We never saw what happened to the Jasons after Jason, Daniela, and Charlie left their world, hoping to find somewhere safe and still.
But Dark Matter Season 2 Episode 5 gave us a deeper understanding of how painful those events were for them. Much of the show has focused on our foundational family unit, but the truth is that none of these other Jasons deserved what came their way, either.
So far, we’ve only seen flashes of the others. We know they exist, but they’ve largely been banished to the sidelines as collateral damage.
Yet they do very much exist. And “Love and Be Loved” is the story of one of them and the decisions he makes when everything he knew and loved is torn away from him.
The Jasons left behind on Dark Matter Season 1 Episode 9 were left to fend for themselves in an unforgiving world. It was theirs, but not theirs. They had collectively lost everything. So what became of them?
This Jason does step into the shoes of another. At this point in the story, he has no choice, unless he wants to die. The world he finds lost its Jason at the age of 16.
His mother has lived with that loss for decades, and her son’s childhood bedroom remains much as he left it. For a man who has nowhere to go, walking into that room offers something he can scarcely believe is still possible: a way home.
Here, we get a glimpse of who Jason is without Daniela, even if this isn’t our Jason.
So much of Dark Matter Season 1 focused on who Jason was with her that we never got to see him otherwise. And with Daniela leaving Jason at the end of Dark Matter Season 2 Episode 4 and Charlie off to college, it’s a perfect time to remember that they aren’t the only ones starting over.
This Jason found a world where he doesn’t have to compete with yet another version of himself. And even better, he doesn’t lie about who he is. He may not be forthcoming at first, but in time, it all comes out. It always does.
His mother knows her son died. She also comes to know the man standing before her, who remembers being that boy and has lived decades her boy never got to have. Their relationship can’t give either of them back what they lost. They love each other anyway.
That distinction matters. Jason2 set everything in motion by deciding another Jason’s life should be his.
The Jasons who gathered outside the Box wanted the same Daniela and Charlie because, from their perspective, they had lost their family.
Here is one of those men discovering that he can love people whose lives have continued without him, and be loved by someone who knows the impossible truth about him.
Time passes quickly in this hour. Roughly six years go by, though the episode seldom stops to announce another milestone.
Instead of drinking himself to death, this Jason has his mother’s unconditional love to help pull him through his darkest moments. Fixing a broken railing leads to crafting a chair for her, and that leads to a business.
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After spending so long facing an endless succession of doors, he begins making things he can hold in his hands. A chair takes patience. It occupies one place. Someone can sit in it and stay awhile.
This Jason has no animosity toward the others, so as he spots more woebegone versions of himself, he brings them home, too. One is dirty and drunk in an alley when Jason finds him. What is one returning son, when you can have three?
By their last Christmas with their mother, the three Jasons and the women in their lives have become an impromptu family. They take turns caring for her as she dies of cancer.
It’s a remarkable answer to the image that closed Dark Matter Season 1.
Back then, a crowd of Jasons stood together because they all wanted the same life, and only one of them could leave with it. Around this table, three of them have found different ways to go on. Their mother has room for all of them.
This Jason’s preoccupation with time leads him to the local bookstore, where he meets the next love of his life. He reads, too, searching other people’s words for a way to understand what has happened to him.
Proust writes about grief as something that eventually wears away, however impossible that may seem while you’re inside it. The episode lets enough years pass for us to see that change in Jason without pretending his earlier life no longer matters.
He doesn’t hide that life from the woman he falls in love with. He takes her to his own grave and then to the Box, now covered in graffiti and sitting in the woods.
Those are extraordinary things to show a new partner, yet the point is wonderfully ordinary: he wants her to know him. His past can be part of their life without deciding its future.
When his mother dies, he reads Tolkien’s “I Sit Beside the Fire and Think” at her funeral. The poem looks back across the seasons of a life, and toward a world its speaker may never see. It also imagines people returning after an absence.
His mother once lost a boy and, against every expectation, got years with the man he might have become. Jason loses her in turn. This time, he has people beside him to share the grief.
Joel Edgerton has been doing so much heavy lifting for Dark Matter, so his skills are often put to the test. But on Dark Matter Season 2 Episode 5, he carries it differently.
There is very little dialogue, which could have been slow and painfully boring. Yet it never was. He shows us a man changing without giving us a speech about the moment it happened.
There isn’t one moment. It happens while Jason repairs the railing, welcomes the other men home, falls in love, and spends ordinary days with his mother.
The settings do just as much work. Dark woods and old architecture give way to street scenes, a used bookstore, and that untouched childhood bedroom. The Box, once the most consequential thing in Jason’s life, sits outside gathering graffiti.
The episode doesn’t explain every feeling or mark every passing year. It trusts us to notice his mother grow older, a business grow, relationships deepen, and the machine that once seemed to contain every possible answer left to weather in the woods.
After his mother’s death, Jason moves in with the woman he loves. On the day of the move, he stops for flowers and runs into that world’s Daniela at the grocery store.
Of course he recognizes her. Of course the encounter means something. But he doesn’t follow her or begin imagining how he might fit himself into her life. He takes the flowers home.
Everything we’ve watched him build allows him to do something that once seemed impossible: see Daniela and keep walking toward someone else.
While he was gone, his girlfriend found his journal, open to a plea to find a world where he could love and be loved.
When he returns, she greets him with a warm smile, and they kiss passionately. She knows what he lost, and she’s there to welcome him into the life they’re making together.
He finally puts away the pipe cleaner wedding ring he’s worn for so long. It’s such a small gesture after all the years it took to reach it. He can remember Daniela and Charlie, love them still, and stop wearing the life he lost.
“Love and Be Loved” gave this Jason a childhood room to return to, then let him grow beyond it. He found his mother, lost her, made chairs, took in two men who shared his face, and fell in love again.
For a Jason who once had nothing but the life he’d lost, that is quite a lot.
What did you think of this extraordinary episode of Dark Matter? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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