Dark (TV series). A series that will make you need…a notepad?

This is exactly the clarification I received from the series when I saw information about it on Facebook. What do you need a notebook for? More…

What would you do if you had the chance to go back in time and save a loved one from death? And what would the consequences of that decision be for the future?

In general, there are several theories of how events can develop in the event of a change in the past. In one vision, the changes will lead to unexpected changes in the future (for example, the death of someone in the past will not allow them to be in the future). In another, there are several “slices” of time at the same time, and the future you can meet yourself in childhood, because these are two separate time lines that exist simultaneously and in parallel. So the main question of the series leads us to the idea that the main thing is not “where?”, but “when?”.

The events take place in the fictional city of Winden, where the first nuclear power plant in Germany was not built. The size of the city is not indicated anywhere, because on the one hand, the city has its own school (which even hosts student performances from time to time), a small hotel, and several other institutions. As usual, there are asphalt paths everywhere, but for some reason, children like to walk to school through the forest. Because… I don’t know. They just like everything. There is no map of the city and the location of objects, there are general plans, where there is a large power plant in the middle of the forest (it is interesting that usually near such stations there is a recreational area with a certain “reservoir” for cooling the reactor), a small settlement outside the station, respectively, and the authors of the series try not to dwell on all this, because one or another question will arise. Nevertheless, about a week ago, a child went missing in the city. The event is very daring, because the last time something like this happened 33 years before, and then the lost boy could not be found. New searches also do not yield results, and besides, from time to time strange events occur in the city, during which the tension subsides for a certain time, which the heroes perceive as “the beginning of the end of the world”. However… the situation is quickly corrected and life goes on.

Characters

The first thing you encounter is a fairly large number of characters. I’ll give you a small spoiler – events will take place simultaneously in several timelines, which is why the same people will look different and, moreover, they will resemble themselves! That is, the casting of actors for this German series was so good that in most cases you can almost immediately find out who is who, what they did, what their character was and what the relationships between the characters were from the very beginning. I would say that the casting here was one of the best I’ve ever seen among TV series. There are no good or bad characters here, and everyone’s story is perceived as someone who chose the life they had, and only they are responsible for everything. But certain emotions will still flow in one direction or another with each episode of one of the three seasons.

History

During the last blackout in the city, a child disappears again – a little boy Mikel, who went with the older children to the forest. Something terrible happens in the forest, the children start running away, and Jonas, next to whom Mikel was running, does not notice how he disappeared. As with the previous child, the search does not lead to any results, but it becomes clear that the events taking place in the city may be somehow connected with the nuclear power plant, where the police are not very willing to let the police in without a search warrant. It seems that the owners of the plant have something to hide, and they are trying to hide from view what no one should see.

Although there is a certain detective storyline, it is not the main one here, because it quickly becomes clear that people disappear not because of the actions of some maniac or rapist, but under mysterious circumstances. The source of these circumstances may be a cave located in the middle of the forest, about which nothing is known (which is strange, but we are not talking about that), and which someone is trying to get into in order to try to find the answer there. At the same time, during the search for the missing child, the body of another child is found in strange old clothes and with a coin around his neck, dated 1986. The same coins are found in a utility room at the power plant, which allows us to assume the attitude of the plant workers to what is happening. However, is this really so, and what secrets can this power plant hide?…

My thoughts (+maybe a few spoilers)

I was intrigued by the series myself after a post on Facebook that said, “You’ll definitely need a notebook for this series.” I didn’t download all three seasons, but limited myself to one. The first of them has 10 episodes, the episodes are long, and each tells the story of a certain period of time. Sometimes the series takes us to other times, where we see the characters in their youth – in what conditions they lived, who was in love with whom, and what relationships they had as children, in order to somehow more clearly understand how everything came to be as it is. The main storyline takes place in 2019, but the plot extends from 1888 to 2053. This is one of the reasons why we will “need a notebook.” Another reason is the non-linearity of the story development, because, as it becomes clear over time, there are people who have the ability to travel through time, and each of these people has their own goals and their own vision of how further events should develop. Everything is included in a certain “cycle”, which remains not entirely clear until the last episodes of the third season.

The influence of events in the past on the future, although it matters, is not linear. That is, the “future you” who came from the past has its own timeline, and if at a younger age you did something (having returned to an even further past) – this will not affect the you who moved to the future. At the same time, there is a rule – you cannot do something that should not be – that is, if you are not supposed to die now – you will not die, even if you try to shoot yourself. And all this fuss leads to the fact that the list is needed not for some difficult time travel and tracking changes, but in the fact that everyone’s actions simultaneously both affect and do not affect what will happen in the end. This is why you constantly feel that someone is fooling you, because, spoiler alert, the missing boy who was sent to the past will later become your father. And a kind of closed cycle comes out of the classical perception of time. This entire storyline is built on these cycles.

Mistakes

I brought this up in a separate point, because, despite the final rating of the series, there are quite a lot of them. For example, there are things that are shown to us from the first episode, but no one explains the essence and reason for them, as well as how exactly they appeared. The series becomes completely crazy when the characters find out that in addition to their universe, there is also a parallel one, which is a reflection of this. A different order of parents, different antagonists, different characters of certain heroes. And there comes a moment when four copies of one person from different times and universes gather in one place, which in my opinion is already completely absurd. No less absurd is the end of the series, when the entire storyline, which took place for about 20 hours, is resolved by a couple of plot twists that “sort of close all the holes”.

The series is about time travel, and without any clear evidence, most of the characters believe it as the ultimate truth and even have thoughts that (without reading the script, of course) just strangely appear in their heads. Of all the characters, only one at least pretended not to believe that all this is true, and she needed to somehow more or less confidently prove it.

Time travel itself was possible by several methods, the main idea was that “the master who made the time machine was able to do it only because a person, using his time machine, returned to the past and gave him the part that was missing for this very time machine (hm…a modern smartphone). In addition to this transition, there was also, somehow, a “sacred transition” through a door in a cave that, as we will later be shown, was dug back in the last century. Why this happened, how they came to this, and in general, the series does not explain, but…

Rating

The most interesting fact about the series is its rating, which is both over 9 overall and in terms of episode views (the episodes of the last season had a rating over 9, so the series is considered almost legendary). Is it for me?

After watching the series, you left a sad feeling in the spirit of “…what?..how?..there will be no more cave?..”, and you would like to watch it. On the other hand, there is a real feeling that the series should have ended with the second season. The list of screenwriters indicates three people and sometimes, while watching the next season, there was a feeling that each plot of each season was written by a separate screenwriter, which is why the story lacks some integrity. Because each time the goal pursued by the characters somehow changed, and you just kept watching to…see.

I would give it a 4 tentacles out of 6. It had a certain charm, but it was squandered by the fact that the story went “somewhere wrong” for three seasons. And if two seasons still held your attention, then the third one made you want to watch “with one eye.”

Author: Sa Crea

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