Dark Matter S2E3 Recap and Analysis: Friends and Strangers

The following recap contains spoilers for Dark Matter S2E3, “Everything Beautiful, Everything Terrible” (created by Blake Crouch, written by Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry & Blake Crouch, and directed by Charlotte Sieling).

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Welcome, dear reader, as we continue to review the second season of the Apple TV series Dark Matter with Season 2 Episode 3: “Everything Beautiful, Everything Terrible.” With this episode, Season 2 has officially won me over. Over the last two articles, I’ve expressed my skepticism as to whether a second season was even necessary and have been worrying that the show was abandoning its more grounded scientific roots. Well, no more.

This episode was a blast. We got Blair back. We got another fun brother-sister duo. Charlie got a girlfriend. We got the Ryan, Ryan, Amanda and Jason 2 team-up that I never knew I wanted. And, more importantly, they gave me what I really wanted: an in-universe explanation of how everyone keeps coalescing around the same handful of worlds. I am a happy camper.

Motley Crew

We start out this episode with another “three years ago” flashback. Last episode we saw them fire up the box. Now they’re sending Blair off to be the first human in superposition. Hard as it might be for us to believe, it looks like Jason 2 was having some doubts at the time about what he had brought into the world.

So, the prodigal son returns to the old watering hole to consult the sage advice of his former professors. He has brought them a philosophical dilemma. Using his old research as an example (nudge-nudge, wink-wink), he spins them a what-if tale and then asks how one deals with the uncertainty of unintended consequences?

One professor posits that to understand the future, they only need to look to the past. Every past innovation has led to positives and negatives. This will open up an exploration and exploitation akin to the opening of the New World, but on an infinite scale. It would bring forth everything beautiful and everything terrible, per the episode title.

Jason poses a follow up question, should they do it? The question is pointless. If it can be done, it will be done. There’s no stopping the advancement because there’s no stopping the human ego. The consequences will be a reflection of humanity itself. Deep stuff.

Family Business

Back on World X (per the official podcast, as in Gen-X world—luv that), Detective MacNamara gets a visitor, his sister Sheila. She’s hired her brother to investigate Velocity-Tech’s sudden technological acceleration. The Leighton Vance of this world is positioning his company to be their equivalent of Apple, and himself as Steve Jobs. Sheila wants to know how he beat MacNamara-Tech (the family business) to market with the microprocessor. His next innovation is rumored to be a “portable telephone,” whatever that might be.

Sheila spots the pictures Mitchell has of the box and the Dessens, and asks what they’re about. He tells her about this family being in San Francisco and Chicago at the same time. How the husband goes to this abandoned school several times a week to work on the box, looking like he’s been trying to destroy it. Then he relays the part where this other couple turned up one day, stepped inside the cube, and vanished. That’s impossible, she says. Yes, it is, he agrees.

It Gets a Little Bit Better Every Day

It’s winter now, and the Dessens have a new apartment, a new Christmas tree, and a new ornament just like the first one they bought together. Charlie has started school and is making new friends. This boy is living the Gen X life. He gets to be there at the advent of home computers and he’s back in an era where they make mixtapes for each other. Lucky boy.

His parents have gotten Charlie a skateboard for Christmas, but all Jason wants is a little bit more saltpeter. He’s mixing up some homemade explosives to blow up the box. He just has to figure out how to do it without blowing himself up. He also has to fit in his visits to the box around his new job, working at the bar with his favorite bartender in every world, Matt. Paid in cash every night? Perfect.

Daniela seems to be genuinely doing better, for the most part. However, as she helps Charlie work on his college application, he remarks about all of the interesting stuff that’s happened to him and Daniela falls right back into the rut of blaming herself. To the point where Charlie has to comment on it and tell her to be nicer to herself.

When Jason comes home later that night and can’t remember the safe word (never let the artist pick your safe word), they have the brilliant idea to have everyone get tattoos, using an image designed by Charlie. Genius.

Strangers in a Strange Land

I skipped over the scene at the DMV because I want to devote some time to just this one scene. We start out with a scare for Daniela, as number 68 sitting in front of her looks a bit too much like Jason from behind. Once his number is called though and it’s revealed that the man is just some stranger, sitting directly across from her is someone who is not a stranger. It’s Blair.

Things start out awkward, with both old friends having slightly different recollections as to how long it’s been. The connective tissue is quickly reestablished though when a rude man brushes in between them and they both recognize him as an old English teacher they had in college together. Small world, indeed.

