How Blake Crouch Turned His Best-Selling Sci-Fi Thriller into Apple TV+'s Dark Matter

0:00They don't realize smart people use smartphones, huh? Seeing through VS, they thought was going to slide. Download text now because it cuts out cloutery. You can literally activate it from your couch. Nationwide 5G with the same towers the other companies use. Pay what you want or not at all. You're in control. Show these ridiculous carriers we ain't paying for stupid. Because we're way too smart to pay them. Free app based talk index via the text now app requires Wi-Fi or data connection data plans all separately. 5G were available. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. It's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East. It's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, OK, hold on. I got a new favorite food. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Cupid Mayon. Yeah, it's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it at the grocery store. And this mayo is different. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Cupid only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, almost buttery.

1:01Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers, chefs use it, restaurants use it, people who really care about flavor use it. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Cupid, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Waiting for your sign? Here it is. Shop Labor Day of Clients deals at Loads before they're gone. Get up to 45% off, select major appliances. Plus, get free delivery, hollowing, installation and parts and a two-year-low protection plan on purchases of $999 or more. Labor Day deals are on now at Loads, in-store and online. Valid through 9.16, while supplies last. Selection various, Valocation. C-Lows.com for more details. You know, you are sitting in traffic. Oh, yeah. The absolute worst. Right. It is a Tuesday evening. It is raining just enough to make all those red break lights smear across your windshield and your hands are just resting heavy on the steering wheel. You're going absolutely nowhere.

2:01No, where at all. Yeah. You are just trapped in this metal box staring at the bumper of like a Honda Civic in front of you. And in that specific quiet kind of boredom, your mind just starts to wander. It always does. It does. You start tallying up this invisible ledger of the paths you didn't take in life. Like, what if you had accepted that job offer in Seattle eight years ago? Or what if you hadn't broken up with that one specific partner? Exactly. Or what if you had just studied something entirely different in college? We all do this. And we just sort of assume those other paths completely evaporated the moment we made our choices. Well, we rely on that assumption for our sanity. I mean, we really have to. What do you want? We have to believe the path we are currently walking on is the only solid ground. Because otherwise, if we really thought about it, the sheer volume of alternative realities would just paralyze us. That is so true. It is basically the defining symptom of the midlife crisis. You know, it is this phantom ache of the unlived life.

3:01Yeah. But typically that ache only really lasts as long as the traffic jam. The light turns green, you step on the gas, and the ghost of that other life just vanishes. But what if those other versions of you didn't evaporate? Right. What if every single one of those unchosen branches just kept growing, completely independent of your current reality, and they are out there right now? It is a genuinely terrifying thought. It really is. And that is the terrifying question right at the center of Blake Crouch's science fiction phenomenon, Dark Matter. Which is just an incredible piece of work. It is. And today, for this deep dive, we are going to explore how it evolved from this mind-bending 2016 novel into a massive flagship Apple TV Plus series. Starring Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly. Right. And what is so compelling when you look at the source material and the production history of this story is that the creation of the show itself was basically a series of massive what ifs? Oh, absolutely. The behind the scenes reality of getting this story to the screen really mirrors the narrative itself.

4:02It really does. So our mission for this Danette dive is to lay all of that out. This is not just going to be a recap of a sci-fi show. No, not at all. We are going to treat this as a masterclass in the mechanics of adaptation. We want to explore how a failed, kind of soulless movie script was resurrected into absolute television gold. And the grueling reality of an author demanding total control of his own universe. Yes, the logistics of that are wild. And ultimately, we are going to look at what a 12-foot metal cube can actually teach us about the physics of regret and, you know, contentment. Because that is the core tension here. We are looking at a story that operates at the very specific intersection of cutting edge quantum mechanics and just the quiet, ordinary desperation of a midlife crisis. Yeah, that domestic dread. So let's look at how this story was actually built broken and then painstakingly rebuilt. Because long before anyone was building metal cubes on a sound stage, this entire universe really started at a kitchen table.

5:02We did. We have to look at Blake Crouch himself. He was in his mid-30s when this idea really took root. And the timing of his age is the engine of the entire concept. How so? Well, think about being in your mid-30s. You have been alive just long enough to start looking backward with a really critical eye. Right. You aren't really looking forward at this boundless potential anymore. Your ledger of choices has some permanent ink on it. Yeah, the concrete has started to dry. Exactly. You have committed to a career, a partner, a city. And Crouch was in that exact psychological space just taking inventory of his own life. And the irony here, which I find so fascinating from the biographical material, is that Crouch is not a physicist. Not even close. Right. The material explicitly notes that he spent his college years actively avoiding math and science. He was an English major. A classic humanities guy. Yeah. But for a decade before he actually sat down to write this specific novel, he was reading about quantum mechanics with this almost religious fervor. He became completely obsessed with the mechanics of reality at a subatomic level.

6:05Just reading textbooks for fun? Basically, yeah. He was diving deep into concepts like the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and specifically the concept of superposition. Okay, right. Superposition. Which, in physics, is the terrifying suggestion that a quantum system can exist in multiple states at the exact same time until it is forced to choose. Wait, wait, before we go further into the many worlds thing, I know we are going to touch on this later, but whenever quantum physics comes up, people always drop the phrase, shorty gersus cat. Oh, of course. And for anyone who only knows that as like a pop culture buzzword printed on a graphic tee at the mall. The hipster t-shirt? Exactly. What exactly is the cat doing in the box? And how does it relate to this idea of superposition? Well, it is the perfect foundational metaphor for what Crouch is doing here. So, Erwin Schrodinger proposed this thought experiment back in 1935, specifically to highlight how bizarre quantum mechanics truly is. Okay, walk me through it. Okay.

