The series is often positioned as a counterpart to ‘Stranger Things’, because both shows have prominent storylines set in the 1980s and feature children who wander about a small town where weird things are happening.
On the one hand, I get it. Those are some pretty big similarities! On the other hand, ‘Stranger Things’ prides itself on its clean, straightforward storytelling; even the series’ mysteries have relatively easy-to-understand solutions. But Dark is a show where even the set decorations are hinting at heretofore unrevealed secrets of the show’s world.
Dark’s second season – of a planned three – dropped in June and it only increased my appreciation for this deeply weird show’s deeply weird grand design. It is not a show that wants to prompt intense emotional responses in you or even a show that really wants you to understand it. It only works if you become obsessed with it and start charting out its many timelines, characters, and iterations. And don’t we all need something like that?
When ‘Dark’ begins, it’s autumn 2019 in Germany. The gray skies and cold rain already make for a foreboding backdrop, but so does a missing boy. So far, so ‘Stranger Things’. But by the end of the first episode, the characters will have discovered something strange and wondrous: there’s a wormhole beneath their small town and it connects two different periods in history that are 33 years apart.
This premise is fairly manageable throughout the first half of season one, when the wormhole seemingly only connects 2019 and 1986. (That first half of the season ends with a terrific reveal that stands as a rare example of how planning every single plot twist in advance can pay off instead of coming back to bite you.) But as the season wears on, a third timeline (in 1953) is added, and the story becomes more complicated.
To be fair, this is true of most time travel stories. If you have free will in a time travel story, you can alter the past and change the present. But this creates a paradox – because if you change the future, then where did the version of you who wanted to change the past in the first place even come from? Many time travel stories sidestep this problem by, in essence, creating alternate realities for the time traveller to become trapped in, but Dark solves it in a way that I’ve consistently found satisfying, if a little overcomplicated: There is no free will. We are all trapped by time. We must follow its dictates.
For instance, if you are a time traveller who goes back in time to kill baby Hitler, somehow your actions must protect baby Hitler, because Hitler existed and for you to know of his horrors, you have to have lived in a world where World War II happened as it did in our world. The classic outcome of this type of situation in a time travel story is that by trying to kill baby Hitler, you instead set him on the path to becoming the great villain we know him to be. The takeaway is that time is our god, and on some level, we have to worship it.
Dark takes this quintessential time travel paradox and cubes it, adding so many paradoxes and logic wrinkles that keeping track of them all can give you a headache. But there’s something entertaining about the intellectual rigor all the same. I never feel like Dark is stuck in a corner. I always know it’s going somewhere ridiculous, and I’m always glad to be along for the ride, even if watching the show feels a little like trying to solve a sudoku puzzle on a roller coaster.
‘Dark’ is streaming on Netflix. The third and final season is currently in production.
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