Now, folks, you know I’m a theories and analysis guy. It’s what I do. I’ve watched this scene quite a few times now and I’m telling you, this is Blair 2, from Jason 2’s world. Let’s look at the clues. As she tells it to Daniela, she was away for a while, having just got back six months ago. She sort of became a nomad, traveling for a couple years until she realized she had been by herself a bit too long. I’ll die on this hill.

Now, that said, Blair thinks she’s talking to the Daniela of this world, so she’s playing it cool. Then she catches the name on Daniela’s Social Security card, “Daniela Stewart,” and now she’s got some questions of her own. She asks Daniella if she misses California, with the undertone that they’re really talking about her old life in her old world, which is how Daniela wistfully answers. Does Blair know? Hmm. I think she at least suspects.

Such a nuanced scene. I really loved it. Both of them are strangers in this world and unsure about the other, yet they still connect at a level of friendship that they share across the multiverse. One of the very cool aspects of this show.

To the Rescue

This episode, we get a glimpse of Leighton Vance’s technology trading network in action. He’s come to a world where a terrible pandemic is raging, bringing with him both a vaccine for the disease and a treatment for the infected. This world’s Velocity Pharmaceuticals is ready to start production and seek approvals in tandem.

The grateful CDC doctor takes him back to see his grandfather, Ezekiel Vance, who has his own private suite. Little doubt that Velocity is running the show here. This brings on a flashback to when Leighton was a kid and his grandfather was working on a new round of hypersonic propulsion in his secret lab out of the basement. Even at that early age, his grandfather is including him and telling him this will all be his someday.

Back at the hospital, Leighton asks the doctor how his grandfather is doing. He’s not out of the woods yet, considering his age, but he has a chance now that Leighton has brought them the treatment. She asks repeatedly if he wants to talk to him, but no, he says, let him rest.

How to Navigate the Box

Amanda and Ryan start out having a conversation very similar to the one Jason 2 had with his old professors. The box is the greatest scientific achievement ever. Amanda is extremely proud of what they accomplished and simultaneously deeply ashamed of the lives it’s destroyed. Ryan takes the side that they are scientists, they just built a tool and it’s not their fault when it is used irresponsibly to hurt other people.

Ryan sounds like Jason 2, and while he’s on that vibe, it occurs to Amanda to try to seek him out as a person rather than trying to find the world that Ryan came from. And it works. They step out into the box encased in concrete, something Jason 2 would do to keep people from using it. Everything in Ryan’s apartment looks right, the Pavia Prize award, the order of the books, the dent he made in the floor. The only thing out of place is the naked Ryan Holder who walks out of the shower in front of them.

Strange Bedfellows

Ryan 3 (I think it is?) calls for help, which turns out to be even more unexpected. How does he know of Amanda Lucas? Because the voice on the other end of that phone call was none other than Jason 2. Alive and well, minus getting slugged in the jaw by Ryan 1 upon arrival.

Then we pan out and find that Agent MacNamara’s crew is set up across the street, surveilling the Ryan Holder apartment. MacNamara shows up with Jason 13 in tow and gets a confirmation that this is the “cell leader” Jason they’ve been waiting for. However, Jason 13 didn’t count on Ryan, his old friend, and Amanda, who he traveled worlds with, getting caught in the crosshairs. Showing that amazing Jason Dessen flare for improvisation, he grabs a gun, turns it towards the window and fires a shot at the apartment.

Thus begins a really well-done car chase scene where Jason Dessen turns into Jason Bourne. Along the way, they fill in Amanda and Ryan on what’s going on and why DARPA is after all of them now. Just as the agents are closing in, Jason 2 makes a hairpin turn that gets them just far enough ahead of the pursuit to allow them to all plunge into the box before the agents burst onto the scene. MacNamara has some new questions for Jason 13.

Puzzle Box

After being the sole parent to send Charlie off to his prom, Daniela drops in on Jason at the abandoned school. He’s been dismantling the box, piece by piece, documenting everything as he goes. He’s not destroying it, he’s studying it. This thing is like someone reached into his brain, pulled out his dream and made it real.

Daniela counters back that it’s not beyond anything that he could possibly achieved—he did achieve it, with 20 years and a team to build it. It’s a different choice. She leaves Jason there to make the choice again, his work or his family. He just missed Charlie’s prom send off and now he’s lying to Daniela. He’s headed down the path that led Jason 2 to do what he did.

