Season 2 of “Dark Matter” opened on a safe word and a hidden gun, with a married couple trained to doubt the man who walked in through their own front door. The finale, “No Quiet Life”, spends the whole episode taking that arrangement apart. It does so with crosscutting that is more mechanical and more merciless than anything the season has tried. Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and Charlie (Oakes Fegley) each get a mission, a clock hangs over all of them, and the show finally has to decide what the box is worth to the people who keep paying for it.
Apple TV released the finale on the night of Thursday, October 29th, ahead of its listed Friday date, and Blake Crouch and Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry are credited with the script, according to TV Obsessive. It is a well-built episode, with three storylines timed to collide, and the way they collide is where the argument starts. The ending asks viewers to accept a cruelty that the characters have only partly earned, and whether that lands is a harder call than the polish suggests. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Dark Matter” season 2 and for every death, reveal and cliffhanger in the finale.
It is a well-built episode, with three storylines timed to collide, and the way they collide is where the argument starts.”
The first scene finds Daniela and a Jason who has been traveling with her in the corridor, having just seen the last of Agent MacNamara (Chris Diamantopoulos). He is the man who came to investigate the dead Jasons in the premiere. This Jason asks after Charlie and trades a memory of the twins as small boys. In the middle of the laugh he opens a door, because holding a memory of a person is how the box finds a world. He will not follow her through, since his presence would only confuse her son and himself, and what he says instead is “Thank you for a really great life”, which plays as a farewell to the marriage. Daniela lets herself into the house in the world where Max is still alive and runs into the Daniela who lives there. That Daniela spends the scene telling her to forgive herself for the Jason she shot in the premiere. She finds Charlie there with Max, the twin who is alive in this world, and he agrees to come back with her to the world where the family has settled.
Elsewhere, Ryan Holder (Jimmi Simpson) and Amanda Lucas (Alice Braga) walk into Velocity while Leighton is off touring the worlds he has been trying to fix. They get Oluko instead, the meditation-teacher version of Leighton Vance (Dayo Okeniyi), who hands over the cure for the Black Iris Plague. Back at the abandoned school where the box sits, the plan comes together. Jason and Blair (Amanda Brugel) will travel to the world where the original box stands and upload a hacking tool Blair built, which is meant to disentangle every box in the multiverse. Ryan and Amanda will deliver the cure to the world the plague is ravaging, and all four sync their watches for one hour and agree to meet at the Village Tap. Oluko, who has had Sandra tailing them, orders her to keep the group out of the box, and she arrives with a gun, which sets off the loudest stretch of the season. The fight follows Jason and Blair into the corridor, and each door they open lands somewhere worse than the last. First comes a Chicago turned war zone, and then a world where gravity has quit and Blair nearly floats away. Jason ends it by throwing the gun and then Sandra out the door, which kills her.
Back at Velocity, Leighton returns from his tour with little to show for it, and what he saw has turned him against his own project. A crop he introduced to one world, after Mount Rainier erupted, has turned invasive and killed whatever else grew. In another world, a version of himself let a plague cure go only to the rich. He tells all of it to Jason 2, the Jason who built the first box, who agrees that nobody can control the thing. The two decide to shut the Pyramid down, since Leighton has already installed a kill switch in it, and to go open the bar they used to talk about. Leighton wants to tell Oluko first, and the audience understands from the moment he says it that this is the mistake. Oluko, the version who never had anyone to lean on, takes the news as a betrayal. The argument ends with him hitting Leighton over the head and strangling him.
Oluko lies to Jason 2 that Leighton agreed to let him use the Pyramid to find a new home, but the sweat and the scratches on his face give him away. Jason 2 shuts the machine down a moment too late, because Oluko, who has learned to see the corridor without the drug, is already gone when the door opens. Crouch told Collider that “our north stars for the second season” were Oluko killing Leighton and Daniela and Charlie ending up stranded, a pair of outcomes the writers knew from the start. Jason 2 finds his friend’s body in the office, and the finale stops being a heist and becomes a tragedy. At the original box, meanwhile, the code injector has been knocked about in the fight with Sandra. Blair repairs it well enough, and the pair start a ten-minute countdown. Velocity security arrives in the lab moments later, and they have to slip back into the box.
Ryan and Amanda, rattled by the clock, take several tries to find the right world. They arrive to a box inside a quarantine tent and a ring of soldiers who hold them at gunpoint, until that world’s Leighton draws the crowd away and nods them toward the door. Jason and Blair cannot find their way home either, until Blair has Jason remember how Charlie reached the right world in the first place. They make it back with less than a minute on the clock, and when Jason checks the box afterward he finds it “dead as a doornail”, so the mission is a success. At that same moment, in the corridor, Daniela and Charlie are about to open their own door when the shutdown reaches them, and a ripple passes through the two of them.
Jason, who believes Daniela is visiting her father, goes home to clear out his research and finds the note she left, which says she went into the box after Charlie. Crouch told Collider that Jason drops his research on top of the note, and that he only realized recently, after someone mentioned it on Reddit, that this is “a nice metaphor for what he’s done the whole season, which is to put his work above the family.” At the Village Tap, Blair, Ryan and Amanda are already reunited when Jason walks in wrecked, and the mood goes with him. The last shot belongs to Daniela and Charlie, who open the door and look out at a world the episode never shows. Crouch told Reactor that it is not the one where Max is alive.
Whether that ending lands probably depends on how much of Jason’s blindness the season has earned, and the honest answer is less than the finale needs. The machinery is tidy, each of the three storylines pays off at the moment the box dies, and the image of research piled on a love note is the best thing the episode does. But the plan leaves most exits open. The Pyramid was only taken offline, Oluko can travel without the drug, and a Jason who knows how to build one box can arguably build another. The cost of destroying this one is steep in feeling and soft in consequence.
The season began with a premiere called “A Quiet Life” and ends on an episode that denies it, and the symmetry is neat enough to be suspicious. Apple has not yet announced a third season. Crouch told Collider there is no news yet, only “a very cool notion for a third season, which would wrap up the show, if we’re so fortunate”, and Ben-Zekry has said the team designed the whole series as three seasons. That would make this finale a second act, and a second act is allowed to end on a wound. The risk is that the wound is the one the show has pressed all season, a family split by the box, and a third season that treats it as a puzzle instead of a grief might not be worth the wait.
What Do You Think? Does a dead box make the Dessens’ story smaller, or does it finally let the show be about the family? Could Oluko, who no longer needs the drug to cross, become the only way back to Daniela and Charlie, and would Jason trust him with it? And did Jason deserve the note he never saw, or is the finale punishing him for a mistake the writers arranged?
See you on the next binge!
