Photo: Apple TV+
Guess who’s coming to dinner? Okay, yes, it’s that Machiavellian multiversal miscreant Jason B again, but he’s offered to cook this time.
He hasn’t even finished prepping their meal before he asks Daniela and Charlie — the spouse and 16-year-old son he has borrowed from his poorer, sadder, more empathetic alter ego — how long they will stay mad at him. To a narcissistic genius like Jason B, it must seem like a reasonable question: All he did was nearly kill Charlie with his ignorance of the kid’s nut allergy. Dude’s had a lot on his mind!
Their dinner is delayed by the reappearance of the Chicago Police Department’s Detective Mason. By which I mean — sorry, sorry, I know — the first-ever appearance of Mason A because the only time we’ve seen the character previously was in Jason B’s home universe, where she was investigating the fact that four different Velocity Labs employees had gone missing. This Mason wants to know what happened to Ryan A, whom Jason B left stranded in a kindler, gentler Chicago in the prior episode. She lets Jason B admit to her that he and Ryan met up at the Village Tap before revealing that she has already seen the two of them together on CCTV footage collected from the bar.
Jason B tells the detective that Ryan was drinking heavily that night, which struck him as odd because he’d never seen Ryan drink before. I’ll confess that Ryan’s canonical sobriety is a detail that had eluded me before now. Sure enough, when I went back to episode one for another look at Ryan A’s celebration of his Pavia Prize victory at the Village Tap, and then to episode two to see what Ryan B was drinking at the opening reception for Daniela B’s art exhibition, I saw that both Ryans confined themselves to Diet Coke. So while I initially thought that Jason B was either lying to Detective Mason or getting a major detail wrong about the Pavia Prize–winning Ryan that Jason B did not grow up with, the same way he failed to note Charlie’s nut allergy, neither was the case. Resolved: Ryans A and B are sober.
Even so, I was puzzled why this Mason was so suspicious of Jason B here. She’s established that he was the last person to see Ryan before the latter’s girlfriend reported him missing, but she plays this scene as though she suspects Jason B of something, even though the Mason of this universe has no reason to believe he has anything to hide.
Daniela looks like she believes her husband is lying to the cop; maybe Mason was picking up on that. As soon as Mason leaves, Daniela confronts Jason B about the vial of Lavender Fairy she retrieved from his secret storage unit. Like the skilled gaslight artist that he is, Jason B tells her the truth but omits the context: He says the drug allows him to observe objects in superposition and that Ryan made it for him. He’s mad that Daniela went to Ryan to try to determine what the empty vial she found was instead of just asking her husband. Jason B pretends to come clean, telling her he was hiding the experiment that has just brought his family a $50 million windfall from Leighton A in a secret storage unit because … he felt guilty for wanting more from his life. All of this is because of his feelings, you see, which is, in fact, the case! Daniela asks him to stop using the drug, and he agrees.
The episode perks up as we leap back to Jason A and Amanda B. Amanda insists that they need a break from their unsuccessful campaign to find Jason’s homeworld, which has kept them in a state of fight-or-flight for 29 days. She warns him that Velocity had established that Lavender Fairy is habit-forming. Her pitch, we infer, is to spend two of their dwindling supply of ampules visiting a world she, not he, has imagined for them. It doesn’t make much sense, but then she’s been right more often than Jason A has. And this Jason, unlike the one Amanda was sleeping with before this strange odyssey began, is a good listener.
They emerge from the Box into a Chicago that seems well on its way to realizing the utopian future of Star Trek. The impossibly tall, narrow skyscrapers are covered with greenery. A group of schoolchildren and their teacher are celebrating “Cold Fusion Week,” though an abundance of turbines suggests this is a largely wind-powered Windy City. Amanda tells Jason she conjured this bright, clean city not by describing a world but simply by focusing on empathy. Strolling along Lake Street, they buy a pair of hot chocolates from a street vendor. The cups the beverage is served in are as delicious as the drink.
