Dark Matter Recap: The Shadow of Quantum Entanglement

Dark Matter
What the Universe Is Made Of
Season 2 Episode 6
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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One of the basic obsessions of Dark Matter is how much the context of a person’s life informs who they are, rather than some intrinsic quality that is going to prevail no matter what. That’s how you can have one Jason Dessen who’s a salt-of-the-earth hero who embarks on a multidimensional journey to reunite with his family and another Jason Dessen who others embark on multidimensional journeys to punch squarely in the jaw. As Blair says in this episode, they’re made of the “same hardware,” but a fork in the road led them on different paths and to a different set of choices that made them who they are. At the same time, the show reminds us their prerogatives can also shift closer together, as Jason No. 1 has started devoting himself to profound scientific questions and Jason No. 2 has shown signs of humility and contrition in the face of his mistakes.

After last week’s Very Special Episode offered a midseason pause, this episode kicks off the season’s second half with a focus on Jason No. 1 and his family, who have broken apart with such startling abruptness that it’s as if an entire episode has gone missing. The episode offers a scientific metaphor for all this character movement: “entanglement.” Sitting at a diner next to Blair No. 2, who’s found her way to analog world along with a host of other characters, Jason No. 1 explains “entanglement” as this idea that individual particles are linked, and even if a dead star goes supernova and the particles are blown across the universe, they can still affect each other a trillion miles apart. Throughout the run of this series, we’ve been introduced to the idea of the box as a machine of infinite possibilities, but as the characters have learned more about how to control it, the distance between them hasn’t seemed so vast. And their relationships persist and evolve, no matter which dimensional chasm might separate them.

In an episode that caters sonically to the Gen-Xers out there — a suitable age range for most of the adult characters — the cold lacquers Pearl Jam’s “Present Tense,” a track off its 1996 album, No Code, over scenes of Daniela settling into a secluded new home by a lake. Other than the Denver Trailways bus that drops her off, there’s no specific indication of where she’s decided to go, but the last name on the mailbox is Vargas, her maiden name, and she’s familiar with the place. There’s plenty of risk to her choice of abode — as we will later discover — but between the plaintive song, the evocative smell of the fabric, and the morning light streaming through her bedroom window, Daniela appears willing to gamble to feel more connected to and grounded in her current situation. The Dessens cannot be together in Chicago any longer, and even as dimensional nomads, they don’t necessarily make as much sense as a unit either.

Breaking them apart like Jason’s particles at the beginning of this episode is a strong dramatic choice for Dark Matter, which challenges our assumption that the Dessens are a united front against a discombobulated universe. It started in the second episode with Charlie insisting he would stay and go off to college on his own — a reasonable stance for a kid who wants to chart his own path. (There’s something to be said here about the generational resentment young people inevitably feel for elders whose mistakes diminish or hijack their futures.) The overarching theme of this somber episode is the Dessens, now that they’re broken apart, are free to follow their impulses as individuals — which, of course, winds up breaking them apart even further. How well will they mesh once they’re all together again?

With Daniela off in the boondocks — a decision that irks Charlie enough to the point he refuses to answer her phone calls — Jason No. 1 can ramp up his interest in being an actual scientist instead of the lowly physics teacher who sacrificed his ambition for a more conventional family life. His deconstruction of the box had the predictable effect of enhancing his appreciation for it, and though he’s backed off the idea of keeping it around, his curiosity cannot be jammed back in the bottle. In finding her way to him, Blair No. 2 arrives with a professional respect for Jason No. 2 that carries over to Jason No. 1 quite easily, and she’s more than happy to encourage his exploration, make connections in the scientific community, and submit those big, important papers he’s been itching to write. She is not among the people who want to punch Jason No. 2 in the face. 

To that end, Blair No. 2 takes Jason No. 1 to a soirée to make introductions, and the two run into a handsome gentleman who Blair assumes to be the Leighton of the analog world and not her former boss. But it turns out the analog world is a Goldilocks dimension for all of them because there’s no digital footprint in this reality, and it’s particularly great for Leighton because he can cash in on microprocessors and other advancements that this society has been slow to develop. It remains to be seen whether Jason No. 1 will get a peek behind the curtain, but Leighton trusts Blair as a colleague from his world, and he shows her a project that seems to be taking the box idea to another level. 

Yet the heart of the episode still belongs to Daniela, whose time at the lake house is meaningful right up to the point where it falls apart. We know she doesn’t mind seclusion based on the idyllic ranch in the woods where she and her family holed up after Jason No. 1 found his way back. But when Gabriel Vargas (Gil Birmingham), the father of the analog world’s Daniela, turns up unexpectedly, she has to improvise, which is an ironic situation for her since she had to manage an improvising Jason No. 2 when he invaded her household. Yet there were so many times Jason No. 2’s behavior seemed grossly out of character, and that’s not an issue with her and Gabriel here. The lake house connects them on a simpler level, and she falls into the role with ease. Only once does Gabriel pick up on an unexpected emotion from Daniela, when he sees a “brokenness” in her eyes that reminds him of when she was an 8-year-old he’d adopted. 

The scene where Gabriel finds out, through a phone call with his analog-world daughter, that this Daniela is an imposter is impressively low-key. “I just spoke to my daughter in San Francisco,” he tells her and confesses to feeling faint of heart. Daniela has some explaining to do, but Dark Matter leaves it at that. The Dessens’ cover has been blown once again, but who knows what the consequences of that might be. The point of this episode is that the Dessens are particles blown to the wind now, and we’ll see how the universe binds them together.

Infinite Jasons 

• The biggest revelation in the episode-ending montage is that Charlie has snuck into the abandoned swimming-pool box with an ampoule. College is a tough adjustment for an incoming freshman. They can either drink shots to cope or the contents of an ampoule. (On a more serious note, his dad mentioned meeting Max on his travels, inadvertently giving his son a motive to venture out to do likewise.) 

• On the Gen-X-music front, the episode double-dips into Radiohead, first with a miserable Charlie drinking at a party to the Easy Star All Stars cover of “Climbing Up the Walls” and later in the closing montage to the “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” a highlight from the band’s great 2007 album, In Rainbows. The Radiohead tone, a kind of melancholy hum of the future, suits this show well.

• The Amanda of the analog world might be stuck running the restaurant her bipolar mother opened when she was a teenager, but she hasn’t lost the inner Amanda who once looked forward to a more ambitious destination. Her advice to Jason No. 1 to be a physicist and “go discover what the world is made of” gives this episode its title. 

• “The Shadow of Quantum Entanglement in the Macroscopic World” sounds very much like a paper that falls into the category of “I can’t wait to read it, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”