"Is that real?"

"No. Fucking. Way."

The man and woman stumble out into the muggy Missouri air, tearing up, then falling to their knees in the gravel. It's late afternoon, and the setting sun casts ochre rays through the willows and ash; lightning bugs have already appeared, neon flashes in the honeysuckle. But the man and woman have no idea what time it is, and their eyes aren't working that well either. For the past six days, they've been struggling to escape a hellish natural labyrinth carved into the hillside behind them, entirely in the dark.

Not half-light, not dimness, not relative dark: total, pitch darkness. Darkness so dark you can't see your hand in front of your face, or even be sure whether your eyes are open or closed. Lost within an ancient cave, the man and woman started off separate and alone, confronting mind-bending isolation that played tricks on their senses and produced ever-more-disorienting hallucinations. Fumbling and crawling, never sure which next step might break their necks or worse, they navigated through an alien environment marked by vermin, severe cold, tight confines, sudden drops, yawning pits, and sharp rocks. Eventually, they found each other deep below the earth, then painstakingly made their way to the surface. And the entire time, circling silently about them in the darkness, intimately near yet incredibly far away, has been a crew of producers and camera operators documenting their every move.

This isn't a psychology experiment or a military training exercise. It's a new show, Darkness, set to premiere on the Discovery Channel on August 2. Call it insane or call it brilliant, one thing is certain: it meets America's insatiable appetite for extreme reality TV, then takes it to a whole new level.

Inside at the Hannibal, Missouri production site of Discovery Channel's "Darkness."

The premise of Darkness is simple. At the start of each episode, three people, all strangers to each other, descend to three different locations deep inside a cave or abandoned mineshaft. They then have six days to find each other and work their way out through a different exit, all without any source of light. They must do it without tools or resources beyond a helmet and a backpack containing some paracord, a little bit of water, and a tiny ration bar—everything else they eat (read: worms and insects), they must forage for themselves.

No gimmicks complicate the bare-bones concept. The cast are paid only for their time; there is no prize. Instead, they are motivated by some combination of personal or professional survival skills and a desire to push themselves to their limits. They have included an instructor in the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program, a former Green Beret, several Marines, firefighters, and an archaeologist who's an expert in pre-modern "bushcraft." There are no teams, no competitive challenges, no winner's ceremony. "We can call it a test of survival or a social experiment, but it's really one and the same," says Rich Ross, president of Discovery. "It's unscripted horror meets psychological thriller in an extreme natural setting," elaborates Chris Grant, CEO of Electus, the company that developed and produces Darkness. "It's about tapping something atavistic, primal. The dark is an animal unto itself—it hurts." The true antagonist isn't other cast members, or artificial challenges: it's the darkness itself.

Fear of the dark is a basic, natural part of being human. Unlike the eyes of creatures that primarily go about their business at night, human eyes are built to operate best during broad daylight. The hardware of large predators who hunt in dark (say, lions) is almost the exact opposite. So in evolutionary terms, being afraid of the dark makes sense.

Of course, not many people in the industrialized world have to worry about being eaten by lions. But fear of the dark abides—and not just among children, who experience it almost universally. When an extreme version manifests in adulthood, it's known as nyctophobia (from nyx, the Greek word for night), a condition that has afflicted everyone from Augustus Caesar to Keanu Reeves to Muhammad Ali. Only a small fraction of adults will admit to pollsters they're afraid of the dark when asked over the phone. But when people are given a chance to list their fears in more private surveys, they're much more forthcoming: some forty percent of adults polled in the United Kingdom, for example, said they are scared to walk around their own homes in the dark, ten percent to the point that they won't even leave bed to use the toilet. Some medical experts argue that many cases of insomnia, which afflicts some sixty million Americans, may also stem from a fear of the dark. What keeps many of these people up isn't the threat of lions, but other, more metaphorical predators—the demons with which our minds, free of daytime distractions, populate the dark around our beds—worries, anxieties, regrets.

