Photo: Apple TV+
Dark Matter’s second chapter rematerializes right where the prior one ended, with Jason A on the run from a bunch of scientists who’ve previously introduced themselves as his colleagues. He returns to the last place he felt safe, The Village Tap, where “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place” is again playing on the jukebox. Matt, his faithful bartender, tells him he’s just missed last call, betraying no sign of recognition.
The Jason B who’s been living in this pocket universe must’ve had fewer sorrows to drown or else chosen to drown them elsewhere because the barkeep swears to Jason A that he’s never seen him before in his life. Jason A tries to jog the bartender’s memory about having sold an expensive bottle of McCallan’s earlier that night, but the barkeep points out that the bottle is still behind the bar. “I haven’t sold a drop all week,” he says before ordering Jason A to hit the road and “get some fucking help.”
Jason A takes this very sound advice and reports to an Emergency Room, telling the doctor who sees him instantly, “I think there’s something wrong with my mind.” And this alternate reality can’t be all bad because instead of telling him to take a seat and ignoring him for eight to 12 hours the way they would in the dystopian medical hellscape that suckers like us inhabit, the hospital actually admits him overnight, and performs a CT scan.
Jason B, meanwhile, wakes up next to his beautiful wife. He’s unimpressed with the clothes he finds in “his” closet but awed by the sight of “his” sleeping son.
A Zippo-flick sound cue signals our return to the other universe as a doctor gives Jason A the results of his brain scan: No damage or tumors, though his toxicology screen did reveal some kind of “psychoactive compound” the doctor says she’s never seen before. She also tells him that they’ve found no record of the wife and son he asked them to contact. Reviewing the facts of his life with him, Jason A finds the details familiar until she tells him he won the Pavia Prize in 2010 and that he’s been missing for more than a year. Using the doctor’s tablet, Jason A Googles the name Daniela Vargas — his wife’s name prior to their marriage, evidently — and finds a website dedicated to her artistic practice.
Back at Velocity, which is apparently the name of the firm from which Jason A fled at the end of the last episode, Amanda wants to call the police to try to locate their once-again-missing employee, but Leighton and Dawn (Aina Brei’yon) — a physically imposing woman whom we instantly grasp is Leighton’s enforcer — says no, unwilling to bring attention to the fact that whatever Velocity has been up to has caused the disappearance of four people. They dispatch Dawn to the hospital — she knows which one Jason would report to, somehow — where Jason A sees her coming and manages to make his escape.
Jason B, meanwhile, is swaggering into work at Lakemont College, where he finds a TA instructing his students on the laws of thermodynamics. He takes a tablet away from a kid who’s playing a game instead of paying attention to the lesson before taking over the classroom. Jason B admonishes these kids to “respect the opportunity!” they’ve been given to spend a few years feeding their brains before they’ll be left to fend for themselves in the mindless killing fields of capitalism. His newfound passion — anger, even — makes his audience sit up straight.
A Zippo-flick away, Jason A arrives at a big solo art exhibition dedicated to the work of Daniela Vargas. It’s an invitation-only affair, and the woman minding the guest list seems taken aback when he gives his name and hands him an envelope. Another attendant tells him to choose one of three cards inside the envelope, which will determine which version of the exhibition he experiences. An overhead shot lets us see the T.S. Eliot quotation inscribed on the marble floor: “Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take, toward the door we never opened.”
Within the gallery, Jason A is shocked to find several large portraits of himself before laying eyes from across the room on Daniela. But this Daniela has long hair, not the sensible middle-aged-mom ‘do his wife wears and is dressed in a glamorous black gown for the occasion. She greets him and immediately introduces him to her agent. “The Jason who inspired the show?” the woman asks. Ryan arrives, but he looks different from the one we met before. This isn’t the confident, prosperous one who bought Jason A a pricey bottle of Scotch at The Village Tap the night before. He’s puffier, bearded, and with more desperation in his eyes. Daniela invites both men to a smaller gathering later, then goes off to play host.
Ryan wants to know where Jason A has been. There’ve been rumors of his psychiatric break and/or death. He asks how “those compounds I made for you” worked out. When Jason A expresses bafflement, Ryan assumes he’s stonewalling and points out how uncool it is that Jason allowed him to do so much work for Velocity without recognition or pay. Jason perks up at the mention of Velocity, which enrages Ryan. Before he can lay into Jason, Daniela silences the room to welcome everyone to her exhibition. After her thank-yous, she invites them all to return and experience the other versions of the show “to find out if the grass really is greener.”
In Jason A’s happy home, Daniela tells Jason B that Ryan called her to ask if Jason B has considered his job offer. Charlie is on his way out to see Brooke, his crush, and Daniela gives her son the same advice her husband gave him the prior day — Charlie should tell the girl how he feels.
