Based on the book by Blake Crouch, “Dark Matter” opens promisingly. The always-good and often-great Edgerton plays Jason Dessen, a Chicago-based physicist with a loving wife named Daniela (Connelly) and a teen son named Charlie (Oakes Fegley). As he celebrates the announcement that his buddy Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) has just won the Pavia Prize, one can sense a little wondering about what could have been behind Jason’s eyes. He’s clearly made some career sacrifices to be a family man, and while regret may be a strong word, we all wonder what might have been if we hadn’t put down roots with a partner and children. Jason’s kind of going to find out.
Of course, a show like this needs to explain Schrodinger’s Cat again, which Jason does in one of his classes, foreshadowing a program wherein two things will be possible simultaneously. After celebrating with Ryan one night and getting a job offer to join him on his next project in San Francisco, Jason is walking home when he’s kidnapped … by himself. Jason2 (also Edgerton, of course) drugs Jason and puts him in a box, sending him across the multiverse to an alternate existence in which Dessen made a different choice at a crucial point in his life.
Fifteen years ago, when Daniela told him she was pregnant, Jason2 chose work over family. Now, having developed a technology to travel to alternate universes, he wants to see the road not taken. While Jason2 takes the place of the original, the “real” Jason is forced to try to find a way back to his reality, leading to some real “Inception”-esque chaos in the mid-section of the season as he travels (with Alice Braga’s Amanda) across a very different version of the multiverse than Marvel ever imagined.