Of the three cast members on this episode of Darkness, which is tentatively set to air early next year, only one confesses to having ever been afraid of the dark. Sarah Williams, a twenty-seven-year-old photographer from Los Angeles, say she suffered from "a severe fear of the dark. It took me until I was in college to sleep without a light on—I was plagued by nightmares until I was seventeen." But this history didn't stop Sarah from signing up for Darkness—just the opposite. "In all aspects of my life," she says, "I'm looking for ways to push boundaries, to push my mind to its absolute limits, to places I've never experienced before." Five-foot-four and blonde, Sarah laughs easily, projects an almost Zen-like calm, and is tough as nails. What attracted her most to the idea of a week in a dangerous cave with a pair of survivalist strangers was that she couldn't fully prepare for it. "Being unprepared is one of my biggest fears," she says. "I felt like this was the ultimate test: just me, as I am, without anything, going into the situation."

The idea of being unprepared has a complicated history for Sarah. Back when she was first getting into camping and hiking, she went on an excursion in the Angeles National Forest with two guys who had told her they were real-deal outdoorsmen. Turns out, they weren't: they hadn't packed properly, didn't know how to conserve or purify water, and one of the two, who had claimed to be an Eagle Scout, kept trying to get directions through the wilderness on his iPhone. Four days later, well into one of the hottest weeks of a record-setting California drought, the group was totally lost and the two dudes were horizontal from dehydration, one sliding into shock. Over the strident objections of the men—"they were very aggressive"—Sarah took everyone's phones, retraced their steps, and climbed a mountain to find enough cell reception to call for a medevac.

In the four years since that near-disaster, Sarah's only gone trekking more. And while she prepared for Darkness by spending time in a sensory deprivation tank, her biggest preparation was making peace with the fact that she could never truly be ready. "The main thing is trust. I just had to trust that bad stuff wouldn't happen, or if it did, I would deal with it then."

Prior to this episode, Sarah's never been caving, but for Tray Heinke, caves are literally home. Tray hails originally from Missouri, but now lives on-site near the Indiana Caverns in Croydon, Indiana, where he works as a guide. Wiry and muscular, he looks like a well-tanned Christian Bale, but with a slight drawl and piercings. He's just turned forty, but for a long time didn't think he'd make it that far. "Back in high school, if you'd asked everybody to vote on who was most likely to die young, it would have been me," he says. "But now, most of my old friends are dead, and here I am, above ground." And below it, too: Tray is a hardcore caver who can compress his torso and strategically crush joints to fit his body through seven-and-half-inch-vertical passages. Clambering through caverns for the past three decades, he has broken limbs and flailed ribs more times than he can count: "Between caves and mosh pits, man, I've been lucky." Tray's also spent long periods of time living entirely off-grid, with only his dog and pet snake for company.

For the first half of his life, Tray lived hard. "It wasn't until I found caving that I got away from drinking and drugging," he says. "Now, don't get me wrong - I still have a drink from time to time, but it doesn't consume me, it doesn't consume my life. Mud is my drug of choice."

When Tray talks about caving, his eyes grow bright and wide, almost as if he's already underground. "I like the idea of going places that no other human has ever seen," he says. "Hiking in the mountains, you kinda hope to get into something like that, where you're hiking a part of the land that maybe somebody's never been before, but then you find a whiskey bottle or a cigarette butt to tell you somebody's been there. All parts of the surface have been discovered —underground is a whole different world." As a cave surveyor who maps undiscovered passageways, he frequently explores dead-end tunnels that no one else will ever visit again: "I've been in parts of this earth that have seen less human interaction than the moon."

Tray firmly believes that going underground in complete darkness is a terrible idea. "You should never go into a cave without three separate light sources and three sets of batteries for each—our lights are our life." But the idea of Darkness drew him in anyway. "It goes against everything that cavers stress—but what would happen in a real situation if my lights got crushed, or something else? You don't do this, I shouldn't be doing this—but I wanted to prove to myself that I could."