He makes the right choice again, ripping everything out of the box until there’s nothing left but an empty frame and piles of wires and panels surrounding it. After dinner with friends, he tells Daniela that he needs to go back one last time. He’s boxed and bagged the wreckage, but he needs to dispose of it to ensure that advanced tech isn’t floating around their nice low-tech world.

However, when he returns to the pool, he finds the box has respawned itself. Someone else has come through the box into their world: Leighton Vance.

Quick Takes

A couple of quick takes on the rest of the episode:

• We got a new director on this episode and it really shows. Charlotte Sieling really likes to flip back and forth between scenes. It’s almost disorienting, but maybe that’s the effect she’s going for.
• There is definitely a Star Trek fan on the writing staff. The one professor says that invention of sailing ships helped so many reach “strange new worlds,” and that these “voyages” led to “discovery.” That’s got to be a nod to those shows.
• It really is worth it to zoom in on the newspaper article MacNamara has in his file on Leighton Vance. Just to give you a flavor, after a normal sounding intro paragraph about the introduction of the personal computer, it reads, “After this exciting discovery, there’s no telling where this technological innovation could take us in the future. One day we may live in a world where our government officials make entirely misguided and catastrophic foreign policy decisions based on fake research that a computer tells them is true.” Hilarious.
• The kids on low-tech world are playing foosball at the mall instead of arcade games. Nice touch.
• There’s another Easter egg in the VHS tape that Charlie pulls off the shelf, The Last Strike: The Adventures of Luke Starkiller. Luke Starkiller was Luke Skywalker’s original name in an early draft of the script for what would eventually become Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope.
• Interesting that World X has a very different looking audio cassette format, but they still have VHS tapes for video. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m nitpicking.
• MacNamara tells his agents the next one to open fire gets “reassigned to winters in McMurdo.” McMurdo Station is an American research station on Ross Island, Antarctica.
• If the box will take you to a specific person just by thinking about them, that has very bad implications for the Dessen family. All that one of the other Jasons needs to do is think of their Daniela and they will be taken right to her. It’s a wonder they managed to make it seven months without being discovered in the other world.
• So, this Leighton Vance who shows up at the end of the episode, is it CEO Leighton, stopping in as part of his technology sharing network? That would explain the recent leaps the Velocity-Tech of this world has been making. Are we going to get a reunion between him and Blair?
• Another episode packed with some really great songs. There was “The Mission” by Puscifer while Jason is mixing explosives at the school, and “Sweetheart, What Have You Done to Us” by Keaton Henson while he’s destroying the box. Although, I gotta say, that end credits song, “Sole” by Turnstile, was a bit jarring.
• The official podcast is once again a must to listen to. The only highlight I’ll point out in that they seem to be confirming my suspicions about guru Leighton. We didn’t get any of that this episode, unless there’s something implied in Leighton coming to find Jason 1.

Best lines of the episode:

• “I like my freedom, Shiela.”
• “How about a little bit more saltpeter.” “That’s so festive!”
• “Nice to see you. Nice to see you, too.”
• “Are you kidding? If this works, you saved us.”
• “Why don’t you stay, listen in, because this will all be yours someday.”
• “I gazed into the abyss and saw a humanoid animatronic mouse gazing back at me, and suddenly the universe made sense.”
• “How do you feel about cereal night?”
• “Hey, it’s me, he’s here. Should we meet up?” “That’s not good.”
• “I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t impressive but you need to calm down.”
• “Really? Really!?!”
• “The next one of you to open fire on the streets of Chicago is getting reassigned to winters in McMurdo.”
• “Two Ryans in the room must have blown their tits off.”
• “I think if you were changing the plan we should have discussed it.”

Conclusion

We’ve moved past the world building of the first two episodes and now things are really cooking. I’m loving the aspect of this show that allows them to pair up different instances of friends, couples, siblings, and even the same character with other instances of themselves. They’re staying pretty true to the science of it all, and having a lot of fun with things in the process. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the gang of four who just escaped into the box, and who this Leighton Vance is who just showed up at the Dessens’ doorstep.

That’s all for this week. Please let us know your thoughts and feelings about this week’s episode, and any theories you have on what’s to come, in the comments below. Remember that TV Obsessive will provide continuing coverage of Dark Matter throughout Season 2 and beyond.

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All images courtesy of Apple TV