7:05Imagine you place a living cat inside a sealed steel box. A sealed box, got it. And inside that box, right alongside the cat, you also place a tiny vial of poison gas. Okay, dark. Very dark. Yeah. And that vial is hooked up to a mechanism that is controlled by a single radioactive atom. Just one atom. Just one. If the atom decays, it triggers the mechanism, the hammer falls, the vial breaks, and the cat dies. Oh, man. If the atom does not decay, nothing happens, and the cat lives. So, it's basically this terrifying 50-50 coin flip. Exactly. But here is where the quantum mechanics come in. The radioactive decay of that atom is a quantum event. Right. And according to the rules of quantum mechanics, until you physically open the box and observe what happened, that atom exists in a state of superposition. Meaning it has both decayed and not decayed. Primaltoniously, yes. That is wild. Therefore, logically, until the box is opened, the cat is theoretically both alive and dead at the exact same time. My brain is already starting to hurt.

8:05It is meant to be absurd. It is only the act of observation, the literal act of opening the box and looking inside, that forces the universe to, quote-unquote, collapse into one definitive reality. Okay. So let me try to map that onto our daily lives, because scaling that up from a cat in a box to a human being's choices is pretty intense. It is a massive leap. Think about having 50 tabs open in your web browser. Oh, the absolute story of my life. Right. It slows your whole computer down. But in the real world, to actually read an article or watch a video, you have to look at one specific tab. Yeah, you have to click on it. And the moment you click on it, you are forced to ignore the other 49. You essentially collapse your attention down to one reality. Right. Exactly. But Crouch is essentially asking, what if you didn't have to collapse the tabs? What if you could take a chemical compound, like a drug that allowed your consciousness to actively browse all 50 tabs simultaneously? That is a phenomenal way to conceptualize the macro scale application of this physics.

9:07It makes it so much easier to grasp. It really does. And Crouch's stroke of genius was taking this abstract subatomic physical theory and weaponizing it into a pure exploration of human regret. He weaponized it. I like that. He really did. He has publicly referred to regret as a corrosive emotion. Corrosive, yeah, because it's a way at you. Exactly. And he didn't originally set out to write an autobiographical self-portrait or anything. Right. It's a sci-fi thriller. But he eventually realized he was using speculative physics as a coping mechanism. Oh, wow. It was a way for a writer who was staring down his own midlife anxieties to safely sit with his unlived lives without letting them completely eat him alive. That is so profound. And the genesis moment for this, the actual spark, happened at a bar in Chicago in early 2014. A very fitting location. Truly. So Crouch is sitting with a novelist friend. They are having a few drinks and they are just turning over these very fragments. Just talking about life. Yeah. They are talking about alternate selves, the ache of a different career path, the classic fear that maybe a deeply peaceful domestic life and like a towering world-changing ambition cannot occupy the exact same physical space.

10:21The old work life balance debate that scaled up to infinity. Exactly. And out of that conversation, the central image of the story just arrived. Is that a nowhere? Yeah. And it doesn't arrive as some complex mathematical equation. It arrives as a visual. A very striking visual. A massive cube sitting in a warehouse under these harsh industrial work lights. A drug that forcibly puts the human brain into a state of superposition. The browser tab drug. The browser tab drug. You take it step inside the cube and the interior architecture manifests as an infinite corridor of doors. Infinite doors. And behind every single door is a universe created by a different choice you made. It is such an immediate visceral hook for a story. It really is. But the brilliance of that 2016 novel is how lean and almost cruel it is with that hook. Cruel is a good word for it. Because you have Jason Desson, this brilliant physics professor who abandoned his groundbreaking research because his girlfriend, Daniella, got pregnant. He chose family over the lab.

11:21He chose family. He chose a very quiet life in Chicago. And then he gets abducted by Jason too. The alternate version of himself. Right. A version of himself from a different universe who chose the lab, who built the box, who won the huge prizes. But never married Daniella. Because he realizes that winning the Nobel Prize didn't actually make him happy. Exactly. So Jason too crosses dimensions to steal the domestic life he sacrificed. And Jason gets thrown into the multiverse and he just wants to get back to the exact life he had. The narrative propulsion there is just incredibly efficient. It just moves. Oh, completely. It is a first person sprint through probability space. You have this man desperately trying to remember the exact granular weight of his own existence. So he can identify his true home in a sea of infinite copies. And obviously a premise that universally relatable, wrapped in the pacing of a high octane thriller. Naturally attracted Hollywood instantly. He warmed it. They don't realize smart people use smartphones, huh? Sand through BS, they thought was going to slide.

12:22Download text now because it cuts out clountery. You can literally activate it from your couch. Nationwide 5G with the same towers the other companies use. Pay what you want or not at all. You're in control. Show these ridiculous carriers we ain't paying for stupid. Because we're way too smart to pay them. We shot them there. Free out base talk and text me the text now. App requires Wi-Fi or data connection data plans. All separately. 5G were available. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albert Sinsvans and Pavilion. Follow is coming, which means coffee and cold season is almost here. Get ahead by stocking up on all your favorite coffee and cold essentials now through September 29th. Shop in store and online to save on products like Allegra tablets, Hallstrops, Mews & X Kickstart, Zyrtec allergy relief tablets, Tylenol liquid gels, One a day men's health, and VIX Daqel and NICOL combo packs. Offer and September 29th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit Albert Sinsvans or Pavilion.com for more details. This is Ashley Akinetti from the Almost Amos podcast. You ever notice you and your spouse keep saying we need to get away, but you never actually plan anything.

