Warning: Spoilers for Dark Matter season 1, episode 9!

Apple TV+’s latest sci-fi hit Dark Matter is based on an acclaimed novel by Blake Crouch, but in translating the story to the screen, the author found new ways to tell his world-hopping, mind-bending speculative tale. The series follows Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) who is kidnapped by an alternate version of himself who swaps places with him so that he can live a happy life with his alternate self’s wife Daniela (Jennifer Connolly) and son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). The original Jason is cast out into an unfamiliar world, and he must fight his way through alternate universes to make it back to his family.

In Dark Matter‘s ending, Jason eventually makes it back, but with hundreds of alternate Jasons on his tail, he is forced to flee into an alternate universe to live in safety with Daniela and Charlie. It’s an ending that leaves room for more story and that’s exactly how Crouch wanted it to be: “There’s always an open-endedness in my novels. I want the reader to continue the journey in their own mind.”

The nine episodes released by Apple TV+ cover all the events in Crouch’s novel, but the nature of the story leaves the door open for Dark Matter season 2, though Crouch is cautious when asked. “I think we have to let the series play out [and] we have to see where things stand and just do a gut check,” he says, “Right now, I think we’re just really excited to let everyone finish this first season.”

Blake Crouch Addresses Dark Matter Ending Theories

Amanda’s fate is also a weight off Crouch’s shoulders

The very nature of Dark Matter‘s story prompts so many questions — when Jason1 returns to his original world, for example, he is followed by all the alternate Jasons that were created while he was in the box. By this logic, there should be a plethora of Jason2s out there somewhere, too. “Technically, yes. There are other Jason2s,” Crouch says, but he was hesitant to bring them into the picture:

I think when you’re dealing with infinities, you have to be a little bit more measured. What crazy high-level math tells us is some infinities are greater than other infinities. I don’t understand how that’s possible. And that was a little bit of our guiding principles in terms of the show. You can make this as crazy and turn your brain into as much of a pretzel as you want to. So we dialed it to what we felt was the appropriate mindfuck level, but not to such a level that it all just doesn’t make sense anymore.

With so many Jasons running around, though, it’s only natural that some may have questions about who really is the original Jason Dessen and if he actually is the one who leaves with Daniela and Charlie at the end of the season. Some could read the ending as ambiguous as Jason, Daniela, and Charlie enter the box with the help of the numerous other Jasons that have made their way to Jason1’s Chicago.

Crouch is here to clear that up: “The intention really isn’t to get to the end of the show and be like, are we watching our heroes the whole time? In my mind, yeah, we are,” he says, continuing, “I’m not trying to mess with the audience along those lines. Technically, yes, between [episodes] five and six, we could have switched to a different Jason [and] Amanda. It’s a valid interpretation.” He’s not opposed to all the theorizing, though:

I’m sure there will be many of those crazy, crazy theories that come out after the show finishes airing. The ambiguity came out just because we really had the time to tell the story of this family coming back together in the last episode, and, in in a lot of ways, in a book, you don’t have to address some things that you have to address [on TV]. When you see things on a screen, and especially with what Daniela went through, and how that would actually cast a real shadow on the family’s reunion, that was kind of a big thing that we found in making the show that wasn’t there in the novel.

One thing Crouch was happy to answer definitively, though, was questions surrounding Amanda’s fate. In the novel, Jason1 leaves Amanda behind, but she is never seen again. Thanks to the show’s expansive take on the source material, though, audiences get to see Amanda one last time in the utopia Chicago Jason1 left her in. It’s a weight off Crouch’s shoulders after her book fate left fans distraught: “The most emails I get about any single thing is Amanda. Like, what happened to Amanda? Why did you do Amanda like that? I can’t believe you would just have her vanish. How could you, you monster?”

He continues, “So one of the things that was really exciting was like, No, we’re going to do Amanda justice with where we leave her. Maybe she’s in a good situation, maybe she’s not, but we’re going to know where she is.” An added twist, though, is that Amanda and Ryan end up in the same city after Ryan is exiled from his world by Jason2:

I don’t remember when the idea of Ryan finding her and how that came up. But it was one of those really happy things. I think originally we had it planned that Ryan was going to get jettisoned into this world. And then we’re like, “Wait, what if it’s the same world as Amanda?” And we’ll drop some bread crumbs and really smart viewers, which we have a lot of them, will catch on to this and those who don’t, it’ll be a nice little bit of a reveal, a mic drop moment when Ryan walks in at the end of the show.

About Dark Matter

Hailed as one of the best sci-fi novels of the decade, “Dark Matter” is a story about the road not taken. The series will follow Jason Dessen (played by Edgerton), a physicist, professor, and family man who — one night while walking home on the streets of Chicago — is abducted into an alternate version of his life. Wonder quickly turns to nightmare when he tries to return to his reality amid the mind-bending landscape of lives he could have lived. In this labyrinth of realities, he embarks on a harrowing journey to get back to his true family and save them from the most terrifying, unbeatable foe imaginable: himself.

Check out our interview about the Dark Matter finale with Joel Edgerton.