The Moment When Apple TV+'s 'Dark Matter' Lost the Plot

I have never read a Blake Crouch novel, but I did watch Wayward Pines, the M. Night Shyamalan series based on a Crouch novel that ran for two seasons on Fox. It was mysterious and intriguing right up until it wasn’t. I don’t remember the exact moment it lost the plot, but once it did, it was almost unwatchable.

The same thing may have happened in the fourth episode of Apple TV+’s Dark Matter — also based on a Blake Crouch novel — only here, I can pinpoint the exact moment I lost interest.

First, let’s back up. Dark Matter is a multiverse story, and though Marvel and DC have taken all the novelty out of the multiverse, it was not a dealbreaker for me. There were some decent multiverse stories before superheroes oversaturated the concept, like Fringe and that little-seen J.K. Simmons show on Starz, Counterpart, and I was willing to allow that another may exist.

Joel Edgerton stars as Jason Dessen, a brilliant scientific mind who — in one universe — is a college professor who gave up the lab to raise a family. He’s married to Daniela (Jennifer Connelly). They have a son together and limited funds. In another universe, Jason is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who eschewed family for the lab and invented a giant metal box that allows a person to travel to another universe, only he hasn’t yet figured out how to return. Nobel Jason does not have a wife, but he does have a girlfriend named Amanda (Alice Braga), who is also a co-worker in his company.

As we piece together over the first two episodes, Nobel Jason uses the box to travel to Professor Jason’s universe, but then figures out how to transport Professor Jason back into his universe. Professor Jason is confused because he doesn’t know about the box, doesn’t understand why Alice lives in the home he is supposed to have with his wife, nor why the people from this corporation are trying to track him down and potentially kill him.

This is where Dark Matter is most interesting, with Professor Jason trying to puzzle together how he ended up in another universe and how to get back to his own while Nobel Jason is in his universe taking up with his family and ruining the life he built.

But then the show all goes to hell when Professor Jason — on the run from the bad guys in Nobel Jason’s company — jumps in the box with Alice. It takes them into a neverending corridor with an infinite number of doors, each leading them into another universe. They do not initially understand what’s going on, and this exchange between Professor Jason and Amanda — where Professor Jason tries to explain — is where I lost immediate interest:

Jason: Maybe we’re in some kind of liminal space.

Amanda: Liminal, as in not real?

Jason: No. It’s real — very real. I think it’s a manifestation of the mind attempting to visually explain something our brains haven’t fully evolved to comprehend.

Amanda: Superposition?

Jason: Exactly! I think the corridor is a cross-section of probable realities. Let’s get out of here!

It’s not the sci-fi mumbo jumbo that’s offputting. It’s not even because it’s the kind of bullshit science that only Christopher Nolan can pull off. It’s what it actually means, which is to say that Professor Jason and Amanda spend the rest of the episode in this “manifestation of the mind,” opening various doors into other universes. What they learn is that if they’re freaking out or panicked, when they open a door, they’ll see a universe that reflects their state of mind: One without an atmosphere, or a post-apocalyptic one, or a universe entirely covered in snow. By the end of the episode, it seems that they have figured out that the way to get to the universe they want to go into is by thinking really hard about that universe before opening a door.

I liked Dark Matter when it was about two versions of the same person adjusting to living in the swapped universes. I liked Dark Matter when it at least pretended to have some scientific basis (there’s some mumbo jumbo about Schrödinger to explain the box, for instance). Dark Matter, however, lost me when it determined that these characters would run around in manifestation of the mind and open one of an infinite number of doors into the right universe by simply thinking about it.

That’s not science! That’s a page right out of Rhonda Byrne’s self-help book The Secret. Thinking about something really hard is not a thing! (Except for the collective mindpower of travelers on a commercial flight keeping a metal tube afloat above the clouds, obviously). Joel Edgerton is a great actor, but not even he can sell, “Take a deep breath. Now, just think really hard!”

It’s not working for me, and I’d really like to open the door to a universe where I’m watching a better show, but as hard as I think about it, I can’t seem to make it happen.