13:24That was us until we did something fun and spontaneous. We went to resort pass.com. There are hundreds of hotel resorts. Pools and spas and private beaches that you can enjoy. You can spend the day at a luxury resort. Pool spa massage without booking an overnight stay. And listen, I may have only been like 15 minutes from home, but it felt like it was a whole different world. And I'm thinking this is exactly what I needed. So just go to resort pass.com. Choose your resort. Choose your day. Luxury resort day passes start at just $25. Once you post your daycation, people are going to ask where you are. Go to resort pass.com slash almost famous and use the promo code almost famous to get $20 off when you spend $100. That's code almost famous at resort pass.com slash almost famous. Right. But the path to Hollywood was an absolute disaster initially. It really was. Because before we get to this sprawling Apple TV plus triumph that we have now,

14:26we really have to look at the failure of compression. Yes. The very first attempt to adapt dark matter almost stripped the soul out of the story entirely. It almost killed him. So let's talk about the film rights. They were snapped up by Sony for a future film back in 2014. Which is crazy because this was before the book was even finished. Wait, really? The book wasn't done. Not at all. The first 140 pages of crouches manuscript had leaked through foreign sub agents. It is wild to think about a half finished word document floating around international agencies and suddenly Hollywood executives are calling you on the phone. Just throwing money at a half-fentious idea. But you can totally see why on paper it looks like the perfect blockbuster movie structure. Oh, 100%. You have an abduction, you have a mystery box, dimension hopping, and a desperate homecoming. It checks all the boxes for a two hour throw ride. But this brings up the brutal mathematical reality of screenwriting. Okay, let's hear the math. A future film is, by definition, a tightly constrained space.

15:30You have roughly 110 pages of script. Right. And in the industry, the golden rule is that one page of script basically equals one minute of screen time. So you have 110 minutes to tell your entire story. Exactly. So crouch attaches himself to adapt the screenplay initially, and then other writers take passes at it over the years. And the script just hovers at what the studio calls a solid B. A solid B. That's rough. It never crosses the threshold into greatness. But why, though? If the plot is so propulsive like we said, why did the movie script fail? Because of triage. Triage, like in a hospital. Exactly like in a hospital. To fit a massive existential, multiverse spanning journey into 110 pages, the writers had to start amputating things. And what did they amputate? The only things that actually make the audience care. The character development and the emotional stakes. Let's look at the math again. If it takes you 30 pages just to establish the rules of quantum mechanics, introduce the concept of the box and explain superposition so the audience isn't hopelessly confused.

16:33You have just eaten nearly a third of your movie. Exactly. You mathematically have no time left to love to character's brief. Wow. In the feature film drafts, Jason was getting abducted by Page 10. Page 10. We barely even know what kind of coffee the guy drinks, and suddenly he's being beaten up in an alley and thrown into an alternate dimension. Right. It completely bankrupted the emotional runtime. That is such a good way to phrase it. Bankrupted the emotional runtime. Crouch himself realized that it was basically devolving into a slick, soulless sci-fi movie. The sci-fi elements were just cannibalizing the domestic drama. Completely. He actually thought the entire adaptation was dead for a few years. But doesn't that raise a larger question about the medium itself? Like, is compression always the enemy of science fiction? Or is it specifically fatal to this story because the sci-fi is really just a Trojan horse? That is a great question. It is absolutely the latter. It's the Trojan horse aspect. Okay. Untack that. The structural limits of cinema simply cannot accommodate the necessary emotional pacing of dark matter.

17:36Longing requires duration. Longing requires duration. You cannot rush the profound feeling of missing your own life. And more critically, look at Danielle's side of the story. The wife who gets left behind with the imposter? Yes. She is living in a house with a man who looks exactly like her husband. He talks like him. He knows his history, but he's fundamentally not him. That is so creepy. It is terrifying. But that slow, creeping, bodily realization of horror cannot be conveyed in a two-minute movie montage. No, you can't just slap a pop song over it and show her looking confused. Exactly. It requires outlisten screen time. It demands that the audience sit with the agonizing discomfort of a counterfeit marriage. Think about how this mirrors our own lives for a second. How often do we triage our own relationship? Oh, all the time. We skip the slow, necessary day-to-day maintenance of a marriage or a friendship, just to hit the major plot points of, like, career progression or life milestones. That is a phenomenal parallel.

18:37The movie script was making the exact same mistake Jason Tumay. Prioritizing the mechanics over the humanity? Yes. And it is exactly why the project really required the intervention of producer Matt Tomak. Right. Matt Tomak. He had worked on the amazing Spider-Man films, didn't he? He did, so he thoroughly understood the mechanics of blockbusters and huge visual effects. But he saw something different here. He recognized that the heart of dark matter wasn't the spectacle. It was the kitchen table questions. Is this all there is, kind of, questions? Yes. Am I happy with my choices? And it is crucial to remember the cultural timeline here. Right. When was this all happening? Tomak was pushing this grounded vision way before the concept of the multiverse became the default grammar of pop culture. Oh true. This is pre-marval multiverse madness. Way before Marvel turned it into a relentless franchise engine. And before everything, everywhere, all at once swept the Oscars. So audiences weren't just exhausted by the concept of infinite universes yet? Exactly. But even then, Colmech didn't want superheroes punching each other through portals.

