Dark Matter, review: multiple universe drama suffers from multiple episode syndrome

The head-scratching idea that we might exist in an infinite set of parallel universes is ripe with dramatic possibility. According to so-called quantum multiverse theory, the life you lead in a neighbouring reality can be subtly or entirely different. That’s the secret at the heart of Dark Matter (Apple+ TV), in which Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), a blameless physics lecturer with a wife and a son, is kidnapped from his happy humdrum life in Chicago.

His masked kidnapper – and here’s what the head-scratching starts – is soon revealed to be none other than himself. This alt-Jason has beamed in from another reality. A brilliant physicist who invented the black box that enables quantum travel, he lives to work, where his rival self works to live. Never having had a family, like a cuckoo he steals it from the multiverse.

The script, adapted by novelist Blake Crouch from his own 2016 sci-fi thriller, offers much scope for visual spectacle. Jason opens the door into Chicagos variously stricken by drought, drowned by risen waters, half-buried in snow, blighted by plague and – in the pleasantest version – basking in happiness. This sunny Windy City even has an Obama Building.

It’s a mad professor’s plot. “Do you know how that sounds?” says an uninitiated character when Jason tries explaining its convolutions. That Crouch’s clever concept doesn’t spring from a wholly original place is acknowledged. When we first meet him Jason is lecturing his students on Schrodinger’s alive/dead cat. Later he (or one of him) goes past a cinema where It’s a Wonderful Life is on, or walks over a carved inscription from Four Quartets: “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened.”

Whether Dark Matter absorbs as drama depends on how much anyone can take of Edgerton. With a smudgy sort of straight face, he’s good at veering from vaguely hunky everyman to conscienceless brainiac. “Oh my gosh, you’re my hero,” says his wife, Daniela (Jennifer Connelly, given a lot less room to manoeuvre), when, as yet unkidnapped, he gets her a coffee in the first episode.

Whether he will turn out to be the hero or villain of his own life/lives plays out across nine episodes, which feels too many. As the real Jason tries to retrieve the existence stolen from him, the episodes seem to multiply as if miming the unending multiverse. In the end, sifting through a motorway pile-up of alternative realities starts to look like a game of Whac-a-Mole.

The first two episodes of Dark Matter are on Apple TV+ now, with a new episode weekly