A world without the internet would ordinarily rank pretty low among the alternate realities most people would willingly choose to live in. For Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), his wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), and their son Charlie, however, it may be exactly what they need. After everything the family has been through, they aren’t looking for a better life anymore. They need a life that is harder to find.
Season 2 has put the Dessens in an unusual position. Jason spent most of the first season trying to get back to Daniela and Charlie after Jason2 stole his life, travelling through the Box and encountering more versions of himself along the way. He finally got his family back, only for the danger to follow them. After taking on new identities and moving to another reality, seven months of relative safety ended when another Jason found them.
So when Charlie gets to choose their next destination, a technologically primitive version of Chicago turns out to have one major advantage. There is no internet, no Google, no smartphones, and none of the digital infrastructure that makes it so easy to connect a person’s name to practically every other part of their life. For a family trying to disappear, that sounds considerably better than it does for everyone else.
A disconnected world makes starting over easier
The difference becomes obvious as soon as the Dessens try to build a new life. In their old reality, finding someone’s address, employment history, photographs, relatives, or other personal information can take seconds. Here, the same information requires phone calls, physical records, libraries, and people who know how to find things the old-fashioned way. The information hasn’t disappeared; it has simply become much harder to connect.
For Jason and Daniela, that is a useful distinction. They have already learned that hiding in a familiar technological world isn’t enough when other versions of Jason know exactly what to look for. A world with fewer digital trails gives them more time to establish themselves before anyone can start connecting the dots.
It doesn’t make life particularly convenient, though. Jason and Daniela have to pawn their wedding rings to get money, while Charlie needs to enroll in school and prove that he exists in this reality. The same lack of infrastructure that makes the family difficult to track also makes some of the most basic parts of starting over considerably harder.
The school nevertheless gives Daniela a way to investigate whether another Dessen family already exists in this world. It does, although the answer is less alarming than it could have been. Their counterparts moved to California three years earlier, leaving enough distance between the two families for Jason and Daniela to consider staying in Chicago without immediately stepping into someone else’s life.
That distinction is important for Jason, who has already seen what happens when an alternate version of himself decides another person’s life is his for the taking. He has no interest in becoming another Jason2. The goal is simply to stay away from their counterparts and give his own family somewhere to live.
The problem is that the Dessens aren’t the only people moving through the multiverse, and the Box remains the thread connecting all of them.
The Box is making this new world harder to hide in
Jason and Daniela need help finding information they can’t easily access themselves, which leads them to Mitchel McNamara, a private investigator. In a world without search engines, someone who knows how to dig through records and track down information is especially useful. It also means giving an outsider a reason to start looking into the family.
McNamara eventually finds the Box, and suddenly the Dessens have another problem. They chose this reality because it makes people harder to find, but they’ve brought with them an object that is impossible to explain and difficult to ignore. The lack of an internet doesn’t stop someone from becoming curious when they discover something that shouldn’t exist.
Ryan and Amanda are also passing through the same Chicago, creating another near miss for the Dessens. Their story has become increasingly tied to the Box, while Leighton is taking an even greater interest in what the technology can do. The man who helped bankroll the Box is no longer simply dealing with the consequences of Jason’s experiment; his interest in alternate realities is becoming a much larger part of the story, particularly as other versions of Leighton enter the picture.
That gives Season 2 a much wider conflict than Jason simply trying to keep his family safe. Jason has become increasingly wary of what the Box makes possible, while other people see that same technology as an opportunity. Ryan wants to use it to find a way forward, McNamara wants to understand it, and Leighton appears increasingly interested in what he can do with access to multiple realities.
The Dessens have chosen a world where technology is limited. Unfortunately, the one piece of technology they can’t leave behind has already started attracting attention.
Season 2 doesn’t need to make the internet-free Chicago a secret paradise for the premise to work. Its value is much simpler: the world is difficult to search, which makes it useful to three people who desperately need to disappear. But Episode 2 also makes clear that hiding from the internet isn’t the same as hiding from everyone.
For now, the Dessens have found somewhere they can stay out of sight. What happens when the people interested in the Box start getting closer may determine whether this reality becomes a temporary refuge or something more permanent.
More importantly, the season is setting up a much bigger question around the Box itself. Jason has spent so long trying to get back to the life he lost that he has had little choice but to see the technology as a means of survival. Other people now have very different ideas about what it could be used for. That shift gives Dark Matter plenty of room to explore the consequences of the Box without simply repeating Jason’s Season 1 journey.