19:41He wanted ordinary flawed people exploring the roads they didn't take. So what happened? How did it get out of movie jail? Sony features eventually allowed Sony television to take over the material. Which changes everything. It does. Moving from 110 page script to a nine-hour television canvas, solved the pacing problem immediately. The story could finally breathe. But that transition introduced an entirely new, incredibly dangerous dilemma. Who is going to steer this massive ship? Right. Which leads us to the author deciding to play God. Or more accurately, the author becoming a showrunner. Which is notoriously rare, right? It is incredibly rare and very risky. Novelists are accustomed to absolute solitary control. They deal in internal monologues and limitless imagination. They just sit in a room and type. Right. Showrunners deal in logistics, union rules, and multi-million dollar budgets. Is it completely different skill set? Now, Crutch had been around television sets before, right? The sources say he wrote and produced for the adaptations of his books,

20:41Weward Pines, and Good Behavior. He had, yes. But he had never sat at the absolute head of the table. He was a producer, not the ultimate boss. But he knew intimately what it felt like to watch other people interpret his sentences and, you know, maybe mangled his original intent. He had seen the Hollywood machine chew up ideas before. So he had this realization where he essentially said, Dark Matter is my child, and why would I let someone else raise my child? It's a very protective stance. He decided that if anyone was going to ruin this story, it was going to be him. I love that. So he stepped up to be the showrunner, Apple TV Plus, officially greenlit nine episodes in March of 2022. A massive commitment from Apple. And Crutch actually moved to Chicago in May of 2022 to just take the ruse completely. But wait, if we look at Hollywood history, when novelists demand total control over their film adaptations, it often ends in complete disaster. Oh, Stephen King directing Maxim over drive comes to mind. Exactly. The skill sets just do not naturally translate.

21:43So how did Crutch actually survive the logistical nightmare of show running? Well, the source of show he didn't do it entirely alone. He wrote the pilot in a large share of the season, but he did bring in a small writers room. Okay, so we had backup. Yeah, including Megan McDonald and Jacqueline Benzekery to really help break the episodic structure, which is essential for a nine hour narrative. But to your point about the transition from novelist to showrunner, there is a beautiful almost poetic irony here when you connect it back to the science of the book. Oh, I know where you're going with this. A novelist in a room essentially lives in a state of superposition. Yes. When you are typing a manuscript, you can imagine infinite possibilities. A room can be any color. A character can have any reaction. You don't have to decide until it goes to print. But a showrunner cannot live in superposition. A showrunner is forced hundreds of times a day to collapse the wave function. That is the exact reality of physical production. A novelist can just write. The cube looked infinite. That is superposition.

22:43It can look like anything in the reader's mind. Exactly. But the showrunner has to collapse that infinite possibility by walking onto a freezing sound stage in Chicago, pointing at a paint swatch and telling a crew to buy 50 gallons of matte obsidian paint. You have to collapse the infinite down to a literal purchase order. The job is just rapid fire decision making, so that hundreds of carpenters, electricians, and actors can actually do their jobs. And the source is detailed, the staggering scale of this commitment. We are talking about seven solid months of principal photography. Seven months is a very long shoot. It followed immediately by four months of grueling post-production and visual effects work. It is a marathon. Crouch described it as the coolest and hardest thing he had ever done. He literally compared it to leaping off a cliff and just waiting to see if the parachute opens. And by claiming that absolute terrifying control. Crouch didn't just ensure a faithful recreation of his book. No, he did something better. He actually used the massive canvas of a premium television budget

23:46to fix his own lingering regrets about the original text. It's the ultimate doover. Let's talk about the ripple effects of that adaptation, because this is where the show truly elevates itself above the 2016 novel. It really does expand the world beautifully. The book, as thrilling as it is, was what Crouch called a single-mind in flight. Meeting it's strictly first person. Right, you are locked entirely inside the head of our abducted Jason. You only see what he sees, you only know what he knows. Crouch is an incredibly effective narrative device for a fast-paced thriller novel. It keeps the paranoia high. But Crouch's biggest creative regret was that he never gave Daniela, the wife left behind, or Jason too, the imposter who stole the life, their own distinct narratives in the book. The reader never got to experience the profound psychological horror of Daniela's daily existence. In television, practically demands multiple viewpoints. Nine hours of watching one man hyperventilating inside a metal box would just exhaust the audience.

24:47It would get very old, very fast. So they expanded the world. Jennifer Connelly steps into the role of Daniela, who is this brilliant artist who sacrificed her public career for her family. A phenomenal casting choice, by the way. Unbelievable casting. Because we aren't tied solely to Jason's perspective anymore, we get to watch Connelly navigate this incredibly intimate violation. We see her noticing the microscopic shifts. Yeah, a slightly different laugh, a different preference in wine, a subtle shift in the way he looks at her. The uncanny valley of her own marriage. They also vastly expanded the character of Amanda, played by Alice Braga. Right, in the novel she is a fan favorite, sure. But if you look closely at her narrative function in the book, she essentially exists as a tool to facilitate Jason's escape. She's a bit of a plot device. Exactly. But in the series, she evolves into a brilliant, deeply conflicted scientist with her own rich, unfinished life. They even build entirely new characters from scratch for the show. Like Blair.

