4 out of 5

Created by: Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese

covers season 1

It’s on Netflix, it’s mysterious, has a broad cast of children, has a focus on duality, and maybe there’s some stuff from the 80s in there.  Oh, right, certainly that’s a rip on Stranger Things.  But also: ‘Everything is interconnected’ is muttered a couple of times, so, Dirk Gently?  How about the brooding cop with the broken homelife, using a tragedy to bring about new focus?  That’s… that’s like any given BBC brooding cop mystery, yeah?  Oh, but there are mutilated bodies and a dude in a raincoat, so it must be a horror-stalker trope.  And the basement experiments with accompanying prophetic elocutions take us full circle back to the OA.

Whether purposefully or by way of natural influence, all of these comparisons / similarities stand true for Netflix’s German series, Dark.  But in the millisecond that your brain registers whichever detail – oh, that’s from show X! – Dark immediately makes it its own.  Stranger Things, for example, has been the most common name drop, but beyond some surface tie-ins, not a moment of the show feels indebted to that series.  I don’t know what Dark is indebted to, actually, except the freedom of exploration our current TV environment allows.  The oblique construction of these ten episodes – and that obliqueness is, admittedly, my docking of a star – would never have flown some years back, and yet Dark’s creators grasp how (in my opinion) tv should work:  You can stack mystery upon mystery (check), but you have to still give your viewers inroads to keep watching and get invested; you can release your series in an all-at-once, bingeable model, but this shouldn’t be a 10 hour movie – make your episodes function as chapters; make your viewers want to continue and don’t just ‘allow’ them because the next episode automatically queues.

Dark does both of these things amazingly well.  We build up our characters quite a bit before the show really starts spiraling out – literally more than halfway through the season to start getting wiggier with it – and the hour-long episodes have precise focuses, and cogs to add to the story machine.

Sci-fi, horror, and drama all meld seamlessly.  I am so impressed by the density of what is revealed that… well, I can’t help but fear a Lost dilemma.  Dark is by no means at the point of feeling random, or weird for weird’s sake, but the season does bring us to a breaking point of information: some things are explained, many are not.  It’s incredibly exciting when the show digs up another layer, but too much further down that path and you risk losing the attachment and investment the show so patiently built up.  On the other hand, some reveal dump can likely only lead to disappointment, as our expectations deflate.

It’s a dilemma, but one to face for season 2.  Here in season 1, the main roadblock is in how you deal with the incoming information.  Without spoiling much of the show’s evolution, the cast grows and grows and, while the director and writers take pains to keep who’s who straight to the viewer, man, it’s tough.  And it is, for better or worse, important to know that who’s who.  My method of dealing was to let it wash over me and play catch up later; I’m here, now, with a glowing opinion, so it worked for me, but I can understand that being a severe deterrent for viewers.

Not much more can he said without unsettling the great sense of discovery the show offers.

Dark is about a small German town, centered around a power plant, in which children are disappearing.  And then the bodies of children show up… different children than the disappeared ones… bodies ravaged in odd ways.  Birds periodically fall out of the sky; lights flicker.  Two families’ fates are wound up in this; through their jobs, relationships, and children’s school and social links we start to understand this town and potentially piece together the Why of these strange things that have been happening.

See what I did there?

Deal with the subtitles, if that’s not your bag.  Let it happen.  Dark does nod to any given trope or show, but whatever it nods at it subsumes and improves.