Dark is a three-season exploration of the human condition through the lenses of science fiction and fantasy. It follows the lives of four families in a fictional German town across different points in time — by the end of the series we have been to 2053 as well as 1888. In case you haven’t guessed it yet — yes, a bit of time travel is involved in the story. I will try and keep this spoiler-free — I rate this as one of the best-made shows I have watched, and want to keep it unspoilt for you in case you decide to watch it after reading this.
Dark is set in a small town called Winden, adjacent to a nuclear power plant and surrounded by a forest. This allows for beautifully atmospheric and dark scenes to alternate with bright daylit ones, creating and relieving tension as the situation demands. The different forms taken by the town and the area surrounding it in the different eras are portrayed flawlessly and seamlessly. All of this makes for a more gripping focus on the storylines.
Any story involving families is necessarily complicated. Involve four of them, and it is a swayambhu Gordian knot. To this mixture, add in time travel, and you have the beginnings of an epic tapestry. Then, go on and break every single rule of time travel fiction, and you have begotten a creation that stands up against the most complicated dessert you have seen on MasterChef Australia and laughs in its face. This complexity is woven into every little bit of this masterpiece — the plot, the character arcs, the action spirals, and most importantly, your own point of view. At times, it is a matter of joy to take a few minutes between episodes and just sit and let it seep into you.
The 10-episode first season is perhaps the slowest. But that is also because we need to know who is who, and the relationships between the different members of each of the families. It kicks off with a suicide by hanging, a missing person and the sudden and dramatic disappearance of a little boy — all this in the first episode! But then the story slowly builds around these events, and we are drawn into the families and their inter-relationships. By the middle of the first season, you are convinced it was a mistake to be tricked into watching it and want to go back to rewatching Archer. But then suddenly there is a crazy twist revealed in the most nonchalant and unexpected way, using a Chekov’s gun from the beginning of the series. This hooks you into staying glued to the screen all the way through to the end of the season without even a toilet break!
At this point, I made what is perhaps the best binge-watching decision I have made in my life — that I would not resume watching the show till I was sure it was over, and all episodes were available to watch. So I successfully resisted watching Season Two when it was released and watched it only once I was sure that it actually ended after Season Three.
In Season Two (8 episodes), the game is afoot from the get-go. The scope of the story expands dramatically, and we learn more startling things about people and places we are familiar with. As we settle into our new knowledge and use it to navigate the expanded storyscape, we are hit with the mid-season reveal that shatters our comfortable familiarity and once again kicks off a thrilling chase to the season-ender. This mid-season reveal to me are the words that will go on a Dark official merchandise T-shirt! You will know it when you hear them!
Season Two ends on a cliffhanger with a crucial death and a reveal that expands the scope of the Dark universe even more than before. It was really good that I could immediately start off on Season Three — the wait would have been unbearable otherwise.
Season Three is where the series expands fully into its form as an epic — where it finally attains viswaroopam in a mere 8 episodes. In fact, to be precise, it achieves viswaroopam-plus status — the expansion is into territory we had hitherto no inkling of. This is also where the whole thing runs away a bit. Of course, the makers of the show were guided by their well-documented and clearly drawn lines connecting everyone and everything to what they must be connected to. In the absence of any such thing, the constantly jumping narrative (remember I told you about 1888 and 2053 — well, there are also a half-a-dozen temporal points in between) gets a bit overwhelming. Just as you think your brain is going to explode (as well as your bladder — this is an absolutely-no-toilet-breaks season), the plot rather neatly dovetails into a few key crises that have clear resolution points. Your brain (but not your bladder) heaves a sigh of relief.
The end of the season, and the series, is rather trite. After exploring everything that has been explored in depth through the three seasons, the ending is a bit too neat. Don’t get me wrong — there is no rush to finish, there is no loose end, and you have to pare things really carefully to spot the paradox, which itself has been used in a very self-aware manner by the makers. The execution, the storytelling, the pacing — everything is spot on. The feeling of neatness is perhaps brought on by the knowledge that we have no further adventures of the Winden-folk to follow.
Dark is the first German-language Netflix Original series, and I really think it must be watched with German audio. It added a lot of depth to the acting, and even though I don’t know German and had to depend on English subtitles, I was spouting German lines by the end of the show.
Co-created by Jantje Friese (who also wrote the screenplay) and Baran bo Odar (who directed it), Dark is a masterwork in storytelling, possible only in the specific format of a bingeable series that releases all episodes at once. The production design is impeccable — Winden through the ages — from 1888 to 2053, with all the stops in between, is real and believable. The acting is spot on, and that is thanks to the casting.
At the end of the day, for me, what carried the series through and delivered fully was the story of the people in it — and not just the protagonists. You care as much about what happens to Hannah as you care about what happens to Marta. As the different characters are placed in increasingly different and (for want of a better word) bizarre situations, the way they react to it is what makes the series. The character arcs are realistic, and perfectly embody what you perceive each character to be. This makes the more fantastic aspects of the storytelling that much more believable, while also making them stand out starkly.
In conclusion, I declare unequivocally that Dark is a must-watch show that defines late-2010s television as much as it defies description or genre-slotting. In scope, in production value, in execution — there is no other era of entertainment that could have produced it. Go watch it.