Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season 2 finale of Dark Matter.
The last episode of season two, like the season as a whole, has some quiet moments and some adrenaline-packed sequences. Relatedly, as series creator Blake Crouch told me in a recent interview, the season also shows “that the box can create absolutely beautiful experiences and absolutely horrendous experiences,” and that the finale is “a complete encapsulation of that.”
Those horrendous experiences include Jason (Joel Edgerton) and Blair (Amanda Brugel) getting chased in the box to two horrific worlds: one where downtown Chicago is a literal battle field, and one where the laws of physics (as we usually experience them on Earth, at least) were taking a break.
That corridor fight, where people rolled out of doors into crazy worlds, was something that Crouch said “was a North Star that we were aiming at from the very beginning.”
Credit: Apple TVWe first see Jason and Blair flee into a war-torn Chicago, where various factions are shooting at each other and, because they’re caught in the middle, our protagonists. That sequence was shot on location, just a few blocks from Crouch lived. He and his partner and show co-writer, Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry, unexpectedly stumbled across it one day while heading home after lunch. “We took a shortcut through an alley and suddenly I’m looking around, and there’s these burned out cars,” Crouch said. “I’m like, ‘Wait, what the hell happened?” And then I was like, ‘Oh, this is our show.’”
The low-gravity world where Jason and Blair end up next is equally terrifying. Ironically, the whole idea of it started out as joke. “We were brainstorming what that second world would be, and I immediately remembered there was this world I had written about in my journals for the book, but had never made it into the book,” Crouch said, referring to his eponymous novel that the show is based on. “Buildings were floating off into the sky and the box was floating; it was like there was no gravity. And I threw it out to our team as a joke. And they were like, ‘Why don’t you write it?’ And so I wrote it, and then when you have a really amazing crew like we do, they took it as a throwdown.”
Credit: Apple TVThat throwdown involved creating a whole other box hoisted on a gimbal, and hooking the actors up to wires. “It was wild, because seeing it like that on the day we shot it, you had no idea if it was really gonna work, because it just looked a little bit goofy,” Crouch recalled. The visual effects team led by John Heller and editor Joe Leonard pulled it all together, however, and blew past what Crouch had envisioned.
The final episode also leaves a lot of open threads to explore in a potential third and final season, though Crouch was coy on what we might see if Apple TV picks it up for more episodes.
One thing he did share: the world that Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and Charlie (Oakes Fegley) end up in is NOT the one they were just in, where Max was alive. Other than that though, all Crouch had to say is this: “We do have a very strong, mind-blowing idea for what the last season would be, if we’re fortunate enough to get to make it.”
The first two seasons of Dark Matter are now streaming on Apple TV.
