
SPOILERS, but all of a sudden at the second season’s conclusion, it’s revealed that not only are there many multiple timelines, but also multiple worlds. But as the twists became twistier, the end of season two and the beginning of season three threw me for such a loop I found that I couldn’t continue with the show.
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There are fascinating mediations on free will and cause and effect this is truly a show that deals with time travel and its consequences like no other. One of the most shocking and effective elements of Dark is that the more characters try and change the past in order to prevent tragedies they’ve experienced, the more we see that they were the unwitting instigators of those events in the first place. The heartbreaking season two episode “An Endless Cycle” where Jonas (Louis Hofmann) travels back to prevent a death that altered his life, only to realize that he’s there to actually cause it, lives in my head rent-free and will remain there. The first two seasons of Dark are compelling in their twisty-turny glory, and sometimes they’re agonizingly and evocatively emotional. Most of the characters are equally clueless, so at least we’re in good company. So, after we meet the interconnected families of Winden that are actually more interconnected than we or they could have possibly conceived (teenagers in love are actually aunt and nephew! A young girl is actually her own mother’s mother!), we’re along for the ride of trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. But most pressing is a system of extensive caves in said creepy forest, wherein special tunnels can guide you into the past in multiples of 33 (so you can head into 19, respectively, and later much further into the past and also the future). The town is also dominated-and perhaps poisoned-by the country’s first nuclear power plant, which factors heavily into the plot arcs. Dark takes place in the German town of Winden, a seemingly quaint place except it’s surrounded by an enormous terrifying (dark) forest people keep venturing into for some reason. Wild stuff, and we haven’t even started scraping the surface yet.
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The series kicks off with a missing child-that’s standard enough thriller fare-only it turns out the kid is missing because he’s traveled back in time, and he’s actually the father of one of the show’s protagonists. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight to plot jail, there’s no way you can possibly guess what will happen next. Oh, also, everyone is an unreliable narrator, probably! Just when you think you might know what’s going on, it turns out you are wrong. Dark, which first bowed in 2017, is the kind of narrative that keeps you on perpetually uneven ground, peeling back more and more layers and revealing absolutely batshit connections.

And it’s not hard to see how this show grabbed the attention of so many worldwide. Was it after Tales From the Loop bowled me over? My intense love affair with Station Eleven? My inexplicable flirtation with the objectively bad Manifest? Whichever it was, several of you were out here saying that when it came to weird science fiction things happening to regular people on TV, Dark was the way to go.

I don’t remember which article it was when our commenters first started recommending Dark.

This was disappointing for a show that hooked me and felt like must-binge TV for two seasons. I’m rarely a quitter when it comes to media consumption-yet I just couldn’t finish Dark. I was on board for this bizarre ride, but by the show’s third season, I felt like we’d gone one twist too far. The show is a, well, extremely dark mystery-thriller in a category I’m going to call “urban science fiction.” Its characters exist (for the most part) in present-day trappings-but then we have strange goings-on involving wormholes, time travel, time machines, and increasingly complex conspiracies that make Lost look like a kindergarten class play by comparison. On the recommendation of several Mary Sue commenters, I watched the first two seasons of Netflix’s first German-language original series, Dark.
