Photo: Apple TV+
Oh, now you give us a cold open: The watch cap-wearing Jason A, whom we have all agreed to refer to henceforth as Jason A-2, has found his way to the Dessen home and taken Jason B hostage. Which was presumably not difficult to do after Daniela, having at last discovered that the man sleeping in her bed for the past month was an impostor, bonked Jason B on the head and shoved him down the basement stairs. As Dark Matter’s finale opens in media res, Jason A-2 is violently interrogating Jason B to find out where not-his-family has fled. When he finally accepts that Jason B has nothing of value to tell him, A-2 just starts whaling on him with a baton. It’s cathartic, if nothing else.
After the title sequence, we’re in the car with the Dessens — that is, with Daniela, Charlie, and the Chosen One among the various Jasons A who was the first to reunite with his family by being clever enough to get himself arrested and then calling Daniela to bail him out. Daniela and Charlie’s phones are blowing up with texts from the many, many other Jasons A who’ve found their way back to the Chicago from which they all originate.
Jason A is at a loss as to how to elude his other selves. He and his family can’t use credit cards without giving away their location; no one takes cash, and any place he could think to lay low would also occur to his innumerable carbon-based copies. Fortunately, Charlie knows about a mansion belonging to the parents of a friend of his that he’s never mentioned to his own folks! He even knows the code to disarm the security system here at stately Contrivance Manor. There’s no denying it’s a sweet set of digs in which to hide out from all the other Jasons, whose claims of Dessen family membership are — and I cannot underline this point enough — just as true and valid as this Jason’s claim.
To wit: “Are they really all my dad?” Charlie asks the one of his dads who happens to be on the premises.
“Yes … and no,” Jason A answers. That’s how we can be sure this guy is the authentically wishy-washy, persuadable Beta Jason we have come, however, reluctantly to love. One of them, anyway.
Daniela, too, is struggling with the quantum-grade madness of their predicament. “I want it to be as simple as you’re home,” she says. Jason says this impossible scenario is like Max’s death: an unfathomable tragedy from which they must somehow start again. In fact, it’s not at all like Max’s death, which was a commonplace, if tragic, occurrence. But we get what he means.
She drifts off in one of this place’s many bedrooms when Jason heads downstairs to the library (Contrivance Manor has a library) and checks his email, where he finds an invitation to a message board with more than 100 other Jasons. “None of you have been through what I’ve been through,” says one of them in a video message. “You haven’t earned it.” Several Jasons send private messages to our Jason suggesting an alliance where they team up to eliminate the others.
Jason steps outside to take the night air, but there’s no relaxing in this scenario. He arms himself with a poker from the fireplace before drifting off in an easy chair. He wakes to find a note from Daniela: “Coffee is made; I’m at the beach.” Contrivance Manor has a beach, too!
The scene wherein Daniela tells her husband about her month with Jason B is another terrific two-hander between Jennifer Connelly and Joel Edgerton. Jason A tells his wife about the version of her he met who never knew him: A cool artist with a cool loft. He’s conflating two of the alternate Danielas he met here; the one whose loft he visited (and later saw shot to death in that loft) in episode two was the one who ended her pregnancy and split with Jason 16 years in the past. There was also the blonde Daniela whom Jason A asked out, unsuccessfully, in her gallery in episode six. No jury in the world would blame him for streamlining this insane story.
“Was I happy?” Daniela asks him.
“She asked the same about you,” he says.
He tells Daniela about the message board populated by his alternate selves, running down some of their proposed solutions for their quantum quandary: a lottery, shared custody. Daniela’s knee-jerk response is that whichever Jason suggested the lottery … just lost it. (Lost the lottery, she means, not lost his mind. They’ve all lost their minds already.) But that might actually be the most humane and just solution! As dumb and arbitrary as this show can be, I appreciate that it forces us to reckon with these ideas.
Back at the Dessen home, Jason A-2 is keeping Jason B restrained. Jason A-2 relays to his captive the human cost of his selfish experiment: The Daniela he left after he got her pregnant is dead, as is Ryan, both murdered by Dawn. Amanda, who “would’ve done anything for you,” as Jason A-2 tells Jason B, is a casualty, too. In Jason A-2’s experience, Amanda was pinioned by a flying tree!
Jason B appears to be exhibiting genuine remorse when he chokes out this bit of self-justification: “I thought that you would love my life.”
Elsewhere, over a breakfast of pancakes made by Charlie, Jason A catches up on the month of his life that he missed while he was tripping the light interdimensional. Charlie tells him that Brooke, the girl he likes, is dating another guy, and that Jason B almost killed him by giving him ice cream with nuts in it. It’s a tender family scene. I’m not sure why Jason A has put on a camo-print jersey here. Did he find it in one of the guest-room wardrobes here at stately Contrivance Manor?
Back at the Dessen home, Jason A-2 has hit upon the notion of trying to track his family via their use of Blair’s car. (I’d forgotten that the vehicle Daniela and Charlie took to meet Jason A-1 at the Bean was Blair’s.) Blair responds to his text by announcing she’s coming to the Dessen house, where she finds a trail of blood leading to a closet where Jason B is bound and gagged. That would be alarming enough, but then she turns to see his watch-capped double, Jason A-2.
“I know this seems very strange,” he understates. He tries to persuade Blair to give up her phone, but the device she withdraws from her coat pocket turns out to be a canister of pepper spray. I don’t know if it’s 5.3 million Scoville Heat Units’ worth of pepper — like Fox Labs, the official pepper spray of Dark Matter, brought to you by Apple TV+, delivers — but it does the job. Having rescued one Jason and subdued another, Blair asks them both a reasonable question: “What the actual fuck is going on?”
