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January 27: The Matter with Dark Matter

 I just finished what I suppose is the first season of Dark Matter, on Apple TV. I kept watching, so that says something for it. I liked it. 

Even though it is preposterous. 

I love that word. It sounds like a medieval monster, or maybe a dinosaur. 

The show is based on the idea of multiverses. Multiverses come from the idea that every decision we make starts a new course of a life split off from the one we are following.  I choose to take a different route to my job one morning. I get into a wreck I wouldn't have if I had stayed on the usual way, or maybe I see a sign about tryouts for a play and decide I need to get back into theatre. What happened to the me who could have gone the usual, no-accident route or not seen the sign? She's still there, but living a different time line in her own "-verse." So, theoretically, there are millions of me living parallel to me but I can't see them. 

So we get to see a lot of versions of the actor Joel Edgerton, who is from New South Wales, Australia. Hundreds of them, thanks to CGI or AI or something. He fights himself, kills himself, runs into himself in another car. Why? Because one of the other versions is able to come into the original Joel Edgerton's life, kidnap him, and take over his identity. This is because Joel (not his name in the show) is a physicist who in one of the -verses invented a "box" that allows something called superposition that lets them open doors into other versions of Chicago IF they have a certain drug and IF they have the right frame of mind. Otherwise, no telling what you get into outside the door--nuclear winter? a crumbling Chicago waterfront? 

Joel has to use the "box" and the drugs to keep trying different doors hoping it opens onto his real life in Chicago at the right time so he can get back to his family, his beautiful but anorexic looking wife (Jennifer Connelly, still beautiful but really thin and angular) and son. This means many, many door openings. Along the way he hooks up with a charming psychologist who is also trying to get home (a plot hole--they couldn't find the same universe and it be right for both of them), finds out that in each multiverses there is a different version of him, starts running into more and more copies, and in the end ..... well, you can watch it. 

Or after my description you decide, I'll pass. Actually, I liked it. But it is preposterous. For one, the physics, two, the box, and three, that his life is so perfect with Jennifer and the son. Jennifer needs to eat something; she is low energy. They live in a cool house that looks like it is two feet from the train line; how good can that be? And come on, if you started seeming twenty, thirty, one hundred copies of your husband, you'd go into a coma. Mom and son just take it as a little weird but par for the course. 

And oh, yes, the one who kidnapped him and put him in the box takes over his life but doesn't really know anything about his life or family, just that it's perfect and he missed it.  

I have also been watching Silo, hoping it's not like Lost. There is a cringy moment in Dark Matter when the psychologist imagines a Chicago that looks like DisneyWorld. Apparently it is happy, progressive Chicago (this Chicago has no crime except the kidnapper). The psychologist and Joel have dinner at the top of the Obama Building.  Oh, please. 

If I haven't ruined it, there are a lot of inventive side plots. Warning, they really like the F word. I mean like three times a sentence. I really don't know who talks like this. What is the point of an expletive that is supposed to be edgy and transgressive if you say it constantly?  Kind of loses any point to it. I hate the word because it is about violence to women, which no one seems to get. 

  

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