Joining Sarah and Tray is a third cast member, Brandon Pope, who is thirty-eight and works as an industrial refrigeration technician. He spends his time away from work hiking in the Arkansas backwoods and teaching survival classes to children. A self-identified survivalist, Brandon also acknowledges that the proposition of Darkness violates rules he otherwise swears by. "I never leave home unprepared, I never go into the woods unprepared," he says. "You're always supposed to have your Everyday Carry gear—a firestarter, water purification tablets, my knives." But the idea of fending for himself in this extreme survival scenario presented a test he couldn't pass up. "I like pushing myself, being out of my comfort zone. I've never been afraid of the dark, never been afraid of creepy-crawlies." He wants to see if he can handle it. It won't be long before he finds out he can't.

The fourth major character on this episode of Darkness is the cave itself. Known unofficially as "The Cave State," Missouri is criss-crossed by some 6,300 caves. Carved by ancient waters into the hills near the small city of Hannibal lie two particularly remarkable caves, making up what is known as the Mark Twain Cave Complex. The first, formerly called McDowell's Cave, has been renamed Mark Twain Cave, after the American satirist who grew up in Hannibal and featured the cave (disguised as "McDougal") in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Twain's tales drew on stranger-than-fiction true stories: in addition to offering a dangerous playground for Hannibal's children, McDowell's Cave played host, at varying points, to Civil War smugglers, bandits, and even a doctor turned DIY forensic scientist who tried preserving the body of his dead daughter in a giant glass jar suspended deep in one chamber. Today, the cave has been wired with lighting and lined with handrails to entertain crowds of tourists; Jesse James' signature, in pencil and soot, is visible on a wall not far from Brad Paisley's.

But the other cave in the Mark Twain Complex, Cameron Cave, is a different story entirely. Cameron is what's known as a wild cave, discovered much more recently and standing more or less unaltered in its natural state, save for a small cinderblock outbuilding constructed around its main entrance.

When you hear "cave," you may envision an open cavern or underground vault. But Cameron is a "maze cave," some 4.62 miles of tunnels arranged in a haphazard labyrinth of five hundred passages stretched across fifty-five acres. There are some small open spaces at the intersections where passages meet, but the passageways themselves are nothing like hallways or human-built tunnels. Many are cramped and diamond-shaped, tight on the bottom and top, with their widest part coming at irregular heights above an uneven floor that rises and falls in unpredictable waves. The walls of other passages are incredibly tall and straight, but also exceedingly narrow, requiring you to walk through sideways while sucking in your chest as you go. Dead-ends are common and precipitous drops are plentiful; tight ledges loom over ninety-foot-deep drops that cavers have given names like the Pit of Doom, the Big Nothing, or the Chasm of Death. Walking (or crawling) through these tunnels is like following the path of an ant that's gotten lost burrowing through a French pastry, except the layers aren't crispy dough, but razor-sharp rock that can tear skin or put out an eye, and where a stumble and fall can easily kill you outright or leave you, bones snapped like twigs, wedged at the bottom of some hellish abyss. Navigating any cave is inherently dangerous ("If you trip and hit your head on a rock," says Tray, "you could potentially be dead from a four-foot fall") but doing it in a scenario where any false step could potentially lead to a dive from God knows how high is another order of magnitude of crazy.

When it comes time to film this episode of Darkness, Sarah, Tray, and Brandon each hike deep into different locations within Cameron Cave. With their each twist and turn, the light from the surface dims and they get ever more lost, until finally the darkness swallows them.

Caves have been sources for shelter, provided canvases for primitive art, and played host to ancient religious rites. But just because humans and caves go back a long time together does not mean they are welcoming, human-friendly spaces. And Cameron Cave is downright hostile.

First, there's the cold. As a rule of thumb, the temperature of any given cave is the average year-round temperature of the region in question. In northeastern Missouri, that means fifty-seven degrees—even when it's in the sweltering high nineties above. But the air temperature isn't the only issue. The cave's limestone is icy cold to the touch; when you sit or lie down, it leaches heat from your body like you're a fancy molecular gastronomy dessert on an anti-griddle.

