In the new series “Dark Matter,” a physics professor (Joel Edgerton) is kidnapped from the streets of Chicago and replaced by an alternate version of himself. This version, rather than working hard teaching distracted students, is that of an award-winning scientist who, among his many accomplishments, invented a box that can superimpose people into parallel worlds.
This alternate Jason, despite his wealth and renown in his own universe, covets the life and family of the humbler Jason – his loving wife (Jennifer Connelly) and son (Oakes Fegley). So he steals them, leaving the original Jason to negotiate a limbo of parallel realities, jumping from one to another as he tries to find his way home, like a sci-fi Odysseus.
“Dark Matter,” which premieres May 8 on Apple TV+, was created by Blake Crouch, adapting his own 2016 novel of the same title. The series is part thriller, part family drama, and part physics primer, enlisting heady concepts like quantum mechanics, superposition, and, well, dark matter, to tell a story about longing, regret, and desire.
It’s the latest project to portray physics as a vital, tense and even sexy subject, joining Oscar juggernaut biopic “Oppenheimer” and Netflix’s alien invasion series “3 Body Problem,” named after a classical mechanics problem. In these stories, physicists struggle with questions of life and death that, as in reality, are intertwined with questions of love.
They are human stories about human dilemmas. But they’re also happy to include a little science into the equation.
“More than anything, Blake and I wanted people to be excited about each episode, learn something from each episode, but also maybe cry through each episode,” Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry said in a video interview. She is a writer and producer on the series and has been Crouch’s developmental story editor since the publication of his 2012 novel “Pines” — she is also married to him.
“We wanted you to feel something in every episode,” she continued. “Ultimately, it’s the story of a man who loves his wife and son. Everything else is just to make it interesting and exciting and give us something to talk about.”
And yet, this man is a physicist; In the first episode of “Dark Matter”, we see Jason try to explain Schrödinger’s cat quantum superposition experiment, which is directly linked to the plot, to a classroom full of disinterested students. The heroes of “Oppenheimer,” particularly the title character, and “3 Body Problem,” about a team of Oxford-trained friends tasked with saving the world, are also physicists. (So do the socially confused young brains of “The Big Bang Theory,” the hit comedy that spawned a prequel, “Young Sheldon,” although the science took a backseat to the jokes and one-liners.)
These series and films enter technical specifications to varying degrees. “Dark Matter” wobbles its core concepts enough to help make the Jasons’ world-hopping seem at least somewhat plausible and to bring a bit of science to science fiction.
The series is a techno-thriller, a subgenre popularized by authors such as Michael Crichton (“Jurassic Park”), whom Crouch cites as a major influence. It’s also a cautionary science fiction tale, the kind with roots that go back to the genre’s origins, including Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818). These are stories of ambition – and often of transgression – about the consequences of interfering with the forces of nature. “Oppenheimer,” a historical drama, deals directly with these consequences, asking what it would have been like to unleash the apocalyptic powers of the atomic bomb (and explaining the concept of fission along the way).
Crouch, best known on TV for the sci-fi thriller “Wayward Pines” (which was based on his trilogy of novels), is definitely not a physicist. An English major at the University of North Carolina, he studied geology to fulfill his science requirements.
“The rocks seemed safe, so I made rocks,” he said in a video interview. But he was also a big fan of science fiction, especially Crichton. “He didn’t invent the technological thriller, but he made it fun,” he said. “A lot of people think ‘Jurassic Park’ is just pulp fiction, but it’s really amazing that he wrote a book about dinosaurs and chaos theory. It’s in the weeds on some of these things.
Crouch feels quite comfortable walking through the woods. He is in love with physicist Aaron O’Connell and his superposition experiments. In layman’s terms, superposition refers to the ability of a quantum system to be in several different states simultaneously until measured. (In the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, a cat in a box is alive and dead at the same time, in the sense of quantum theory.) In writing “Dark Matter,” Crouch also consulted astrophysicist Clifford V. Johnson, at the time, professor at the University of Southern California who, according to his biography, was “primarily concerned with developing theoretical tools for describing the basic structure of nature.” (Johnson is now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.)
But for the purposes of the series, as Ben-Zekry said, “You have to tell a driving story. No one cares about your science and how smart you are if you’re not entertained and excited.”
Viewers may recognize “Dark Matter” as a variation on the multiverse story made popular in recent years by Oscar winners including “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (and its sequences). It’s a popular concept in the world of fantasy franchises, and a useful way to expand those franchises’ narrative universes. But for Edgerton, the appeal of “Dark Matter” lies largely in the characters’ normalcy, in the fact that they are dealing with everyday concerns like work-life balance and raising a family.
“It’s a parallel universe narrative for the average family,” Edgerton said in a video interview alongside Connelly. “Instead of going to galaxies and trying to go through wormholes, it becomes a show that looks more inward.”
The defining question behind “Dark Matter” can be summed up by the title of the first episode: “Are you happy in your life?” “It has its own suburban kind of esoteric, thoughtful reflection about it, which I think is superhuman and not supernatural,” Edgerton said.
And if you learn a little about a subject that gave you trouble in high school, Connelly said, that’s great, too. “I think science is personally exciting,” she said. “If people take that away, great. Science is super captivating and sexy.”
While recognizing their imperative to entertain, Crouch and Ben-Zekry also see a greater purpose in putting science front and center, especially at a time when the very concept of facts is increasingly under attack.
“I hope programs like these do a lot to unite thinking and remind people that we’re all in this together,” Ben-Zekry said. “That you don’t have to believe the same things I do, but science can at least give us some objective reality.”
In Crouch’s opinion, the current climate is enough to make us feel like we’ve fallen into an alternate reality. Just like Jason.
“Especially after 2016, it seems like we’ve all fallen into another dimension, with this notion of fake news and the question of what’s real,” he said. “There is a destruction of truth and reality. I think we all still want to understand what reality is.”
