‘Dark Matter’ Creator On Where Jason Ended Up In Finale: “I Never Intended For Audience To Have Definitive Idea Where Family Ends Up”

Lynette Rice
·9-min read

SPOILER ALERT! This story contains plot points from the Apple TV series Dark Matter.

Dark Matter, the sci-fi starring Joel Edgerton as a physicist and family man who is abducted into an alternate version of his life, ended its nine-episode run June 26. Here, author Blake Crouch — who wrote the book that the series is based on — talks about the challenge of adapting his 2016 novel for the streamer and whether Jason and his family ended up in a good place.

More from Deadline

DEADLINE Before we delve into the finale, can you address why it took so long to get this to the small screen? The book was first optioned in 2014.

BLAKE CROUCH It was optioned as a film. It kind of spun around in film development until 2019. So for about five years, drafts of feature adaptations were written. I wrote one, a couple other guys came in and did passes, but we could really never get the script beyond a B. Just never felt great about it. We were missing the heart of what Dark Matter was because you have to do all this stuff in 110 minutes. Luckily we were able to move Dark Matter from Sony features over to Sony Television because even when we had sold to Sony features, Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg, who now run Apple, were the heads of Sony TV, and they were telling us, ‘guys, it’s a TV show.’ I immediately started thinking about what that adaptation might look like, and it just kind of all fell together. To go from 2019 into production three years later is pretty fast.

DEADLINE Originally when the script went out and you had meetings, was there any initial confusion over how the box works?

CROUCH Yeah. My day job is as a novelist and I have a cover designer, and I had him do up a deck so I could actually show people, ‘here’s the box, here’s what happens inside when you take the drug.’ I mean, it’s a very complicated thing to actually explain to people. We didn’t take a script out. We took a pitch out. Most people aren’t going to read a whole book just for a meeting. So it was a tricky pitch. I didn’t want people to be confused. Of course, we ended up selling it to Apple, who were fans of the book back when we were trying to make a movie. So there was a big shorthand with those guys.

DEADLINE You didn’t necessarily make it easy for folks to follow. There were times when I was confused, but you charged ahead. You didn’t do any intros like ‘this is bad, Jason’ and ‘here’s good Jason.’ Were there any discussions about providing some cheats for potentially confused viewers?

CROUCH No, I never wanted to make that version of the show. I knew what we were making was going to be grounded, adult cinema. I think fans of my books are very smart readers. I don’t dumb things down for them, and I was never intending to dumb the adaptation down for an audience. And I think the response speaks for itself. I think a lot of people do understand that and are on board with it. And if people don’t want to make that leap, and the idea of quantum mechanics doesn’t spike their curiosity and what it says about the path not taken and the choices in our lives, then no harm no foul.

DEADLINE Were you at in production when the strike came along?

CROUCH We had finished 10 days before. We had the first six scripts finished or in states of being finished [before production started]. The fifth episode was completely rewritten because one thing we were going to do with the VFX turned out to be catastrophically expensive. And so we came up with something that I think wound up being even cooler. We added some scenes. Once we saw what our actors could do — for instance, the plague scene from episode five was originally not going to be filmed because it was so close to the pandemic. I thought people wouldn’t want to watch a triggering scene about an even worse pandemic when we’re still in Covid. But by the time we were filming, we’re like, that’s going to be two years before this show comes out. I think we can do it.

DEADLINE Are there infinite amount of Jasons at any one time?

CROUCH Yes.

DEADLINE Once bad Jason went into the box, that triggered all the other Jasons coming forward, right?

CROUCH Correct. We called him Jason 2. We named them in the order in which they appeared.

DEADLINE How much did you obsess over what the box should look like?

CROUCH A lot. It was one of the first things we started working on after the show was greenlit in March of 2022. We brought on production designer Patricio Farrell, who’s amazing, and obviously the box is the first thing we wanted to figure out. It’s described pretty well in the book but of course, we wanted to kick the tires on a lot of things. And we came up with probably 50 designs, some of them wildly crazy, not even a box. Some of them looked incredibly futuristic, some of them looked cyberpunk. And we ultimately came back to a version of what was in the book, but we added a little dimensionality to it. So when the infinite corridor is in effect, you get a little bit more sense of depth because we have these little columns every 12 feet. It just gives the sense of how many boxes there are. Very subtle stuff, but it took a long time to get there. It also took a long time to figure out what the box was going to be wrapped in. We wanted it to look like metal, but didn’t want it to look like a boring black monolith. We explored it being made of sort of a black glass, like an obsidian, kind of like what your iPhone screen looks like. But that was going to raise way too many logistical issues with having to VFX out cameras and things like that. So we ultimately landed on the metal that it’s wrapped in, and our crew literally used this acid to distress the metal. That’s what the cloud effect looks like when you see the lighter areas of the box.

