Dark Matter (2024)

Jason Dessen is abducted into an alternate version of his life. To get back to his true family, he embarks on a harrowing journey to save them from the most terrifying foe imaginable: himself.

Typically, I don’t write about movies here, unless they are exceptionally good.

• When they are, I tag them as masterpieces.
• But also there is this tag, cinematography. It’s when I break the rule and actually write about some film.

This story is about the ideas this work bears.

• Which also has its tag, ideas, obviously.

Recommendations

There is this TV series from Apple TV, Dark Matter (2024). It was released a bit over half a year ago, and I have it written somewhere that someone (I won’t even recall who) recommended the thing for me.

Unfortunately, I’m weak for this, some random recommendations. I invented a separate system, to battle this. I try to write down all the recommendations. Otherwise, it becomes a burden on the outskirts of my mind, to watch something. I have some movies I postponed watching for many years, and they have no memories left. Who recommended me them, in which context. It becomes ‘you must watch it!’ and in some scenarios they’re just a burden to me. They never disappear from my subconsciousness, and that’s a bad thing.

Upon writing the thing down, I can actually release that. For that very reason there are two projects I invented: links and til. While the former it the primer of this, I plan to never visit the links I posted there. Or, maybe once, but more likely not. But the latter is something I plan to come back to. Which more likely would inherit the fate of the links.

This habit is difficult to form, and I’m not writing these things down every single time. Especially if the recommendation comes from some random dude on the internet. Yet, I may note somewhere in my mind, ‘this could be good.’

I think that’s how Dark Matter, the TV series, appeared in my plans.

Some new colleague recommended the series to my wife recently, and so she came to me with the offer to watch it. Well, I could postpone this for another 8 months, yet we started watching it right away.

We were fortunate to finish the entire show within the weekend, starting with the Friday night. It allowed us to immerse into the universe, and not make it a long project, to finish the show. While I have no issues with that, still, getting things done feels better, most times.

No Season Two

The show was advertised to my wife as having a logical end, which suggests there’s no season 2 planned.

After finishing the last episode, the ‘logical end’ thing we both expected to see was shattered cruelly.

Yeah, the end is very logical when you know nothing about logic. Indeed.

And it took me like 10 seconds to confirm the ‘no season two planned’ statement too. I was laughing finding the very apple.com resource for that (the link is already up there). It’s like there’s no more authoritive resource on that than Apple itself.

We found out both statements to be false upon actually finishing the whole first season.

Well, okay, we’ll be waiting for the 2nd one. I’m very curious to explore their attempts to not spoil the whole thing. My bet, it’ll be much worse. But we’ll see how it’ll develop.

By the way, I like TV series that are planned as one season, and they tell a completed story, with no ending that yells at you ‘haha, we’re going to make it another Days of Our Lives, brace yourself!’

However, there are second seasons I’ve been waiting for. Severance is being the latest example. I was very sad upon getting news they were abandoning season 2 with the authors’ strike in Hollywood. Sincerely, I don’t care about all other works, but I wanted Severance story to get to some point, otherwise it’s just too many questions with too little answers.

Fingers crossed they won’t spoil such a talented piece of work.

Please, please, please 🤞

Plot

Spoiler alert: I don’t care about spoiling you anything. If you read further, it’s your choice, of which I have no control.

The story is about the scientist who created a machine (a cube) that allows travelling through multiverse.

In this story, multiverses we’re shown are those where each choice creates another universe, and there are infinite number of them. I love this concept deeply, and you can sell me any low-effort movie that follows that concept.

• Coherence (2013) is a great example here, the budget is just $50K, and the box office is just thrice that, $140K. Yet, I like the movie, and won’t even call it low-effort. It’s just not your mainstream Hollywood normie.

He, the scientist, regrets one decision in his life, where his girlfriend becomes pregnant and he articulates he does not want to have a kid, and he’d rather follow his career instead.

He travels to the universe of the protagonist, the guy who made a different choice in his life. He articulated to his girlfriend that he’d rather spend all his life with her than in a sterile lab. They marry and they have that kid.

Two, twins. They lost one at 3 y.o. point, 12 years prior the time-line in which the story unfolds.

The scientist is the antoganist, who abducts the family guy and sends him to his world instead, where he’s super-famous and rich. Taking his place, and pretending he’s the family man.

Family

Personally, I like this family storyline, where they show multiple layers of what family is.

• It’s when you usually more poor than you’re being single, due to having to be present with the family.
• But not only that, of course. It’s the shared memories, laughs and tragedies, and mutual coping with them.
• It’s talking through the choices you make, getting advices from each other.
• Listening each other, of course. Instead of pushing your narrative.
• Wearing that fucking ring that I personally absolutely hate since day one. But which I’m used to too much, and uncomfortable with having it not, even despite all the discomfort it brings me.

  When we married, I complained my wife about the ring, and joked it also shows everyone I’m lassoed now. ‘It’s the quality mark’ was the reply.
  
  Well, I always loved wearing the fuck-off face before girls, they like the unavailable guys even more. The ring does this job on its own, without the face.
  
  And it helps to understand Frodo too, it’s a genius metaphor Tolkien invented, the ring of power.

I like this moment when he talks to his another-universe girlfriend, talks about the family and there is this ‘you know’ which triggers him to realise people without kids have no ‘know’ in this, they have no expirence of the hardships of parenting. Parenting cannot be observed from the side.

