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I I feel like I’ve been living in a parallel universe since about 2016. Everything intangible we depend on—democracy, the rule of law, policing through trust, grandpa grandpa—is going horribly wrong. Reality became disorienting enough without the world of entertainment spinning me around multiple universes. But the multiverse is having a moment (or technically many moments), as is the fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe provides such fertile and lucrative ground for its characters and the Oscar-winning likes of Everything Everywhere All At Once or Constellation. I’ll also add Netflix’s 3 Body Problem because a fictional past, present, and future Earth in the same storyline seems close enough to me.
Now we have Blake Crouch’s nine-part adaptation of his own book of the same name, Dark Matter. Physics professor Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) – henceforth referred to as Jason 1 – leads a quiet life teaching, then comes home each night to his loving wife Daniella (Jennifer Connelly) and engaged teenage son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). If there’s a twinkle behind his eye when his friend and fellow college student Ryan (Jimmy Simpson) wins a prestigious physics prize, well, we’ve all had moments of wondering about the path he didn’t take, haven’t we.
It turns out that if you’re a physics genius, you don’t have to wonder. You can understand. So Jason 1 is kidnapped and drugged by Jason 2 (also Edgerton), the version of himself who has devoted his life to science, become rich and famous, and secretly developed a way to jump across universes to replace Jason 1, so that he could enjoy all the blessings of family life and leave his other self, apparently suffering from amnesia, in the world of Jason 2.
From there, two very enjoyable storylines develop. One is a domestic thriller as Jason 2 tries to avoid being exposed as a fraud by seeking out dinner guests he’s supposedly known for years and figuring out how to be a responsible parent.
The other is sci-fi fun, as Jason 1 gradually figures out what happened and sets off as a high-tech Odysseus to travel through the multiverse to get home to Daniella 1 (although Daniella 2, who is single in her universe, is quite the temptation to stay).
Jason 1 is accompanied by Jason 2’s partner Amanda (Alice Braga), a psychiatrist who has trained previous time-travelling subjects (we don’t know how well she did since they failed to return). She shows an impressive willingness to step outside her professional box and enter the quantum superposition cube that Jason 1 abandoned in its early stages but which Jason 2 continued to refine, and ingest the rather untested psychoactive compounds necessary to see and choose all available universes .
Crouch and Edgerton do a wonderful job of making the Jasons different from each other, yet recognizably related—two people who came from the same source. This allows questions of identity, nature vs. nurture, and whether good angels can drive out bad ones to be much more intriguing than if we were simply presented with a hero and a villain.
Alas, we viewers exist in a universe where Faulkner’s advice to writers—”Kill all your darlings”—is largely ignored. Crouch has made a few improvements to the character arcs and closed a few loopholes in his page-turning tome, but he’s also developed a propulsive plot that keeps the physics accessible for more than nine hours that make you feel every minute. There’s a lot of wheel spin and extension that makes you wish it was either a six-piece, or maybe a really good, tight four. Nine is a universe away from what he can bear.
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