This post contains spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of Dark Matter.
The Dessens finally seem to have what they’ve been fighting for. When Season 2 of Apple TV’s Dark Matter opens, Jason and Daniela Dessen (played by Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly, respectively) are living a seemingly ordinary life in the woods, discussing a leaky roof, drinking coffee and making plans for the weekend. And after the mind-bending events of Season 1, the quiet feels almost too good to be true.
It is.
Based on Blake Crouch’s bestselling novel, Dark Matter returns with Jason, Daniela, and their son, Charlie (Oakes Fegley), having spent seven months in a reality that finally feels like home. But the Season 2 premiere, “A Quiet Life,” quickly makes it clear that the family cannot simply settle into a new world and forget everything that happened before.
“They don’t stay there very long,” Connelly tells Gold Derby. “It was nice — kind of the way it was in Season 1 — where we have a flash of things being stable and then everything sort of takes off from there.”
There is, however, an important difference this time around. In Season 1, Jason and Daniela’s original life is fractured early, separating the couple as Jason becomes trapped among alternate realities. In the Season 2 premiere, they face the new threat together.
That threat arrives in the form of another Jason. Daniela encounters him inside their home, and the difference between the two is immediately clear. This version of her husband is dressed differently and has no wedding ring, instead wearing an elastic around the finger where the ring would be.
He reminds Daniela of the life they shared, including their first meeting, their marriage, and the night they held their son together at the hospital. He asks her to make a different choice and stay with him. When he becomes aggressive, Daniela grabs the gun hidden in her room and shoots him.
For Connelly, that moment represents a profound rupture for her character.
“She’s done something she never thought she would be capable of doing,” the Oscar winner says. “I think it’s wildly confusing because it’s someone who looks exactly like the person that she loves. What does that mean? What does it mean that she kind of then moves on and is able to kind of try and pack that away and dismiss it? What does that say about her? She starts wrestling with all of those questions and starts to really doubt herself and it brings her to a really vulnerable place.”
The family’s escape eventually leads Charlie to confront Jason with the reality of their situation: as long as the Box exists, they may never be able to stop another version of Jason from finding them. That pushes Jason toward a decision that has been hanging over him since Season 1 — destroying the dimension portal that is the Box.
For Edgerton, however, the choice is complicated. “I think there’s a conflict in Jason that is the awareness that, in order to be really safe, one choice is to destroy the Box, but if they were to destroy it too early, they could be stuck in a place where it is still dangerous,” he explains.
“In Season 1 we see Jason’s self-deception about, ‘I think we should destroy the Box,’” the actor continues. “And the moment he makes that decision, we realize he’s unable to do it because he’d rather understand it and see how it works for his own selfish reasons.”
The premiere also begins to redefine what a “perfect” world means for the Dessens. Jason’s expectations, for example, have become remarkably modest.
“I think that the answer to that for them is maybe a little elusive,” Edgerton says. “They’re putting a value on it as being a place where no one’s going to bother them, that they’re safe from the other versions of Jason, somewhere where they can earn money and Charlie can go to school. They’re looking for the simple mechanics of a life, you know, food, air, maybe a basic life that we should all take for granted.”
But that simple goal becomes complicated by the way Jason and Daniela process everything they have been through. “Jason is on his journey and is sort of looking elsewhere because he’s dreaming about the Box and what could he have been and where could that take him,” Connelly says. “And he’s sort of going further and further away from the family into exploring the Box, and Daniela is sort of retracting further and further into herself because she doesn’t feel safe anymore.”
“The existence of the Box even in this stable world is kind of pulling them in different directions,” she adds. “It’s not so much this little literal physical world right now as their inability to be in it together.”
The premiere’s final moments are poised to bring that tension into the next chapter. Jason, Daniela, and Charlie enter the Box looking for somewhere they can start over. Jason opens a door, looks at the world on the other side … and immediately recognizes it. “I think I’ve been here before,” he says.
The cliffhanger points toward a part of Jason’s journey that he may not have completely left behind: his connection to Amanda (Alice Braga). “I think that’s a sort of a hint … to the reminder of a kind of a part of his journey that he left behind, a friendship that he left behind, a guilt that he experiences in regards to Amanda,” Edgerton says. “A reminder of that friendship or relationship as a place that is maybe not somewhere for us to go as a family.”
