Dark Matter Recap: Nevermind

Dark Matter
Everything Beautiful, Everything Terrible
Season 2 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Now that we’re three episodes into the second season, it should be said up front: Dark Matter is much stronger now than it was in its first season. The uptick in quality is largely connected to the box and the multidimensional chaos that peaked with the Jason-pocalypse that ended season one and has now spilled over into new worlds and new messes. The existential weight of the show’s earliest episodes, staked largely on Jason No. 2 jettisoning Jason No. 1 from his modest life as a science teacher and family, had a tendency to slow the pace and expose its weaknesses in characterization and dialogue. At its worst, Dark Matter could feel like a Charlie Kaufman movie — the endlessly scaffolded universe of Synecdoche, New York comes to mind, in particular — without the wit and bruised humanity. Now the box has so wildly destabilized the action that it often approaches a giddy farce, even though it’s more of a challenge to keep track of who’s who and who’s where.

With that in mind, it’s a little funny for this week’s episode to open three years ago with an ethical query into a technology that we already know will blow up like the atom bomb. While it’s a clunky dramatic device to round up a bunch of old college professors at a bar and ask them the questions that have haunted scientists through each new advance in technology, the ideas that circulate are nonetheless compelling. We are in Jason No. 2’s world now, right on the cusp of his great-and-terrible invention finally coming to fruition, and he’s wondering, “How do we deal with the uncertainty of work when we do not know the outcome?” Given that there’s no chance Jason would put a halt to finishing the box — and couldn’t even if he tried, since Leighton and the Velocity team are thoroughly invested in it — it’s as if he’s seeking absolution in advance for the sin he’s about to commit. 

In a sense, he gets what he’s looking for. One professor reflects on how the invention of sailing ships led to new discoveries and commercial frontiers on the one hand and disease, colonization, and slavery on the other. Another talks about the internet as a great repository of human knowledge that has also led to isolation, depression, cruelty, and misinformation. (“We built these great connectors of minds and ideas,” he jokes, “and most people just simply use them to masturbate.”) The consensus view is reflected in the title of this episode, which is that these big, transformative leaps in technology wind up reflecting the best and worst of humanity. And moreover, there’s an inevitability to these advancements that cannot be suppressed. “If it can be done, it will be done,” one says ruefully. “Humans, we can’t help ourselves.” Blair Caplan will step into the box like a half-trained Neil Armstrong, and the very fabric of reality will be forever shredded like wrapping paper on Christmas morning. 

In the present, however, that doesn’t stop Jason No. 1 from trying to slam on the brakes. As far as he can tell, this Jason has as close to a perfect landing spot for his family as they could want. With technology still lagging in this analog, computer-free reality, the Dessens seemingly only have to worry about the Dessens who actually belong in this world, who are all the way across the country in California. Without the advanced technology that makes anonymity impossible now, Jason No. 1 and his family have finally gotten to a place where they can build some semblance of a normal life, even if they haven’t scraped together the cash to buy back their wedding rings yet. Though the pace of change has gotten speedier, thanks to the wizardry of Velocity Tech, we still see Charlie perusing through VHS tapes and cassettes and Daniela taking prom photos on good old-fashioned camera stock. In some ways, it seems like a nice fantasy to live in an analog past, even if Nirvana has never existed. 

The long-term plan is for Jason to destroy the box. This would theoretically seal the Dessens off from inter-dimensional travelers and give them some stability, with the added bonus of living in close proximity to deep-dish pizza, since they can still live in Chicago rather than some woodland homestead. One of the more intriguing twists in this episode, however, is the reminder that Jason No. 1, our noble-hearted protagonist, is still quite literally the same guy as Jason No. 2, our nefarious antagonist. The only difference between them is the path they chose through life and how it seems to have corrupted Jason No. 2. Here, in the process of dismantling the box in an abandoned high school, Jason No. 1 naturally becomes intrigued by the technology that once consumed his doppelgänger, and he secretly sets about taking scrupulous notes on the component parts he discovers. And who can blame him? Jason is currently earning a few extra bucks wiping down counters and hauling ice at a bar, which is even less glamorous than teaching science to disengaged students. Meanwhile, a version of him spearheaded the creation of the most extraordinary piece of technology in history, and he’s expected to just torch it? 

Upon discovering her husband’s secret, Daniela is hurt because she’s made her own sacrifices in putting family first. She’s still living with the trauma of having to shoot another Jason, and the show has curiously tabled her feelings about the period where Jason No. 2 took her real husband’s place in the marital bed, which cannot be easy to process, either. That said, the writers are a little quick to bring Jason No. 1 back to a place where he’s dismantling the box as he and Daniela had planned, because it seems like obvious and fertile dramatic territory for the two Jasons to be more alike than they seem. But the plot makes it all a moot point anyway, because the box returns to the abandoned high school fully formed and another imposter looks to blow up the Dessens’s spot. 

In other developments, Dark Matter once again pushes the outer limits of comprehensibility by having Amanda No. 2 and Ryan No. 1 emerge from the box into the absolute chaos of Jason No. 1’s world, which is now occupied by Jason No. 2, many dead Jasons from other dimensions, a second Ryan, and Agent Mitchel MacNamara. (Got all that? I’m not 100 percent sure I did.) The one key revelation Amanda has about their adventures in the box is that you can get to a world by thinking about the person you want to find, which is how Ryan No. 1 is able to enjoy the opportunity to slug Jason No. 2 in the face. The show seems to realize that it’s turned Jason No. 1’s Chicago into a metaphysical dumpster fire, and the tone turns unexpectedly giddy, like a sci-fi version of one of those upstairs/downstairs farces. The frenetic action leads to four of them (the two Ryans, plus Amanda No. 2 and Jason No. 2) piling into the box like a clown car, bound for destinations unknown.

Meanwhile, Leighton’s exercise in world-building continues with corporate and medical inventions in dimensions where there’s a need for his services. The analog Chicago that the Dessens currently occupy has left so much room for technological development that Velocity Tech is producing wonders at a remarkable clip, from microprocessors to portable telephones. On a more altruistic front, Leighton also stands ready to end a gruesome pandemic in another world, turning up with vaccines and medications like a multidimensional DoorDash service. A man who dreamed about changing the world is hell-bent on changing a bunch of them. 

Infinite Jasons

• Though Leighton appears in front of their home at the end of the episode, the Dessens don’t realize that the MacNamara of their analog world has been sniffing around, too. They may not have the internet in this dimension, but they do have still photography, and now MacNamara knows that the family was somehow in Chicago and San Francisco at the same time. 

•  Charlie learning that Nirvana never happened in this world recalls Marty McFly introducing rock-and-roll to the past in Back to the Future. It would be worthwhile for him to pick up a guitar and learn the chords for “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

¨• Let us be grateful that man’s failure to land on the moon did not stop Paul Verhoeven from directing Basic Instinct.

• “I gazed into the abyss and saw a humanoid animatronic mouse gazing back at me.” — Charlie, remembering a box trip that opened into a Chuck E. Cheese 

• With respect to Jason No. 1, who has a lot on his mind, he should have done better remembering passwords like “Degas,” given that his failure to do so could result in his wife shooting him dead. The tattoo solution does seem sounder, at least until future Jasons figure it out. 

• “This is your apartment, man. This is your world. This is your life. It’s everything.” Ryan No. 1 has a cool doppelgänger. Maybe they can be buddies like the two Xanders at the end of the classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “The Replacement.”