The cold is what drives the first cast member out of the cave. "I hike in temperatures like that all day long, in short sleeves and shorts," Brandon says later. "But in a cave it's a completely different 56 degrees. I remember, first night I was in there, laying on the ground, it was almost instantaneous, the body heat was sucked right out of my body." He tried getting some rest, hoping to regain some energy. "I got out my blanket, and I laid down, using my blanket as a pillow. I dozed off, but the cold woke me up. I was frigid." He tried to go back to sleep. "I shave my head, which means a lot of my body heat goes out of my head. So I tried to cover up with my blanket, but from being on the ground, my blanket was a little damp." When he woke up a second time, he was shivering uncontrollably and couldn't feel his toes. At that point, Brandon started to worry about hypothermia. Realizing he simply couldn't adapt, he tapped out, activating a small emergency radio that called the crew to come and extract him. "I have a new respect for caves," he admits. "You can't go in there thinking you're Mr. Badass and going to make the cave your bitch."

Brandon's experience gets at another challenge of surviving underground, in the dark or otherwise: what happens to your sense of time. Brandon fell asleep twice, and only for thirty or forty minutes at a go. But when he awoke, he was certain that he'd been asleep for two eight-to-ten-hour stretches. When the safety crew came to retrieve him, Brandon was adamant he'd been underground for two full days. In reality, he'd only been below for twelve hours.

Scientists have documented this phenomenon extensively. Researchers who have undertaken simultaneous but separate sojourns into caves for extended periods will emerge with radically different estimates of how long they've been below—different from one another by weeks, and different from the calendar by yet more. Absent cues from the aboveground natural world or data from clocks or phones, our conscious perception of time can get weird, fast.

But that's nothing compared to what goes on inside our bodies. When people talk about your "circadian rhythm," they're actually referring to dozens of different physiological processes, cycles governing everything from your heart rate to your breathing to your immune system to your digestion to your body temperature. These sub-systems operate on their own timelines, but are largely kept in sync with each other as long as the body follows a roughly 24-hour cycle that tracks changes in ambient light and various social cues. In situations of irregular light and darkness, everything goes out of whack within a couple of days. It is not uncommon for test subjects living underground to start sleeping and waking in forty-eight-hour cycles, or to experience bizarre changes in their behavior or sense of self. Michel Siffre, a European scientist, spent months at a time in half-lit caves in the Alps and Texas as part of research he carried out for NASA. Siffre not only got hypothermia, but also went off the rails, in one instance desperately trying to befriend a mouse for companionship but instead accidentally crushing it and falling into near-suicidal despair. When asked about the impact of those experiments on his mind and body, Siffre, who's now in his seventies, describes it as "hell" and speaks of feeling like "a semi-detached marionette."

And then there are the hallucinations. Just because darkness deprives us of visual stimulation doesn't mean our hyper-vigilant brains won't try to generate some. In laboratory studies, researchers have been able to reliably provoke hallucinations in most subjects after only a single day of blindfolding. Those hallucinations generally follow a pattern—first, spots of light (called "phosphenes"), followed by shapes and colors, and finally even more elaborate illusions like walls, cityscapes, sunsets, and faces (one test subject, a woman in Boston, reported recurrent visions of Elvis). These visions are technically "pseudo-hallucinations," which means you see them while knowing that they're not real, but in the disorientation of total darkness, they can be distressing indeed.

For Sarah and Tray, the visuals started as spotlights and then progressed to geometric shapes and various scenes. Making things even trippier was an ever-increasing porousness between lucid dreams and waking reality. "The only time I knew I was asleep," says Sarah, "was when I could see, because then I knew I was dreaming." Tray had a similar experience. "Our brains will produce images of our hands even in darkness," he says, referring to a phenomenon known as "The Spelunker's Illusion." "At one point, I was waving my hand in front of a wall, and when I put my hand in front of me, it blocked my sight of the wall, and that's when I knew for sure I was asleep." The wall he saw was a surface of sheer rock, and it wasn't unfamiliar to him: It was the cave wall he had seen with his own eyes only a few months prior, when he had almost died below ground on a speleological expedition.

