Apple TV’s Highly Ambitious Sci-Fi Adaptation Is The Most Unpredictable Show Since Lost

Published Sep 19, 2026, 10:00 PM EDT

Dhruv is a Lead Writer in Screen Rant's New TV division. He has been consistently contributing to the website for over two years and has written thousands of articles covering streaming trends, movie/TV analysis, and pop culture breakdowns.
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Apple TV is the streaming home of an incredibly ambitious sci-fi show that is progressively becoming as unpredictable as Lost. A first-time viewer watching Lost instantly assumes that the show is going to be about the dynamics between the survivors of a crashed plane on an isolated island. However, what starts as a survival thriller soon transforms into a mind-bending puzzle box.

With each new episode, Lost drops a new set of strange sci-fi and supernatural mysteries. Like its characters, the show keeps viewers on their toes and forces them to keep guessing what lies ahead. Although Lost eventually fails to pay off all of its mystery setups, its gripping mystery box approach continues to influence many modern sci-fi thrillers.

Adapted from Blake Crouch's novel of the same name, Apple TV's Dark Matter is treading the same path in season 2. After exhausting its source material's story in season 1, the show is heading in a direction unknown. However, despite having many chaotic and overwhelming multiversal story beats, Dark Matter season 2 is as exciting as Lost.

Like Lost, Apple TV's Dark Matter Keeps Getting Increasingly Chaotic (& That’s A Good Thing)

Image courtesy of Everett Collection

Apple TV's Dark Matter grounds itself in real quantum mechanics concepts. However, instead of delving too deep into high-concept sci-fi, the show uses human emotion as a narrative device to drive its multiversal stories. With each new episode, it brings bizarre "what-if" scenarios to the table. Similar to Lost, it even keeps subverting expectations and makes viewers question where its story is heading.

However, what grounds its chaos is the relatable human stories and dilemmas of its characters. Lost succeeded because the Island’s bizarre phenomena (polar bears, smoke monsters, time travel) were almost always tied back to the survivors' guilt, regret, and desire for redemption from their mistakes in the real world. Dark Matter does the same with its depiction of multiverses.

Each new universe is a narrative engine either consciously or subconsciously manifested through a character's deepest desires or insecurities. In season 2, especially, Dark Matter has been unfolding with an incredible momentum since episode 1. It has already walked through multiple alternate worlds while also adding new players to its roster.

Despite being chaotic and mind-bending, however, Dark Matter remains as compelling as ever because of its relatable portrayal of a family's struggles to find its place in the overarching multiverse. In one of its recent installments, the series even highlights the toll multiversal travel has already taken on the central Dessen family, forcing all members to split ways instead of sticking together.

Multiverse Stories Were Getting Boring, But Dark Matter Revives Interest

In 2022, Everything Everywhere All At Once set an incredibly high bar for multiversal stories. Since then, almost every movie or show that has focused on parallel worlds and alternate realities has arguably felt underwhelming. Despite being incredibly ambitious, Dark Matter, too, explored familiar tropes and narrative territories in season 1.

However, in season 2, Dark Matter is starting to become increasingly novel. It is hard to foresee where the show is heading. At the same time, the more it develops the stories of its characters across a vast number of alternate worlds, the more the show's overarching stakes seem intimate and tethered to human emotion.

Multiverse fatigue is still very real, especially when it comes to superhero movies. Apple TV's Dark Matter has still etched a solid identity for itself, though, by focusing less on spectacle and more on how terrifyingly exciting it can be to escape the consequences of your life in one world and jump into a new one to start afresh.

While Apple TV's Dark Matter is yet to become as big and popular as Lost, it easily ranks among some of the best modern mystery box sci-fi thrillers of our time.

Dark Matter

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.