Photo: Apple TV+
Dark Matter is a show with its fingers in so many sci-fi pies — alternate timelines, unfamiliar beings in familiar bodies, reality-altering psychoactive drugs — that it’s tough to discern, a third of the way through its run, whether the show represents a creative evolution of any of these concepts or just a stew of familiarity.
The last episode’s introduction and shocking killing of Daniela B, the one who ended her pregnancy and her relationship with Jason B after he chose the “cold, sterile lab,” suggested a frightening and unpredictable course for the series. The third episode, “The Box,” is more drearily familiar in both its suspenseful sequences, as Jason A tries yet again to escape his captors at Velocity, and its comedic ones, as Jason B turns to social media to try to keep up appearances as Daniela A’s faithful, unexciting husband and Charlie’s devoted dad.
Too many of these scenes unfold exactly as we’d expect. Jason B exhibits a newfound joie de vivre by ordering a $100 bottle of wine at dinner and then another one. An utterly unconvincing Chicago police detective grills Velocity CEO–probable supervillain Leighton Vance about Jason B’s disappearance, sudden reappearance, and then redisappearance. So far, so weak. From this scene, we learn at least that Velocity’s main product is “transistor-based silicon qubits for quantum and healing processors” and that one of the other Velocity staffers who hasn’t been seen since she stepped inside the mysterious Box was named Blair Caplan. And that she walked into the Box four months before Jason B did.
Leighton tells the cop, Detective Mason, that he hasn’t seen Jason in more than a year and feigns surprise when she tells him that Jason checked himself into a hospital three nights earlier and was later seen at Daniela’s art exhibition. Detective Mason says that her “predecessor” on this multiple-missing-persons investigation had noted Jason was in a relationship with another Velocity employee when he vanished.
Cut to Amanda, the former live-in partner of Jason B and now the reluctant ally of Jason A, laying into her boss for making her lie to the cops. My favorite part of this scene is when Leighton says that Dawn disobeyed him by murdering Daniela B instead of dragging her back to his lair along with Jason A, and Amanda says, “I warned you about hiring her!” We can only hope that Dawn’s next annual performance evaluation documents that she shot an unarmed woman between the eyes.
The meaningful kernels of information from the scene are that the Box has been online for 18 months, Leighton has sunk a billion dollars into this project, and Leighton fears that “Chicago is so close to connecting the dots” about the four missing Velocity staffers and that “we” will go to prison if they do. Their argument is interrupted by Jason yelling via the live feed from his cell that he’s ready to cooperate.
Amanda theorizes that superposition might have caused Jason’s memory loss — neither she nor Leighton are yet hip to the fact that the Jason they have in captivity is not the one they’ve been working with for years. So Leighton decides to remind amnesiac Jason — who is in reality Jason A — what he has been doing with the past decade of his life. He brings him to the Box.
Jason A says he had an idea for something like this years ago, but he abandoned it. “So your memories stopped before winning the Pavia,” Leighton says, holding our hands a little too tightly. Jason is excited when Leighton tells him that the breakthrough that made the Box work was adaptive shielding.
“Adaptive. Fuck. That’s it,” Jason A swoons. Joel Edgerton’s trick is to speak all his clunkiest lines in the lowest octave of his voice. It works for the most part! That adaptive shielding prevents leakage from the world outside the Box.
“It’s like the world’s most advanced noise-canceling headphones,” Leighton says, as though trying to undersell the invention on which he has personally spent a billion goddamned dollars. Amanda reiterates that he’s the only person to come back out of the Box after stepping into it. Three others have gone in and were never heard from again: Blair Caplan first, then two others after Jason.
In a control room overlooking the hangar where the Box resides, Leighton shows Jason A the video of Jason B stepping inside the Box and of a team in hazmat suits following him inside a short while later to find no trace of him. Then there’s another video, from 14 months later, we infer, of a weak and disoriented Jason A crawling back out.
Have we heard the last of the Zippo-flick sounds to signal a change in dimensions? We know we’ve switched in the next scene because Charlie is here, browsing at a skate shop. Jason B is acting like a divorced dad trying to make up for a forgotten visitation date, splurging on a pricey board for the boy and some accessories too. It’s a pretty good way to keep the kid from noticing that Dad is asking a lot of weird questions, like, “What’s Blair’s last name again?”
Daniela A has told him they’re hosting a dinner party the following night, so Jason B is trying to soak up as much intel on “their” friends as he can from their social-media profiles. But the fact that the woman who went into the Box before Jason B did shares a name with the friend of Daniela A’s whom we met at Daniela B’s art gallery in the first episode is a significant new plot-thickener. It certainly seems so to the Talented Mr. Jason B, who rubs his mouth contemplatively.
Having accepted at last that Jason A doesn’t remember her, Amanda introduces herself, explaining that her job at Velocity is to “train the Box pilots,” a program that affords these intrepid interdimensional pilgrims “emotional regulation” and “hyperfocus.”
“I oversaw trials for Lavender Fairy, the drug Ryan built,” she adds.
