Dark Matter season one had a clear narrative throughline. Main character Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) was kidnapped by a Jason from another world who’d invented a way to hop between dimensions. While the duplicitous Jason 2 settled into Jason 1’s life, Jason 1 managed to escape Jason 2’s world and set out on a quantum-powered quest to find his way home.
Season two, which picks up after Jason 1 and his family, wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and son Charlie (Oakes Fegley), have reunited and are attempting to restart their lives in a parallel Chicago, has gotten a lot more complicated. As you’d expect, the ability to travel between worlds—via “the Box,” Jason 2’s invention, with the help of a special compound perfected by chemist Ryan Holder (Jimmi Simpson)—has sparked a cross-dimensional ripple effect.
For Ryan—specifically Ryan 1, the show’s primary version of the character—that’s meant venturing on his own homeward journey.
In season one, Ryan 1 became another one of Jason 2’s kidnapping victims, paying a terrible price for figuring out that a slippery doppelganger had taken over the life of his best friend. Jason 2 did show a tiny bit of consideration by stranding him in a wonderfully progressive world—rather than one of Dark Matter’s worst-case scenario dimensions, which have included perpetual blizzards, rampaging tornados, and murder hornets.
But it was still a monstrous thing to do, and as Simpson pointed out in a recent interview with io9, Ryan 1 is one of few Dark Matter characters who wasn’t actively involved in creating the Box.
A version of him did dream up the drug that enables travelers to shift between dimensions, but even that specific Ryan (Ryan 2, who’s implied to have been killed off in season one) didn’t know exactly what it was going to be used for.
“He didn’t ever choose to say ‘go’ and do this with the Box,” Simpson explained, speaking about Ryan 1. “Almost every other character that’s traveling, save for Jason’s family, made a choice to explore places and to insert themselves into places that they shouldn’t be. Whereas Ryan was a victim. He was like, ‘What the hell happened? How do I get home?”
As we’ve seen in season two, Ryan has teamed up with Amanda 2 (Alice Braga), who happens to be in that same progressive world. She’s there by choice, having decided to remain there after traveling with Jason 1 across season one, and agrees to help him recreate the drug so that he can re-enter the Box and return home.
They bond over their mutual loathing of Jason 2; the guy who stranded Ryan is also Amanda’s odious ex-boyfriend. Soon, she decides to go with him. She was part of the team that helped create the Box, and she feels guilty about Ryan’s plight. The least she can do, she figures, is try to guide him home.
However, “home” is an increasingly complicated concept. Because of the events of Dark Matter season one, the world where Jason 1 once lived is compromised. Certain shady pockets of the government have discovered the Box and are keenly interested in anyone connected to it, and Ryan can’t stay there.
So he and Amanda decide to go back to what they’ve affectionately dubbed the “polite sex world,” a place where the Box wasn’t met with fear. The opposite, in fact: it was hailed as a public art installation donated by some generous, if mysterious, creator.
It’s also a place where they can both live without attracting suspicion. As we learned in season one, the Amanda in that world has never lived in the United States. And the version of Ryan that was born there died some years prior. After “our” Ryan was stranded there, he was able to reunite with his sister, who joyfully accepted his miraculous reappearance.
So it makes sense he’d want to go back. If his true world isn’t an option, this is a pretty great second choice—until he and Amanda realize something has gone terribly wrong in their absence.
When they first emerge from the Box, all seems normal, but that doesn’t last long. “You’ve broken quarantine and curfew,” guards in heavy protective gear inform them before forcing them into a holding facility.
The very confused pair learn that Chicago is being throttled by a deadly outbreak that’s rapidly becoming a global problem. And it’s their fault. Other versions of them, spawned thanks to decisions they made during their Box travels, became infected and unwittingly brought the “black iris plague” back to this world.
For Ryan, it’s a horrifying realization on many levels.
“As season two progresses, he realizes he doesn’t know exactly where his home is, and maybe he is more of an explorer than he thought,” Simpson said. “I think there is a certain, not just courage, but also he [took] pride in that he was able to do this. And so to find out that he is Patient Zero and that he not only did his brain partly have to do with creating the Box, but he himself has now sacrificed countless lives? It’s a low point.”
Simpson revealed that he actually broke his leg near the end of the season and was able to use the injury in his portrayal of Ryan. “He’s in a lot of pain in a lot of ways. The bone marrow line [after Ryan has been subjected to invasive medical tests] was already written in episode seven, and I actually was limping because of that before I broke my leg. The run to the Box was an actual ‘me in pain trying to get through and see what else can be done from this horrible mistake that I made.’ So there are layers of pain throughout Ryan starting in episode seven, and it all does boil down to, ‘Oh my god, this is my fault.’”
While Ryan 1 is the show’s main version throughout season two, we do see other Ryans pop up from time to time. The Ryan who was swapped into Ryan 1’s world back in season one to conceal his disappearance—the good-natured mechanic—finally gets to go home, giving us a very rare Dark Matter happy ending.
There’s also a Ryan who pops up in yet another world, where he starts working with different versions of Leighton (Dayo Okeniyi)—Jason 2’s former business partner—who are trying to create an even more powerful Box. They style themselves as a “multiverses without borders” group, aiming to help connect different worlds with life-saving advances in technology, medicine, and more. You know, in case a deadly plague breaks out in a world that urgently needs access to the cure.
We don’t get to know this Ryan too well, but he does have a distinguishing characteristic: a mustache.
“That Ryan has a much greater sense of confidence because it’s born from being his authentic self,” Simpson said. “I did have the backstory that he was married to a man, and it was a beautiful relationship. And he lost him, and so he’s forging his life on his own. That’s part of the reason why he agrees to go ahead and do this because he does believe in the greater good even if he doesn’t understand that that’s not exactly what’s happening.”
Earlier this year, io9 talked to Blake Crouch, the creator, showrunner, writer, and executive producer of Dark Matter, which is based on his novel. He said he envisioned a three-season arc for the show. So we asked Simpson—a sci-fi fan who’s also appeared in Westworld and Black Mirror and is thrilled to be part of shows that specialize in “Bradburian, Asimovian-level predictive sci-fi”—what he’d like to see in Ryan’s future should Dark Matter return.
“I think he’d like to live in a universe where he truly understands his health insurance and whether or not he could get a massage four times a year,” Simpson said. “I hope that he lands in a place where science, like human empathy, is as strong as their need to explore. So that as they break through other universes or other civilizations, they bring with them the responsibility of not damaging them. I think that’s where he would land the most happily because he is an empathic human being, and he’s also got this big engine running upstairs. And you can’t have that first thing without a lot of emotional intelligence.”
New episodes of Dark Matter arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
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