Photo: Apple TV+
We want to speak about chilly opens. The franchise that made them immortal started the customized by having 007 himself look like killed by Robert Shaw earlier than the title sequence of From Russia With Love, kicking off a convention of attention-grabbing pre-title set items that might stay an indicator of the collection. Forty-nine years later, Skyfall would repeat the gag of getting Bond look like killed earlier than the opening credit.
I don’t know if Blake Crouch, the novelist turned showrunner of Dark Matter, or Alik Sakharov, the director of the collection’ penultimate episode, are Bond-o-philes, however they’ve actually seen community dramas the place the chilly open has lengthy been commonplace. Some chapters of Dark Matter have featured chilly opens; Episode eight, “Jupiter,” inexplicably doesn’t.
Inexplicably, I say, as a result of the episode opens with Jason A, our hero, trying to homicide Jason B, the villain, within the alley behind Jason A’s home. At lengthy final, the “Schizoid Man”/Superman III/Terminator 2/Star Trek VI doppelgänger dustup we’ve considerably impatiently been ready for! And though Jason A has a knife and Jason B is armed solely with a trash bag, Jason B manages to repel the assault, smashing Jason A’s cranium into the asphalt. The man we’ve spent seven hours of tv rooting for is now lifeless. If that gasp-inducing second doesn’t belong earlier than the title sequence, I don’t know what the hecking heck does.
I wouldn’t make a difficulty of this had not Dark Matter’s sixth episode, “Superposition,” deployed a chilly open, trying to goose suspense by delaying its title sequence till ten minutes right into a 55-minute episode. And what occasion was deemed sufficiently shocking, stunning, intriguing, or in any other case dramatic to supply the little hit of narrative propellant to kick us right into a title sequence?
Daniela stating to her husband, whom we all know to be Jason B, that it’s bizarre that he’s began flossing now. Don’t you dare contact that Apple TV distant, True Believers!
So I’m deducting one full star for the absence of a chilly open in an episode that clearly calls for one, however in any other case this installment is fairly rattling good, delivering absolutely on the premise the prior episode’s concluding scene teased: The battle is not Jason A — or Jason One, as one among them refers to, uh, themselves on this episode — vs. Jason B. It’s a complete bunch of Jasons A (a flock of Jasons? A faculty of Jasons? A homicide of Jasons?) who’ve branched off from the one Jason B kidnapped and exiled to a international universe a few month in the past in story-time, versus the one Jason B.
All the Jasons A have been wronged by Jason B. All have suffered. Some of them, we study, have suffered worse than “the” Jason A we’ve been following has, bearing the seen scars of horrific accidents. All of them have fought their option to their dwelling dimension solely to search out themselves, fairly actually, redundant. The stakes have been raised!
After Jason B fights off his would-be murderer, Daniela goes to go to Ryan C — the auto-mechanic Ryan whom Jason B kidnapped and dropped at Jason A’s dimension to get the police off his again for Ryan A’s disappearance. Daniela is puzzled that Ryan, the good chemist who has been her good friend since faculty, now is aware of her solely as a buyer at his auto store (and that he claims to run an auto store). Asking him to explain what he remembers, Ryan C tells her some man he didn’t acknowledge stored shopping for him drinks. Showing Ryan C a photograph of Jason on her telephone, Daniela will get affirmation that Jason is accountable for Ryan C’s predicament.
Back on the Milshire Hotel, we see a person who certain seems like Jason A unwrap the knife we noticed him purchase final episode. Wait, didn’t we simply see him get killed whereas trying to chop Jason B with that very same knife? Well, one of him, yeah. Stepping into the hallway, he finds himself face-to-face with himself. One Jason flees, the opposite provides chase. Still one other, this one dressed within the goofy bear-patterned sweater we noticed him applicable from the snowbound home in episode four, steps out onto N. Milwaukee Avenue.
The Jason he’s pursuing eludes him by slipping into the Village Tap, the place tattooed barkeep Matt welcomes him. “I need a drink,” Jason says.
“That was quick,” Matt retorts. That’s when Jason A-1 spots Jason A-2 in a sales space. Matt clocks him, too.
