Apple TV's 'Dark Matter' Season 2 Is an Enjoyable Headache | Review

Season 2 of Dark Matter opens on more than a dozen bodies laid out in a row, every one of them Jason Dessen in a different set of clothes. It's an efficient way to remind viewers where Blake Crouch's Apple TV adaptation left off two years ago, and it's a fair warning about what's coming, because the new season has more versions of this man than it can find room for.

Here, we’ll do you the favor of recapping Dark Matter’s first installment. Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), a physicist and professor walking home one night in Chicago, gets abducted into an alternate version of his own life by, well, himself — or, at least, the version of himself who chose the career over domesticity. That Jason built a device called the Box that moves people between parallel universes, then used it to take Jason's wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). The first season is a tense, stakes-laden chase through infinite realities as Jason fights to get home, only to discover that dozens of alternate Jasons had the same idea. It ends with the family fleeing into the Box together, letting Charlie choose their destination so no other version could follow.

Season 2 of that journey starts well. The Dessens have had seven months in a world that finally seems safe before an alternate Jason turns up at their door, claiming to be the original. The family runs, picks another door. By the second episode, the season is also tracking Amanda (Alice Braga) and Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) trying to find their way back, Leighton Vance (Dayo Okeniyi) chasing his vision of a perfect world, and Blair (Amanda Brugel) trying to stop him.

Nobody Is Getting Enough of Jennifer Connelly, Including 'Dark Matter' Season 2

Edgerton was the reason that Season 1 held together, and that hasn't changed. He stays watchable even when the show around him buckles under its own ambition. The trouble is that the Jasons he's inhabiting this time have drifted so far from one another that recognizing them as the same man takes work the story doesn't reward. Our Jason sinks deeper into his obsession with the Box. The other one has partnered with an alternate Leighton on a plan to strip technology and ideas out of healthier universes and haul them home to fix their own broken one, a project he has convinced himself is altruistic.

Connelly, meanwhile, gets the season's most gutting material and not nearly enough screen time to do it justice. Her Daniela is unraveling, growing more paranoid with every door they open. Connelly plays that fear so raw, you wish the show would just park the camera on her face and let her work. Instead, the plot keeps yanking us elsewhere. Simpson gets the funniest line of the season while he and Amanda are stuck in a world too colorful and too polite to trust. "No one's getting banged here," he says. "They're just generously knocking." There's also an agent named Macnamara (Chris Diamantopoulos) working the case of the bodies, a man who belongs to no named law enforcement agency but does enjoy the donuts. He only matters when he’s actually on-screen, a problem so many characters in Dark Matter share.

'Dark Matter' Season 2 Keeps Interrupting Its Best Ideas

Here is where Dark Matter Season 2 starts to lose us. The show is wrestling with enormous questions about identity, regret, and whether the desire to be a better version of yourself is ambitious or destructive. Episode 3 digs into this when Jason 2 seeks ethical counsel about his multiverse project, and the answers he gets cut right to the core of what the show wants to be about. A man created a cosmic disaster because he couldn't handle living with regret. He built a metaphysical portal to shop for a better reality. That’s both a ridiculous exercise in human hubris and an oddly relatable desire, but Season 2 has no room to sit with any of it.

There's so much plot crammed into each hour that the ideas get raised and then dropped. The worldbuilding is inventive, and then it's gone in ten minutes. The clearest sign of the trouble is a small detail in that same episode, when the Dessens get matching tattoos so they can tell which versions of each other they belong with. The audience could use the same system. Keeping up with which Jason is which, which Leighton is which, and which world any of it is happening in turns into a season-long physics test you're always studying for and never feel like you'll pass. Once the confusion pulls you out of the emotional stakes, getting back in is difficult. It's hard to care about a character when any version of them might turn out to be a worse copy. Dark Matter raises that question on purpose, but it just hasn't built anything sturdy enough to hold the answer.

There's a Great Sci-Fi Show Buried Somewhere in 'Dark Matter' Season 2

There are still real thrills. A chase sequence in Episode 3 unloads a heavy amount of exposition with enough momentum that it plays as a set piece instead of homework, and it starts to make sense of why Jason is being hunted across timelines. A major reveal about how the Box operates midway through the season produces its sharpest sci-fi turn, the kind that reminds you why this premise grabbed readers in the first place. What's been made, in this case, cannot be unmade.

But Dark Matter Season 1 worked because it had a clean emotional throughline underneath all the sci-fi machinery: a guy trying to get home to his family. Season 2 fractures that into a dozen competing threads, and the result is a show with plenty of big ideas and big consequences but not enough small, human stakes to connect them. The performances keep pulling you back in, and the plot keeps shoving you out the door before you've had time to feel anything.

Dark Matter Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV.