There are so many sub-genres of science fiction, and so many excellent vastly different sci-fi movies and television series, that singling out any as “the best” seems silly.
How can you compare stories featuring aliens (e.g., Falling Skies, Colony, Raised by Wolves) to fantasy (e.g., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Game of Thrones, The Witcher), horror (e.g., American Horror Stories, Van Helsing, Servant), post-apocalyptic (e.g., The Walking Dead, The Last Ship, Z Nation), space operas (e.g., Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, The Expanse), super heroes (e.g., The Flash, Titans, Superman & Lois), alternate histories (Man in the High Castle, Watchmen, For All Mankind), cyberpunk (e.g., Dollhouse, Almost Human, Altered Carbon), dystopian futures (e.g., The Handmaid’s Tale, Westworld, Snowpiercer), parallel worlds (e.g., Sliders, Fringe, Counterpoint), time travel (e.g., Quantum Leap, Travelers, Outlander) the supernatural (e.g., X-Files, Supernatural, Stranger Things), or franchises (e.g., Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate)?
That said, Netflix’s mystery thriller, Dark, needs to be carved into the Mount Rushmore of science-fiction dramas. It’s the most meticulously well-crafted series I’ve ever seen. It can be as confounding as it is compelling, but when it’s over, you realize you’ve just seen a masterpiece.
Dark is among the very best sci-fi series ever made, and is certainly the best one incorporating time travel. It is a rare thrill to watch a television series with such lofty ambitions so masterfully achieve its goals with a nearly perfect series finale.
Dark is Netflix’s first original German series. It was originally pitched as a darker, more complex version of Stranger Things. It premiered in December 2017 and aired for three brilliant and often mesmerizing seasons. It is difficult to describe what it’s about to someone who hasn’t seen it because it isn’t linear strorytelling. It jumps back and forth across time, and it takes a while before you realize what’s going on.
According to Streaming On Demand Analytics (SODA), Dark was the second most watched non-English-language series on Netflix (behind only Money Heist) between 2017 and 2020, and was viewed by roughly half of all Netflix accounts in the UK, France, Spain, and Italy (significantly more in its home market of Germany).
I’ll try not to give too much away, but there are some spoilers ahead.
Dark is an intricate puzzle that manages to incorporate many elements of various science-fiction genres without fitting neatly into any one of them. There are causal loops, multiple timelines, a parallel universe, a dystopian future, a group intent on causing an apocalypse (which has or hasn’t already happened), and another group determined to stop them (as they engage in debates about predetermination versus free will). At the center of it all, spiraling in and out of focus, is an at once tragic and hopeful love story.
As the series begins, it appears to be a standard crime drama. In the fictional small German town of Winden, with a nuclear power station at its center, two children disappear in similar fashion 33 years apart. But you quickly discover there is a lot more going on here. A time-travel conspiracy and hidden connections, secrets, and lies among four families, spanning three generations, are slowly unraveled over the course of 26 episodes.
The series starts out in 2019, but gradually expands to include several other time periods – first 1986 and 1953, then 1920, and eventually 2052 and 1888. A wormhole (created by a blast at the nuclear power plant), which opens portals between two parallel worlds and several timelines, is located deep within Winden caves. Dark has its own unique rationale as to why time travel is only possible in 33-year increments.
It’s not always easy to follow who’s who as different characters and versions of characters at different ages and different realities interact with one another. In one scene, multiple versions of the same character are in the same room at the same time. The series requires your attention – no multi-tasking while watching or you’ll get lost pretty quickly. Even if you’re paying attention you might get lost for a while.
As the philosophical pendulum swings back and forth between fate and free will, some characters do horrific things, justifying them by “knowing” they are necessary for events to unfold the way they are “supposed to.” Some characters are determined to stop a cycle of events that seems to keep repeating. Others have no idea they are being manipulated by some sinister master plan.
I often find time travel stories annoying, because they typically follow one of two tracks. Either you can’t change the past because if you could, there would be no reason for you to go back and change it in the first place (and if you are able to change some detail, it inevitably leads to causing the event you wanted to prevent). Or, if you change the past, it simply creates an alternate timeline, rather than affecting the timeline you originated from.
So I expected a familiar, unsatisfying ending, which would leave much of the complex web of mysteries unresolved. Yet the writers somehow managed to pull it all together into a conclusion that makes sense and is close to perfect (and perfectly satisfying).
The background music and the cinematography are appropriately ominous. The large cast, which includes, Louis Hoffman, Lisa Vicari, Maja Schone, Jordas Triebel, Oliver Masucci, Mark Waschke, Sebastian Rudolf, Karoline Eichhorn, Moritz Jahn, Gina Stieibitz, Carlotte von Falkenhayn, Andreas Pietschmann, and Dean Lennard Liebrenz, are all spot on for their respective roles.
While debating the existence of God, and fate versus free will, one of the characters declares, “God is time, and time is not compassionate,” which describes this series as well as anything. As does the Albert Einstein quote that appears onscreen during the first episode: “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
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