Apple's Returning Sci-Fi With 81% On RT Does The Multiverse Better Than The MCU

Published Aug 27, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT

George is a film critic and journalist with over nine years of experience in the entertainment industry. Beginning as the Co-Creator and Co-Editor of Star Wars Holocron, the most followed Star Wars fan account on Twitter/X, George went on to develop The HoloFiles, a movie and television-focused website with his brother and writing partner Josh.

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This week, the second season of a critically acclaimed Apple TV series premieres and shows how the multiverse, a vast and potentially unwieldy storytelling device, can be done right. Based on the novel of the same name by Blake Crouch, Dark Matter premiered in 2024 and was met with critical acclaim. The series starred Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, a physics professor who is abducted and thrown into an alternate universe by a multiversal variant of himself who plans to steal Jason’s blissful family existence and make it his own.

Taking place across numerous universes, featuring countless numbers of Jason variants, and juggling dense concepts like superposition, Dark Matter could have easily gone off the rails and devolved from complex to convoluted. Thankfully, that was not the case. Season 1 demonstrated that, unlike many other current pieces of media about the multiverse, stories about the infinite number of realities parallel to our own do not necessarily need to be overly cerebral and unapproachable. Instead, they can be both cognitively challenging and emotionally moving.

Recent years have seen the multiverse emerge as one of the most prominent storytelling devices across media. This December, the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues the Multiverse Saga with the highly anticipated release of Avengers: Doomsday, which will bring together heroes from across various universes. Ahead of the big showdown against Doctor Doom, however, Dark Matter shows how the multiverse can lay at the heart of a mature, sprawling, deeply personal, and ultimately accessible story.

How Dark Matter's Multiverse Is Different From The MCU's

The Marvel Cinematic Universe first dabbled in the idea of multiple, branching realities in Avengers: Endgame before expanding the concept in projects like Loki, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Deadpool & Wolverine.

As made clear in Avengers: Endgame, there is no such thing as altering the past in the MCU. Instead, the multiverse is composed of infinite parallel realities. New realities, or branches, may share the same exact history as another timeline, but diverge when an action alters the path. This is known as a Nexus Event, which gives ways to a new timeline of its own. For a while, the Time Variance Authority (TVA) governed the multiverse and ensured that there was only one sacred timeline by pruning all others. That changed in Loki Season 2 when branches were allowed to grow freely, unleashing the full might of the multiverse.

To travel the MCU multiverse, there are a variety of options, including sorcery, engineering quantum tunnels using Pym Particles, and universe-breaking technology.

Dark Matter approaches the multiverse a tad differently and with a bit more scientific rigor. The mechanics of the multiverse are tied to the concept of quantum superposition, which is the idea that a particle can exist in multiple states until it is observed.

Traveling the multiverse in Dark Matter requires a specialized isolation chamber, known as The Box, to shield a person from external observation, thus allowing them to enter a state of transition where multiple possible realities overlap. Travelers must inject a special psychoactive compound that allows their mind to focus and navigate an infinite hallway of potential choices and alternate worlds. To add another layer to the mix, the specific timelines that a person visits depends entirely on their subconscious thoughts and emotional states when they open a given door.

Both the MCU and Dark Matter acknowledge the multiverse as being the culmination of infinite timelines running parallel to one another that are created when different choices or actions are made. Where they differ is the degree to which Dark Matter integrates an understanding of contemporary physics into its explanation for how multiversal travel is possible. The MCU takes a more frivolous approach to explaining how it all works, while Dark Matter grounds its explanation in more rigorous science.

The multiverse in the MCU and Dark Matter also differ in another key way. Whereas timelines in the MCU can branch infinitely and be visited by anyone with the right means to travel, in the world of Dark Matter, one can only visit adjacent realities where one’s physical matter already existed. That means that people can’t hop to realities that are so fundamentally different from their own; instead, they are restricted to timelines that have been created as a result of more proximal choices relevant to a given person’s experience.

Why Dark Better Uses The Multiverse Better Than Marvel (So Far)

In the MCU to date, the multiverse has primarily been used as a tool for creatives to bring different versions of the same character onto the screen. This was best exemplified in Spider-Man: No Way Home as variants of Peter Parker played by Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire all shared the screen for the first time.

Loki remains the only MCU project to date that has used the multiverse as more than just a device for spectacle and cameos, allowing the existence of parallel realities to comment on characters’ identity, loneliness, and empathy.

Dark Matter resembles Loki more than Spider-Man: No Way Home in this regard. The series uses the multiverse to carefully examine the concept of roads not taken. Every potential decision everyone faces is a fork in the road that creates a brand new universe, meaning there are many variants who look, feel, sound, and think very similarly. This is something the MCU hasn’t quite explored yet as multiversal variants tend to be wildly different from one another, even being portrayed by different actors.

In taking a more intimate approach to the multiverse, Dark Matter explores the multiverse to enrich its characters’ journeys and confront their fears, weaknesses, regrets, and capacity for darkness in a way the MCU has yet to do.

Dark Matter

9/10

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  Daniela Dessen

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  Joel Edgerton

  Jason Dessen / Jason2

Based on his novel of the same name, Dark Matter is a sci-fi drama-thriller television series created for Apple TV+ by Blake Crouch. The series follows a physicist who is kidnapped and thrown into an alternate reality where he witnesses one potential path his life could have taken. However, he learns that the lives of his family are in jeopardy by an alternate version of himself.