At some point, a scene shows up on screen that you want to turn off—not because it’s scary, but because it’s unbearably familiar. A physicist stands in front of another version of himself, and the tension between them isn’t just out of thin air. It’s the impossibility of being both at once. One stayed with family, the other went into science and became a Nobel laureate. And they look at each other like through a warped mirror: you recognize your own face, but the eyes feel strange. Suddenly your own choices feel like something outside yourself—as if they weren’t really yours at all.

Usually it seems like the choice is all me. I decided, I picked, I’m the author of this life. But “Dark Matter” carefully turns that idea inside out. It feels like you’re just signing a decree someone else already wrote—made up of circumstances, the push of small decisions, random words on the right day. When the physicist meets his alternate self, neither looks like the master of his fate. Both are equally trapped by their own choices and equally strangers inside their own lives.

The weirdness starts when the show stops being sci-fi and turns into something almost like an autobiography for any viewer. Because this break isn’t about parallel universes. It’s about that feeling when a question suddenly hits: what if I’d turned left instead of right? What if I’d stayed or left back then? Regret isn’t a memory of something real—it’s a longing for an impossible future that will forever stay just a mirage behind glass.

Every life path feels both possible and out of reach at the same time.

The most interesting thing is seeing both characters envy each other. The one who chose work and success looks at the family kitchen like a lost universe of warmth; the one who stayed with loved ones sees in the other’s awards a ghost of his own unfulfilled dream. Neither gets it all at once.

Parallel lives turn out not to be a way to escape the pain of choice, but a new source of it. You lose both universes at once—because the version of you that you are now closes the door to the other.

Here quantum physics breaks out of science journals straight into psychology: the many-worlds interpretation stops being a theory about electrons and becomes almost a myth about human identity. If all possibilities really exist somewhere close by—can consciousness be a superposition of these possibilities until the moment it realizes itself? Or is only the version of “me” that feels the pain of losing the alternative real?

The paradox is thinner than it seems: if memories can be made up (and the brain does this every morning anew), then where does the “real me” end and just a bunch of forks in the road begin? Is being yourself remembering everything before, or just standing at the crossing of many paths?

Did you choose your life, or did it choose you?

And suddenly it’s clear: there’s no right version of yourself. All are equally real or all equally imagined; none saves you from the feeling of missed choice.

It’s either freedom (you can let go of chasing the perfect branch) or horror (you’ll never be all those people at once).

If none of us fully chooses ourselves… is it even possible to choose differently?