Jason A asks her what happened the day he disappeared 14 months earlier. Amanda tells him that he’d recalled visiting an ex-girlfriend the prior day and that she knew he was about to do something dramatic. This jibes with the conversation Daniela B recounted to Jason A in the previous episode, the one that inspired her art show. (Fourteen months seems like a very quick timeline for assembling an immersive solo show like the one we saw in the previous episode, but whatever. Daniela B was inspired, evidently.)
Jason A has read up on the past 15 years of “his” life, from winning the Pavia Prize on, and is now at least entertaining the notion that his memories of his life as a humble physics professor with Daniela and Charlie could be false, a symptom of severe mental illness somehow induced by the Box.
A universe away, Jason B glances at his iPhone’s Notes app to try to recall whom the dinner guests he’s greeting are. His dossier on the enigmatic Blair Caplan is unhelpfully thin: “D’s friend, lawyer, not close?” For all the swagger he has exhibited with his family and his students since crossing dimensions, Jason B seems cowed by Blair. “You must love being a lawyer,” he stammers. He’s more confident schmoozing with the other guests. At least until Ryan arrives — with the same attractive woman we saw him leave the Public Tap with in the first episode — wrapping Jason B in a bear hug from behind and whispering in his ear, “Don’t fight it.”
This is the first time Ryan A has seen Jason since Jason angrily rejected his job offer by phone. It’s also the first time, presumably, that Jason B has been face-to-face with this universe’s Pavia Prize–winning version of Ryan. Ryan apologizes sheepishly for “overstepping boundaries,” but Ryan B, his affect betraying nothing, tells him to forget it.
“You look good,” Ryan tells him.
That was a premature call about the Zippo flick going away because we hear another one before we return to Leighton and Jason A in another observation room with several people watching them from beyond the glass. Leighton has become a hostile interlocutor now, which becomes apparent even before Dawn throws Ryan B up against the glass. “You’re an impostor,” Leighton tells Jason A. “Another version of the Jason we love.”
All true and correct, but Leighton isn’t buying Jason A’s claims of innocence. He has decided, apropos of nothing, that this Jason must know where their Jason is and that trigger-happy Dawn can beat this knowledge out of him. There follows a trans-dimensional crosscutting sequence wherein Jason B gives a toast to Daniela A and their guests while Dawn pummels Jason A into an unresponsive pulp. It’s notable that when Jason B raises his glass to Daniela and says, “I do not deserve you,” Blair — who just might be an interdimensional impostor herself — is the one to interject, “That’s true.”
Leighton looms over a bloodied Jason, insisting that even though this is not the Jason he knows, not the Jason who built the Box, he must nevertheless have some vestigial understanding of how it works.
After their guests have gone, Daniela A and Jason B share a slow dance in their living room. “The past few days have been different,” Daniela says. “They’ve been great. But they’ve been different.”
Leighton finally throws a bloodied Jason A in a locked room with Ryan B. Jason A begs Ryan to tell him what Ryan meant by those compounds he’d referred to in the prior episode. “You asked me to build a drug that would alter the brain chemistry of the prefrontal cortex,” Ryan blubbers, with the intention that part of the brain would be temporarily put to sleep. (Jimmi Simpson is very good at selling this dialogue.) Jason A speculates that the drug “stops the brain from causing its own decoherence” as a result of “the observer effect.” They’re working it all out when Leighton, Dawn, and two other lackeys show up to ask Ryan, “Would you come with us, please?” Maybe we’ll find out they had some reason for allowing Ryan to speak with Jason A for two minutes before dragging him back out again and, we infer, killing him.
Amanda comes to break Jason A out. “What about Ryan?” he asks her. “I’m sorry,” she says.
She’s also not terribly competent because she leads them both right into Leighton. With him and his leg-breaker in between them and the building’s only exit, Amanda leads them both back to the Box. (Somehow Jason A’s passcode to the hangar where the Box is stored works even though Amanda’s has been turned off. It’s also unclear how Jason A knew Jason B’s passcode — is it his dad’s birthday in reverse, just like how Jason B correctly guessed Jason A’s iPhone code two episodes ago?) Leighton and Dawn pursue them, and when Dawn fires her pistol at them (and Leighton’s billion-dollar Box), Leighton doesn’t object. Dawn even tries to jam the doors of the Box to prevent them from closing, getting several of her fingers severed in the process. (Her annual performance evaluation should note that, too, I suppose. “Exhibits admirable tenacity in her pursuit of management objectives” and what have you.)
Inside the Box, dozens of Lavender Fairy are conveniently stored for whoever needs them. Amanda injects herself and Jason A as they wait out the three-minute countdown before the Box will open again. As her iPhone alarm stirs them from their psychotropic stupor, we get our first glimpse of the interior of the Box, its marblelike black corridors stretching into infinity.
• At their dinner party, Daniela A asks Jason B from across the span of their large dining table if he recalls the name of a hotel where they stayed on their vacation. The scene is framed as though Jason B’s inability to recall a name that his spouse has herself forgotten would be the undoing of his whole years-in-the-making trans-dimensional charade, but after a moment of blankness, he comes up with the name: mahekal. It’s a lot of windup for a detail that’s not a substantial clue, so I will share that this is evidently a Mayan word that means magical. Are you not entertained?