Prior to heading below that day, Tray and his caver friends had monitored the aboveground weather forecast, which predicted an inch to an inch-and-a-half of precipitation, likely snow, for an entire afternoon. Later that day, when they were deep within a complex of unexplored caverns, the weather suddenly changed, with four-to-six inches of hard rain falling in a single hour, a deluge that rapidly flowed underground. "We were in the worst possible place we could be," Tray says. "I was in an ear-dipper, which means I had an ear against the ceiling and an ear in the water." But the water kept rising, and, he says, "I had to go through the last ten feet with my face underwater holding my breath." Soaked and frigid, Tray and his friends barely made it to higher ground, and set up to wait for rescue. But the hours passed, supplies ran out, and one of Tray's friends fell into shock. "We were faced with two decisions: we either give up, lay down and die, or we go for it and die trying." Just when everyone had decided to go for it, Tray and his friends heard the calls of the rescue team around a bend. "I just started bawling," he says.

Dogged with hallucinations and haunted by traumatic memories, Tray and Sarah fumbled separately through Cameron Cave. Eventually, calling out into the darkness, they heard each others' voices.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the question of how people interact in the dark. The first holds that, under cover of darkness, people try to get away with things. "Rulers that are watchful by night in cities are a terror to evil-doers, be they citizens or enemies," Plato pronounced some twenty-four-hundred years ago, expressing a sentiment still shared by many contemporary urban planners, who argue that erecting lampposts will bring crime down. Psychologists have documented a so-called "anonymity effect" whereby people will take advantage of low light conditions to cheat other players in small-stakes games.

But there's another, less pessimistic perspective. In our everyday interactions, we humans are constantly assessing one other, and most of us lean heavily on what we see. Even a cursory visual scan of another person yields a superabundance of information, from the cut of their clothes to their gender to the color of their skin to whether we find them sexually attractive. But when these cues are unavailable, your first impression of another human being is no longer whether they're a dude in a Yankees hat or a woman in Prada; instead, they're a disembodied voice telling you their story, or a hand in the darkness passing you a much-needed sip of water. Researchers have observed that job interviews carried out in darkness are less likely to be skewed by biases, and that groups of people interacting in low light may be more cooperative and less prone to stereotyping one another.

Three days into their experience underground, Tray and Sarah finally crossed paths. Whooping and yelling, they drew close, then introduced themselves. Says Sarah, "The moment I met him and he was like 'Hi, I'm Tray, I'm a caver,' I felt like it was heaven-sent." "Meeting Sarah was awesome," Tray concurs. Together, the two talked, and formed mental images of the other that were drastically different from reality. "I thought [Sarah] was much older than she is," says Tray, "Not by the sound of her voice, but just to hear her talk—she sounds much older. She's wise beyond her years." Sarah, for her part, decided Tray "was six-five and big-stature, big chested, a white guy from the Midwest, like a rancher, with a cowboy hat, and older, muscular, but with a little age on him, like an older Indiana Jones."

Sarah and Tray won't share how exactly they managed to puzzle their way out. "You're just going to have to wait and watch the episode," Tray grins. But they do say that they worked together and shared what few supplies they had—one tiny ration bar, supplemented by a cache of additional bars they found. "My guess is we consumed six hundred calories over the entire time, maximum," Tray says. The two spent time comparing hallucinations and talking about cookies and T-bones. Their circumstances were incredibly intimate, but the dynamic was one of comrades. To be sure, sex isn't at the top of the list of things you think about when you're preoccupied with not breaking your neck, but Sarah is frank about the realities of being a woman alone in the dark with a strange man: "I'm constantly listening, and being very, very aware of my surroundings." If the cold demanded it, Sarah says she would've been open to getting near Tray to share warmth, but early in their meeting, she set a clear boundary: "If you try anything, I'll stab you in the throat."

