It’s funny to write a review of the show without explicitly discussing the book it was based on. But since that’s the topic for next week’s (very long) article, I’m keeping this review limited to the show itself, both to avoid revealing the differences between the two for people who haven’t checked out both but also as an attempt to see how the show stands as its own piece of art.
Firstly, it must be said… AppleTV is killing it when it comes to the production of science-fiction shows. If it’s your thing, and you’re reading spudWorks, so it’s probably your thing, AppleTV is pretty much the place to go these days for ground breaking science-fiction. Just in case you haven’t heard, there is (in no particular order): Silo, Severance, Foundation, Invasion, Monarch, Sugar (spoilers), For All Mankind, its spin-off Star City, Pluribus, and coming up will be Neuromancer. Since the service has only really been around about seven years, that’s a Murderer’s Row lineup of shows.
And that’s just the sci-fi.
Add to that list Dark Matter, a show helmed by the author who (literally) wrote the book it’s based on. Staring Jennifer Connelly, Joel Edgerton, and Jimmi Simpson, it’s a mind-bending nine-episode series about a what a man might do if he had regrets and an unlimited physics budget.
Joel Edgerton plays a mild-mannered physics professor named Jason who’s having family pasta night with his wife, Daniella, played by Jennifer Connelly, and his son Charlie, when she finds out that his best friend not only one the prestigious “Pavia Prize” but is holding celebratory drinks at a bar around the corner. Reading that this is an attempt to reach out to a guy who was once on the same fast track, she encourages Jason to go and have a couple with him.
Reluctantly, he does. And his life is never the same.
Meeting his friend Ryan, played by the always great Jimmi Simpson, Jason has a couple of drinks and then, on his way home, is abducted by a gunman. Forcing him to strip and then injecting him with something… it’s the last thing Jason remembers until he wakes up, basically in a white room, with a bunch of people promising him he’ll be alright.
Before he knows it, Jason is being interviewed by his “best friend” Leighton Vance and a woman who seems more than a little curious about him, Amanda Lucas. But, obviously, this is all wrong. He hasn’t seen Leighton since college and he has no idea who Amanda is, even though she says they’re an item. Or they were, until he disappeared a year ago.
Jason breaks out of the complex and manages to get home only to find… it’s not how he remembered it either. The picture of him and his family at Yellowstone is now just a picture from Yellowstone. His kitchen, different. Charlie’s room, his home office. And there’s Amanda, holding up her keys to the house she lives in also.
He runs away, checks into a hospital. Checks himself out, right before Leighton’s heavy finds him, and then goes looking for Daniella who, for some reason, is now a famous artist, hosting a show that was inspired, in part, by his ideas. The whole world has gone topsy turvy!
Before long, he’s re-captured and Leighton has serious questions about who Jason actually is. And brings in this world’s fat-Jimmi (sorry, Ryan) to prove he knows something is going on. The whole time, Amanda is watching and clearly getting cold feet. Finally, she breaks him out and the two of them head for the box, just in the nick of time, disappearing into the multi-verse.
And that’s about two episodes of content! There’s still the whole rest of the story!
Now, if you’ve read the last part of this series, the review of the novel, my criticism of the science in the story remains the same. Schrödinger’s Cat is, at best, a metaphor for the way quantum states are unpredictable but, even then, it’s very simplistic and wasn’t intended as a field manual for quantum states. But… for the story, it works well enough as getting into actual quantum physics can be confusing even to enthusiastic amateurs like me much less the casual viewer on a Friday night.
What is different with this version, and something I’ll be discussing in depth next week, is that the character work in the TV show is so much deeper than in the book. Blair, a character I didn’t even bring up above, is a totally new invention for the show while Leighton goes from a one or two book-scene guy to a full season-long person. We never know Charlie or Daniella as people because the book’s narrative stays so close to Jason they’re objects of desire but not what you’d really classify as characters in and of themselves.
My second criticism of the book, the sad-sack Jason Dessen that is mooning about for his wife and son, is fortunately replaced by a character who, while obviously confused at first, uses it as a drive to keep exploring but never for self-pitty. I would be honestly curious to know how much of that was within the script and how much Joel Edgerton brought to it.
Lastly, the one thing the show can do that the book can’t is bring the viewer along for the visual ride. And, while it might be tempting to think that it’s not a very visual book, what with it taking place in and around Chicago, the various worlds of the multi-verse actual leaves a lot to be shown and this show is, frankly beautiful.
Unlike a lot of movie adaptations, the advantage that Dark Matter has in being adapted to television is that the content was given time to breathe. Concepts that were well covered in the book were more fully explored. And, for all of Jason’s emotionalism in the book, the show allows the viewer to get to know the stakes in a much more real way since we get to actually spend time with the characters.
Having re-read the book and just re-watched the series… I will not lie. I much prefer the series. But we’ll get into the differences and what makes the show better in more detail next week.
The number of ampules we need to find a world with Season Two is not that many. We just need to open the right door.