25:47They don't realize smart people use smartphones, huh? Sand through BS, they thought was going to slide. Download text now, because it cuts out cloutery. You can literally activate it from your couch. Nationwide 5G with the same towers the other companies use. Hey, what you want or not at all, you're in control. Show these ridiculous carriers we ain't paying for stupid, because we're way too smart to pay them. Free app based talk index, me the text now app requires Wi-Fi or data connection data plans all separately. 5G were available. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albert, Sins, Vaughn's and Pavilion. Follows coming, which means cough and cold season is almost here. Get ahead by stocking up on all your favorite cough and cold essentials now through September 29th. Visit AlbertSinsvansorPavilions.com for more details. This is Ashley Akinetti from the Almost Amos Podcast. You ever notice you and your spouse keep saying, we need to get away, but you never actually plan anything. That was us until we did something fun and sponsored. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.

26:47I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Play by Amanda Brugel.

27:49She didn't exist in the book at all. Not as single mention. She was engineered specifically for the series to act as a hinge point in the multiverse. She is someone who offers help in a hostile reality and later becomes an accidental beacon drawing other versions of Jason toward the family. But the most fascinating character evolution, the one that completely rewires the emotional circuitry of the story, is Jason himself. Yes. And a massive portion of that credit goes directly to the casting of Joel Edgerton. Edgerton didn't just act in the series. He was an executive producer and his influence on the narrative architecture was profound. The story of his casting is remarkably serendipitous, actually. How did it happen? Well, Edgerton had read the book and actually reached out to the production team before they had even begun a formal casting search. He just called them up. Basically, he was on a Zoom call with Crouch and Tolmock just discussing the themes of the novel. And off screen, the two producers started texting each other saying, that is Jason, we're done looking.

28:50Because it is a virtually impossible acting challenge when you think about it. He has to play so many different versions of the same guy. He has to play an every man, an arrogant genius, a soft, weary father, a hardened survivor, and a terrifying villain all wearing the exact same face. It is a masterclass in subtle physical acting. And the moment Edgerton came on board, he started advocating for massive narrative changes. There are two master strokes he pushed for that we have to unpack here. Okay. What is the first one? The first is the growth of the villain. It's Jason too. Right. In the original novel, Jason too is more of a blunt instrument than a complex soul. He is just the obstacle for our hero to overcome. He is the bad guy. But Edgerton recognized the demands of the medium. He refused to let Jason to be a one-dimensional demon on screen. Which makes sense. If the audience is going to sit and watch this man for nine hours as he tries to inhabit a stolen life, he needs a true emotional arc. So Edgerton argued fiercely for Jason too to have a path to redemption.

29:51And in the television finale, Jason too actually aids our protagonist. He realizes the catastrophic error of his hubris rather than just dying as a simple roadblock. That choice makes the tragedy of Jason too so much richer. It forces the audience to realize that the villain isn't some alien monster. The villain is just a version of you that made a selfish choice. Yes. But the second change Edgerton pushed for is the one that completely floored me. The dead twin. The addition of the dead twin. It is so heavy. This is perhaps the most profound shift in the foundational lore of the story. Explain the difference from the book. In the book, the family that our Jason is fighting through infinite terrifying dimensions to return to is relatively speaking perfectly intact. It is a warm, happy, functional home. They have their son, Charlie, everything is fine. But Edgerton, who had actually recently become a father to twins himself in real life, suggested injecting a profound lingering grief into that quote unquote home reality. He suggested that Jason and Daniela son Charlie originally had a twin brother named Max, who died years ago.

30:57Let's analyze how radically that alters the hero's journey. It changes everything. If Jason is racing across the multiverse just to get back to a postcard perfect flawless existence, it's a standard action movie. The stakes are high, but they are simple. But by adding to dead twin, Jason is fighting tooth and nail, risking his life repeatedly to get back to a reality that includes agonizing foundational pain. Because he still chooses that pain. That is the beautiful crushing reality of it. He could easily use the box to find a universe where Max lived. Exactly, the multiverse is infinite. That world definitely exists somewhere. But he doesn't want a perfect world. He wants his world. The grief over his dead son is part of the specific irreplaceable texture of his reality. That right there is the quiet, philosophical thesis of the entire adaptation. The point of life is not to endlessly search the multiverse for a timeline where you never suffered. The point is recognizing, accepting, and claiming your own world scars and all.

31:58Fundamentally changes the story from a sci-fi thriller into a pure meditation on acceptance. But speaking of making difficult choices, being the showrunner, Mint Crouch also had to turn the knife on his own writing. He had to kill his darlings. He had to kill some of his absolute favorite darlings. There was an incredibly striking, famous image from the novel that they completely stripped out of the television show. The rules of the hallway. Yes. Readers of the novel will know exactly what you were talking about. In the book, there is this deeply chilling moment where Jason is walking down the infinite 5D corridor inside the box. He looks ahead and sees another version of himself, naked, beaten, bleeding, and stumbling through the exact same space. It is an unbelievably cool, haunting visual on the page. So why on earth would you cut that from a visual medium-like television? Because the science adviser tapped Crouch on the shoulder. The science adviser ruined the fun. Well, the adviser, and eventually Crouch's own internal logic, pointed out that this sequence fundamentally breaks the foundational rules they had established for how the box operates.