The whole 9 episodes of the show, he tries to come back to his family. Realising along his way that his family is what matters, not the same people of another universe.

There was that powerful moment when he comes home, gets upstairs, and he sees his wife lying in his bed with another him. He realises it’s the wrong universe, once again.

The number of these jorneys are limited, and he has just one attempt left, to find his very universe in the infinite number of them.

He does not leave that house, and just tiredly sits on his kitchen’s floor. His son goes down the stairs. They chat, he mentions son’s name, and the son corrects him, wrong name, again.

Later, he writes down into his diary that he understand his double, as he was considering the same thing, taking the place of this other him, whose life is just better. He has his second child alive in this universe.

Imperfection

That makes him realise that perfection isn’t what worth pursuing, and imperfections make the whole thing much more perfect.

Unfortunately, the whole TV series is not perfect either. It has many rough edges that spoil the whole thing, when you think too much. It does not connect. But as I’ve written before, to invent a great fictional universe— probably you have to keep it fictional and don’t care about reality easily breaking the whole concept of yours.

I love the show for the ideas it brings, but I hate to say I didn’t like it’s production. It’s too Hollywoodish to me, and in my vocabulary it’s not a compliment. There are countless of ‘oh, yeah, I see, it’s for normies, right, I’ll just try to ignore this’ emotions I had upon wathching it.

I got no chills, even at the most powerful moments. I won’t call the show great, but it’s good. And that’s a good thing either. It’s not bad.

It left me thinking about many things, beyond the very stupid illogical half-assed things in the movie. ‘Ah, it’s just a movie, what would I expect?’ was my remedy.

Choices

The story exploits the uncertainty we all bear.

What if?

What if we’d made another choice? What would our life be? Would it be better? Would it be much better?

I guess, they tried to show the whole question is just plain wrong. It would be another life. Not yours, but someone else’s.

Upon arriving at the wrong destination, we know it for certain, that choice was just wrong.

But the correct thing is not to reverse the choice and make a different one. It’s to learn from that mistake, and be more experienced than you was. That other person made no mistake and didn’t learn from it. Yes, their life could be easier, but are we pursuing just an easy life? Aren’t we?

It helps.

It helps work through some hardships and understand that without them, I’d be just a very different me.

Ideas

The same idea was brought by The Butterfly Effect (2004), where the main character tries to change some past, and he changes the future.

Of course, the primer of all this is Back to the Future (1985) series.

My foster father had the scenario printed from somewhere, and in my childhood, I’ve been reading this story time and again.

First time I watched the actual movie was probably 5 years ago, maybe slightly more. I know it by heart, I’ve read the scenario tens of times at least. I deeply love the concepts the story tells.

I think you can find it online, I remember me downloading it from somewhere just about 10 years ago, when I couldn’t reach that printed version of my childhood. I should have the file somewhere in my Kindle.

While these two stories deal with the time, past and the future, this story is about parallel universes you can travel through.

God

I like the idea of creating a new world each time you make a decision. I do believe this, actually. I don’t believe in God as others do, I have my own set of beliefs. There is God in it, but it’s not that bearded white man, I just absolutely hate this silly interpretation, and it’s hard for me to even not disrespect this world view.

For me, God is the universe we all have, it’s the chaos all around is. God is not ever-forgiving and there’s nothing like that, never was and never will be. It’s the machine, the mechanism, the algorithm that just simply does not care about all us, so insignificant we all are.

I don’t believe in the afterlife either. Meaning this heaven or hell thing.

That does not make me cruel or morally corrupt, surprise! To me, it’s just not that stupid simple, ‘don’t steal or else you’d be punished.’ I don’t steal not because I’m afraid of the punishment, I don’t do it because I don’t see it as a something worth doing. It’s just stupid, and it’s for stupid people. If you really need something, you can ask, and in most situations, you’d be given what you ask. Unless you ask for something you cannot be given freely.

The afterlife I believe in, we could travel to some other world, some other universe. Why not? It’s just not us any more, it’s a different state of this biological organism. I am what I eat, and I will be what I’m eaten by.

Math

As a mathematician, I’d say being parallel means, you can never cross. You can have this railroad illusion of parallel lines joining at some point.

Also, I enjoy the concept of infinity. I do believe our universe is infinite. It has no beginning and it has no end. It’s a concept that’s difficult to grasp by our finite intellect, yet if you know some basic math, you’d be able to operate the concept of initity. I like infinity.

A very old friend of mine from some of my previous lives in some other parallel universe has this infinity sign tatooed on her wrist. I’d love to have one too, yet something kept me off the idea of having the sign myself either. Probably, since she made it already, my memories of her would have the infinity brought up automatically.

My very first version of my personal website had the infinity sign favicon too. I like infinity.

There are infinite number of the parallel universes, and having this concept of them being more and more aligns with the expanding of the universe.

Why it grows? Where it takes all the energy for that? My guess, we’d never find answers for that, and probably we don’t even need to. Doesn’t mean we don’t need (and want) to seek them. Maybe, it all is just a simulation we live in.

Speaking of simulation, I remembered The Matrix (1999) franchise. I’d say it has the same vibes for me. The idea is absolutely terrific. Yet, the realisation. Well, meh. Or, it has its cult-like status already, but to me all the movies (but the original) is just too weak. The original one is good, but it’s the idea that makes it outstanding, not the realisation. Here, I feel similarly. The realisation is much better, thanks to the technology we have these days. Yet, for me, the idea stands first.