Dark Matter Season 2 Makes A Surprising Connection To Another Apple Sci-Fi Show

Warning: This article contains spoilers for "Dark Matter" Season 2, Episode 2, "A Perfect World."

If you think the housing market is bad these days, imagine uprooting your entire family and traveling to a whole new alternate reality just to find a place to live. "Dark Matter" may not have any more source material to work from in Season 2 , as series creator Blake Crouch is now moving beyond the pages of his original novel of the same name. Yet, it remains as laser-focused as ever, even as Season 2, Episode 2, "A Perfect World," makes a fascinating (if inadvertent) connection to a very different Apple TV sci-fi show.

In retrospect, maybe we should've seen this coming. Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) and his family have gone right back to square one as world-less refugees forced to find a new reality to call their own. This brings them crashing into some less-than-ideal places, including what's essentially a surveillance state that's even more dystopian than our own world already is. Obviously, this is bad news for a family that needs to stay incognito. Not only are other versions of Jason desperate to hunt them down, but there's also the threat of the shady government agent Mitchel MacNamara (Chris Diamantopoulos).

So, where in the multiverse could the Dessens possibly go? Well, how about a world straight out of "For All Mankind?"  Okay, so the parallels aren't quite that simple, but the similarities are awfully striking. Like "Dark Matter," this particular streaming series is all about what-ifs — specifically, what if the Soviets beat the United States to the Moon? And while, in that case, it accelerated humanity's advancement into the stars, "Dark Matter" proposes a world where the Moon landing never happened ... and neither did the technological leaps that came with it.

Read more: 14 Times Star Trek Broke The Mold

Dark Matter Season 2 puts its own sci-fi twist on For All Mankind

Whatever device you happen to be using while reading these words, imagine a world where that wasn't even possible. "Dark Matter" has jumped headfirst into some seriously unsettling territory on many occasions before, but none can rival its most nightmarish one yet: a scenario where computers were never invented. Spooky, I know.

In one of the season's funnier and more lighthearted moments, Jason and his family of runaways come to the realization that they may have hit the jackpot. Apparently, John F. Kennedy lost the tightly-contested 1960 presidential race to Richard Nixon in this reality. Nixon would then go on to do Nixon things, including defunding NASA and preventing the Moon landing — and, implicitly, perhaps the space race as a whole — from ever happening. Of course, that means humanity was never incentivized to come up with the cutting-edge advancements needed to make such leaps in science, including microchips and microprocessors. Goodbye computers, hello tech-free bliss!

This should feel like awfully familiar territory for any fans of "For All Mankind," another show that has had quite a propensity to throw alternate-timeline twists at us in fun and clever ways. Now, of course, "For All Mankind" doesn't do away with the Moon landing entirely. Rather, it changes which nation was the first to make it there. But, hopefully, you can forgive us for almost immediately clocking this as a reference (however inadvertent it may be) to a fellow Apple TV series that sci-fi nerds love. Now, let's fire up a "Dark Matter" spin-off series set in the Cold War where Jason and his family are busy doing cool spy stuff ... or just watch "Star City" again .

New episodes of "Dark Matter" premiere on Apple TV every Friday.

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Read the original article on SlashFilm .