The Multiverse Strikes Again
Why the debates are coming earlier
Like most people, I sometimes wonder how life might have unfolded had I made, at critical junctures, a different choice. What I haven’t done is break into a parallel reality, identify a better version of myself, and force him at gunpoint to trade places. Laziness? The reader may suspect so. Then again, parting ways with the antagonist of Apple’s new series Dark Matter, I don’t have a Ph.D. in quantum theory.
If the multiverse is having a moment, it is only because “the Science” continues to have a biger one. One might expect, observing the hard sciences’ replication crisis, a little representational modesty. How about a series in which a heroic researcher eschews phacking and gets the same results twice in a row? Instead, we have quantum superpositions. Scratch a popular screen production these days, and one is likely to find the well-credentialed bending time and space to their will. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2023 Oscar winner, Michelle Yeoh’s AlphaEvelyn discovered “verse-jumping” seemingly by accident, so exceptional was her apparent brilliance. It wasn’t Mister but Doctor Strange who strode through Marvel’s “Multiverse of Madness” the previous year. It’s all nonsense, of course, but of a peculiarly triumphalist kind.
Given this context, it is no surprise to find Apple’s latest taking for granted its own narrative plausibility. Kidnapped into an alternate reality, the show’s protagonist barely asks questions, so complete is his faith in physics to achieve the impossible. Fifteen years ago, the same program might have saved its quantum gobbledygook for a late-episode “reveal,” stunning viewers with a high-theory exposition dump. The Dark Matter of today, by contrast, throws us into the deep end halfway through its pilot. With the multiverse on every tongue, there is simply no need to disguise the engine driving the show’s brazenly ridiculous plot.
Dark Matter stars Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, a physics professor at a Chicago-area community college. Married to artist Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), Jason enjoys a comfortable life and has no regrets about a long-ago decision to prioritize family over the lab. Things change when, one rainy evening, a masked man abducts our hero and injects him with a mysterious syringe. Upon waking, Jason finds himself known to all as a famous scientist and entrepreneur. Even Daniela has changed, recalling him as a one-time boyfriend but decidedly not as a husband.
If the plot I’ve summarized thus far owes much to The Twilight Zone, the similarity is often to the good. Like “The Parallel,” a fourth-season episode anticipating today’s alternate-universes obsession, Dark Matter captures well the existential terror of being the only sane man in the world. Helping matters greatly is the performance of Edgerton, who brings to his protagonist role a bruised vulnerability reminiscent of Steve Forrest’s in 1963. Who cares if the Australian roughneck is as believable a physicist as Leonardo DiCaprio would be a priest? The actor nails Jason’s panicked frustration.
To whom does one turn when one’s sense of reality matches no one else’s? The answer, for a while, is Connelly’s Daniela, who possesses, in both universes, all of the actress’s customary warmth. Later, a psychiatrist named Amanda (Alice Braga) plays an important role as our hero explores the technology responsible for his crisis. Through it all, Jason’s goal is simple: to get back to “real” life and vanquish the kidnapper who has stolen his very existence. To do so, he will have to enter “the Box,” a room-sized, steampunkish cube that holds a gateway to every possible world.
It is no spoiler to reveal that the villain being chased is Jason himself. The series shows us as much half an hour into the pilot. Brash and swagering, this doppelganger is the very man our protagonist has been mistaken for. What he wants is a taste of married life with Daniela, an outcome he foreclosed in his own reality by choosing careerism and pecuniary success.
Is it a sign of bad morals that I found myself cheering for the false Jason? He is certainly the more interesting figure, dressing down “his” bored students one moment and seducing Daniela the next. In a plot twist that delivers much-needed emotional complexity, Connelly’s character finds herself at least temporarily impressed by her husband’s alteration. Like Beauty preferring the Beast, she wants the dangerous man, not her familiar milquetoast. Never mind that fake Jason knows nothing about their life together and can’t get through a dinner
party without a who’s-who cheat sheet.
For the most part, Dark Matter balances its dueling plotlines well, shifting between Jasons like a magician flipping a coin. Less compelling are the graspers and hangers-on who dog the real Jason in his adopted realm: Dayo Okeniyi as a fanatical corporate stooge and Jimmi Simpson as our protagonist’s apprehensive frenemy. I suppose these supporting players are necessary if the show is to fill nine hours. Then again, the program feels bloated even at its best. If ever there were a series that could have lopped o four episodes, this is it.
Still, one is tempted, coming to the end of each installment, to let the next one start up. Dark Matter is handsomely produced, reasonably intriguing, and the beneficiary of two solid leads. At least in this iteration of our universe, there are far worse shows.
Last Wednesday morning was a little chaotic as news broke that President Joe Biden had rejected the plan of the Commission on Presidential Debates and challenged former President Donald Trump to two debates. By the end of the morning, Trump had accepted, and the plan, approved by both candidates, was for a first debate on CNN in Atlanta on June 27 and a second debate on ABC News on Sept. 10.
Why did it happen? Certainly both campaigns recognized, as the Commission on Presidential Debates did not, that millions of people are going to vote well before Nov. 5, Election Day. Those voters need a chance to see the candidates debate before they vote, not after. That’s a reasonable concern for all people.
But Biden has something special to worry about. It’s a two-part problem for the president: 1) He is trailing in a lot of polls, especially in key states, and 2) a lot of voters have already made up their minds. In addition, this — right now — is a period in which the voters who have not made up their minds are getting closer and closer to doing so. So if the polls don’t change by late June, when the first debate is scheduled, Biden might be facing a large, hardened segment of the electorate that will not vote for him under any circumstances. He needs to get in front of them to make his pitch before it is too late.
In every presidential election this century except one, the candidate who was leading in the polls in late June went on to win. (The exception was 2016, when Trump was behind in the polls in June and went on to defeat Hillary Clinton.)
The general election polls, of course, are very close.
The RealClearPolitics average of national polls has Trump ahead by a single percentage point, well within the margin of error. Biden’s biger problem is this: It seems likely that Trump will win all of the states he won in 2020. If he does, he just needs to win a few key states — say, Arizona, Georgia, and any one of Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin — to win the White House. And in some of those key states, Trump has leads that appear to be both solid and durable.
Just last week, the New York Times released a poll that found Trump leading Biden in five of six key states, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, while leading in just one key state, Wisconsin. The new New York Times poll was very similar, indeed almost identical, to a New York Times poll from six months ago, in early November 2023. Despite everything that had happened in the last six months, such as Biden’s supposed “bounce” after the State of the Union and the beginning of Trump’s felony trial in Manhattan, Trump’s lead endured.
If that situation continues, there will be increasing pressure on Biden to shake things up. Maybe the Trump trial, if Trump is convicted, will boost Biden in the polls. But there is also the possibility Trump could be acquitted or have a hung jury — or that he will be convicted but that it will have little eect on the race.
In any event, in June, Biden could be the candidate who needs change. A debate will give him that opportunity. Just imagine a debate followed by a series of events similar to what happened after the State of the Union, in which a chorus of Biden supporters praise his performance against Trump and declare that he is on the comeback trail. It might not work, but if today’s conditions continue, Biden needs something. ★