Dark Matter (2024)

The premise

Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) is a physics professor in Chicago with what Apple's synopsis calls "a happy, fulfilling life" with his wife, Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), and their son, Charlie (Oakes Fegley). His closest friend is Ryan Holder (Jimmi Simpson). Then one day he is abducted off the street.

Wikipedia's summary puts it simply: a physicist "is kidnapped into an alternate version of his life." Apple's synopsis adds that he comes to realize "there are infinite other alternative lives he leads," and that he "desperately tries to get back to his real life." Also in the mix are Amanda Lucas (Alice Braga) and Leighton Vance (Dayo Okeniyi), the CEO of Velocity Labs. That's as far as the open part of this review goes.

How it handles time

The travel in Dark Matter runs sideways, between realities, and never backward or forward through the years. Every jump stays in the characters' own present, and the catalog files the show under parallel universes only. The idea underneath comes from the novel, which, according to its Wikipedia article, draws on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: the theory that every possible outcome creates a new parallel world.

The machine is the Box, which gives Episode 3 its title. It's a sealed metal box built at Velocity Labs. A traveler goes inside and takes a compound that inhibits areas of the prefrontal cortex and induces a state of superposition.

Crouch has his own explanation for what people see once they're in there. He told Variety that it "is a manifestation of a five-dimensional probability space from inside the minds of the people who step into The Box." I like that framing, because it puts the traveler's mind at the center of the physics, and the season builds its rules from there. Those rules arrive in the middle episodes, so I've kept them for the spoiler section.

What I can say here is that Season 1 sets them out clearly and sticks to them. The few times the show changes the shape of the game, it does so by applying a rule it already stated rather than inventing a new one. The one soft spot is that some of the steering depends on a character's state of mind, which is hard to pin down on screen.

What works

Having Crouch run the show pays off. He is the creator and showrunner, and he wrote or co-wrote six of the nine Season 1 episodes, including the first four. He also reshaped the story for television instead of copying the book. The novel stays with Jason's point of view, while the series adds parallel storylines for Daniela, Amanda, and others. "The book is all from Jason's POV," Crouch told SciFi Vision, and the screen version let him "expand that story."

The show also widens the map. "There are more worlds in the show than there are in the book," Crouch said to Screen Rant, including one at the top of Episode 5 that came from his writing journal. The project was first developed as a feature film, and producer Matt Tolmach has said the material "was telling us to do something different." Nine episodes give those extra worlds room.

Chicago itself does a lot of work. The production filmed mainly in the city for six months from October 2022, using Cinespace studios, Millennium Park, Lake Shore Drive, Montrose Harbor, and the University of Chicago libraries. Grounding the alternate versions of the city in real places makes each shift easier to read. Jakob Verbruggen directed the first three episodes, and the score is by Jason Hill and Mac Quayle.

Edgerton and Connelly are executive producers as well as leads. Season 1 reviews were good rather than great, though. As of October 13, 2026, Rotten Tomatoes shows 81 percent for Season 1 (average 6.9/10, from 59 reviews), and Metacritic gives it 64.

What doesn't

The pace is the main problem, and the critics' consensus on Rotten Tomatoes says as much, if gently: the season's "intriguing ideas are spread a tad thin over its season-long runtime," though "fans of foreboding sci-fi will find its residue addictively sticky." I agree with the first half. Screen Rant and Collider both say Season 1 adapts the whole novel, and nine episodes is a lot of room for one book.

The source material came with a mixed reputation, too. Wikipedia describes the novel's reviews as mixed, and Andrew Liptak of The Verge called it "the equivalent of a science fiction beach read." The series keeps that page-turner energy, and I think it keeps some of the book's thinness with it.

Season 2: the verdict (no spoilers)

Season 2 ran for ten episodes, weekly on Fridays from August 28 to October 30, 2026. It's original material beyond the novel, written entirely by Crouch and Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry, and critics rate it at least as highly as the first season: as of November 2, 2026, Rotten Tomatoes shows 81 percent from 27 reviews and Metacritic gives it 76 from eight critics, against 64 for Season 1. Ready Steady Cut called the finale "undeniably a fun hour of television," while noting that it trades logic for excitement in places.

I'm not putting a number on it yet, and that's a choice, not a delay. The finale closes one problem and opens a bigger one, and it stops on a cliffhanger. Crouch has said he pitched the show to Apple as a three-season arc, but as of November 2, 2026, Apple TV hasn't renewed or canceled it. Scoring the middle of a trilogy before anyone knows whether the last part exists would mean scoring half an argument. What happens in the finale is in the spoiler section below, clearly marked.

Final score

Score covers Season 1. Season 2 is complete but unscored: it ends on an open cliffhanger, and a third season isn't announced (as of November 2, 2026).

Overall: 7/10. A clear, well-cast parallel-world story told at a pace that tests your patience in the middle stretch.

Paradox Meter: 4/5 (Season 1). The Box follows a short rulebook that the season keeps, with only the mind-driven steering left fuzzy.

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• Counterpart (2017): Counterpart (2017), a Starz science fiction thriller series created by Justin Marks and starring J. K. Simmons, which ran for two seasons and 20 episodes (2017–2019). (not on the site yet)
• Coherence (2013): Coherence (2013), a psychological science fiction thriller film written and directed by James Ward Byrkit, about a woman (Emily Foxler) facing "strange occurrences" after a comet passes close by. (not on the site yet)