‘Dark Matter’ Is Your Next Head-Spinning Binge Obsession

Dark Matter is the second Apple TV+ series in the past two and a half months to revolve around quantum entanglements, flip-side doppelgangers, and intertwined multiverses, as well as to initially let viewers get out ahead of its central mystery. Yet unlike the listless Constellation, writer Blake Crouch’s adaptation of his own 2016 novel is a descent down a what-if rabbit hole that continually ups the head-spinning ante. Mining its now-familiar conceit for maximum reality-warping madness, such that every new twist builds logically and crazily from its last, this nine-part drama, premiering May 8, is a superior slice of small-screen science fiction. It’s a series that knows exactly what it wants to be and where it wants to go—the two precise things that elude its protagonist, who winds up at war with himself in ways that are both figurative and loopily literal.

(Warning: Minor spoilers ahead.)

In modern-day Chicago, Jason (Joel Edgerton) teaches quantum physics at Lakemont College to kids who don’t seem to care much about his lecture on Schrödinger’s Cat and quantum superpositions—a paradox which argues that objects can simultaneously exist in two different states. Jason lives in a cozy home with his art gallery curator wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and their teenage son Charlie (Oakes Fegley), and by all reasonable accounts, they appear to be a close-knit and content clan. Even so, when Jason is encouraged by Daniela to join his old friend Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) at the local bar in order to celebrate Ryan winning a Pavia prize in physics, his old, lingering regret—about giving up his promising research career for quiet, modest domesticity—bubbles to the surface, this despite the fact that Ryan offers Jason a lucrative gig in his forthcoming start-up venture.

Read more at The Daily Beast.