Jason A-2 seems to have logged a couple of extra tough miles on his method again to this Chicago than Jason A-1. He’s sporting a watch cap, which doesn’t fully cowl an enormous stitched-up gash on his brow.
“I guess this was inevitable. That different versions of us would spawn in the box.,” Jason A-2 muses.
“Every choice I made in there created a different Jason,” Jason A-1 says, choosing up the thread. And each alternative every of these Jasons made, and so forth, and so forth.
Jason A-2 reveals that the Amanda who helped him escape from Velocity Labs perished in “a very dark world.” He’s relieved to listen to that Jason A-1’s Amanda discovered a welcoming world and selected to remain there. They’re each out of ampules.
The discuss rapidly turns to homicide. (Or suicide, technically?) “You must have thought of Kankakee, right?” asks Jason A-2. We don’t know what that’s, however the Jasons A agree they find out about “that first reserve” — huh? — due to Charlie. Which signifies that “Jason Two — that’s what I call him — doesn’t know about it.”
This is Jason A-2 speaking now. The one who noticed his Amanda die arrived again in Chicago a day sooner than Jason A-1 and had already dug a grave and procured a gun. He declares his intention to “make Jason Two pay.”
“We all think of ourselves as Jason One,” he says. “Can’t all be Jason One.”
“I don’t want to hurt you or anyone like us,” Jason A-2 declares. “But I’m not gonna let anyone get in the way of me being with Daniela and Charlie.”
He does his selves a stable and pays for his or her beers earlier than excusing himself.
Jason A-1 wakes up on a park bench earlier than shopping for himself breakfast at a diner. He has the identical e book of matches we noticed him choose up on the Village Tap the evening earlier than, which is how we all know he’s the identical Jason. He makes use of them to fireside up a stogie, proper in the midst of the diner. Being a pleasant man, he seems uncomfortable to be partaking in such poor conduct.
“You are a very rude man,” one other patron tells him. His server tells him he can’t smoke inside, as does her supervisor. The cop who reveals up, in a short time, to take him into custody has a well-known face: She’s Dawn, who in Jason B’s dwelling universe was the Velocity Labs leg-breaker who murdered Daniela. “How did you become a detective?” Jason A-1 asks her as she places him behind her cruiser.
Jason B is brushing his enamel methodically — he’s actually dedicated to oral hygiene, this sociopath — when Daniela is available in to ask if she will be able to take the Civic to run an errand. Jason B testily tells her to take Charlie’s automobile as a result of the corpse of the Jason he killed the prior evening remains to be within the trunk. Jason B has additionally evidently forgotten that he promised to take Charlie on a tour of the University of Chicago campus, which Charlie factors out as soon as the 2 of them are within the automobile. Jason B had deliberate on unloading that physique after dropping off Charlie in school, I suppose?
On their tour, Jason B factors out the home the place he first caught sight of Daniela and tells Charlie that had he not chosen to attend that celebration, he would’ve regretted it for the remainder of his life. Charlie is angered by this: “Your whole life hinged on a moment that was basically a freak accident,” he says, leaving unstated that he himself wouldn’t exist had his previous man not attended that celebration.
We already know Jason B lacks the bedside method to reply sympathetically to an outbreak of adolescence as extreme as this one, however he doesn’t even get the prospect to strive as a result of he spies yet one more Jason following the pair of them. This one has what seems like a considerable burn scar on the appropriate facet of his face. Jason B is attempting to maintain forward of this letter-unknown Jason with out tipping off Charlie that one thing is improper. It isn’t working.
Daniela, in the meantime, has used a pair of bolt cutters to interrupt into Jason B’s storage unit. You’d suppose these locations would have measures in place to stop this. Daniela finds a full field of ampules of Lavender Fairy, banded stacks of forex from different dimensions — hey, it’s Robert F. Kennedy’s face on the $20 invoice! — and unsecured cell telephones stuffed with images of what seems like her husband being surreptitiously noticed. The most intriguing clue is a pair of overalls with a reputation patch that reads “Ryan” over the breast. The Ryan she regarded as loopy had insisted that he’s a mechanic.
