By George & Josh Bate
In recent years, the multiverse has emerged as one of the most prominent storytelling devices across film, television, and literature. In 2023, Everything Everywhere All At Once, the Daniels’ bizarre, frenzied journey across multiple branches of reality, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Over the past several years, Marvel Studios has explored alternate realities, parallel lives, and dimension-hopping across the likes of Deadpool & Wolverine, Loki, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and, very soon, will deliver arguably the most anticipated multiversal story of all time in the form of Avengers: Doomsday.
Amidst this deluge of stories about the infinite number of realities parallel to our own, Apple TV and author Blake Crouch have masterminded arguably the best of the bunch. The first season of Dark Matter debuted on the streaming service in 2024 and was met with rave reviews, described by critic Richard Roeper as “mind-bending” and “exhilarating.”
This week, Apple TV debuts the second season of Dark Matter and once again invites audiences along for a winding, thoughtfully constructed adventure through the multiverse that will mess with your head (and your emotions).
Based on the acclaimed sci-fi novel of the same name, Dark Matter explores the concept of the road not taken to its fullest and most fascinating extent. In season one, professor and family man Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) was walking home on the streets of Chicago when he was suddenly abducted and thrown into an alternate universe by a multiversal variant of himself determined to take Jason’s place and live the blissful family life he never could. Season one concluded with Jason finally reuniting with his wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and son Charlie (Oakes Fegley) and relocating to another universe free of countless number of Jason variants.
Season two begins with the reveal that the Dessen family’s happy ending was short lived as they struggle to shake off variants of Jason desperate to be reunited with his wife and son. Meanwhile, Jason’s partner from another universe Amanda (Alice Braga) and best friend Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) unite to find their way home as Blair (Amanda Brugel) tries to prevent powerful CEO Leighton (Dako Okeniyi) from causing chaos through his pursuit of creating a perfect world.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to speak with Dark Matter author and showrunner Blake Crouch and star Amanda Brugel about the upcoming second season, the appeal of the multiverse to contemporary audiences, playing multiple versions of the same character, crafting a challenging yet accessible series, and more.
It is no coincidence that, in the remaining months of 2026, audiences will be treated to the second season of an acclaimed series on a premium streaming service and one of the biggest movies of all time, both of which employ the multiverse as a core fixture of their narratives. Crouch reflected on why creatives like himself are so drawn to telling stories about the multiverse. “For us, I can only speak for our show, but it’s a mechanism that lets us lean into character in a way that you really can’t lean into as deeply without looking at all the possibilities of what your life might have been,” Crouch explained. “And we get to actually show those other lives and we get to have our characters meet other versions of themselves. And I just think it allows us to explore a lot of rich material.”
Whereas season one of Dark Matter was based on Crouch’s novel of the same name, season two finds the showrunner and author pen an original story from scratch. Crouch contemplated the initial terror and eventual liberation that came from not basing the second season on a preexisting story. “Terrified at first and then very freeing later,” Crouch said. “Everything I’ve written has been for the screen has been based on my own source material. It doesn’t make it super easy, but at least you have sort of the foundation of the house to jump from. And obviously things are changing because it’s a different visual medium, but you have a great starting point. [In season two,] I didn’t have that luxury. It was the blank page that 500 people in our crew are relying on. So it took a while for me to [outline Season 2], because I’m really hard on ideas. Especially at the outset, I don’t trust them. I just think I don’t want to fall in love with an idea. I want to be really swept away and seduced by it. And that takes time. So with season two, it was a painful start, but then once we got going, I saw, ‘Wow, we can do some amazing things.’”
One of the creative decisions that Crouch makes in season two is to give actor Amanda Brugel a more prominent role in the story. In season one, Brugel’s character Blair was intriguing in that she was the first person to use The Box that allowed one to travel the multiverse. She was referenced frequently, but only seen in several poignant, important moments of the show. That changes in season two, in which Brugel is now a series regular.
