Diksha Sundriyal
Apple TV+’s ‘Dark Matter’ explores the possibilities of alternate realities through the story of Jason Dessen who is kidnapped and thrown into a world he does not belong to. To an everyday person, it would have been difficult to grasp the idea of landing in a completely different world, but Jason’s background in physics allows him to understand the state he is in and, more importantly, how to get out of it. Jason discovers that his counterpart in this new world came up with a way to jump realities, and a drug called Lavender Fairy was an important step in making that journey. Does such a drug exist in real life? SPOILERS AHEAD
The Applications of the Fictional Lavender Fairy are Rooted in Science
‘Dark Matter’ adapts Blake Crouch’s sci-fi novel of the same name. While everything in the story is entirely fictional, Crouch built his story on the firm foundation of science. So even though many things mentioned in the story, like the drug, do not exist in real life, there is a scientific explanation behind them that explains how Jason Dessen’s alternate reality-traveling machine might work.
In the show, the said drug is created by Ryan Holder, Jason’s friend from college who also has compelelty different lives in both realities. In Jason’s original world, Ryan won the Pavia Prize for his groundbreaking work in the field of prefrontal cortex study, something that Ryan wishes to expand upon now that he has unlimited resources and funding at his disposal. Unbeknownst to him, in a different reality, he has already created something that can change not just his world but also many others.
In the alternate reality, the other Jason, aka Jason II, won the Pavia, while his friend Ryan II went on to live a rather uneventful life. However, he was still working in the same field, and Jason made use of his expertise by getting him to create a drug that would help a person inside the box travel to a different dimension. Ryan creates the drug on Jason’s specifications but is still kept out of the loop as he doesn’t understand exactly what Jason needs it for. It isn’t until much later that the truth comes to light, and Ryan discovers what is really happening at Velocity Labs.
While building the machine, Jason realized that a person’s brain was the most important part of the system, and it needed to be worked like every other part of the machine. He discovered that the brain needed to tone down a bit while operating the machine. The drug Ryan created was supposed to suppress a person’s consciousness to the level that it doesn’t dissolve a state of superposition by observation, allowing them to access an alternate reality. In theory, the drug seems to work wonderfully, though no real-life versions of it have been created so far.