Towards the end of their time in the cave, Sarah's dreams began to change. Up to that point they had all been set at night, but in one of her last dreams she was aboard on a boat, watching "the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen in my life—waking, sleeping, anything." Or it could've been a sunrise—Sarah's not sure. Soon after, the two finally surfaced, then hugged and high-fived, mud and dirt flying everywhere.

And then, their eyes still not having fully adjusted to the light, their minds hovering in some psychic space between peak experience and utter exhaustion, Sarah and Tray turned to face glowing cameras and talk about their feelings.

Because the entire Darkness enterprise hinges on pitch-black surroundings and maximum isolation, the crew must cast no light and remain silent and disengaged unless absolutely necessary. Their cameras are variously customized to detect light beyond the visible spectrum (night vision) or heat signatures (thermal infrared), and are either carried either by hand or mounted on tiny drones. The cast members are illuminated by tiny LEDs on their helmets, which emit a light that's detectable in infrared but invisible to the naked eye. This means that while the cast sees only darkness, the cameras see their faces framed in a soft green glow, like a spacesuit out of an Aliens movie. Meanwhile, the entire cavern is being scanned via LIDAR, a technology that maps out 3D spaces using invisible laser pulses.

But the gadgets only go so far—people still have to be underground to operate them. Some of the crew wear night-vision goggles. These devices are marvels of engineering, to be sure, but compared to what you might expect from action movies or Call of Duty, they pretty much suck. They have a single lens, which sticks out from the middle of your face like the snout of a metallic anteater. There's no peripheral vision, you can't see your feet without bending your head all the way downward, and the visuals you do get are like looking through the pane of a foggy, grey-tinted porthole that turns into static if you make any sudden moves. Some crew members can't even use the goggles at all, since their camera eyepieces are offset, and combining the two is a good way to accidentally walk into an abyss. So they walk everywhere with one eye constantly glued to their camera, the other seeing nothing but blackness.

The audio crew has it particularly rough. Like everybody else, they're lugging sixty to seventy pounds of electronics on their backs, but they also have to operate the dials and buttons of accordion-sized mixing devices entirely by ear and feel, since all running lights and gauges have been blacked out with tape and markers. Yet wherever the cast decides to go, the crew must follow, even into rock formations with names like "Tall Man's Misery," where the cast can proceed on their hands and knees but crew must contort themselves while trying not to either snap an ankle or hit a button and accidentally erase an entire day's worth of tape. "The environment is oppressive— it's a dark, nasty place to exist," says executive producer Johnny Beechler. "Humans are not meant to be in the places we film. Especially in the dark."

Johnny's candor gets at something complicated. As a state of affairs into which adult human beings can consensually enter, Darkness is pretty intense. The cast members can leave at any time, but barring disaster, the crew are stuck. Everybody's got a bruise or a hair-raising story of backwards fall into nothingness, but they all keep showing up, swallowing grunts and yowls of pain so the cast members can't hear them.

The cast aren't the only ones sleeping weirdly, or having lucid dreams—some, Johnny included, get night terrors, or wake up convinced they're still inside the cave well afterward. A medic is on hand at all times during filming, and a psychologist is on call, too. Meanwhile, in the cave, a squad of specialists is in charge of safety. "Our mandate for the cast is no loss of life, no permanent injury," explains Phil Gaultier, a soft-spoken Canadian mountaineer. "But the cast is making their own choices. From a risk management perspective, [risk] has to be completely transferred to them. The safety net is very loose. We're there, we're present, but our mandate is not to interfere in their experience—which they signed up for. And which is what I think the viewer wants to see: people going through a real experience. And for that you have to have real consequences."

