Warning: Dark Matter episode 4 spoilers below!
Dark Matter creator and showrunner Blake Crouch says it was Joel Edgerton who came up with the show's biggest change from the book.
"About two years ago, shortly after we had cast Joel Edgerton, we met in LA for a Dark Matter 'summit' for four days to go over the first four scripts and to talk about the rest of it. It was an idea that Joel had – it really changed, in a lot of ways, the depth of the show," Crouch tells GamesRadar+.
"He said, 'I think that Jason shouldn't just be trying to get back to this perfect world. It would be so much more powerful for me playing this character if he wants to get back to his family, even in spite of like, some pretty intense trauma that happened in that family's history.' And it was such a brilliant note. It was one of those light bulb moments and it didn't just affect one thing. It affects the whole middle part and end of the show and gave it a depth it wouldn't have had otherwise."
The series is an adaptation of Crouch's novel of the same name, which stars Edgerton as Jason Desson, a scientist and family man who gets kidnapped by an alternate-universe version of himself. In the novel, Jason's family consists of his wife Daniela and his son Charlie – and he spends the duration of the book trying to find a way home to them. In the series, we learn that Jason had two children: Max and Charlie.
After Daniela gave birth to the twins, Max suffered complications and passed away during surgery. The heartbreaking addition to the story does exactly what Edgerton said it would do: it makes Jason's journey that much more meaningful. It drives home the point that Jason's idea of utopia is anywhere his family is, and it contrasts with Jason 2's more sinister, selfish nature.
