By Ryan Berenz
If a simple, scientifically proven test could definitively determine your soulmate — that one person you’re cosmically connected to — would you take it? And if you took the test, how would the result change your life?
Those questions are at the core of AMC’s six-part speculative sci-fi drama Soulmates (Mondays), which tells stories of characters who’ve been profoundly affected by the breakthrough discovery of the human “soul particle” in 2023. It has already been renewed for a second season.
Fifteen years in the future, the Soul Connex company offers customers the chance to find their soulmate. (Think of it as an internet dating service that is irrefutably accurate.) The science is perfect, but its real-world application isn’t. There’s no guarantee that their soulmate has also taken the test. There’s no guarantee that their soulmate is the person to whom they’re already married. There’s no guarantee they’ll like their soulmate’s family or friends. There’s no guarantee that their soulmate is even still alive.
“I always saw it as a world — if you were looking in the big, big, big picture — it’s the equivalent of destiny versus free will,” explains co-creator and executive producer Brett Goldstein. “If soulmates exist, then it’s this person you’re destined for. But if you’re destined, then you have no choice. But we live in a world where theoretically we have free will, so that’s the real question: If everything’s laid out for you, then what’s the point of your basic life?”
In the episode “Break on Through,” Malin Akerman (Billions) and Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) play two people who embark on a disturbing odyssey in search of meaning in their lives after their soulmates have died.
“Sitting in a group somewhat like AA for people who’ve lost their soulmates that they’ve never met, it’s just really a strange beginning to this really cool episode,” Akerman says. “I just loved it. I thought it was just such a creative episode, and really kind of disturbing, all in one.”
In the case of Akerman’s character, the soulmate test gave her tunnel vision, and she became unable to see the forest for the trees.
“Instead of using our own gut feeling and our own brains and developing our own opinions, we’re going against our own grain,” Akerman says. “That is so frustrating to watch, but so much fun to play in a role like this. You get to play the duality of it, the contradicting feelings within oneself.”