Apple TV's 19-Episode High-Concept Series Delivers A Masterclass In Hard Sci-Fi

Published Oct 31, 2026, 2:30 AM EDT

Tom is a Senior Staff Writer at Screen Rant, with expertise covering everything from hilarious sitcoms to jaw-dropping sci-fi epics.

Initially he was an Updates writer, though before long he found his way to the TV and movies team. He now spends his days keeping Screen Rant readers informed about the TV shows of yesteryear, whether it's recommending hidden gems that may have been missed by genre fans or deep diving into ways your favorite shows have (or haven't) stood the test of time.

Tom is based in the UK and when he's not writing about TV shows, he's watching them. He's also an avid horror fiction writer, gamer, and has a Dungeons and Dragons habit that he tries (and fails) to keep in check.

Modern sci-fi is absolutely obsessed with the multiverse. Parallel dimensions have long featured in classics like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, but the 2010s and 2020s have turned alternate realities into a genre staple. From blockbuster crossovers to ambitious experimental TV shows, stories about alternate versions of our own reality are everywhere. That popularity has produced some spectacular sci-fi, but it’s also meant that interdimensional travel is starting to feel too familiar to be exciting.

Franchises like the MCU, shows like Rick and Morty, and movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once have all found entertaining ways to explore the idea. Their dives into the multiverse have led to some incredible adventures, but they rarely explore the personal consequences of leading an interdimensional existence. That’s why Apple TV+’s Dark Matter is so refreshing for sci-fi fans suffering from multiverse fatigue. Across 19 episodes, the two-season series turns the existence of other realities into a frighteningly intimate problem.

Adapted by Blake Crouch from his own novel and debuting in 2024, Dark Matter follows Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, a physicist who finds himself dropped into an alternate version of Earth. Getting home means navigating realities shaped by possibilities he barely understands, while confronting the choices that made him who he is. For sci-fi fans who think multiverse stories have been done so much they have no surprises left, Dark Matter is a welcome change. Rather than a lighthearted adventure, it’s a dark, character-driven thriller that makes infinite possibility feel claustrophobic and dangerous.

Dark Matter Turns Interdimensional Travel Into A Gripping Multiverse Thriller

Credit: Everett Collection

With so many movies and TV shows out there about multiversal travel, Dark Matter needed to put a unique spin on the concept to stand out even before viewers get hooked on Jason’s story. It does this with a wonderfully unsettling invention: the Box. Inside, travelers encounter a corridor of doors leading into alternate realities. Finding another universe is relatively straightforward. Finding the specific universe containing the people you love, however, is an entirely different challenge. That distinction transforms multiverse travel from an exciting opportunity into a desperate survival problem. Once one is in the Box, it’s tricky to find the way back.

This isn’t just because the travelers in Dark Matter are traversing the multiverse without a map, either. Operating the Box involves more than understanding the machinery, since the machinery has rules of its own that aren’t clear until it’s already too late. A traveler’s mental state helps determine which reality appears beyond a door, making fear itself a practical danger. Jason must learn how to control his responses while in a situation that gives them every reason to panic.

That creates a gripping feedback loop: the more desperate to find his way home Jason becomes, the harder it is for him to get there. The fact that not every version of Earth he encounters is going to be a safe or friendly one only adds to the apprehension, making the risks even higher. Even apparently welcoming realities soon reveal that there’s danger lurking for any unwary dimension-hopper who lingers too long. Dark Matter is an airtight thriller, and it keeps the tension high by ensuring that its sci-fi concepts like the Box are the cause of problems rather than being solutions to them.

Dark Matter's Multiverse Hopping Asks Serious Philosophical Questions

Dark Matter is a great sci-fi thriller, and it treats its thriller side just as masterfully as its sci-fi. Being lost in the multiverse is already a perilous enough predicament, but rather than using the scenario as the basis of a reality-hopping adventure, the Apple TV+ show instead harnesses it as the foundation for some truly terrifying edge-of-your-seat storytelling and complex character work.

For example, the idea of alternate selves plays into Jason’s struggle just as much as alternate realities. Jason 2, a version of Jason from a different reality, is a major antagonist. The conflict between them is used to explore ideas like envy, regret, and the lengths people will go to if given the opportunity for a second chance. In his own reality, Jason 2 is extraordinarily successful professionally, but this came at the cost of his marriage and family. When he learns of the existence of a world where he can have the domestic life he always craved, he treats Jason’s life as something that can be forcefully taken.

The fact that he’s another version of Jason, and so understands his mind and how he’s likely to react in any given situation, makes Jason 2 an especially terrifying thriller villain. Not only that, but it also gives Dark Matter the chance to explore some truly unique psychological territory. Through the different Jasons, the series asks questions around cause, effect, and how one decision can lead to not only a radically different future, but a radically different person. Individuality is also a key theme the show dives into here, forcing viewers to consider whether Jason and Jason 2 are simply two sides of the same coin, or whether their deviations from one another’s life choices are enough to distinguish them as distinct individuals.

The result is a thriller in which reaching safety cannot erase what happened. Other realities offer proof that different lives were possible, but that knowledge brings grief, jealousy, and, in the case of Jason 2, toxic obsession. Dark Matter understands that the multiverse, far from being a canvas for sci-fi adventure, is a source of emotional horror: discovering an infinite number of alternative realities can make committing to one imperfect life harder than ever.