I never feel like Dark is stuck in a corner. But there’s something entertaining about the intellectual rigor all the same. The takeaway is that time is our god, and on some level, we have to worship it.ĭark takes this quintessential time travel paradox and cubes it, adding so many paradoxes and logic wrinkles that keeping track of them all can give you a headache. The classic outcome of this type of situation in a time travel story is that by trying to kill baby Hitler, you instead set him on the path to becoming the great villain we know him to be. We must follow its dictates.įor instance, if you are a time traveler who goes back in time to kill baby Hitler, somehow your actions must protect baby Hitler, because Hitler existed and for you to know of his horrors, you have to have lived in a world where World War II happened as it did in our world. But this creates a paradox - because if you change the future, then where did the version of you who wanted to change the past in the first place even come from? Many time travel stories sidestep this problem by, in essence, creating alternate realities for the time traveler to become trapped in, but Dark solves it in a way that I’ve consistently found satisfying, if a little overcomplicated: There is no free will. If you have free will in a time travel story, you can alter the past and change the present. To be fair, this is true of most time travel stories. Why you should watch 12 Monkeys, Syfy's unlikely time travel movie remake (As if to underline its themes of fate and freedom, the series even has a seemingly villainous Catholic priest character, because why not?) But where something like the four-season Syfy series 12 Monkeys turned those ideas into the stuff of grand opera and surprising playfulness, Dark weaves them into a complicated puzzle that you, the viewer, are meant to solve. The whole thing can feel a little like an adaptation of that gif of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia trying to explain his conspiracy wall, but when it works, it definitely works.Īt its core, Dark is primarily concerned with determinism and free will, as so many great time travel stories are. Season two increases the juggling act, by leaping several months ahead in all three timelines - to 2020, 1987, and 1954 - and then adding two more timelines in 19 (the latter of which is a post-apocalyptic mess). (That first half of the season ends with a terrific reveal that stands as a rare example of how planning every single plot twist in advance can pay off instead of coming back to bite you.) But as the season wears on, a third timeline (in 1953) is added, and the story becomes more complicated. This premise is fairly manageable throughout the first half of season one, when the wormhole seemingly only connects 20. But by the end of the first episode, the characters will have discovered something strange and wondrous: There’s a wormhole beneath their small town, and it connects two different periods in history that are 33 years apart. The gray skies and cold rain already make for a foreboding backdrop, but so does a missing boy. When Dark begins, it’s autumn 2019 in Germany. And don’t we all need something like that? Time travel stories are almost always about making sense of a puzzle at some point. It only works if you become obsessed with it and start charting out its many timelines, characters, and iterations. It is not a show that wants to prompt intense emotional responses in you or even a show that really wants you to understand it. But Dark is a show where even the set decorations are hinting at heretofore unrevealed secrets of the show’s world.ĭark’s second season - of a planned three - dropped in June, and it only increased my appreciation for this deeply weird show’s deeply weird grand design. Those are some pretty big similarities! On the other hand, Stranger Things prides itself on its clean, straightforward storytelling even the series’ mysteries have relatively easy-to-understand solutions. The series is often positioned as a counterpart to Stranger Things, because both shows have prominent storylines set in the 1980s and feature kids who wander about a small town where weird things are happening. The best way to experience Netflix’s Dark might be as a graph.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |