Dark Matter 1.3: Missing Fingers

Just saw Dark Matter 1.3, the third episode of what I'd call the interchanging alternate reality series on Apple TV+.  I thought it was excellent.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

Dark Matter 1.2 ended with the shocking murder of Daniela 2 in Jason 1's reality -- that is, not the Jason who actually built the full-size superimposition box/room that makes shifts into alternate realities possible -- and this in effect is an announcement that this story, or at least some of the characters in it, really mean business.  Their motives are still not clear by the end of the third episode, but Dawn losing a few of her fingers as she tries to stop Jason 1 and Amanda after firing a gun at them confirms that this narrative means business indeed.

The loss of the fingers also serves another important purpose.  We're told that four characters in World 2 entered the box/room, and, who knows, there could be more.   We'll at least now know immediately that if Dawn suddenly shows up in World 1with missing fingers, she's actually Dawn 2.

But lest you think that Dark Matter is all quantum mechanics and gore, there's also some nicer clever touches in 1.3  My favorite is the guess who's coming to dinner party in World 1, in which Jason 2 struggles to know who everyone is and what they do -- using an iPhone to help (of course it's an iPhone, the series is on Apple TV+ -- and Ryan 1 tells Jason 2 that he's looking good (which he should -- award-winning scientists probably do live and look at least a little better than their harried professor counterparts).

Dark Matter continues to be philosophically provocative, hard hitting, and we can now add, suitably wry. More than enough for me to eagerly continue to watch.

See also Dark Matter 1.1-1.2: Break-Neck Action and Philosophic Contemplation

Paul Levinson interviews Mark Dawidziak about Edgar Allan Poe

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 386, in which I talk to Mark Dawidziak about his latest book A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, and another iconic author Mark has written about, Mark Twain.

• more about A Mystery of Mysteries 
• watch a video of this interiew
• more about It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles

Check out this episode!

Podcast Review of Dark Matter 1.1-1.2

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 385, in which I review Dark Matter 1.1-1.2 on AppleTV+.

Further places:

• written blog post review of Dark Matter 1.1-1.2
• written blog post review of Quantum Suicide
• audio podcast review of Constellation
• alternate reality short story "The Other Car"
• It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles
• Tetrad on History and Alternate History

 

Check out this episode!

Dark Matter 1.1-1.2: Break-Neck Action and Philosophic Contemplation

Dark Matter, the first two episodes of which debuted on Apple TV+ today, is the third alternate reality narrative I've seen on the screen in the past month (see my reviews of Quantum Suicide, a film created by Gerrit Van Woudenberg which should be streaming on some major app by the Fall, and Constellation, another series on Apple TV+).  All three bounce off the at-once famous and infamous Schrödinger's cat.  Quantum Suicide has the feel of Primer and the work-at-home scientist.  Dark Matter, as of the first two episodes, has a similar feel.  And I'm beginning to think I don't want to think about these matters too hard, because the more I think about them, the more I think it's possible that I could be in an alternate reality myself, right now.  But, hey, I'm so dedicated to doing this review, that I'll risk it, anyway.

[Some spoilers ahead ... ]

One thing that makes Dark Matter, adapted by Blake Crouch from his novel of the same name published in 2015 (which I haven't read), different from the many other alternate realities that I've encountered on pages and screens is that the two versions of the lead character Jason, once the story gets going, share the same knowledge of themselves and the alternate worlds they inhabit, up to a point.  Or, to be more precise, the two versions of Jason have switched realities -- for some reason we do not yet know -- and each quickly learns about their new reality, while retaining knowledge of their original reality before the time that their original reality split in two.  

We also are beginning to understand that the fork in this particular double reality happened 15 years earlier, when Jason had to make a decision about how he felt about his girlfriend Daniela's pregnancy.  Our story begins in the present, with Jason and Daniela happily married, with Charlie their 15-year-old son.  Before too long, Jason is kidnapped and ends up in an alternate reality in which Jason didn't want to be a father, Daniela had an abortion, and they're living separate lives.  As the two episodes unfold, with an appealing mix of break-neck action and philosophical contemplation, we find the Jasons beginning to struggle with the question: In one reality, he's a happily married father, but he and Daniela have lackluster careers.  In the other reality, Jason is a pathbreaking, enormously successful physicist and Daniela a famous artist, but neither has much of a personal life.  Which life will/would Jason choose?  That is, assuming Jason has the power to now make such a choice.

I'll definitely be watching every episode of this new series, and posting reviews here as appropriate.

The Singer Sisters: The Musical Mystique

There's a meta-genre of fiction epitomized in different but overlapping ways by Eddie and the Cruisers, Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap, and Daisy Jones and the Six -- the first and the third adapted to the screen from novels -- that helps us understand what those who make music that lights up our nights are doing when they're off-stage and not in the studio.  Sarah Seltzer's The Singer Singers, a debut novel to be published this August, not only fits well in that narrative family, but in some ways exceeds it.  I'd expect to see it adapted on some kind of screen before too long.

The Singer Sisters actually tells us two stories, deftly interwoven.  One is a moving snapshot of the folk-rock music scene,  and therein the larger music venue in which folk-rock played, in the last third of the 20th century.  The other is a tableau of upper middle class Jewish culture, in New York City, Boston, and beyond, in the same period of time.

The Singers -- aka the Zingleman sisters -- strive to succeed across two tempestuous generations along with other fictional singers and writers, against a backdrop of real superstars that even non-devotees of folk-rock will instantly recognize.  The characters worry about "stealing from Dylan".  One of the singers concludes that "Joan Baez was right and Dylan wrong, that kindness mattered more than genius" (I would say that both are crucial).  There's a quote from Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain" -- "see the silver bird on high" -- and a mention of Phil Ochs (not a superstar but shoulda been).  And there are fictitious characters that the cognoscenti will surely know, like the rock critic who uses his way with words to unfairly lambaste brilliant work (as the real rock critic did to Phil Ochs -- not to mention Paul McCartney). Meanwhile, the Singer songs are not only spoken of by the characters, but Seltzer actually delivers more than a dozen sets and snippets of original lyrics, demonstrating a considerable talent not only as a novelist but a lyricist, and leaving the reader yearning to hear them put to music and fulfilled in song.  In addition to a movie or a limited TV series, The Singer Sisters also has the makings of a Broadway musical.

The Zingleman sisters are Jewish, and their Yiddishkeit permeates the novel, not only in cream sodas, but their parents' wise view that they'd rather see their children fed with goishe food than go hungry without it. In this sense, The Singer Sisters has a kinship with Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, and I hope the novel is recognized as the compelling portrait of Jewish culture in America that it is.  It's especially important, given the rising wave of anti-Semitism that's afflicting our country and the world.

In case it's not obvious, The Singer Sisters is very much a woman's novel, explored in sisterhood, motherhood, and daughterhood, with love, heartbreak, pain, exultation, and a panoply of uniquely female emotion in every chapter.  But men might well get a necessary education from this novel too, and I heartily recommend it to any human being.

Pre-order The Singer Sisters here.

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"Paul Levinson's It's Real Life is a page-turning exploration into that multiverse known as rock and roll. But it is much more than a marvelous adventure narrated by a master storyteller ... it is also an exquisite meditation on the very nature of alternate history." 

-- Jack Dann, Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History

Science fiction sampler

Thanks Bob Hutchins for the soundtrack via Udio AI