Outside of the city, Jason A and Daniela have opened a bottle of wine over dinner, which perhaps helps Jason A find the lovely metaphor he deploys to help his wife and son understand the fact of the multiverse: To a fish in a lake — I’m paraphrasing here — that lake is the whole of existence. Until you take the fish out of the lake, revealing to it that the world is vaster and stranger than it could ever comprehend. (He leaves unspoken what happens to a fish freed from the water for more than a minute or so.) “If our consciousness were more fluid, we could literally reach out and touch” those other realities parallel to our own, Jason muses.
“Are there any worlds where you were tempted to stay?” Daniela asks him. He acknowledges there was one, without going into detail about that utopian cold-fusion-powered Chicago or the other smart, gorgeous brunette who invited him to stay there with her. Daniela is overwhelmed that he resisted all temptation to fight his way back to her. Just like all the other Jasons A on their trail.
Coldplay’s Y2K ballad “Sparks” soundtracks a montage of Daniela logging on to the Jasons subreddit for herself and then taking (one of) her real husband(s) to bed. But Daniela reveals postcoitus that she posted on the message board to tell all the other Jasons that she’s taken. “I choose you” is the Wiggumesque statement of devotion she delivers to the Jason A who, once again, may or may not be “the” one who was abducted outside the Village Tap. I wish we’d been shown the text of her message! How do you tell 100-plus versions of your spouse of 15 years not only that your marriage is over, but also that you won’t grieve for them because from your point of view you were never married to them to begin with?
Later, Jason A catches a glimpse of movement in the darkness beyond the kitchen window. Venturing outside to investigate, he finds another Jason, who has been wounded and is quickly bleeding out. He sees still another Jason felled by a gunshot as he runs inside to collect his family. But another Jason has made it inside already, and that Jason’s shotgun beats our Jason’s fireplace poker. Shotgun Jason tells our Jason to give him his clothes, a classic Terminator move. And he’s shrewd enough to ask if he and Daniela have established a safe word.
Somehow, Jason A knocks the shotgun from his hand. There’s a struggle on the floor before that other Jason A is shot in the head by … Jason B! He says he isn’t there to try to steal not-his-family “back,” laying his pistol on the floor to prove he means no harm.
“I’m the one responsible for all this mess,” he begins. Charlie socks him in the jaw, interrupting his apology. Kids today. Undeterred, Jason B ushers not-his-family outside to the family Honda Civic — which, unless he made a stop at Pine Barrens or a limestone quarry en route, still has the corpse of a Jason in the trunk. He even gives Jason A his wedding band back. Gunshots echo from inside the house; it’s every Jason for himself in there. Jason A even has to run down a(nother?) Jason A-2 — he’s dressed like the one Blair pepper-sprayed back at the Dessen home, but who knows? — who tries to shoot him through the windshield of the Honda.
In the car, it’s Charlie who discovers that Jason B has brought the family a bounty: There’s a generous supply of Lavender Fairy ampules, the lowercase-B box containing the remains of Charlie’s poor dead brother Max, and a phone on which Jason B has recorded a voice memo. The message is his mea culpa, along with his attempt to atone for the suffering he has created:
“This world is no longer safe for any of you. And I hope you can find a new home, and I’m sure you will because you’ve all been through things I can’t imagine. And they’ve shaped you into an even more perfect puzzle that can only fit one another.”
So it’s once more into the Box, dear friends, for the Dessen clan. (Based on what we’ve just witnessed, won’t that just create more duplicate Dessens? Shhhh. Daddy’s watching his show.)
Arriving at the Box, they find that Jason B was not the only one who had this idea. There’s an entire assembly of Jasons milling around the Box. It’s one thing for a hundred dudes to declare “I am Spartacus!” It’s something else for every one of them to be Spartacus equally. And for all but one of them to sacrifice his own future to allow what was once his family to have a shot at an ordinary life during which they will never even miss him, because they will do their best to forget they ever lived through such a mind-bending trial.
“We came to say good-bye,” one of them says. Another tries to protest, but the others insist he allow them through. Various other Jasons whisper the names “Daniela” and “Charlie” as their former wife and former son walk past.
How is this flock, this school, this murder, this pile-up of Jasons going to dispose of itself? That is not a question that shall be answered this day.
Why don’t we have a triple-digit surplus of Jasons B to contend with, since Jason B has clearly done enough Box-jumping to earn Premier Miles status? (He told Leighton he had dosed Lavender Fairy and gone daytripping “more than one hundred times.”) That question, too, shall remain unposed.
Big Black Delta’s “Roost” is the dreamy anthem that scores the series-closing montage: Ryan A finds Amanda B in Seattle. “Do you know me?” she asks. “No,” he answers. “But I’ve been looking for you.” Let’s give it up here for Jimi Simpson, the MVP of this unhinged series. We then see Blair B screw her courage to the sticking place and head back into the Box to leave the world of pigeon-sized carnivorous locusts behind. The final shot is of the Dessen family stepping out into a new world while the camera stays behind to peer down the endless corridor of possibility until it finally fades to black.
And that’s a wrap for Dark Matter, a more-thoughtful-than-I’d-expected series that lives up to its name by giving us a quasi-happy denouement that is in fact quantifiably more tragic than if Jason A had never found his way back to his family. Hundreds of Jasons A found their way back, many killed one another out of jealousy, and all but one of those that survived found that Daniela had chosen another iteration of him. Who ever suffered a breakup as cruel as this?
At least they’re all surrounded by guys who understand their problems.
