Dark Matter Recap: Remembrance of Jasons Past

Dark Matter
Love and Be Loved
Season 2 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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The thing about the Jason-pocalypse that ended the first season of Dark Matter is that all the Jasons who converged in Jason No. 1’s world, having each embarked on a multidimensional odyssey to get back home, are good and worthy men. They have not stolen another person’s life, like Jason No. 2, and upended the destinies of countless variants across limitless realities. They just have the simple misfortune of not being Jason No. 1 and thus not having the claim on Daniela and Charlie that they believed themselves to have. The bloodbath that inevitably followed their convergence in the same reality had the initial effect of blotting out their humanity, because it was most important for the original Jason to be the one to survive and move forward with his family. Only later, when Daniela shot one of the Jasons with a handgun, did it start to feel to her (and to us) that there was a tragic dimension to the other Jasons.

Dropped here as a Very Special Episode at the midpoint of this season, “Love and Be Loved” is by far the most introspective and emotional episode Dark Matter has ever attempted, and it’s a fine example of how the chaos created by the box has opened up a wealth of creative possibilities. While we still have our two main Jasons on the move, along with variations on a few other major characters, the show has allowed itself the freedom to hit the pause button on those subplots and peel off into an affecting stand-alone episode like this one. For one, it’s nice to take a pause from the wildly baroque plotting for a week, even though we get multiple Jasons here, too. But mostly, it’s an opportunity for series creator Blake Crouch — who’s credited for writing every episode this season, alongside Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry — to use his metaphysical conceit to express some essential truths about the human condition.

There are still plenty of Jasons left without a home or a purpose, but as this episode opens, they appear to have collectively neared the “acceptance” stage of the five stages of grief, though the “depression” stage still lingers strongly. Whatever the case, they are magnanimous enough to wish Jason No. 1 and his family well: “We figured that your only chance at a normal life was to leave this world,” says one of them. “We came to say good-bye.” Yet their magnanimous gesture doesn’t obscure the fact that they’ve lost everything — not just their home and family, but their basic uniqueness as individuals, too — and they have no obvious path forward, certainly not in this Chicago. And so the episode follows one of them to the top of a building, where he contemplates suicide before considering the one ampoule he’s got in his pocket. I’ll just call him “Jason” from this point forward in the recap, because the episode is devoted to him and we’ll likely never see this version again in the future. 

After jotting down his wishes in his notebook, Jason winds up at his mother’s doorstep in a Chicago where Jason Dessen died at age 16. His mom (Linda Bove), a deaf widow who’s lived alone for many years, is grateful for this miraculous development, despite it violating the laws of nature. It’s a shame that the episode doesn’t go deeper into how she feels about resuming a relationship with a son she buried over three decades earlier, but Crouch and Ben-Zekry decide to stay close to Jason’s perspective, which is wise given the time constraints. A shot of Jason scanning his childhood bedroom, which is still festooned with posters of things he liked as a teenager (Close Encounters, Stand by Me, Cindy Crawford), recalls the great Albert Brooks comedy Mother, where he plays a middle-age man who moves back with his mom to discover the roots of his grown-up mistakes. That isn’t quite Jason’s mission here, but he similarly regresses before he can move forward.

As with the other sad Jasons that sent off Jason No. 1 and his family in the beginning of the episode, this Jason has experienced profound loss, and the change of location doesn’t immediately ease his grief. With nothing to do but marinate in his feelings, he starts drinking heavily, to the point where his mom worries that she’s going to outlive her son a second time. Facing an existential decision similar to the one he made on the Chicago rooftop, Jason opts to focus on simple, constructive tasks like fixing the busted bannister and window screens in the house and leafing through the first volume of Marcel Proust’s seven-part Remembrance of Things Past. This monastic routine leads to some quality carpentry and eventually a small business called “Jason’s Chairs,” which is a funny name that’s even funnier when he’s asked whether he makes anything else. (No.) During this stretch, he comes across two more Jason Dessens on the street and brings them into the fold — a reminder that all the Jasons think alike and may follow each other inadvertently.

As six years pass and his mother gets sick with terminal cancer, Jason assures her that he doesn’t intend to be alone forever. His life with Daniela and Charlie now “feels like a dream,” and he can move forward. It’s here that the episode starts to gain in emotional force, because all those Proustian themes about processing memory, time, and loss become the fabric of his own story and the road to a new beginning. It starts with Jason meeting Maria (Angela Sarafyan), a bookstore proprietor, and going about the normal business of flirting and dating and eventually falling in love. He eventually has to disclose who he is and what has happened to him, but the show allows the images to do all the storytelling, rather than tortured bouts of dialogue. It is understandable that Maria looks a bit weirded out when Jason shows her his own tombstone and tries to explain how this graffiti-painted black box in the woods is actually a machine that travels through dimensions. She will come back to him later. 

The fullness of the life he’s led, however surreal and misbegotten, comes through in a passage from J.R.R. Tolkien that he reads (and signs) to his mother on her deathbed, just as she signed it to him as a boy. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo Baggins sings a song that reflects on his adventures and all the things he’s seen and will never see, and it’s a bittersweet passage that suits this occasion. Yet the real payoff to the episode comes when Jason and Maria are back together and spending their first night under the same roof. She discovers the wish he wrote in his notebook, about all he’s lost and his desire to “love and be loved again,” and he happens to run into the Daniela of this world at the store while picking out flowers. The two have a great chemistry — the phrase “in another life” has never been so apropos — but Jason has let that part of his life go and has moved on to a new love.

It’s all a lovely reflection on life and loss, and our capacity to process grief and bring those memories forward into something new. It’s also a fitting tribute to the random Jasons who scraped and clawed to get back to a life that wasn’t theirs to claim. Perhaps there’s a suitable dimension for them, too. 

Infinite Jasons

• Though he ultimately decided not to throw himself off a building in despair, Jason might have considered a less destructive option than diving onto a street full of innocent people. 

The range of dates on Jason’s childhood-poster collection seems a little wide: Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out in 1977, Stand by Me in 1985, and Cindy Crawford’s Pepsi ads were in the early 1990s. It’s possible that Jason was a teenager in the ’90s who never lost his love for films he saw earlier in his life, but they’re not all from the same era.

• Grateful to the episode for allowing the two additional Jasons to keep their beards to avoid confusion. They seem like pleasant dudes to have around for the holidays, too. The more the merrier! 

• “That’s like my prison read. It’s just one of those sprawling classics you will never get through unless you were locked up and had nothing but time.” This is Maria describing the Proust volumes, but for me those words apply to Robert Caro. I’m ready for prison, please! I hear only great things about The Power Broker and LBJ volumes!

• How many chairs did Jason need to sell to pick up the check at Le Bouchon? 

• If you’re wondering where you’ve seen Angela Sarafyan before, she’s been an arresting presence in movies and TV shows since the early 2000s, when she appeared on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer during its last season. I remember her most from recapping Westworld, on which she played the popular “host” Clementine Pennyfeather. She’s also Superman’s mom in the 2025 version.