Dark Matter
A Perfect World
Season 2
Episode 2
Editor’s Rating
Jason, Daniela, and Charlie arrive in an idyllic world just as Amanda and Ryan leave another.
Photo: Apple TV
At its core, Dark Matter is a series about the folly and hubris of humankind, even when — nay, especially when — idealists have the power to achieve transformative change. The title of the second episode, “A Perfect World,” could apply to the goals of multiple major characters, from Leighton No. 2, who’s seeking to mix-and-match advancements from multiple planes of reality, to Jason No. 1 and his family, who are searching for a peaceful place to settle and rebuild their lives. Yet the title is also dripping with sarcasm, because the search for a perfect world has already been fatally compromised by less-noble aspects of the human character, whether it’s the jealousy Jason No. 2 felt about the road not taken or the violence that has naturally come with dimensional upheaval. People looking out for themselves have compromised the fates of those who have less control over their destinies.
Opening this episode with a flashback from three years earlier is a clever reminder to viewers about where this corporate initiative started, and the arc feels uncannily like that of Silicon Valley writ large. Broadly speaking, many prominent Silicon Valley companies started in a place of technological service and innovation only to have more recently shifted into the dystopia business, and public sentiment has shifted in kind. (Never forget that Google’s motto was once “Don’t Be Evil.”) In the world where the box is brought to life — thanks to Jason No. 2’s decision to choose career over family, which opens up a cultural can of worms all its own — Leighton No. 2 and his team seem to have genuinely good intentions about what this power might mean for mankind. It’s worth excerpting Leighton’s soaring speech to the troops here:
“Through this door are worlds, worlds that have cured diseases that still ravage ours. Through these doors are worlds that have reversed climate change, saved species from extinction, crushed poverty. Through these doors are worlds that have ended war. We will visit these worlds. We will find the best technology, the brightest ideas. And we will bring them home.”
If you’re a Velocity Labs employee, you have to be feeling great about the boss’s champagne toast here, at least if you’re not already entertaining the many ways such a technology can go wrong. And the remarkable part of this entire sequence is that at least two characters are actively imagining uses for the box that will compromise the experiment. We know that Jason will use the box to take the path he rejected and see what life might have been like had he married Daniela, which is what gets Jason No. 1 jettisoned from his cozy domestic life as a father and science professor. We also know that Blair will follow her ambition to be the Neil Armstrong of the group and become the first person ever to be put in superposition, but she’ll wind up in a dark, lonely, and unenviable place. In a poignant moment at the party, Amanda warns Blair that they don’t know much about how the box works (an understatement, to be sure) and wants her to do “extra mental conditioning” to prepare. That advice was obviously ignored.
When the episode cuts to the title “NOW,” it chooses not to settle on one of our antagonists, like Jason No. 2 or Leighton No. 2, but on our heroes, Jason No. 1 and his family, who are still experimenting with the box and looking for a place to start over. Though they are completely blameless in all of the terrible events that have befallen them, the show makes it clear that they’ve been put in a woefully compromised position, too. Daniela has killed a man for the crime of not being her Jason, but rather another Jason whose personal history and worthiness align with his almost completely. That Jason had to die for the family to survive and find another place for themselves, but it seems to be feeling an awful lot like murder to Daniela. And if it didn’t, we’d have to think about how much the box has devalued individual life.
Nevertheless, they keep persisting, and after a number of hiccups in the box already, Jason No. 1 hands the responsibility of finding a new home to Charlie, who wishes for a world “where people mind their own business, where it’s easy to blend in, with less complications like facial recognization or CCTV or digital footprints, where the Dessens live far away and are not criminals or famous.” And credit to Charlie, the cursed monkey’s paw of the box lands the Dessens in a world that not only lacks surveillance technology but also a little invention we call “the computer.” They’re all mystified by a Chicago that makes it seem like they’ve traveled in a time machine, and it takes some old-fashioned research to figure out what happened. It turns out that they’re in a reality where no one ever went to the moon, because JFK lost to Nixon, Nixon defunded NASA, and the microchip and microprocessing developments prompted by space travel never came to pass.
It’s an absurd notion that humanity would fall behind quite this drastically, but it’s an ideal destination for the episode. For one, it’s fun to watch the Dessens, Charlie especially, have to adjust to America’s analog past after taking its digital present for granted. Time becomes harder to fill when you’re not, say, doom-scrolling on TikTok or watching Netflix at 1.5x playback speed, and information has to be acquired through microfilm and card catalogs. For two, Dark Matter can blow past the problem of the internet making it easy for people to find each other and communicate, which is safer for the Dessens and requires less from the show to make their disappearance plausible. With a little luck, they can co-exist with the Dessens of this world, just so long as they keep their distance.
But that human folly thing? It applies here, too. When Daniela tries to enroll Charlie at a local high school for his senior year, she’s told of her remarkable resemblance to one Daniela Dessen, whose son Charlie once went to the school. The family catches a break when they learn that other Dessens moved across the country to California, but Jason No. 1 invites more trouble when the private investigator he’s hired to work on paperwork is this world’s Mitchel MacNamara, who’s perplexed by Jason’s request that MacNamara look into what others might be trying to find out about him and his family. And so he starts poking around in areas Jason No. 1 would not want him to see.
There’s some complicated business in this episode about Leighton No. 2 and his efforts to consolidate information gleaned from other worlds, like a volcano eruption that “liquefied” most of the Pacific Northwest and led to a food supply crisis that the scientists of that world had been able to address. But with Leighton’s long-term plans still in development, it’s worth talking about the dramatic steps Ryan No. 1 and Amanda No. 2 are taking to leave the utopia of Happy Chicago and perhaps use the box to exact some dimensional justice by “kicking the ever-loving shit out of Jason No. 2.” In a sad turn, Ryan shows Amanda footage that he found of Jason No. 1 peaking out of the box, seeing Happy Chicago and going back through the door, like Grandpa Simpson at the burlesque house. With Ryan having completed work on an ampoule that could make superposition possible, the two strike out on their own journey, only to land in the same dimension and hotel floor as the Dessens.
The collision of these characters makes some sense, since Amanda No. 2 and Jason No. 1 did a lot of traveling together and they had a habit of choosing the same low-key hotel to crash for the night. Having them pass through the hotel hallway earlier in the episode, without us knowing yet who they are, is a neat structural trick that pays off in the closing minutes. Now they’re all in a place where they may not be safe, because McNamara has found the box. He will certainly have a few questions.
• The two Leightons are the first time we’ve seen versions of the same person collaborate, which is a credit to him, considering all the innocent Jasons who have been murdered. They even have different names, which is a blessing for your humble recapper: Leighton No. 2 is a brainiac tech entrepreneur who mastered the sciences at the University of Chicago, and his meditating doppelgänger calls himself “Oluko,” meaning “teacher.” For now, Oluko is forging a smooth psychic path for Leighton to do this work.
• There’s a reality where Zima is still a thing.
• Any awed mention of “computers” in scare-quotes makes it an obligation to link to the classic scene in NewsRadio where an expert is asked about “the future of business.” That expert would feel comfortable in the reality the Dessens find themselves in currently.
• It’s a small matter, but it’s good for the show to address the question of money, which it does here in a lovely scene where Jason No. 1 and Daniela pawn off their wedding rings to raise enough cash to get started in their new environment. The stakes for them finding success quickly are high.
• After getting stuck on the idea that humanity’s failure to land on the moon would prevent it from having computers in the present day, I asked my mother-in-law, a retired government engineer, if that made any sense to her. Alas, it did not. One intriguing assertion she did make, however, is that wars are a more potent accelerating force for technological development than space travel.