Dark Matter Season 2 Reveals Daniela's Trauma — And It’s Got Nothing To Do With The Multiverse
Things are starting to make sense.
The Apple TV series Dark Matter has, since 2024, charted new territory for what a sci-fi series about parallel realities can feel like. While Season 1 was based on Blake Crouch’s mega-popular 2016 novel of the same name, Season 2 has gone in an entirely new direction, giving new backstories to various characters, including Jason Dessen’s (Joel Edgerton) long-suffering wife, Daniela (Jennifer Connelly). As with Season 1, Daniela has spent much of Season 2 thinking about alternate versions of her husband and how to protect her family in the strange multiverse she has to navigate.
And now, in Episode 7 of Season 2, “The Pyramid,” more of Daniela’s family backstory is getting unpacked, and what we learn here makes her character even more interesting than we realized back when this journey started in 2016. Ahead of the debut of Dark Matter, Season 2, Episode 7, Inverse has a sneak peek at this episode with an exclusive clip from Apple TV. Watch it below.
Dark Matter Season 2, Episode 7, Exclusive Clip
In this scene from Season 2, Episode 7, Daniela talks to Gabriel (Gil Birmingham), who is a version of her father in the analog, less-technology-developed world the Dessen’s have settled on. But in speaking to this man, who is not really her father but a version of him, she opens up about how her father, in her world, was abusive and alternated between being kind and acting in ways that were utterly cruel.
Daniela likens this experience to the literal various versions of Jason who they’ve encountered throughout the multiverse, including Jason 2, who, in swapping places with Jason 1 and co-creating the technology of the Box, started all of this to begin with.
Out of context, this scene might seem like it comes from any other TV show about family grief and the struggles to overcome trauma. But, that’s what makes Dark Matter so interesting and unique; the sci-fi aspects are actually front and center; this man is not actually Daniela’s dad, and yet he is.
With Dark Matter, the sci-fi metaphors aren’t just the subtext of the show; the metaphors actually become quite literal. So, in a sense, Daniela using the metaphor of her father’s shifting mood swings is a moment where the show is slightly more naturalistic than a huge majority of its other storylines.
Whether or not this catharsis brings Daniela any peace, or creates more stability for the Dessens in general, remains to be seen.
Dark Matter Season 2 streaming dates
Leighton (Dayo Okeniyi ) and his multiverse duplicates are making a huge impact on Dark Matter Season 2.
After Dark Matter Season 2, Episode 7, the show will start entering the endgame of this batch of episodes. Here’s what the release schedule looks like from here on out.
- 10.9 Episode 7, “The Pyramid”
- 10.16 Episode 8, “The Basic Oneness of Everything”
- 10.23 Episode 9, “How to Build the Box”
- 10.30 Episode 10, “No Quiet Life”
