2 out of 5

Created by: Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese

covers season 1

Appearing soon after the second season of Stranger Things, Netflix’s Dark felt like another peak time for the streaming service: an original, complex offering that truly felt like its own experience; a differentiator. Its storytelling was also quite unique, working with the more expanded style of the streaming era, but the creators also showing a willingness to not give the audience all of the info and payoffs up front. It had the intrigue of Lost without the pointless ante ups; the style of Stranger Things without seeming like a nostalgia knockoff. It was slow, but also very deliberate. In short – an event.

With the series’ success and critical acclaim, you could tell that creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese were emboldened to keep pushing, and the series just got more byzantine and paced across its further two seasons.

You’ve got that credit built up; I can understand how Baran and Jantje (and Netflix) figured their new series, 1899, could just jump right into the byzantine stuff and expect it to land. Unfortunately, it turns out that doing some setup beforehand – taking some time with characters, grounding us in a setting, giving us some clear plot threads to initially follow – is kind of important for that level of complexity; 1899 often rings hollow and forced, eventually getting around to some interesting ideas, but only after beating us over the head with imagery we’re not supposed to fully understand for several hours first, and creating a cast that makes more sense conceptually than as people we necessarily want to follow around.

There are many leads in the show, but most central is probably Emily Beecham’s Maura, one of the many passengers aboard the Kerberos, a steamship with an international set of passengers and crew, making a journey to the promise of the US during a time we’ll assume matches the title. There’s the lower classes, most Dutch, locked in steerage; the working class – some Polish – forever dirty and shoveling coal; the well-dressed passengers of Spanish, French, English, and Chinese descent; and the German crew. This makes for interesting communications that the show admirably sticks with, no one magically understanding languages they don’t speak, and some bonds transcending that; thematically this can link to some more general communication disconnects, but there’s definitely something outside of the show informing this concept (the wiki page discusses it as a response to Brexit) that’s well-intentioned, though ends up feeling like a miss. Like many things on this show, it comes across as a good idea that’s too confusingly tossed into a pit of good ideas but not developed enough to feel like it matters.

Maura doesn’t seem to remember why she’s on the Kerberos, beyond a mysterious letter from her brother telling her to be there. Maybe other passengers have similar letters. Maybe a lot of people say portentous things in response to oddly phrased questions / statements that no real person would make, and everyone is probably hiding something. It’s all very spooky.

The Kerberos runs into a ship that’d gone radio silent – The Prometheus. Investigations – questionably motivated – turn up some oddities on the ship that will have Dark viewers questioning if we’re repeating some tricks from that show, and that’s 1899’s other main problem: purposefully trying to avoid comparisons. Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese took the unique tone from their prior effort, and the moody palette, then seemed to realize a lot of the plot tricks they were pulling appeared similar, and so obfuscated them further, trying to convince us No, it’s different! but not wanting to explain exactly how. This leads to further oddly phrased questions / statements – characters responding in quite abnormal ways to utter strangeness, as events on Kerberos and Prometheus draw into question the nature of everyone’s current realities, and understanding why they’re all there.

Again, this does get to some cool places (and visuals), but it’s a really slow, generally non-immersive combination of doing too much and stalling at the same time, with too many characters without distinct personalities to get behind, and want to follow. This makes the reveals, when they eventually occur, feel quite inorganic. And most damningingly, that’s to the extent that the big end-of-season punch doesn’t land either; while I’m sure additional seasons would / could shape this into more gripping TV, I can understand how and why Netflix decided to let it go after this first season.