“Just to be able to play with these actors was so exciting in season one, to be in the proximity of Alice [Braga] and Jennifer Connelly and Joel [Edgerton],” Brugel stated. “And so then the idea that I was brought back in just a larger capacity [for Season 2] was just terrifying if I have to admit….I was scared. I was scared to go head to head with these performers. They’re really, really good. I feel like I’m good, but these are some pretty strong actors. And so in talking to Blake and [Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry], our co-show runner, I felt so, I was saying this to you yesterday, I felt so given such an amount of freedom and trust and space to talk about what I liked or talk through scenes or walk through scenes. And so initially scared, but then so excited.”
Brugel joked that she is “ruined now, because I have to go back to play just one version of a character.” She elaborated, “I’ve had the experience of being able to go back and forth and play different versions. It’s the biggest gift for an actor. It really is the best gift.”
Playing multiple versions of the same character was a gift, but also a challenge, one that Brugel took in her stride. In discussing how she prepared to take on versions of Blair that are variants of one another, yet have the foundation of the same person, Brugel identified music and physicality as key elements of her preparation.
“Music is such an in for me,” Brugel described. “It started many, many years ago. It probably started in theater school. So music and then physicality. The physicality changes slightly [between Blair#01 and Blair#02], but then, to keep them the same, there’s a core. So, at the top of my script, I would always write, I keep going back to this word: moral compass, moral compass, moral compass. I feel like Blair is sort of good and always fighting for good and other characters in this are fighting for a tremendous amount of different things that are fighting for different versions of good, but not just the overall concept of good. And I think that that’s very Blair. And so a strong moral compass, but then music and physicality really helped change it up. You blast heavy metal in your ear, you’re going to change the way you act or you blast like 90s R&B and it’s going to change.”
A testament to the complexity and potential unwieldiness of a concept as dense and infinite as the multiverse, a show like Dark Matter could very quickly (and easily) get out of hand and become overwhelming for viewers. But Crouch’s precise writing and firm handling of the science behind concepts like superposition and infinite universes ensure that his show remains complex, but never convoluted. “It’s the same challenge I face with my novels,” Crouch said. “I don’t want the science to feel just tossed in there. It needs to be baked into the story itself. It also has to have a certain level of rigor behind the science, because I do think that people want to be challenged. And I do think people read my books and hopefully watch my shows because they want to have to do a little work on their end to follow what’s going on. I think our audience is incredibly smart. And then on the other side is the emotion and the character stuff, and threading that needle between the two is the job.”
“The emotion and the character stuff” that Crouch refers to resonated with Brugel, who found herself applying the series’ idea of roads not taken to her own life. “It’s been lovely to ask myself emotionally intelligent questions,” Brugel said. “It gave me a lot of pause, a lot of opportunity to reflect on my life, choices that I’ve made, and, especially to your point, career choices.”
Brugel elaborated on her contemplation of what life may have looked like had certain paths been taken over others. “You can follow the breadcrumbs to where one job sort of grew out of another and grew out of another,” she said. “And I think often, even if I didn’t follow that certain breadcrumb will still have brought me to this point. And I think our show asks that maybe if I had gone on a different path, would it still bring me back to the same point? Would it bring me back to the same person I am? I think about that all of the time. And I don’t know the answer.”
Ahead of the season two premiere of Dark Matter on Friday, August 28, Crouch and Brugel both described the upcoming season in three words. “Emotional, home, and friendship,” Crouch stated. Brugel, meanwhile, delivered a more alliterative answer. “War. World. Wound,” she said.
Those hungry for more mature adventures through the multiverse, ones unpopulated by masked superheroes and liberated from tens of movies and shows to watch as preparation, will find Apple TV’s Dark Matter to be the emotionally resonate, high-concept piece of prestige storytelling they’ve been missing.
Watch our full interview with Dark Matter author and showrunner Blake Crouch and star Amanda Brugel below….