At this universe’s version of the Green Mill — the famous gin joint that James Caan blew up in Michael Mann’s Thief 43 years ago and that has been featured in many other iconic Chicago movies and TV shows — a bartender recommends a restaurant called the Spire at the top of “The Obama Building.” (The Obama Presidential Center currently under construction in our world looks cool, but it won’t be a cloud-piercing skyscraper.) Amanda departs, asking Jason A to meet her there in two hours. She gives him a parting kiss like they’re a long-established couple.
Jason A arrives at the Spire, offering breathtaking wraparound views from above the clouds, to find Amanda resplendent in a new green dress. She’s bought a slick new suit for him, too. His gift for her is more modest: Dares, the type of candy she told him several episodes ago that she likes and that does not exist, so far as Jason A knows, in his home universe. She’s moved that he remembered. Her Jason wouldn’t have.
She waits until after dinner to drop the bomb: In their brief time apart, she has learned that her alter ego in this world was born in Seattle — part of a country called Cascadia in this utopia! — but grew up in São Paulo and moved to Chicago at 17. She also went missing two years ago.
“It’s perfect,” Amanda says. She intends to stay. She’s already used the vanished Amanda’s identity to get a new passport “using facial recognition and a retinal scan.” She invites Jason to remain in this paradise with her, knowing he’ll refuse.
She has also finally hit upon an idea that should’ve come up the moment she and Jason A started to figure out that the Box responds to their subconscious emotions: “What if I’m the thing that is keeping you from connecting to your world?” she asks. (I asked this question two episodes ago.)
Their farewell kiss is a real one, passionate and tender. That night, back inside the Box, Jason checks his remaining stash. Three ampules after he stealthily dropped a pair into Amanda’s purse. (She refused to let him give them to her.)
There follows an odd interlude of Jason B looking at a wrecked version of his house on a burned-out version of his street. Maybe his sadness at parting from Amanda steered him to this bummer world. Then he travels to another one, wherein he and Daniela are married but her art career is still thriving — he passes a banner advertising an exhibition of her work entitled “Uncertainty.” Standing outside “their” home, he calls her from a burner phone while watching her through a window. “I took so many moments with you for granted,” he says. She promises him a night in, for which she’ll wear “my sexiest sweatpants.”
“I would really love that,” Jason A says. But he knows this isn’t his Daniela, and Joel Edgerton plays his heartbreak at this fact beautifully. He passes a store with a mask in the front window like the one Jason B wore the night he abducted Jason A and dragged him to the Box, and we sense his temptation to usurp the life of this world’s Jason the way Jason B usurped his.
That night, he breaks into “his” home and stands over the bed where that world’s Daniela and that world’s Jason sleep. Recoiling from the brain-breaking sight, he retreats to the kitchen, where another mind-blower awaits him. He hears someone come in, and the kid looks identical to the son he’s not seen in a month, except for the slick-haired version of Charlie who tackled him back in Episode Five. “Charlie,” Jason A says.
“Your other son,” the kid says to his old man, who’s dressed like a cat burglar. It’s Max, the twin who in Jason A’s world did not survive past infancy.
Whoa.
Back in Jason A’s universe, Jason B is in Amanda A’s office for another therapy session. He’s angry that Daniela went to Ryan to ask about his ampule before confronting him and says he’s thinking about leaving. Amanda’s questioning of this course of action provokes this vindictive Jason into dropping an on-the-spot psychological profile of her, like Bond and Vesper sizing one another up on the train in Casino Royale. He’s cheating, of course — she doesn’t know that another version of her was his lover. Unnerved by the accuracy of his conjectures about her life — “You’re the kind of person who needs to rescue other people instead of helping yourself!” — she throws him out.
As he arrives home, Detective Mason is waiting on his doorstep. She tells him that Ryan’s cell phone was last tracked to a warehouse in South Chicago following his Village Tap drinking session with Jason. Jason denies having accompanied Ryan there. Mason implies that she’s looking for CCTV footage that could prove he lied to her. But again, her suspicion seems motivated by nothing.
