Dark Matter is officially back on Apple TV, and its season 2 premiere picks up seven months after everything fell apart last season. We know Dark Matter Season 1 used up all the material that author Blake Crouch wrote in his original novel. In a way, that story was already over, though it left plenty unfinished for the people who are now displaced in its aftermath.
Had Crouch signed away the rights and walked off, I’d have written off this season as a cash grab riding the first season’s success. Instead, he wrote every new episode alongside Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry, pushing the story somewhere his own book never went.
Episode 1 of Dark Matter season 2 is mostly about the show setting the table. A lot happens as we see where everyone is and how they’re holding up, and the story so far is genuinely engaging. It also left me with a few things I can’t stop turning over.
Questions I’m hoping Season 2 will answer
The episode opens with agent Mitchel MacNamara staring down a pile of genetically identical corpses, confidently assuming it’s cloning. He’s obviously wrong, but watching him chase the truth is going to be one of this season’s ongoing threads.
So the first question is: how did all these other Jasons end up dead? Season 1’s finale gave us a chaotic pileup of doppelgangers converging on the same reality, but the show hasn’t spelled out whether these deaths came from Jasons turning on each other, or something more deliberate, like a version of Jason trying to protect the secret of multiversal travel by eliminating witnesses. It’s the kind of mystery that could go a lot of different directions, and MacNamara’s investigation seems built to drag us through all of them.
If every choice creates a Jason, what about everyone else?
Jason, Daniela, and Charlie have spent seven months building a normal life in the woods, and that doesn’t last long. Another Jason, desperate and unraveling, finds Daniela alone in the house, refuses to leave, and forces her to shoot him. Cleaning up the body drags them back into the box entirely, and once inside, nothing goes smoothly.
Every choice creates a new Jason. That’s the rule this entire multiverse runs on, and it’s why we have so many Jasons cluttering this multiverse in the first place. But Daniela and Charlie have now traveled through that same box too, just far less than Jason has. Does that mean a few other versions of Daniela and Charlie exist somewhere, shaped by choices we’ve never actually seen them make? The show hasn’t touched this yet, and I wonder whether the writers have plans to deal with this or just quietly hope nobody notices.
Here’s what we learned, though
Ryan and Amanda spend most of the episode assuming their box is dead weight. It’s been relocated to a different part of the city, and Amanda’s working theory is that the move itself severed whatever connection powered it in the first place. As far as they know, they’re stranded.
Except they’re not. When Jason briefly steers his family into that same world, the visit ends up creating a new, functional box that Ryan and Amanda can now actually use. I’m guessing the next episode will show whether they can actually put it to use, which would confirm that moving a box doesn’t necessarily kill its connection to a world. As long as someone out there is still thinking about that world, the link holds. That’s bad news for the Dessens, who are hoping to disappear for good by destroying the box once they find their next favorite world.
My thoughts on the Dark Matter season 2 premiere
One episode isn’t much to judge a season on, and I’m not going to pretend I have this show figured out yet. But Episode 1, “A Quiet Life,” did what a premiere is supposed to do: it made me care about where all these scattered pieces are heading. And I’m sticking around to find out what happens next. I just hope the show remembers to actually answer these questions before season 2 runs out of episodes.
Meanwhile, I’ve got one eye on Silo too, its season 3 finale, “Troy,” lands this Friday, September 4, and it’s finally set to reveal how the world actually ended.