Why you should never watch sci-fi series on streaming channels

Jason Dessen, the hero (and, as you’ll discover shortly, anti-hero) of Apple TV’s latest sci-fi caper Dark Matter, is a physics professor at a second-rate university in Chicago. You can tell he’s not that good at his job because he introduces the concept of Schrödinger’s cat (surely the only interesting bit in the entirety of physics) five minutes before the end of a lecture. ‘Oh and the cat dies,’ he says to the uninterested students as they file hurriedly out of class.

Still, at least he’s happy. His teenage son might have been genetically engineered to fit the phrase ‘but he’s a great kid’ and his hot wife Daniela is beyond perfect. Want to know how perfect? Well it’s their weekly special quality-time date night – when they get to drink wine and dance smoochily together and embarrass their son – and suddenly Daniela spots some text messages coming through on his phone.

Is she monitoring him for infidelity? Why, no. She’s following her instinctive urge to make her husband’s life even better. The texts are from his best mate Ryan, who has just won a major science prize and wants him to come for a few bevvies in the pub down the road to celebrate. ‘But it’s our date night!’ protests Dessen (who is also a perfect spouse). ‘Go and be with your male friend on this special day. You know you want to,’ she says (or similar). So off he goes, much to the incredulous bemusement of all male viewers everywhere.

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, a very different Jason – Jason2 – is living a much more successful life. Instead of sacrificing his ambitions for family, he has pursed them ruthlessly and ended up creating a gigantic box, based on the Schrödinger’s cat one, which somehow enables him to enter infinite parallel universes, such as the one inhabited by Jason.