Curiouser and curiouser! Jason A and Amanda enter the fourth episode of Dark Matter under the influence of Lavender Fairy, which you will no doubt recall is the psychoactive drug that Ryan B cooked up to prevent “decoherence.” Without the Fairy, the narrative pseudoscience goes, our primitive, puny-human consciousness would simply reject the possibility of a multiverse, making the interior of the Box look like nothing more than “storage space,” as a not-yet-dosed Leighton Vance — sorry, this would be Leighton A, now — comments midway through this episode. But with the Lavender Fairy temporarily stopping the prefrontal cortex from harshing our multidimensional mellow, the interior of the Box is an endless black corridor with a different reality behind each of its innumerable doors.
“A manifestation of the mind as it attempts to visually explain something our brains haven’t fully evolved to comprehend,” Jason A tells Amanda. You can see how she found at least some iteration of this cat irresistible. The first door they try brings them to a ruined Chicago, its streets deserted and the bare branches of the trees covered in rust-colored ash.
The mighty Windy City skyline along Lake Michigan looks like it’s suffered a kaiju attack — that really does look like a giant bite mark in the side of the John Hancock Center — though the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier is still standing. Jason A and Amanda barely have time to drink in the horror before a skyscraper begins t.