33:03Okay, remind me of the rules. The 5D corridor inside the cube is not a physical place that exists in the real world. Right, it's not a real hallway. It is a physical manifestation of the user's consciousness. It is a probability space rendered as architecture by the mind of the specific person who stepped inside. So because the hallway is generated by the user's mind in that exact moment, another physical Jason from a different timeline could not possibly already be wandering around in it. Precisely. The physics of their own fictional universe forbated. Crouch was faced with the classic Raiders dilemma. Choose between what is visually cool and what is internally consistent. And he chose consistent. He let the image go. Which shows a massive amount of restraint. Because if the psychological weight of these heavy character changes like the grief of the dead twin and the marital tension, if any of that was going to land with the audience, the physical environment of the multiverse had to feel painstakingly undeniably real. If the rules of the box feel flimsy, the emotional stakes feel flimsy.

34:06The environment could not look like a glossy computer-generated comic book movie. The aesthetic had to match the psychological grit of the story. They don't realize smart people use smartphones, huh? Seeing through VS, they thought was going to slide. Download text now because it cuts out clonery. You can literally activate it from your couch. Nationwide 5G with the same towers the other companies use. Pay what you want or not at all. You're in control. Show these ridiculous carriers we ain't paying for stupid. Because we're way too smart to pay them. Reappase, talk and text me the text now. App requires Wi-Fi or data connection data plans all separately. 5G were available. Hey, it's Ryan C. Crest for Albert Sense and Tom Thumb. Now through September 29th. Save on all your favorite personal care essentials and earn four times the points. Shop in store or online for items from your favorite brands like native, panting, crest, always, Gillette, Oral Bee, and Tampaks and earn four times the points. Points can be redeemed for discounts on future purchases on groceries and gas.

35:07Get these deals before they're gone. Offer and September 29th. Restrictions apply. Officers may vary. Visit Albert Sense, vansorpavilions.com for more details. This is Ashley Akinetti from the almost famous podcast. If you ever notice you and your spouse keep saying, we need to get away, but you never actually plan anything. That was us until we did something fun and spontaneous. We went to resortpass.com. There are hundreds of hotel resorts, pools and spots and private beaches that you can enjoy. You can spend the day at a luxury resort, pool, spa, massage, without booking an overnight stay. Listen, I may have only been 15 minutes from home, but it felt like it was a whole different world. I'm thinking this is exactly what I needed. Just go to resortpass.com, choose your resort, choose your day, luxury, resort, day passes start at just $25. Once you post your daycation, people are going to ask where you are. Go to resortpass.com, slash almost famous and use the promo code almost famous to get $20 off when you spend $100.

36:11That's code almost famous at resortpass.com slash almost famous. Which brings us to the monumental task of designing infinity. Let's talk about the physical construction of this box and how they handled the alternate versions of Chicago. Because you read the book, you already have the box in your head. Crouch described it with stark simplicity, a 12 by 12 foot cube. You would think that would be a dream assignment for a production designer. Just like it's a square box, make it look heavy, we're done. In reality, that simplicity paralyzed the design team for a bit. Production designer Patricia Farrell and his team generated somewhere between 50 and 100 different conceptual designs for this single object. Over a box, how do you draw a hundred different versions of a box? Because it is the centerpiece of the entire mythology. It is the stargate. It is the delorean. If the box looks cheap, the show fails. Okay, that is a lot of pressure. Some of the early concepts weren't even strict cubes. Some leaned heavily into a neon cyberpunk aesthetic.

37:11I can't even picture that. And many of the initial designs envisioned it as a massive glass black structure. Like a gigantic monolithic iPhone screen standing in a warehouse. That sounds incredible and theory, but practically on a film set, that is a total disaster. A total disaster, yeah, completely unusable. If you build a highly reflective 12 foot black cube, it is going to act like a giant mirror. It is going to reflect every single camera lens. Every massive lighting rig and every crew member standing around in a puffy jacket holding a boom mic. Exactly. It would require a small army of visual effects artists to painstakingly rotoscope and paint out the crew from every single frame of the show. It was logistical nightmare. So they pivoted. They went back to the raw text and they decided to add texture and dimensionality. Instead of a flat, smooth cube, they designed protruding columns running vertically every 12 feet along the interior. And this turned out to be a brilliant, necessary design choice. Why?

38:11Because when the interior of the box expands into the infinite corridor, those columns give the human eye a physical anchor to measure distance and perspective. Oh, because if the walls were perfectly smooth, an infinite hallway would just look like a flat, gray blur on screen. Exactly. The brain needs texture to understand scale. And the production actually built 90 feet of this physical hallway on a massive sound stage in Chicago. 90 feet of practical set. It was long enough for Joel Edgerton to actually sprint down it, giving the camera real physical motion. And then the VFX team extended that 90 feet into infinity digitally. To solve the reflection issue on the exterior, they used an acid distress metal, which gave the surface an organic, weathered patina, so it wouldn't just read as a blank reflective void. And the lighting of that corridor is so unsettling. Cinematographers John Lindley and Jeff Greeley spent weeks hunting for this specific, sickly steel green hue that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves.