At the college library, Charlie is alarmed by his dad’s odd conduct. Jason B orders his not-yet-licensed-to-drive son to go accumulate the automobile and choose him up whereas Jason B tries to elude the wounded Jason on his heels. The pursuit culminates in our second Jason-v.-Jason mêlée of the episode, this one a males’s room brawl within the custom of True Lies or Mission: Impossible — Fallout, with the caveat that neither participant is a educated murderer, so it’s all lots messier. Jason B kills the scarface Jason, this one packing a distinct mannequin knife than the one we noticed a minimum of one Jason A purchase within the prior episode. He wants a second to gather himself after killing himself for the second time in possibly 12 hours, so he simply barely finds his method again exterior to rescue Charlie, who has been pulled over by a campus cop. Jason B manages to steer the cop to allow them to go earlier than the matter of the lifeless physique within the trunk comes up. You positively get factors in your license for that, and Charlie doesn’t even have a license but.
The subsequent scene is the massive payoff as Daniela bails Jason A out of jail following his arrest for inflicting a scene together with his huge stogie. Jason A tells her he hasn’t laid eyes on her because the evening he went to the Village Tap to have fun Ryan A’s Pavia Prize triumph and that getting himself arrested was a ploy to get her a spot the place they may discuss.
“That man isn’t me,” Jason A stammers. “He’s another version of me.”
He’s misplaced her lengthy earlier than he will get to “he has access to other realities,” so to show his wild story, Jason A begs Daniela to name him. In a beat right out of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Jason A stares silently at Daniela whereas she speaks on the telephone to the person whose voice matches his precisely. It’s a fortunate factor Jason B picked up. Jason A tells her to say to the impostor on the opposite finish of the road that she’d like to go to the Keys once more for Christmas, reasoning that Jason B gained’t know she’s referring to a visit that by no means occurred. It works.
Jason A begs Daniela to satisfy him later with Charlie at a location of her selecting as a result of anywhere he thinks of Jason B would doubtless guess. Without promising she’ll positively come, she names the Bean in Millennium Park. (If she’d used this beloved reflective sculpture’s formal title, Cloud Gate, we’d have cried foul.) He’s additionally intelligent sufficient to ask her to think about a secure phrase. Jupiter is what she chooses.
Returning dwelling, Daniela begins to textual content Charlie to summon him out to affix her within the automobile, however then erases the message and goes into the home. I don’t perceive this alternative. Inside, she finds Jason B in a state of alarm, telling her all of them must flee. She tries to talk privately with Charlie, in particular person and by way of textual content, however Jason B is watching them each like an interdimensional hawk. He retains telling Daniela to get a suitcase. Thinking on her toes, she asks him to assist her attain one within the basement after which hits him over the pinnacle as he begins down the steps.
The remaining moments are unhinged. As Charlie and Daniela attempt to escape in her automobile, they’re intercepted by Jason A, who hustles them each into his stolen trip. As he drives, he explains he hasn’t seen both of them since that evening on the Village Tap, that the person they’ve been residing with is a fraud, and so forth. Realizing that this Jason A isn’t the one she bailed out of jail, Daniela asks him to tug over. Just then, their automobile collides with one other one, this one pushed by nonetheless one other Jason A! Daniela and Charlie flee on foot as two Jasons A attempt to free themselves from their crumpled automobiles.
Arriving on the Bean, Daniela calls for that the Jason A ready for them there communicate their secure phrase. He does, after which wraps their son in his arms, maintaining his eyes on his spouse.
It’s a cathartic reunion. But what about all the opposite Jasons A who’ve fought their method again to their household to search out that they’ve been changed not simply by a grasping, gaslighting villain however by duplicates who, once more, are simply as aggrieved as they’ve been? This is a narrative whereby the losers are going to outnumber the winners by lots.
• We have affirmation finally that the Village Tap playlist consists of a minimum of one track that’s not the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” The track enjoying when two Jason As share a sales space and drink their pints collectively is Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna,” from the 1966 landmark Blonde on Blonde. Surely there’s a dimension on the market with a track known as “Visions of Jason” from the album Brown on Brown.
