Dark Matter (2024)

Crouch has made a few improvements to character arcs and closed a few loopholes from his page-turner of a book, but he has also stretched a propulsive plot that kept the physics accessible to more than nine hours that make you feel every minute. There is a lot of wheelspinning and longueurs that make you wish it was either a six-parter or perhaps a really good, tight four.

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. .... 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.

It can make you tired after awhile, keeping things sorted, and “Dark Matter” does go on for a while, though Crouch is careful to turn his midlife crisis drama into an action film at regular intervals. Things grow more and more complicated, as the very premise suggests they must, and at some point you may just be wondering how, or even if, Crouch is going to dig his protagonists out of the hole he’s dug for them; I’m sure some of you, smarter than I, will have worked it out.

Not as ambitious as Foundation, nor as brain-taxing as Constellation, this ‘what if?’ series hits the spot nonetheless, maintaining Apple’s status as the default home of thoughtful, adult-orientated sci-fi.

Notable epiphanies and lasting meaning are glaringly absent, which feels all the more unjustifiable since the series is so devoid of fun. It’s unflagging gloom and one-note characters limit its capacity to shake anything loose within the audience.

Dark Matter falls somewhere in the middle of that pack, which is to say, you ultimately won’t miss all that much if you leave this door closed.

Everything that it offers can be found somewhere more interesting, and we are all better off putting ourselves in front of those pieces of media instead of something that feels uninspired in the way that this show unfortunately does.

It’s a series that doesn’t lack for ingenuity and, especially in the last two hours, ideas pop up that border on inspired, but the lack of tonal variation ultimately dooms Dark Matter. It’s an unrelenting dirge that could have benefitted from an occasional dose of fun and perhaps an occasional willingness to trust whimsy delivered without momentum-draining explanations.

Nine hours feels punishing. And even when the later installments finally start embracing the weirdness of the premise, the specific idea is introduced so poorly, it takes multiple scenes across two different episodes before it’s completely clear what’s happening. Too much of the earlier plot is so telegraphed that the audience is perpetually ahead of the characters; by the end, the reverse has happened, but too clumsily for the surprise to properly land.