39:11It had to feel like a subterranean industrial warehouse, but one that was entirely unlit by any recognizable traditional light source. This ties directly into crouches absolute, non-negotiable golden rule for the visual effects team throughout the entire production. No theatrical lighting announcing the trick. He banned any glowing portals, any sparkling energy beams, any magical hums. You had to believe that you could physically step off a dirty street in Chicago and just walk right through this thing. He sanded away all the fantastical sci-fi tropes until it just felt like cold, brutalist reality. And that rigid adherence to reality extended to the alternate worlds outside the box as well. A key rule of the lore is that the box always appears at the exact same geographic coordinates in every single universe, regardless of what has happened to that specific Earth. That constraint is brilliant. If the box is built inside a specific warehouse in our universe, but in universe B, that plot of land was zoned for a highway 50 years ago.

40:12The box simply spawns in the middle of moving traffic. Which is such a cool visual. To ground this, the production decided to treat the city of Chicago as the ultimate anchor. It was the one constant that the multiverse was not allowed to entirely erase. They didn't just fly around the world filming in random deserts or tundra to represent different universes. They used technology to mutate Chicago itself. And this is where the technological ambition of the show really peaks. The visual effects teams built a highly accurate, foundational digital model of downtown Chicago. They didn't just guess at the scale, right? They used LiDAR scanning. They did. Wait, I hear LiDAR used on true crime shows sometimes or when they find ancient ruins in the jungle. How does that actually work for building a TV set? LiDAR stands for light detection and ranging. Imagine a scanner standing in the middle of a Chicago intersection firing millions of tiny invisible laser pulses in every direction. Millions of lasers. When those lasers hit a building, a stoplight, or a fire hydrant, they bounce back. By measuring exactly how long it takes for the light to return, the scanner creates a perfectly accurate, three-dimensional geometric map of the environment down to the millimeter.

41:21That is insane. They combined that laser data with photogrammetry, which is stitching together thousands of high-resolution photographs and satellite maps. So they essentially created a perfect digital twin of Chicago inside a computer. And then they handed that pristine digital city over to the VFX houses. And essentially said, all right, subject to the city to death and rebirth. Destroy it. They buried the digital Chicago in massive snow banks for an IC universe. They buried it in endless dunes of fine sand. They rusted the bridges and ruined the skyscrapers. So beneath the distraction, it was always unmistakably a slightly altered version of the skyline the audience recognized. We have to talk about that sequence in episode four. The implosion of downtown Chicago. The production notes refer to it as a demolition valet and it is genuinely breathtaking. You watch these iconic towering skyscrapers just collapse into dust. But they didn't just animate it to look cool. No, they had a science consultant on hand the entire time. Even when they were depicting a nuclear winter or an atmosphere where the oxygen mixture had completely changed,

42:25the visual effects had to accurately reflect what would physically happen to the brick, the flow of the Chicago River and the way light refracts through that specific atmosphere. It is the ultimate macro manifestation of Schrodinger's ASCAT. You are opening the box and seeing an earth that died, an earth that froze, and earth that burned. But it is all scaled up to a human emotional level and filmed on location in real neighborhoods like Logan Square and River North. The hard science is there if you want to dig into the physics of atmosphere collapse. But it is entirely grounded in the physical tactile reality of the city. I want you to picture this for a second. Imagine stepping out of your own front door right now. The physical layout of your street is exactly the same. The distance to your neighbor's driveway is identical, the oak tree is in the same spot, the mailbox is there. But the sky above your house is a bruised toxic purple and your entire neighborhood is buried under three feet of fine white sand. That uncanny valley, that deeply unsettling feeling of being home but fundamentally not home, is the true aesthetic triumph of this series.

43:33And that obsessive grounding, that unyielding commitment to making the infinite feel tactile, dirty and real, was so incredibly successful that it propelled the series right past the boundaries of the original source material. Yes, this brings us to the post book frontier. Season 2. Because season 1 used up the entire 2016 novel, they held absolutely nothing back for a rainy day. All the plot, all the betrayals, all the multiverse jumping was completely burned through in those nine episodes. And Apple TV Plus looked at the cultural response, looked at the viewership, and renewed the show for a ten episodes season 2, which is premiering on August 28th, 2026. Leaving the safety of the book entirely behind. The show has been remarkably candid about this transition. He openly admitted that writing completely off-book scared the shit out of him initially. I mean, how could it not? When you read a novel, you have years to tinker, to plot, to rewrite a chapter 20 times in complete isolation. Television production schedules are a moving train. They do not afford you the luxury of endless contemplation.

44:35But rather than just winging it, he and Jackal Benzekri sat down and mapped out the architecture for season 2 and season 3 together. They envision this continuation not as an endless episodic cash grab, but as a definitive trilogy with a planned, concrete ending. And the premise they have developed for season 2 represents a brilliant thematic evolution. It moves entirely away from the frantic, dimension-hopping, escape thriller mechanics of season 1. It transforms into an exploration of what they are calling an undocumented life. Think about the terrifying logistics of what happens after the season 1 finale. You have a family, Jason, Daniela, and Charlie that has crossed dimensions together to escape the chaos, and they are now living in a reality where they do not officially exist. The bureaucratic nightmare alone is staggering. Your fingerprints don't match any state or federal databases. Your social security number is belonged to other people, or to nobody at all. Your bank accounts don't exist here. How do you enroll your teenager in high school? How do you get a job? How do you hold a marriage together when the very structural architecture of your legal and social identity?

