Photo: Apple TV+
We need to talk about cold opens. The franchise that made them immortal began the custom by having 007 himself appear to be killed by Robert Shaw before the title sequence of From Russia With Love, kicking off a tradition of attention-grabbing pre-title set pieces that would remain a hallmark of the series. Forty-nine years later, Skyfall would repeat the gag of having Bond appear to be killed before the opening credits.
I don’t know if Blake Crouch, the novelist turned showrunner of Dark Matter, or Alik Sakharov, the director of the series’ penultimate episode, are Bond-o-philes, but they’ve certainly seen network dramas where the cold open has long been standard. Some chapters of Dark Matter have featured cold opens; Episode eight, “Jupiter,” inexplicably does not.
Inexplicably, I say, because the episode opens with Jason A, our hero, attempting to murder Jason B, the villain, in the alley behind Jason A’s house. At long last, the “Schizoid Man”/Superman III/Terminator 2/Star Trek VI doppelgänger dustup we have somewhat impatiently been waiting for! And even though Jason A has a knife and Jason B is armed only with a trash bag, Jason B manages to repel the attack, smashing Jason A’s skull into the asphalt. The guy we’ve spent seven hours of television rooting for is now dead. If that gasp-inducing moment doesn’t belong before the title sequence, I don’t know what the hecking heck does.
I wouldn’t make an issue of this had not Dark Matter’s sixth episode, “Superposition,” deployed a cold open, attempting to goose suspense by delaying its title sequence until ten minutes into a 55-minute episode. And what event was deemed sufficiently surprising, shocking, intriguing, or otherwise dramatic to provide the little hit of narrative propellant to kick us into a title sequence?
Daniela pointing out to her husband, whom we know to be Jason B, that it’s weird that he’s started flossing now. Don’t you dare touch that Apple TV remote, True Believers!
So I’m deducting one full star for the absence of a cold open in an episode that clearly demands one, but otherwise this installment is pretty damn good, delivering fully on the premise the prior episode’s concluding scene teased: The conflict is no longer Jason A — or Jason One, as one of them refers to, uh, themselves in this episode — vs. Jason B. It’s a whole bunch of Jasons A (a flock of Jasons? A school of Jasons? A murder of Jasons?) who have branched off from the one Jason B abducted and exiled to a foreign universe about a month ago in story-time, versus the one Jason B.
All the Jasons A have been wronged by Jason B. All have suffered. Some of them, we learn, have suffered worse than “the” Jason A we’ve been following has, bearing the visible scars of horrific injuries. All of them have fought their way to their home dimension only to find themselves, quite literally, redundant. The stakes have been raised!
After Jason B fights off his would-be assassin, Daniela goes to visit Ryan C — the auto-mechanic Ryan whom Jason B kidnapped and brought to Jason A’s dimension to get the police off his back for Ryan A’s disappearance. Daniela is puzzled that Ryan, the brilliant chemist who has been her friend since college, now knows her only as a customer at his auto shop (and that he claims to run an auto shop). Asking him to describe what he remembers, Ryan C tells her some guy he didn’t recognize kept buying him drinks. Showing Ryan C a photo of Jason on her phone, Daniela gets confirmation that Jason is responsible for Ryan C’s predicament.
Back at the Milshire Hotel, we see a man who sure looks like Jason A unwrap the knife we saw him buy last episode. Wait, didn’t we just see him get killed while attempting to cut Jason B with that same knife? Well, one of him, yeah. Stepping into the hallway, he finds himself face-to-face with himself. One Jason flees, the other gives chase. Still another, this one dressed in the goofy bear-patterned sweater we saw him appropriate from the snowbound house in episode four, steps out onto N. Milwaukee Avenue.
The Jason he’s pursuing eludes him by slipping into the Village Tap, where tattooed barkeep Matt welcomes him. “I need a drink,” Jason says.
“That was quick,” Matt retorts. That’s when Jason A-1 spots Jason A-2 in a booth. Matt clocks him, too.
Jason A-2 looks to have logged a few more rough miles on his way back to this Chicago than Jason A-1. He’s wearing a watch cap, which doesn’t completely cover a big stitched-up gash on his forehead.
“I guess this was inevitable. That different versions of us would spawn in the box.,” Jason A-2 muses.
“Every choice I made in there created a different Jason,” Jason A-1 says, picking up the thread. And every choice each of those Jasons made, and so on, and so on.
Jason A-2 reveals that the Amanda who helped him escape from Velocity Labs perished in “a very dark world.” He’s relieved to hear that Jason A-1’s Amanda found a welcoming world and chose to stay there. They’re both out of ampules.
The talk quickly turns to murder. (Or suicide, technically?) “You must have thought of Kankakee, right?” asks Jason A-2. We don’t know what that is, but the Jasons A agree they know about “that first reserve” — huh? — because of Charlie. Which means that “Jason Two — that’s what I call him — doesn’t know about it.”
This is Jason A-2 talking now. The one who saw his Amanda die arrived back in Chicago a day earlier than Jason A-1 and had already dug a grave and procured a gun. He declares his intention to “make Jason Two pay.”
“We all think of ourselves as Jason One,” he says. “Can’t all be Jason One.”
“I don’t want to hurt you or anyone like us,” Jason A-2 declares. “But I’m not gonna let anyone get in the way of me being with Daniela and Charlie.”
He does his selves a solid and pays for their beers before excusing himself.
Jason A-1 wakes up on a park bench before buying himself breakfast at a diner. He has the same book of matches we saw him pick up at the Village Tap the night before, which is how we know he’s the same Jason. He uses them to fire up a stogie, right in the middle of the diner. Being a nice guy, he looks uncomfortable to be engaging in such poor behavior.
