Review: Dark

[jducoeur]

(h/t to Alexx for putting me on to this one.)

Deep in the Black Forest of Germany is the small town of Winden -- a place that would be utterly unremarkable except for the nuclear power plant on the outskirts of town. It's a place full of ordinary human intrigues: people feeling that their lives are a bit empty, taking a bit of solace in affairs, with parents and children who are always torn between loving and hating each other.

Except that several children are going missing, the same way they did 33 years ago.

Dark is a very German series (on Netflix, well dubbed into English) that I've been bingeing during my morning runs recently. It is quiet, moody, and pretty gradually paced -- very different from typical American fare. It starts pretty slowly, and has a large cast with extremely complex inter-connections (far moreso than you realize at the beginning), so be prepared for it to take several episodes to really make heads or tails of all of it. But once it gets going and you start to understand what's going on, man -- the second season is ferociously gripping, as the stakes gradually rise and the sheer complexity of the story starts to become apparent.

Mind, this is a science fiction story, although that's not at all obvious at first. I'll avoid any serious spoilers, but suffice it to say, this is the most ornate time-travel epic I've ever come across, and that's where much of the complexity comes from. You don't have people interacting with dinosaurs or spaceships or any such hoo-hah, and minimal SFX: it all happens in Winden, in a highly constrained time-travel model that will gradually become apparent. The human-level pathos aside (and there is a huge amount of that), this story is all about time travel, and what a ghastly idea that is.

(Yes, it reminds me of Continuum, my all-time favorite time-travel story, and it might yet turn out to be as good; we'll see. But it's a very different time-travel model, with very different consequences.)

While 17-year-old Jonas is more or less the central character, I can't quite call him the protagonist: this is very much an ensemble show, and everyone is important. (Note that some of the characters who appear quite minor in season 1 turn out to be central in season 2, which is part of why the cast is so huge.) None of the characters are simply black and white. The central villains (as far as I can tell so far) all think of themselves as the heroes, and for all I know they might be correct on some level. Pretty much everybody is very flawed and human, and everybody has a bad habit of keeping a few more secrets than they should. The acting is solidly good across the board.

Content warnings for outrageous abuse of time paradoxes, and accidental incest. More seriously: abduction and violence against children, including murder -- while the level of on-screen violence is pretty low by American standards, there are several 10-to-12 year old children who get hurt or killed (mostly but not entirely off-screen): it's both a recurring theme and pretty central to the overall plot, so if this is a trigger for you, stay away.

There are two seasons so far, totaling 18 episodes. This brings us to a sort of closure point, but suffice it to say, the story is far from over: if anything, the last moments of season 2 open up a whole new vista of complexity. The pacing feels like they are targeting five seasons, and I hope they get to do all of it -- it's a strong show, well worth watching with the above caveats, and recommended...

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

Time travel! I live in hope, despite my belief that it mostly can't be done on TV (unless in s miniseries or planned-N-seasons-and-then-end format. Which maybe this is?).

[jducoeur]

It definitely *can* be done on TV -- as mentioned above, _Continuum_ is great, and _Dark_ might prove to be. The key is (a) the series needs to take a really clear stand on how time travel *works*, and work hard to be consistent, (b) the way it works needs to be limited enough to not degenerate into deus-ex-machina chaos, and (c) you need to know where the story is going.

_Continuum_ always had a planned conclusion -- indeed, the point where I fell in love with it was somewhere in season 2, when I realized that there was only one possible ending that both fit everything we knew *and* would be satisfying from a story POV (and yes, that was more or less precisely the ending we got). I had guessed that they had intended seven seasons based on pacing, and I've heard plausible rumors that they originally intended ten; in practice, it got cut off at three-and-a-half, but with just enough warning to pull the story together in that final half-season. (Albeit with some plot lines that clearly got chopped off at the knees -- what I suspect was probably intended to be the entire plot of season five got crammed into five minutes of explication.)

_Dark_ -- don't know whether they actually have the story fully mapped, but it certainly *feels* like they do, in the way the threads keep tying together. Certainly they're mapping at least each season in gory detail, although I don't know how deep the overall story bible goes...

[mtbc]

With Dark if they don't have it mapped well enough not to trip over themselves in due course its so complex I don't think I'd realize anyway!

[danabren]

Thanks for the review

[ilaine]

Looks like a good candidate for watching in German, thanks :D I'm not good enough to watch without subtitles, but it is good practice, especially for picking up cadence and intonation

Continuum

[rickgilbert]

I watched the first half dozen episodes of Continuum, but it did not hold me. Did the cop ever realize the terrorists were the good guys and switch sides? I wanted to keep watching long enough to see that happen, but I lost steam.

Re: Continuum

[jducoeur]

tl;dr -- the series is *far* deeper and more complex than you would have realized from the first few episodes: the first season just scratches the surface of what's going on here. It resolutely defies easy concepts of "good guys" and "bad guys": there are several factions with competing priorities, none of which are easy to categorize in terms of good and evil. Nor is there is a simple "switch sides", but suffice it to say, her viewpoint gets a *lot* more nuanced as the story goes along.

I can see losing steam during the beginning, but suffice it to say, by the time we get to the end of the second season, I found it ferociously gripping, and heavily binged the last couple of seasons. Despite the series getting cut extremely short, IMO they nailed the ending, which is an essential part of any good story...