The next scene is of Jason B sledgehammering his way back into the concrete-coated Box, like John Wick digging up his cache of weapons and gold coins from the floor of his basement. Why hasn’t Detective Mason come to check out this warehouse already since Ryan’s phone went offline here? Why didn’t Jason B come up with a less reversible method of sealing up the Box?
We then find Jason B having beers with yet another Ryan — Ryan C, we’ll call him — this one a guy who got a DUI after high school that ruined his plans to attend the University of Chicago. (“We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” the Animals song we heard on the jukebox of two different versions of the Village Tap in episodes one and two, is playing, but this can’t be the Village Tap because the hard-drinking Ryan C says that the garage he runs, Loyalty Motors, is “over in Logan Square” rather than, “here in Logan Square.”)
Next, we see Jason B drag Ryan C, whom he has plied with booze and possibly also drugged, back into Jason A’s universe. Jason B gives Ryan C a dorky haircut so that he’ll more resemble the Pavia Prize–winning Ryan of this world and then deposits him in Ryan A’s bed. Will the perpetually side-eyed Detective Mason be fooled by this? Giving a prone, unconscious person a haircut seems like a tall order even for a Pavia Prize–winning sociopathic genius physicist like Jason B. Leaving Ryan’s place, Jason B has what sure looks like a moment of self-doubt.
Down to his last ampule of Lavender Fairy, Jason A makes one final attempt to write his way home. He describes his first sight of Daniela and their first evening together. “I’m leaving a world today where our boy made it,” he writes, “where Max is alive.” He admits he was tempted to stay there and steal that Jason’s identity. “I’ve started to suspect that it is the imperfections of life that amount to a different kind of perfection,” he concludes.
We can be grateful he hasn’t taken up songwriting, but this hoary solipsism is just the ticket. As he emerges from the Box, the Village Tap looks right. The wine bar looks right. Matt, the Village Tap bartender, recognizes Jason, and Jason embraces him out of pure joy.
He runs for home, past the Logan Square Theater. Behind his house, he finds the tree he and Daniela planted in memory of their gone-too-soon son Max, right where it should be. He climbs the front steps and through a window, spies his wife and son in the kitchen — where they’re joined by his interdimensional doppelganger. Damn, that cat is inevitable!
Inside, Jason B tells Daniela that he’s just returned from collecting Ryan from a bar in Gary, Indiana, after “a massive bender” and that he’s going to go call Detective Mason to tell her all is well.
Jason A does what any of us would do in a fix like this: He goes to buy a gun.
“I don’t know the first thing about them,” he tells the helpful clerk at Field & Glove, who recommends a .40-caliber Glock 23 pistol. He’s ready to close the deal until she asks to see his state police-issued Firearm Owners Identification Card, the type of potentially lifesaving technicality that Jack Reacher would find a way to (reach) around. Cardless, he settles for a can of Fox Labs pepper spray the clerk tells him has “5.3 million Scoville heat units,” offering both product placement and potential Hot Ones crossover — and a knife.
A moment later, he reappears at the store and tries to buy a gun again, confessing, “I don’t know the first thing about them.”
“We just did this,” the clerk sighs. Jason is adamant he’s never set foot in this store.
The very observant clerk asks if he has a twin, saying the guy she just sold the pepper spray and knife to was identical to him, only “he didn’t have a brace on his finger.”
Brace? Does she mean the little piece of twine Jason A tied in place of the wedding band Jason B stole from him? She’s right about the rest of it, though: Both these guys are dressed like Jason A.
Oh, shit: Barring some larger disruption to spacetime, we’re now dealing with Jason B, Jason A, and … Jason A-1? Jason AA? Jason A2? We’ve got dimensionally displaced Jasons on the same damn block. And while neither of them has a firearm, one of them is packing heat — 5.3 million Scoville units’ worth.
• On the Logan Square Theater marquee as Jason runs past it: It’s a Wonderful Life and Upgrade are real movies, obviously, though the relevance of the former to Dark Matter is much more readily apparent than that of the latter. Summer Frost is an upcoming James Gray adaptation of a short story by … Dark Matter novelist and showrunner Blake Crouch.
