One of the most interesting ideas running through Dark Matter is that identity is shaped as much by circumstance as by character. The Jasons are the clearest example.
They may share the same basic DNA, memories, and intelligence, but one choice sends them down radically different paths. One Jason becomes the devoted husband and father willing to tear through the multiverse to get back to his family. Another becomes the guy everyone would very much like to punch.
As Blair points out in this week’s episode, they are essentially working with the same hardware. What changes is the life built around it.
Season 2, Episode 6, “What the Universe Is Made Of,” written by Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry and Blake Crouch and directed by Amit Gupta, leans directly into that idea as the Dessen family continues to splinter.
After last week’s detour, the focus returns largely to Jason, Daniela and Charlie, although “family” is becoming an increasingly loose term.
The episode introduces a useful scientific metaphor for what is happening to all of them: quantum entanglement.
Jason explains that two particles can remain connected even after being separated by enormous distances. A star could explode, scattering them across the universe, and somehow one can still affect the other.
Subtle? Not particularly.
Effective? Absolutely.
That is basically where the Dessens find themselves now.
They are separated geographically, emotionally, and, in some cases, dimensionally, but they remain bound together in ways none of them fully understands.
Daniela heads for the woods.
Daniela has left Chicago behind and retreated to a remote family lake house, seeking peace after everything she has endured.
The opening, set to Pearl Jam’s Present Tense, gives the sequence a distinctly Gen-X melancholy. Daniela arrives in a world that feels quieter, warmer, and more grounded than anything she has experienced lately.
For a while, it works.
Then her stepfather, Gabriel Vargas, shows up.
Played by Gil Birmingham, Gabriel brings out a side of Daniela we rarely get to see. Their relationship feels lived-in almost immediately. He senses that something is wrong with her, even if he cannot possibly understand what.
Daniela slips surprisingly easily back into the role of daughter. That becomes much more complicated when Gabriel receives a phone call from his actual daughter, who happens to be alive and well in San Francisco.
Suddenly, the woman standing in his house looks exactly like Daniela, paints like Daniela, and knows him like Daniela. But she isn’t his Daniela.
The scene works because the show does not overplay it. There is no giant confrontation. Gabriel simply looks shaken and tells her that he just spoke to his daughter.
Sometimes the quietest multiverse moments are the strangest.
Jason remembers he is a scientist
Back in the analog world, Jason is becoming increasingly drawn toward something he gave up long ago: ambition. For much of his life, Jason chose family over the scientific career he might have had. Now, after dismantling and studying the box, his curiosity has been reawakened.
A conversation with this world’s Amanda helps push him further.
Amanda never became the doctor she once hoped to be. Her life took another turn when her mother spent her college money opening the diner she now runs.
She tells Jason not to make the same mistake she did by forgetting about himself.
He is a physicist. Maybe he should start acting like one.
Soon Jason is working on a paper called “The Shadow of Quantum Entanglement in the Macroscopic World,” which sounds exactly like something you tell people you’re excited to read and then quietly hope they never ask about again.
Blair, meanwhile, encourages him.
She knows another version of Jason was capable of extraordinary scientific achievement, and she understands that this Jason has the same raw ability.
Different choices. Same hardware.
There is something almost bittersweet about watching Jason discover that Jason 2 may have been right about one thing: a part of him still wants more professionally.
Blair finds Leighton
Blair also gets one of the episode’s more intriguing developments when she encounters Leighton. Initially, she assumes this is simply the version of Leighton native to the analog world.
Nope.
It is the Leighton she knows.
And apparently, he has been very busy.
This world’s lack of a digital footprint makes it an ideal base of operations, letting him introduce technology from more advanced realities and profit from innovations that don’t yet exist here.
Eventually, Leighton takes Blair underground through a series of abandoned freight tunnels and reveals an enormous hidden project.
Whatever he is building appears to take the box concept to another level.
And judging by where the story seems headed, it will probably cause problems.
Because on Dark Matter, enormous secret scientific structures rarely exist simply because somebody needed extra storage.
Charlie makes a dangerous choice
Charlie may be the episode’s most quietly unsettling part.
College is not going particularly well.
He parties, oversleeps, ignores Daniela’s calls, and generally drifts through a life he once desperately wanted.
Then Jason tells him something extraordinary.
During his travels through the multiverse, Jason met a version of Max, Charlie’s twin brother who died in their world. In that reality, Max survived.
Charlie immediately wants to know everything. Jason describes him as quick-witted, empathetic, and, affectionately, “kind of a little bit of a dick.” For Charlie, the revelation completely changes what the box represents.
Until now, it has largely been the thing that destroyed his family’s life.
But if somewhere in the multiverse there is a version of the brother he never got to know, the box suddenly offers something else.
Possibility.
By the closing montage, Charlie has made his decision.
He enters the abandoned swimming pool facility, takes an ampoule of Lavender Wings and walks into the box.
He is going looking for Max.
And nothing about that seems likely to end simply.
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The family is still connected
By the end of the episode, the Dessen family has been scattered even further.
Daniela reaches back into the past. Jason is moving toward a professional future he once abandoned. Charlie is literally stepping into another universe searching for the brother he lost.
They are all going in different directions.
Yet the episode’s idea of entanglement suggests the distance may not matter.
The series has spent two seasons showing us infinite versions of people created by different choices. Now it is asking something slightly different:
What happens when those people try to become someone new?
Jason is rediscovering the scientist inside himself. Daniela is searching for an identity that exists outside her marriage and family. Charlie is beginning his own journey rather than simply following his parents through theirs.
For a show built around infinite worlds, Dark Matter is becoming increasingly interested in something much smaller.
The choices that make one person different from another.
And whether the people we love can remain connected after those choices pull us apart.
Dark Matter Episode 7, “The Pyramid,” begins streaming tonight at 7 PM CST on Apple TV+.
