// THE VERGE — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Apple TV’s sci-fi thriller Dark Matter gets even trippier in season 2
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Things aren’t getting easier for Jason and his family — or viewers, for that matter.
Things aren’t getting easier for Jason and his family — or viewers, for that matter.
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Confusion is a generally accepted side effect of mystery box shows. They slather on secrets with the promise of a satisfying payoff in the end, and sometimes the cast and crew even have a hard time following what’s going on. But even by the standards of the genre, Dark Matter is extreme. Its multiversal premise, which involves a man kidnapping a version of himself from another world, can be hard to wrap your head around, and as the first season went on, things only got harder to follow. With the return of the show for season 2, I have both good and bad news: The show is more dramatic and thrilling than ever, while also being ever so much harder to follow.
Spoilers follow for the first season of Dark Matter.
First, a reminder of where the story left us. Based on the novel of the same name, Dark Matter follows Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), a physics professor in Chicago who is living a relatively normal and contented life with his artist wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and teenage son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). In another world, a different version of Jason decided to forgo that family life in pursuit of his dream, which was apparently to build a gigantic box that allowed people to travel to other parallel universes. But that alt version of Jason ultimately wasn’t satisfied with the life he had, and used the box to travel to a world where he and Daniela were together. He then kidnapped himself, abandoned that version in another world, and proceeded to take over his life.