“Dark Matter,” “Doctor Who,” “Interview with the Vampire” and “Heeramandi”

THE MORNING LIST

Even Doctor Who, the oldest surviving television hero, is getting a facelift. The four series of the week are eyeing innovation, whether it’s putting feelings through the filter of quantum theory or injecting a dose of politics into a melodrama from Bollywood.

“Dark Matter”: Joel Edgerton in lives other than his own

Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) wakes up one day in a world that is not his own. An unmotivated physics professor, he is nevertheless the happy husband of Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and the loving father of a teenager. But in this other life, Jason is a brilliant physicist without children. He has a girlfriend, but it’s not (or no longer) Daniela.

Besides, Jason isn’t quite himself anymore either. The mechanisms which allowed it to pass from one world to another, until – as we will see later – bringing a life into another, give the first episodes of Dark Matter an interesting tension, despite the theoretical complexity of the subject. This tension gets bogged down a little halfway through, as the doors to the multiverse open and close, revealing a multitude of parallel realities which are all paths that Jason could, or should, have taken.

Faced with this ocean of possibilities, the characters have difficulty keeping up, due to lack of depth. Dark Matter However, it frees itself from its imposing program in its second half, undoubtedly helped by changes in director. The series then finally moves away from the parable on personal development to allow a form of gentleness and melancholy to blossom, a corollary of the existential dizziness caused by the multiple comings and goings of its protagonists in the corridors of quantum physics. Me. F.

“Doctor Who”: new actor, new era, same recipes?

Disney+, which co-produces (and broadcasts in France) alongside the BBC this new reboot of the venerable British series, understands this well: it is never too late to take an interest in Doctor Who. Especially if he now has the features of Ncuti Gatwa, who was Otis’s best friend for four seasons in Sex Education. The actor, the fifteenth to play the role, breathes a breath of queer fantasy into the first episodes of this fortieth season, and above all gives him the means to conquer a new audience.

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