“You are a very rude man,” another patron tells him. His server tells him he can’t smoke inside, as does her manager. The cop who shows up, very quickly, to take him into custody has a familiar face: She’s Dawn, who in Jason B’s home universe was the Velocity Labs leg-breaker who murdered Daniela. “How did you become a detective?” Jason A-1 asks her as she puts him in the back of her cruiser.
Jason B is brushing his teeth methodically — he’s really committed to oral hygiene, this sociopath — when Daniela comes in to ask if she can take the Civic to run an errand. Jason B testily tells her to take Charlie’s car because the corpse of the Jason he killed the prior night is still in the trunk. Jason B has also evidently forgotten that he promised to take Charlie on a tour of the University of Chicago campus, which Charlie points out once the two of them are in the car. Jason B had planned on unloading that body after dropping off Charlie at school, I guess?
On their tour, Jason B points out the house where he first caught sight of Daniela and tells Charlie that had he not chosen to attend that party, he would’ve regretted it for the rest of his life. Charlie is angered by this: “Your whole life hinged on a moment that was basically a freak accident,” he says, leaving unspoken that he himself would not exist had his old man not attended that party.
We already know Jason B lacks the bedside manner to respond sympathetically to an outbreak of adolescence as severe as this one, but he doesn’t even get the chance to try because he spies yet another Jason following the pair of them. This one has what looks like a substantial burn scar on the right side of his face. Jason B is trying to keep ahead of this letter-unknown Jason without tipping off Charlie that something is wrong. It isn’t working.
Daniela, meanwhile, has used a pair of bolt cutters to break into Jason B’s storage unit. You’d think those places would have measures in place to prevent this. Daniela finds a full box of ampules of Lavender Fairy, banded stacks of currency from other dimensions — hey, it’s Robert F. Kennedy’s face on the $20 bill! — and unsecured cell phones full of photos of what looks like her husband being surreptitiously observed. The most intriguing clue is a pair of overalls with a name patch that reads “Ryan” over the breast. The Ryan she thought to be crazy had insisted that he’s a mechanic.
At the university library, Charlie is alarmed by his dad’s odd behavior. Jason B orders his not-yet-licensed-to-drive son to go collect the car and pick him up while Jason B tries to elude the wounded Jason on his heels. The pursuit culminates in our second Jason-v.-Jason mêlée of the episode, this one a men’s room brawl in the tradition of True Lies or Mission: Impossible — Fallout, with the caveat that neither participant is a trained assassin, so it’s all a lot messier. Jason B kills the scarface Jason, this one packing a different model knife than the one we saw at least one Jason A buy in the prior episode. He needs a moment to collect himself after killing himself for the second time in maybe 12 hours, so he just barely finds his way back outside to rescue Charlie, who has been pulled over by a campus cop. Jason B manages to persuade the cop to let them go before the matter of the dead body in the trunk comes up. You definitely get points on your license for that, and Charlie doesn’t even have a license yet.
The next scene is the big payoff as Daniela bails Jason A out of jail following his arrest for causing a scene with his big stogie. Jason A tells her he hasn’t laid eyes on her since the night he went to the Village Tap to celebrate Ryan A’s Pavia Prize triumph and that getting himself arrested was a ploy to get her a place where they could talk.
“That man isn’t me,” Jason A stammers. “He’s another version of me.”
He’s lost her long before he gets to “he has access to other realities,” so to prove his wild story, Jason A begs Daniela to call him. In a beat right out of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Jason A stares silently at Daniela while she speaks on the phone to the man whose voice matches his exactly. It’s a lucky thing Jason B picked up. Jason A tells her to say to the impostor on the other end of the line that she’d like to visit the Keys again for Christmas, reasoning that Jason B won’t know she’s referring to a trip that never happened. It works.
Jason A begs Daniela to meet him later with Charlie at a location of her choosing because any place he thinks of Jason B would likely guess. Without promising she’ll definitely come, she names the Bean in Millennium Park. (If she’d used this beloved reflective sculpture’s formal name, Cloud Gate, we’d have cried foul.) He’s also clever enough to ask her to think of a safe word. Jupiter is what she chooses.
Returning home, Daniela begins to text Charlie to summon him out to join her in the car, but then erases the message and goes into the house. I don’t understand this choice. Inside, she finds Jason B in a state of alarm, telling her they all need to flee. She tries to speak privately with Charlie, in person and via text, but Jason B is watching them both like an interdimensional hawk. He keeps telling Daniela to get a suitcase. Thinking on her feet, she asks him to help her reach one in the basement and then hits him over the head as he starts down the stairs.
The final moments are unhinged. As Charlie and Daniela try to escape in her car, they’re intercepted by Jason A, who hustles them both into his stolen ride. As he drives, he explains he hasn’t seen either of them since that night at the Village Tap, that the man they’ve been living with is a fraud, and so on. Realizing that this Jason A is not the one she bailed out of jail, Daniela asks him to pull over. Just then, their car collides with another one, this one driven by still another Jason A! Daniela and Charlie flee on foot as two Jasons A try to free themselves from their crumpled cars.
Arriving at the Bean, Daniela demands that the Jason A waiting for them there speak their safe word. He does, and then wraps their son in his arms, keeping his eyes on his wife.
It’s a cathartic reunion. But what about all the other Jasons A who’ve fought their way back to their family to find that they’ve been replaced not just by a greedy, gaslighting villain but by duplicates who, again, are just as aggrieved as they have been? This is a story wherein the losers are going to outnumber the winners by a lot.
• We have confirmation at last that the Village Tap playlist includes at least one song that is not the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” The song playing when two Jason As share a booth and drink their pints together is Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna,” from the 1966 landmark Blonde on Blonde. Surely there’s a dimension out there with a song called “Visions of Jason” from the album Brown on Brown.
