Blake Crouch writes the thriller of the choice not made: one ordinary man, one other life, and the physics to swap them. On the page it moves. On screen, with Dark Matter (2024), the idea is good and the hours are too many.
Fi1m perspective
A physics teacher is bundled into a van in Chicago and wakes in a hangar where strangers applaud him for coming back. That is the opening of Dark Matter (2024), Crouch's adaptation of his own 2016 novel, and it is his whole method in miniature: a small life, one door, and someone on the other side who knows more than you do. He has been asking the same question since he turned from crime to science fiction, which is what if you had chosen differently, and he describes the book as "a story about the road not taken". The phrase is modest, and at his best so is the work.
He began with thrillers, Desert Places (2004) and Locked Doors (2005), and found his audience with the Wayward Pines trilogy (2012–2014), adapted for television in 2015. Then came the turn: Dark Matter (2016), Recursion (2019) and Upgrade (2022), all built on parallel worlds, time, memory and the consequences of a decision. Since 2020 he has worked mostly in television, having co-created Good Behavior (2016) with Chad Hodge before writing and running Dark Matter himself. His prose is short paragraphs, single-sentence lines and a great deal of white space; he says he writes the way he likes to read. Readers find that either propulsive or numbing, and both are right.
What he brings to the screen is restraint, which is rarer in this genre than it should be. The multiverse on television has mostly meant costumes; Crouch's version is not a thousand selves but two, and one marriage, and Joel Edgerton plays both men. For two episodes the series treats the premise as seriously as it deserves. The applause in that hangar unsettled us more than anything in the later episodes, because Edgerton plays a man being congratulated for something he did not do and cannot yet refuse, and the series lets the wrongness sit there without explaining it.
The trouble is that the engine of the page does not run on screen. A one-line paragraph can carry a reader straight past a thin patch; an hour of television cannot. The old ghost story about the man shown the life he did not live is over in two hours because its lesson is learned in two hours, and Dark Matter has nine, so it keeps opening doors onto rooms we have already seen, with a slightly different skyline. Pace at the expense of depth is the complaint made of his novels, and television, which is slower by nature, takes the pace away and leaves the complaint.
He is a brisk and honest ideas man, and television has so far made him a slower writer than his readers know him to be. There is a second series. We would like him to find a door that opens somewhere new; failing that, watch the first two episodes, which are good, and treat the rest as optional.
Biography
Blake Crouch is an American writer. Born in Statesville, North Carolina, he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with degrees in English and creative writing.
He published his first novels in 2004 and 2005, and later became known for science fiction and thriller works including the Wayward Pines trilogy and the novels Dark Matter (2016), Recursion (2019) and Upgrade. The Wayward Pines trilogy was adapted into a 2015 television series. Crouch also co-created the 2016 series Good Behavior, based on his novellas.
Crouch wrote the screenplay and served as showrunner for the 2024 Apple TV+ adaptation of his novel Dark Matter, on which he is also credited as creator.
