Thoughts on some video series: “Dark”

I’ve finished all three seasons. It’s a German Netflix series dubbed in English. The voice-dubbers have done a fine job, by the way. The series, in the end, folds in on itself, undoing what it has wrought from the beginning. The story is about time and the dire consequences of tampering with time. The masterful part of the enterprise is that exposition and explanation occur right to the very end and are woven into the series extremely well.

As the series progresses, you’re presented with brief interludes that either explicate or incorporate theories about the time/space continuum. While they do a good job of cementing things, these thoughts seem facile and incomplete. But this isn’t a course in quantum physics. It’s a drama. So they do help to move the action along.

Some jarring moments seem to force characters to behave in ways intended only to move things in a particular direction. Only later does one realize that what the character did is directly related to in inherent trait that will become even more crucial as this strange set of worlds develops. Hannah Kahnwald/Nielsen, for example, has a vindictive streak even as a teenager, a streak that in adulthood develops into a deviousness and even viciousness that damages those she touches.

While one might question the motivation for her young self lying about witnessing a rape as a mere plot device, her later behavior seems to make that bit of nastiness of a piece with her personality.  Still, that lie IS a plot device. You get over it.

The series takes some getting used to. Don’t judge it on the first 2 or 3 episodes. Stay with it. It will pull you into its endless cave crawls and the puzzling worlds created by the manipulation of time. A good reason to stay to the end is that you might think you have an individual or relationship figured out, only to find out more than once that you do not. You might think that the series is a meditation on good and evil. It is, however, not that simple. Characters find themselves landing in time periods whose events force them to commit desperate acts, acts that seem driven by destiny or by forces beyond personal control.

Every 33-year sequence (there are many and they keep piling up) brings its own terror and inevitability, with all of them combining to release an apocalypse in one of them, a frightening end-time from which there seems no escape. It all appears to lead back to a repeating event in the stored waste in a nuclear power plant (whose twin towers seem to attain status as a character in the series). This repeating event, however, is a wonderful, oft-repeated bit of misdirection, as you learn only at the end: it is not a cause; it is an effect.

The performances are often powerful. Sometimes, however, the director’s hand seems to land heavily on the actors, forcing them into far too many pregnant silences, often rife with tears. This becomes quite annoying, even more so in Season 3 when, for example, the soulfully anguished Jonas (or one of them) frequently interacts with a soulfully anguished Martha (one or another of them) multiple times. It feels as if these long silences, were they removed, would reduce the total number of episodes by at least one.

I’ve never been happy with dramas that depend in any way on the pathetic fallacy. In this series the clichés of dark clouds and rain far too often hammer home the mood of the piece. It constantly rains; the sun seldom shines; the world is wet and, well, dark. The actors must have had a hell of a time drying out all the time. The raininess and cloudiness are among a few clumsy aspects of the series, including, as I’ve mentioned, some plot-device actions which are jarring, and not all of which ultimately resolve into believability. Yes, we do know that the series title is “Dark.” We get it. Thanks.

Despite my quibbles, I can say that the series is provocative and engrossing. It resonates after its conclusion. The series was designed to finish in three seasons. There will be no more episodes.

Recommended.