Apple TV ‘Dark Matter’ Season 2 Episode 6 Review - Making a Box in Control

Daniela travels alone to a remote family cabin. The place is empty, so she settles in: she gets an abandoned jeep running, repairs a painting, starts sketching again, and nurses an injured bird. Her stepfather, Gabriel Vargas (Gil Birmingham), eventually arrives. In her original life, he is gone; here he is still alive. She calls him “Papa.” He accepts her thin excuse for showing up unannounced and asks after Jason and Charlie. He can tell she is not ready to go back to the city and talks about the empty-nest feeling he had when she left home for school, and about the brokenness he saw in her eyes the first time they met. He is her stepfather, not her biological father; she and her mother had already been through a lot before he entered their lives. They paint together. While she is out walking, Gabriel gets a phone call from the Daniela who actually belongs to this world. He recognizes the visitor by her brushstrokes, but the call makes him think he is having a stroke or a manic episode. Daniela sits him down and explains the Box and the multiverse.

Back in the city, Charlie is sliding into drinking. Jason is a regular at the diner where Charlie, Eduardo, and this world’s Amanda work. He finally talks to Amanda. She wanted to be a doctor; her still-living bipolar mother bought the diner on a whim, and Amanda ended up running it. She is divorced, treats her staff like family, and notices Charlie is not okay after Jason and Daniela split. Instead of pushing Jason to fix the marriage, she tells him to prioritize himself, or he will not be able to help anyone else. Jason takes that to heart and starts writing a thesis on quantum entanglement. His real goal is to understand how the Box links people and worlds so he can disentangle this one and shut the local Box down.

Blair, who had recognized Daniela earlier, meets him at the diner. After he explains superposition and the multiverse, she produces a vial of Lilac Wings. She is not the local Blair. She is Blair from Jason2’s world—the first test subject, the one left in the reality with the giant murder hornets. Jason apologizes for abandoning her. She says the ordeal forced her to face the Box the way Amanda once faced hard things: repeat the frightening act until the panic fades. Once she could travel freely, she looked for anonymity and landed in this low-tech world, then ran into Daniela. They talk about entanglement. Jason thinks the Box is cementing connections that their choices already created, and that understanding it might let him cut this world loose. Blair is skeptical; destroy one Box and another appears. She invites him to a party that night.

The event is a fundraiser for the Vance STEM Educational Trust. Blair introduces Jason to a version of Dr. John Lindley who has never met the Jason native to this world. The Vance name puts Jason on edge. He leaves after the science talk. Once he is gone, Leighton tells Blair he is the Leighton from her original universe. He has been in this world for about two years. He asks about her cat, Murphy, and apologizes for sending her into the Box before it was properly tested. She accepts—she stepped in willingly. He confirms Jason is from another world and presses her to hear him out, even though she wants a life that does not involve more travel.

Jason has dinner with Charlie and tries to plan a birthday while Daniela is gone. Charlie wants none of it. Jason mentions that he once met a version of Max in the multiverse. The conversation briefly lifts Charlie, then pushes him the other way. He takes Lilac Wings and a flashlight and steps into the Box, apparently looking for a world where Max is still alive. Jason does not know and keeps working on the entanglement thesis.

Blair goes to Leighton’s mansion-like office. On the way to the basement, he explains what he has done with two years in this slower world: he smuggled microprocessors and other tech from elsewhere, which let him build wealth and influence while the local technology stayed behind. He shows her freight tunnels he believes exist in a similar state across reachable worlds, and a secret lab. Inside is a larger, evolved Box—pyramidal, with a flat top. The episode ends on that reveal. The implication is a more controllable machine than the original corridor, whose destination still depends on an unstable mind. Leighton frames it as a way to improve worlds, not just exploit them. That puts him on a collision course with Jason, who wants this world cut off from the multiverse entirely. Charlie’s disappearance is the obvious force that could pull those agendas together—or turn them against each other.

The sixth episode of Dark Matter Season 2, “What the Universe Is Made Of,” slows Dark Matter to a reflective crawl. Daniela’s reunion with her stepfather and Jason’s entanglement thesis feel more contemplative than tense, and the hour risks becoming maudlin. Blair’s reveal as a multiverse traveler and Leighton’s pyramid Box finally add stakes, while Charlie’s decision to enter the corridor lands as the sharpest beat. A quieter midpoint that earns its late twist, but not the season’s strongest one.

Final Score - [7/10]