Review of the series Dark Matter

The science fiction series Dark Matter looks exactly like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, only without the jokes, but with a serious attempt to visualize the theory of quantum physics. Serious actors Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly (about whom it is safe to say that it is not their style to be funny on screen) emphasize the solidity and intelligence of the show, created by Blake Crouch and based on his own novel of the same name.

In the story, Jason, an ordinary physics teacher, lives in Chicago with a beautiful wife and a teenage son, seemingly living a happy life. But when a close friend of his wins a cool physics grant, the hero can hardly hide his dissatisfaction with the way his life and career have turned out, a career that hasn’t worked out because he once had brilliant ideas in his head and could have made incredible discoveries. But when his then-girlfriend (now wife) got pregnant unplanned, he chose family over science, saying, “At the end of my life, I’d rather remember the woman I love than a sterile laboratory.” In fact, she also hides the fact that she regrets some of the things that the burden of her family prevented her from doing. After all, she used to paint quite talentedly and could have become an artist, but after becoming a mother and wife, she put down her paints and brushes.

So they don’t admit to anything, they smile and hug, but he goes to the pub near his house almost every day for a drink, and she drives thoughts of how life could have turned out differently out of her head at the gym… Once, after a night at the bar, where a friend is celebrating a grant and Jason is not too happy about it, an unknown masked man attacks the hero right outside his house, takes his clothes, cell phone, wedding ring… and gives him a message: “Remember that you dreamed of being a scientist.” Jason wakes up in another (alternative) world, where the other version of his self has no beautiful wife, no son, no family comfort, and at the same time a family burden, because he chose a sterile laboratory long ago.

So many things have been made about parallel realities on the small screen and the big screen, from the old J.J. Abrams series Fringe, which aired in the noughties, to Marvel and DC comics, that it’s clear that the first fair question to ask about Dark Matter is whether it offers the audience something new, different, alternative. And surprisingly enough, it does. Both from a scientific and technical perspective and from an existential one.

And Fringe, where a father stole his living son from another reality because his son died of an illness in his own world; and the DC Flash, where Barry Allen tried in vain to save his dead mother; and Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where the Scarlet Witch sought to become a mother to the children of another version of herself because she had no children… – all these stories teach us that reality cannot be changed by interfering with the parallel one, and even if it can, sooner or later we will have to face very bad consequences.

Dark Matter teaches something different. In other words, it doesn’t teach at all, because it avoids didactic imposition, but only states the paradoxical essence of human nature, which is always to be dissatisfied with what you have and to complain to death about the wrong choice. That is, if in one reality one version of the self is depressed because of giving up a career for the sake of a family, then in some other reality another version of the self will certainly consider the chance to be happy to be lost precisely because the career prevented them from building a family with their beloved. Because, as they say, the grass is always greener next door…

In Dark Matter, this paradox of human existence becomes even more ironic. After all, the other Jason (the one who won the grant and became an inventor, but did not marry) eventually makes a grand discovery and a colossal contribution to quantum physics only to find himself in that version of the multiverse and become the version of Jason who chose a woman over science. He is like Sisyphus from the ancient Greek myth, who, instead of the famous stone, pushes up a conditional, indefinite dream (a heavy and essentially meaningless burden) in one endless circle, and it keeps rolling down, and all that is possible (as Albert Camus said) is to imagine Sisyphus happy.

In parallel with gloomy existentialism, instead of any specific instructive moral, Dark Matter also tries to visualize the mystery of quantum superposition, on which all science fiction about multiverses is based, with the help of real scientific tools. That is, there are no incomprehensible portals (holes in the air), no witticisms and caricatures like a world where people are paints, or a world where people have sausages instead of fingers… Here, in fact, the moment of incomprehensible existence in the moment (forgive the tautology) of all possible realities at once is firmly held on to, perhaps, the only more or less rational possibility (again, forgive the tautology): the possibility of building for a person the same conventional box (literal cube) in which Schrödinger’s cat sat, which was alive and dead at the same time… married and unmarried, successful and a loser, happy and unhappy at the same time…