One of the more persistent frustrations with Dark Matter has been what the series has done – or hasn’t done – with Jennifer Connelly.
For much of the story, Daniela has been forced into reaction mode while multiple versions of Jason Dessen have dictated the action around her. Jason No. 2 stole her life. Jason No. 1 fought his way back to her. And Daniela, despite being played by arguably the most accomplished performer in the ensemble, has largely been left processing the consequences.
This week, the series finally begins correcting that imbalance.
The episode picks up after Leighton No. 2 arrives in analog Chicago, where Jason No. 1, Daniela, and Charlie have tried to build a new life. Jason immediately views Leighton’s appearance as proof that destroying or neutralizing the box may be impossible.
That realization creates a much bigger problem than Leighton himself.
The Dessens may never again be able to believe any home is truly theirs. Anyone could arrive through the box. Another Jason could surface. Their identities could become vulnerable again. What initially seemed like escape has become something closer to permanent exile.
They are dimensional nomads.
Jason’s first instinct is familiar: pack up and run.
Charlie has had enough. “I’m done with your box bullshit,” he tells his father before laying out everything the different versions of Jason have cost him.
Charlie’s anger gives the episode its strongest emotional grounding. Unlike his parents, he has actually begun building a life in this Chicago. He has friends, a girlfriend, college ahead, and even a job. To Jason, relocation is protection. To Charlie, it means losing everything yet again because of decisions made by versions of his father.
His refusal also forces Jason and Daniela to confront what remains after the adventure supposedly ends.
The episode cares less about multiversal spectacle than about what living through that spectacle does to a marriage.
Daniela loves the man who crossed realities to get back to her, but that doesn’t mean he is still precisely the man she knew. Jason No. 1 has been changed by the box, by survival and perhaps even by some of the ambition and curiosity that defined Jason No. 2.
And Daniela has changed just as much.
The episode underlines that idea during a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, where Daniela and Charlie stand before Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Charlie notes the diner’s apparent lack of a visible exit, turning Hopper’s famously isolated figures into an obvious metaphor for the family itself.
It isn’t exactly subtle.
But using one of Chicago’s most recognizable cultural institutions as the setting works beautifully for a series that has continually treated the city as more than scenery.
Daniela later runs through the city and ends up at her father’s former bakery, suggesting she is beginning to consider something she’s rarely been afforded throughout the series: a future defined by her own choices rather than Jason’s.
That question of identity runs through the episode.
If circumstances can turn one Jason into a loving husband and another into the man who steals someone else’s life, then identity is less fixed than anyone would like to believe. Experiences change people. Trauma changes them. Opportunity changes them.
And perhaps surviving the box doesn’t mean returning to who you were before it.
Elsewhere, Jason No. 2, Amanda No. 2, and Ryan No. 1 continue traveling together as they look for a world where Ryan can remain.
The two Ryans continue to provide some of the episode’s funniest moments, particularly when they wind up at Chicago’s Village Tap and convince the bartenders they are long-lost identical twins.
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One of them invents a story involving the woman who supposedly kidnapped and raised him. The other immediately supplies the detail that makes the lie sing: her name is Joyce.
It is a welcome bit of comedy in an otherwise melancholy hour.
Their story also mirrors what is happening between Daniela and Jason.
Jason No. 2 and Amanda once shared an intimate partnership that the box ultimately destroyed. Now the Jason who began as the show’s antagonist seems increasingly capable of understanding the damage his own ambition caused.
Jason No. 1, meanwhile, can’t fully suppress his fascination with the machine he’s spent so much time trying to destroy.
The two men may be moving closer together psychologically even as their lives move further apart.
By the episode’s end, both Daniela and Jason No. 2 are effectively seekers, unsure exactly what comes next but increasingly aware that returning to the past may no longer be possible.
That gives Connelly something the series has too rarely provided her: agency.
Daniela is no longer merely the wife everyone is fighting over.
She is finally beginning to ask what she wants.
And for Dark Matter, that may be a more interesting question than what happens when somebody opens the next door.
Episode 5 drops tomorrow.
