Watching: Dark Matter S1

2024, download

The multiverse is in. Not enough movies of TV shows are properly exploiting its potential. What we really need is a Max reboot of "Sliders". But I will be OK with this one, though it suffered much from what I feel a lot of genre TV does -- adding into much dramatic filler, in order to ground it in a world where a wider audience will enjoy.

SPOILER WARNING: In order to actually relate my 1 Great bit, I need to spoil the best part of the entire show.

What 100.  Jason Dessen's a physics teacher at a Chicago college, unsuccessfully attempting to convey the idea of Schrödinger's cat to his bored students. He's also rather checked out at home. Then another Jason Dessen shows up and steals his life, shoving Our Jason into his world, where he discovers his alt had invented a method to traverse alternate universes. Our Jason escapes back into the box, along with Other Jason's wife, and spends the rest of the season desperately trying to get back to his own world, his own wife. It takes awhile and the return has some unexpected consequences.

1 Great. The consequences. You would assume that if one Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton, Zero Dark Thirty) has invented a box that can traverse infinite number of alternate universes, that there is also an infinite number of Jason Dessen's doing the same. But most of these stories consider a one to one linear path for the traversal. Jason 001 goes to Jason 002's universe, and Jason 002 ends up going to the universes of Jason 342, Jason 881, Jason 9999, Jason 41001, etc. And in those universes, if a Jason is using his box to steal another Jason's place in another universe, then they are all similarly displaced from our perspective's early versions. But, since the show postulates, like so many other multiverse shows have, that new universes are born of choices, then there were new choices for Jason 002 each and every time there was one to be made, creating Jason 002.1, Jason 002.2, Jason 002.3, and so on. Guess what happens in the last few episodes? All those Jason's return to what is technically their original universes as well. Suddenly Jason 001 is not only dealing with a very very angry Jason 002 but many many MANY more. But who gets to have this world, this life, this wife (Jennifer Connelly, Dark Water)?

Does your head hurt yet? Its not perfectly thought through, but its sure a novel take on the multiverse traversal idea.

1 Good. Jason 002 gets to visit a BUNCH of worlds before he figures out how to properly control the box. Until the final few episodes, I was convinced they were going to reveal that it was never actual, physical, travel but just perceptual, and Jason 002 was going to wake up in a box eventually, but that theory was too fraught with paradoxes, so the show did do as expected --- have him do the Sliders thing, and go to a bunch of slightly different worlds. Some were good, some were only imperceptibly different, and some were vastly, terrifyingly different. Some were incredible, utopian places, others were just apocalypses. As Jason and Amanda (Jason 001's wife; Alice Braga, Elysium) work to control the boxes, things become less... interesting.

And no, we never get a "everyone is a cartoon" or "everyone's a blob of paint" universe, which just told me that Jason and Amanda are not very imaginative.

1 Bad. The drama. This is an idea that has to be spread out over season for accessible viewers. It knows where it wants to go, but it has to establish the Jason's and their family dynamics and their relationships and their worlds. And all too often, all that filler became boring AF. I just didn't find either Jason's rather compelling.

This is a show that doesn't need a Season 2; its all done and if I was be asked if it was "good" I am not sure what I would answer. I know I like anything multiversal in nature, but until the final few episodes and a handful of segments as they visited other worlds, I wasn't always very engaged.