Dark Matter season 2 gives the Dessens seven quiet months before it takes them apart
Dark Matter mirrored its 2016 ending for the Dessens in Season 1 — but Season 2 isn’t playing along.
Look, adapting a beloved book to TV is always a gamble—especially when you start fiddling with the ending. Fans of Dark Matter (like me, painfully attached to the finale on the page) know exactly what I mean. So it’s fair to say Apple TV’s version has taken a punt most writers would avoid: they’ve not just tweaked the ending, they’ve fully undone it at the start of Season 2. If you thought the last season landed in a suitably strange place, brace yourself—it gets yanked straight out from under you almost immediately.
Dark Matter Season 2 opens by ripping up the emotional closure of both the source novel and Season 1’s apparent ‘new life’ for the Dessens, bringing chaos right back through the door.
Upending the Happy Ending
The finale of both Crouch’s 2016 book and Dark Matter Season 1 ended with more Jason Dessens than you’d ever want to meet all descending on one timeline. Our ‘main’ Jason (played by Joel Edgerton) managed—just about—to escape with his wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and son Charlie (Oakes Fegley), using the infamous Box to vanish into the multiverse. It was quietly hopeful, if not straightforwardly cheerful. They were gone, and in theory, safe. The show hinted they’d finally get to live somewhere peaceful, with all the family drama and existential terror left behind.
Only, in Season 2’s opener, Crouch chucks that hope right in the bin. Those early, sun-drenched scenes of the Dessens living a charmed rural life? Do not get comfortable. Within minutes, yet another desperate, universe-hopping Jason tracks them down. What should be an awkward multiversal doppelgänger situation turns violent fast—Daniela is forced into a shocking act that qualifies as, well, killing another version of her own husband. If that wasn’t enough, after just seven months enjoying their hard-won tranquil corner of the cosmos, the police sniff out what happened. The family flees, again, cramming themselves back into the Box, with Charlie torn away from the tentative life he’d started building. The notion that they’d ever get a truly fresh start is unceremoniously scrapped, and it’s made painfully clear that epilogues can always be messed with if there’s a new season on the horizon.
Seven months in a new universe is all the Dessens get before things unravel completely.
- The Box: That weird multiversal device still has rules and limits unexplored in Season 1, and now Season 2 hints that Crouch’s got plenty left up his sleeve about what it can (and can’t) do.
- More Universes: The “escape plan” never looked sustainable, but now it’s official—no world is truly out of reach or consequence. If you ever wondered about the odds of random Jasons popping up: very high.
- Charlie: After all that trauma, the kid actually starts putting down roots in this universe—only for it to be ripped away all over again. Seriously grim.
The Book Always Left the Door Open
Truth is, if you actually go back to the novel’s ending, it was always a bit ambiguous. Satisfying, yes, in that deliberately unresolved, headscratcher way good science fiction thrives on. But Crouch’s show now chooses to race headlong into everything the book only hinted at—or left for fanfiction.
Season 2 doesn’t just pick up where the novel left off; it explodes the boundaries. The first season already wedged in new faces and subplots to pad out the universe, but this one’s gunning hard for questions that bugged readers (myself included): Can the Box be destroyed? Can it be moved? Are the other universes just superficial variations, or can things get properly unhinged? There’s an odd satisfaction in knowing that the showrunner asking and answering these questions is Crouch himself. The result: what was once clever sci-fi set-dressing is now actual storyline, and the show feels more unhinged (and more fun) because of it.