DEADLINE How was it for you in the adaptation process? Was it a lot harder than actually writing the book?

CROUCH In some ways, yes. It’s just so much more logistically to handle and so many more people and personalities. But we always had the bones of the story. We were basing it on the book, and we had a beginning, middle, and end that everyone loved. So those guardrails were just so helpful and important throughout the season. Other things were harder. Was it harder than writing the book? Absolutely. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

DEADLINE Was this enough episodes? Did you want more?

CROUCH No, it was the perfect amount. In fact, we were originally going to do eight episodes. Episode five was not originally contemplated as one of the episodes. It was going to be eight. And then it started to feel a little bit like we were rushing through Amanda (Alice Braga) and Jason’s journey together, and when they finally go their separate ways, we wanted audiences to feel like that was a legitimate option for Jason to stay with her. So we went to Apple and said, ‘Hey, I think we actually need one more episode.’ And they were like, okay.

DEADLINE I loved that scene for multiple reasons. One, because it happened in the Obama building.

CROUCH Oh, there’s so many Easter eggs in the show. There’s a ton of things for observant audience members to pick up. There’s a bunch of references to my other books, to other people’s books. I’m in the show, my wife’s in the show, one of our dogs is in the show, one of my kids is in the show. Keep an eye on the theater marquees. Anytime you see a theater marquee, there’s something going on.

DEADLINE What episode were you in?

CROUCH Seven. There’s a grizzled bar patron drinking out of a bucket of beers. That’s me. My son is at the end of episode eight, the very last shot at Millennium Park at the Bean.

DEADLINE So can we believe that Jason and his family ended up back in Amanda’s Chicago?

CROUCH I never intended for the audience to have a definitive idea of where the family ends up, just like what happens in the book.

DEADLINE All these the other Jasons, are they really that bad?

CROUCH Most of them, no. They are all offshoots of our hero, Jason. Some of them come off as a little more erratic and dangerous because of events that happened to them as they’re traveling through the corridor and the box and encountering even maybe worse things than our Jason encountered. It kind of broke their brain, but they are all essentially the same version of our hero, Jason. They were all the same person in the pilot episode. In fact, they were basically all the same person until they’re abducted by Jason 2.

DEADLINE You never actually explained what the liquid was that they inject themselves with, right?

CROUCH We don’t say what the actual chemical compound is made of, but it is a chemical that triggers certain regions of the brain and the prefrontal cortex, essentially putting them to sleep with the theory being that even if you’re inside the box, if you’re not under the effects of this drug, nothing happens because you’re still observing reality. You are collapsing all possible realities into one reality inside the box. But if you can shut down that part of your brain, then you can observe all possible realities, which is visually explained as the infinite corridor.

DEADLINE What was it like working with Joel Edgerton?

CROUCH He’s such an incredible human, first of all. But he’s also not just an actor. He is a writer and a director himself. So he brings that skillset, which is an added bonus. He contributed beyond his amazing performance. A lot of the cool things that aren’t in the book are in the show because they came from ideas he had.

DEADLINE I’m sure you were asked this many times when you first wrote the book, did something in your life triggered this idea in the first place?

CROUCH I was going through a little bit of a midlife crisis in my late thirties when I was writing this book and wondering about the path not taken, what if I’d done this instead of that. And out of those questions, this story came.

DEADLINE It really could work as a series.

CROUCH I think that a little bit of the alternate worlds goes a long way. I think people are interested in them, but they’re not as interesting as following the characters along on their journeys. So for us, it was always about, let’s let the show have as much as it needs to have in terms of episodes to breathe and to tell the story correctly. But we never wanted to feel like revamping that. Every episode is packed full of meaningful plot that pushes the story along. So we never really contemplated getting longer and more episodic with it.

DEADLINE What is next for you?

CROUCH I’d love to finish my next book, which, so that’s next on deck. My publisher’s pretty great and understanding. I think they knew this was a passion project of mine doing Dark Matter, at least in what I thought was the right way. So they’ve been patient with me.

Best of Deadline

Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next
  • Up next

Latest stories