Real consequences can hurt: people have fallen off ten-to-fifteen-foot drops, walked face-first into rock formations, and tumbled down long slides. "That's when it gets very, very real for the cast," says Johnny. "We've had some lashing out, some frustration, and that's when we remind them: I didn't sign up for this, I have to document it; I didn't make you go there, I'm following you. You can't help them, you can't hold their hand. That's where it becomes very real."

At the end of the day, Darkness is a TV show—but the darkness itself couldn't be more real. For all the artifice that makes the experience possible, going into the cave as a cast member still means entering a hostile environment deprived of one of your primary senses. That also means embracing a kind of radical responsibility for allyour actions—from where you step next or how you shift your weight to your decision to come into the cave in the first place. You can never be certain whether the crew is nearby, but it doesn't really matter. "When you see somebody fall, my instinct is like, 'Let me help you up,'" says Francisco Cortez, the show's director of photography. "But instead, I do the opposite. I get in their face without them knowing I'm a couple of inches away, and I get their expression, their pain. They're going through a whole new traumatic experience, and you just see a whole different panic."

Cruising silently past a cast member in the inky blackness, undetected mere inches from their unseeing, wildly dilated eyes, crew members glimpse grief, agony, fear, joy, all of it framed by an unearthly green halo. "We're seeing a side of people that maybe they never knew they had, and we have the ability to capture it, document, and see the evolution of that," Francisco says. "The green image, it's still a green image, but as a storyteller, it doesn't matter, I take pride being able to see those moments, to document them."

"We cry down there," adds one of the crew. "A lot."

Audiences and critics may say they want novelty, but the advertising calculus means that creators are always juggling competing pressures to innovate and to play it safe. Darkness does have some television precedents, like a BBC special where an expert in trauma psychology confined six hapless Britons in dark cells for 48 hours, or a forgettable American game show where Jaleel White challenged contestants to a face a variety of Fear Factor-style challenges in the dark for a $5,000 prize. But in terms of its combination of inherent psychological pressures, natural environmental risks, and a collaborative survival dimension, there's never been anything quite like Darkness. If it feels like the brainchild of a mad scientist or demented philosopher, it kind of is. Max Levenson, who heads development at Electus and came up with the Darkness concept together with his team, dropped out of a philosophy Ph.D program to move to Hollywood and make TV. "Part of the idea behind this experiment was to understand how depriving participants of their most relied-upon sense would affect their relation to themselves, to each other, and to their environments," Max says. "The results have been crazy to watch on all three fronts. But, yeah, at the end of the day, it's the kind of philosophical experiment that would never get funded by the academy, and that's too entertaining not to be on television."

If Darkness is a kind of experiment in extremity—physical, psychological, even philosophical—then the possibilities for what happens next are as varied as the dispositions and stories of the cast members. "A misinterpretation of this would be, Well, how often can you watch people in the dark? Ross says. "And my contention is, as long as there are people, and people are different, the dark is not the issue. It's about three people working together, and what they learn, individually and collectively. It's different every time."

Although they have high hopes, multiple crew members insist that, no matter how the show performs, the time they spent on Darkness will be a highlight of their careers. As for the contestants, Brandon wants another shot, to show his kids he can do it—or at least to teach them that "if something seems impossible, still give it a try anyway." Sarah's biggest lesson is about the human capacity to meet challenges. "Before I went into the cave, one of the things my dad said to me was, 'don't be a victim of the cave, don't let the cave happen to you—be the light, be the force. You happen to the cave. I feel like I went through this uncertain situation, and I did okay, beyond okay—I feel like I completely grew from it." Sarah admits, "It shouldn't take this kind of drastic situation to come to these realizations, but we get set in our ways, and need to be shaken up once in a while."

Tray, for his part, is carrying around a more tangible takeaway: an unfinished pack of cigarettes. A smoker for three decades, Tray took his last puff just before entering Cameron Cave, and hasn't had a cigarette since. A crew member quit with him. They're staying in touch, keeping each other honest.

Photos by Barrett Emke.

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