed Chicago of Jason A’s home universe, Daniela is contemplating an unusually shaded wooden box — is it a dodecahedron? — with the name “Max” inscribed upon it. We learned in the last episode, as that interloper Jason B pored over family photos and documents to learn about the past 16 years of “his” life, that Charlie had a twin sibling. The way that fact affected the Dessen family comes more clearly into focus as Jason B, riding shotgun to a newly licensed-to-drive Charlie, asks what they should do to celebrate the boy’s birthday. “The usual thing,” Charlie replies. Further declaring his independence from the cautious Jason A, Jason B tells Charlie to speed up as a traffic signal is about to change. “There’s a lot of yellow in that red,” he muses.
Inside the Box, Jason A and Amanda discern from a GPS device that they evidently thought to bring with them while running for their lives that the Box occupies the same geographical space whatever dimension it’s in.
Jason B saunters into his classroom at Lakemont College, throwing a glass bottle against the wall to command the attention of the room when a verbal request doesn’t do the trick. He announces a pop quiz, commanding the group to tear a sheet of paper from their notebooks. “No one uses notebooks anymore,” a student protests. Jason B announces that anyone who neglected to bring an analog pen and paper to class with them is flunked, then decides to go even bigger. “Good luck,” he says, walking out on his class and his job. (Class seems to be much better attended on this eventful day than it was in the first episode when Jason A attempted to explain Schrödinger’s Cat in the final seconds before the bell.)
Jason A and Amanda emerge from the Box into yet another reality, this one sylvan and peaceful. There’s no sign of civilization, or of Lake Michigan, which left me confused since they just told us the Box remains in a fixed location in each world. The next door Jason A opens leads to a universe even more terrifying and inhospitable than the first ruined Chicago we saw, its sun low and angry in the sky. “There was no atmosphere!” Jason A gasps after slamming the door on that dumb universe. Amanda panics, running down the infinite corridor until she at last collects herself. Jason A catches up to her and proposes a plan that sounds like the least terrible of their shitty options. “Let’s start opening doors and hope one of them looks like home.”
The next door they try brings them to the Back to the Future, Part II section of the episode, wherein they see other, presumably slower-running versions of themselves get captured by Leighton and Dawn’s multiversal understudies. That Amanda tells Leighton she’s done enabling his evil schemes, which prompts Dawn to deploy her signature move, shooting that Amanda in the head and then subduing Jason with a taser. Our Amanda is understandably shocked into paralysis by witnessing her own murder, but Jason A shoves her back into the Box and slams it shut behind them — albeit not before that world’s Leighton catches sight of them, a what the fucking fuck expression overtaking his features.
The next door they try leads to a Chicago even colder than the one we know. Whatever ecological catastrophe has befallen this especially Windy City has blanketed everything in ice. Jason A drags the already frozen-into-unconsciousness Amanda inside a house, where the windows have been boarded up and the corpse of a household pet lays on the kitchen floor. There’s no running water or electricity, but Jason A finds some matches. It’s enough to get a fire started to try to save Amanda’s life.
There’s another scene of an increasingly panicked Leighton B trying to find his way free of the Box, and then we’re introduced to Leighton A, whom we’re meeting for the first time. Jason B has come to see him in his magnificent trust-funded penthouse. This Leighton, still in his silk PJs in the middle of the day, is the one who didn’t lose his parents at an impressionable age and who didn’t fund an interdimensional transit device. “I want to show you something,” Jason B tells him. Arriving at a warehouse — one that looks different in daylight from when we saw Jason B drag Jason A here (probably) in the first episode, Leighton A reiterates that he’s not investing in whatever Jason B is about to pitch him. But he’s disarmed when his old college pal offers him “a very special psychoactive drug.” No one can refuse the Lavender Fairy!
Jason A, meanwhile, has managed to source some warm clothes and camping gear in that abandoned house. Amanda, once again awake after some hours by the fire, confesses that she was remembering her childhood skiing trips in Argentina and the whiteouts that occasionally made travel impossible, just as Jason A opened the door to this universe. The Box has been buried in the snow. Jason A speculates that the Box was responding to Amanda’s subconscious by guiding them into this snowbound world. If that’s the case, Jason A theorizes, “We could go home.”
By subconsciously clicking the heels of your ruby slippers together, maybe? Dark Matter noveilst turned screenwriter producer Blake Crouch is losing me here. That the Box is steered by the subconscious desires of any occupant — provided, of course, that they’re high on Lavender Fairy — feels like an interdimensional bridge too far. Clearly, Jason A’s speculation about how the Box works must be correct because when Jason B, the architect of all this misery, brings idle rich Leighton A into the Box, he cautions him against “thinking the wrong thing in here.”
Back in snow-blind Chicago, Jason A and Amanda locate the buried Box using a compass — part of that cache of useful gear Jason A found in that abandoned house. Their proximity to Lake Michigan and the Sears Tower makes it easy for them to see which way north is, so when the needle of the compass points in another direction, Amanda speculates that the compass is responding to the magnetic field emanating from the Box. They dig their way back in and enjoy a thermos of hot something-or-other. And you hope it has some bourbon or brandy in it because this is the point at which Jason A tells Amanda that Jason B — until recently, her live-in romantic partner — did this to him, to them, on purpose.
Amanda seems to accept this, saying that her Jason would’ve tried to rationalize it. She asks Jason A if he was wealthy in his world. He was not; Jason B obviously was. Jason A realizes that today is Charlie’s birthday.
A cut back to Daniela and Charlie in that less desolate Chicago begins one of the most elegant sequences of the series to date: They find it puzzling that Jason B hasn’t returned home yet given the occasion, but they decide not to wait for him. Mother and son take a seat in the backyard beside a tree. “Tell me the story?” Charlie asks.
We then intercut between Daniela telling Charlie the same tragic family history that Jason A is now sharing with Amanda a universe away. Charlie had a twin brother who had an unspecified birth defect. Max lived long enough for he and Charlie to become “inseparable,” Daniela says. But Max died during a surgical procedure when he was just a few years old. The family planted a tree in the backyard in his memory, stirring his ashes into the soil. Each year on the birthday Charlie and Max shared, the family of three sits together by the tree to remember him.
That’s “the usual thing” Charlie was referring to in the car with Jason B when his dad asked him how he wanted to celebrate.
Leighton A, meanwhile, emerges from the Box with Jason B. We don’t know exactly where Jason B took him, but Leighton says, “It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Jason B returns home to find Daniela and Charlie making dinner. He perceives that he missed something significant, but he doesn’t know what it is. The flowers he’s brought for Daniela and the bottle of Champagne for them all to share don’t quite compensate for this omission, but the set of keys to a brand-new ride he presents to Charlie cools the kid’s anger, at least.
Daniela is, understandably, pissed. She’s not placated by her husband’s disclosure that he quit his job today. He thinks she should quit hers, too, and go back to painting. He tells her he’s returned to the special project he abandoned years ago when Daniela told him she was pregnant and that he’s found an investor. “We don’t have to worry about money anymore,” he tells her. If only it was so simple!