“Strong disagree,” Jason B interjects, contradicting “his” counsel from a day before. “Relationships are a negotiation, and whoever speaks first kind of loses,” he says.
“That’s a cynical view of love, My Love,” Daniela says. But she’s too besotted by her husband’s newfound passion to question his sudden shift in personality too closely.
In the Alternate Chicago, Daniela B, Ryan B, and Jason A are passing a joint around at Daniela B’s incredible exposed-brick loft. “Where ya been?” Daniela asks Jason A. He tells his friends about the wild events of the prior 24 hours or so, presenting the nightmare he’s been living as a hypothetical. Ruling out LSD and “multi-tiered deepfake punking,” Ryan says the guy experiencing all this must be crazy.
Jason A asks Daniela B if he really inspired her show. “You told me that our existence is all about choices,” she answers. “You said our choices create worlds, and so theoretically, we simultaneously inhabit an infinite number of them.” Jason B went on to tell her that his worst choice was the one he’d made with her. And that he was working on a secret project. And that he’d probably never see her again.
That was the last Daniela B had seen of him until he showed up at her gallery show earlier that evening. His first words to her in years were to ask where Charlie was. So now Daniela B wants to know: “Who’s Charlie?”
“Our son,” Jason A tells her. He goes on to tell his friends about the versions of their lives that he knows — his marriage to Daniela, Ryan’s career as a Pavia Prize-winning neuroscientist. To Ryan B, this all sounds like a particularly cruel joke. He storms out, telling Jason A to, in the words of the 19th-century German physicist Rudolf Clausius, “eat a bag of dicks.”
Daniela B is more receptive to Jason A’s story, however. She invites him to stay with her until they can figure out what’s happening. After she goes to bed, Jason A takes a rubber band and puts it on his ring finger. Jason B stole his wedding band, but Jason A wants a physical reminder of what he’s lost.
Back in the Chicago where things started, short-haired Daniela A heads out for a long training run, and Jason B calls Ryan to decline the job offer — forcefully, ungratefully, angrily. As he concludes the call, the camera zooms in on his wedding band.
A universe away, Jason A calls Amanda — she’s working out when she picks up his call, so I’m glad the show doesn’t pretend its principals all look the way they do without making an effort — to say he’s about to check himself into a mental hospital. But it’s a ruse to lure her out of her house, or their house, so that Jason A and Daniela B can snoop around without her interfering. Jason is struck by a monochrome photograph of a waterfall. In the house he remembers, the photo is in the same place but features their happy family of three in front of the nature scene. “I’ve never been there,” Daniela B says. “It was the trip of a lifetime,” Jason A assures her.
Jason goes upstairs into what should be their son’s bedroom. This is where Daniela B reveals that it was her pregnancy with Charlie that was the Sliding Doors moment where realities diverged. The Jason she knew, Jason B, chose the “cold sterile lab” that figured so prominently in the marriage proposal that Daniela A recalled near the end of the prior episode. Her Jason told her he was too busy with his research to raise a kid, so she ended the pregnancy and they went their separate ways.
Daniela B is exhibiting a near-superhuman capacity for empathy. As painful as it is for her to hear that this Jason comes from a world where they kept the baby and got married, she believes him. In fact, she’s warming to the idea of her other life — all of it except the part about how she quit painting.
There follow some clunky and unnecessary expository scenes hopscotching among the two realities, where Jason A explains to Daniela B that Jason B must’ve used his years of solitude in the aforementioned cold, sterile, lab to construct a device that allows him to traverse dimensions. Meanwhile, we see Jason B stowing some gear, including the pistol and the Eyes Wide Shut mask he wore when he abducted Jason A, in some nondescript storage facility. This all feels like the kind of lame, over-explanatory stuff you’d shoot for a trailer.
The episode’s final moments are much, much better. Daniela B asks Jason A what their marriage is like. Both Jennifer Connelly and Joel Edgerton are terrific in this scene, as he recalls their years together, and she tries to imagine them. “How’s the sex?” she asks, and he blushes.
They’re both vulnerable enough that she ventures a kiss. They’re interrupted by a ringing phone and a hangup, followed by a knock at the door — an insistent, cop-style knock. Through the peephole, Jason A recognizes Dawn, Velocity’s legbreaker. She shoots through the lock and forces her way inside, tazing, binding, and gagging Jason A.
He’s still conscious when she shoots Daniela B between the eyes.
• Composer Jason Hill’s score for Dark Matter has been exceptional thus far. While some of the writing, in this episode in particular, has felt overdetermined and prescriptive, the music has been perfectly calibrated, stoking mystery and menace. Fine work from the composer of Gone Girl and other David Fincher projects.
