Apple TV's 'Dark Matter' Season 2 Is an Enjoyable Headache | Review

Published Aug 28, 2026, 3:00 AM EDT

Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women’s sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She’s covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling’s best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.

Season 2 of ***Dark Matter ***opens on more than a dozen bodies laid out in a row, every one of them Jason Dessen in a different set of clothes. It’s an efficient way to remind viewers where Blake Crouch’s Apple TV adaptation left off two years ago, and it’s a fair warning about what’s coming, because the new season has more versions of this man than it can find room for.

Here, we’ll do you the favor of recapping Dark Matter’s first installment. Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), a physicist and professor walking home one night in Chicago, gets abducted into an alternate version of his own life by, well, himself — or, at least, the version of himself who chose the career over domesticity. That Jason built a device called the Box that moves people between parallel universes, then used it to take Jason’s wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). The first season is a tense, stakes-laden chase through infinite realities as Jason fights to get home, only to discover that dozens of alternate Jasons had the same idea. It ends with the family fleeing into the Box together, letting Charlie choose their destination so no other version could follow.

Season 2 of that journey starts well. The Dessens have had seven months in a world that finally seems safe before an alternate Jason turns up at their door, claiming to be the original. The family runs, picks another door. By the second episode, the season is also tracking Amanda (Alice Braga) and Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) trying to find their way back, Leighton Vance (Dayo Okeniyi) chasing his vision of a perfect world, and Blair (Amanda Brugel) trying to stop him.

Edgerton was the reason that Season 1 held together, and that hasn’t changed. He stays watchable even when the show around him buckles under its own ambition. The trouble is that the Jasons he’s inhabiting this time have drifted so far from one another that recognizing them as the same man takes work the story doesn’t reward. Our Jason sinks deeper into his obsession with the Box. The other one has partnered with an alternate Leighton on a plan to strip technology and ideas out of healthier universes and haul them home to fix their own broken one, a project he has convinced himself is altruistic.

Connelly, meanwhile, gets the season’s most gutting material and not nearly enough screen time to do it justice. Her Daniela is unraveling, growing more paranoid with every door they open. Connelly plays that fear so raw, you wish the show would just park the camera on her face and let her work. Instead, the plot keeps yanking us elsewhere. Simpson gets the funniest line of the season while he and Amanda are stuck in a world too colorful and too polite to trust. “No one’s getting banged here,” he says. “They’re just generously knocking.” There’s also an agent named Macnamara (Chris Diamantopoulos) working the case of the bodies, a man who belongs to no named law enforcement agency but does enjoy the donuts. He only matters when he’s actually on-screen, a problem so many characters in Dark Matter share.

window.arrayOfGalleries[“article-gallery-1-1818123309”] = ’“<div class=“w-gallery-carousel”><section id=“main-carousel-1-1818123309” class=“splide splide-gallery” data-gallery-expanded-id=“main-expanable-carousel-1-1818123309” data-gallery-expanded-thumbnail-id=“expanded-gallery-thumbnails-1-1818123309”><button class=“expand icon i-expand” type=“button”></button><div class=“splide__track”><ul class=“splide__list” style=“—gallery-aspect-sm: 2 / 1; —gallery-aspect-md: 2 / 1; —gallery-aspect-lg: 2 / 1;” ><li class=“splide__slide gallery-main-img”>