45:40It's essentially a witness protection program, but you are hiding from the universe itself. And this reflects such a rare, almost unprecedented privilege for a novelist. Most authors, when they sell their film rights, have to sit back and watch a compromised, watered down translation of their life's work on screen. They take the check and they look away. Exactly. But Crouch, he was given a multi-million dollar budget to revise and perfect his own story in season 1. And now he gets to write a sequel that he never even had to endure publishing as a book first. It is every writer's obsessive dream of the second draft. Except this second draft comes with a Hollywood VFX budget, a massive physical warehouse, and the digital reconstruction of a major American city. And crucially, the actors are entirely on board for this shift in tone. Both Jennifer Connelly and Joel Edgerton have expressed deep excitement and interviews about leaning into the granular, messy, domestic turns of this undocumented relationship.

46:42It proves that the cast is just as invested in the kitchen table drama as they are in the sci-fi spectacle. They want to play the nuances of the marriage, not just stare at the multiverse. Which brings us to the final synthesis of what dark matter truly represents as a piece of storytelling. Because when a show looks this good, it is incredibly easy to talk about it as if the primary achievement or the visual effects of the corridor itself. It is easy to get distracted by the spectacle. The corridor is beautiful, the production design is staggering, the light-ar-scan destruction of Chicago is mind-blowing. But the true achievement isn't the corridor. The achievement is that Blake Crouch insisted on using this massive, incredibly expensive, high-concept sci-fi device simply to put a microscope on a marriage. Let's look at the foundational motivations of the characters one last time. Jason too didn't dedicate his life to building this reality-shattering box so he could become a god, or conquer alternate earths or collect boundless wealth. He built it because he couldn't stand the cold, lonely reality of the life he had optimized for professional success.

47:46He just wanted domestic life, he wanted a wife and a kid. And our Jason, he doesn't cross infinite terrifying realities for the sake of scientific discovery or exploration. He crosses them strictly because a specific woman and a specific boy are waiting on the other side of an uncountable number of terrifying doors. And Daniela's story, which was finally given the oxygen it needed to breathe in the television adaptation, is the absolute heart of that examination. What does it actually like to live with a copy of the person you love? To notice the wrong toothbrush by the sink, to notice a slight, uncareristic shift in their tone of voice, and to ultimately have to decide whether love can survive when the person standing in front of you is a counterfeit. So we arrive at the dramatisturros wager of this entire narrative. The core philosophy that Crouch is putting forward, both in the 2016 novel and the Apple TV Plus series. Superposition. The idea of keeping all your options open, of living in a state of infinite possibility and refusing to commit, is a terrible model for human contentment.

48:50The unlived life will always sing a siren song. There will always be a whisper in the back of your mind asking, what if... What if I took that job? What if I moved to that city? But the work of a grown person is to hear that song, to acknowledge the past is not taken, without abandoning the room they are currently standing in. You can choose a life, but you cannot freeze it in amber. You have to actually live it with all the pain, the grief, and the compromises that come with it. Which brings us right back to that invisible ledger we were talking about in the very beginning of this deep die. You're sitting in traffic, the rain is falling, and you are thinking about the doors you didn't open. In dark matter, Jason literally builds a physical 12-foot metal box to open those doors and look at the lives he didn't choose. But I want to leave you with a thought. Aren't we all currently carrying a tiny version of that box in our pockets every single day? The smartphone as the multiverse cube. That is a piercing comparison. Think about the mechanics of it. Every single time you open social media, the algorithm is essentially feeding you a limitless corridor of alternate lives.

49:58You are swiping through the European vacations you didn't take, the lucrative careers you didn't pursue, the houses you didn't buy, the people you didn't marry. In the show, the Phi-B corridor is physically shaped by the user's consciousness and desires. So what does your digital algorithm corridor say about your unlived desires? And more importantly, is staring into that little glass box every day, making it harder for you to just walk home, open your own front door, and be happy with the reality you're actually standing in. A question definitely worth sitting with the next time you are stuck in traffic. It really is. Thanks for diving deep with us. Hey, it's Ryan C. Crest for Albert since and Tom Thumb. Now through September 29th, save on all your favorite personal care essentials and earn four times the points. Shop in store or online for items from your favorite brands like native, panting, crest, always, Gillette, Oral Bee and tampax and earn four times the points. Points can be redeemed for discounts on future purchases on groceries and gas. Get these deals before they're gone. Offer and September 29th, restrictions apply offers may vary. Visit Albert since vans or pavilions.com for more details.

51:03This is Ashley Akinetti from the almost famous podcast. You ever notice you and your spouse keep saying we need to get away, but you never actually plan anything. That was us until we did something fun and spontaneous. We went to resort pass.com. There are hundreds of hotel resorts, pools and spots and private beaches that you can enjoy. You can spend the day at a luxury resort, pool, spa, massage without booking an overnight stay. And listen, I may have only been like 15 minutes from home, but it felt like it was a whole different world. And I'm thinking this is exactly what I needed. So just go to resort pass.com, choose your resort, choose your day, luxury, resort, day passes start at just $1,500. Once you post your daycation, people are going to ask where you are. Go to resort pass.com slash almost famous and use the promo code almost famous to get $20 off when you spend $100. That's code almost famous at resort pass.com slash almost famous.

52:04In the next rare well done, the thrive team helps two people with CIDP tackle the tricky issue of friendship. They say the quiet part out loud in the event my CIDP worsens. My friends might decide it's too much. Get nudged outside their comfort zone. I don't know if I want to. To forge stronger connections. The best thing that's ever happened to me, our friends of Taurori. Watch Raurian Michelle take on the friendship factor on the next episode of Rare Well Done.