Dark

DARK A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

Dark, Netflix’s first Germanlanguage TV original, returned for a second season on the 21st of June this year, a date that many of you who have watched the first season will remember as the day Michael Kahnwald committed suicide. (If you haven’t watched it yet, don’t worry; this little detail will not spoil the season for you – it is the very opening scene of the series). With its events taking place seven months after those of the first season, this latest instalment comes with two more time periods (yes, that does mean many new faces for us to grow used to), a lot more lies, some more truths, and several new revelations. However, I can assure you that as is its tradition, even with this new season, Dark provides no easy answers, and in the end, you might just feel as lost, though much more excited, as you did after the end of the first season.

I will just pause a moment here for the benefit of those readers who, having not watched the first season, are feeling as outof-place as Mikkel did when he unknowingly travelled back to 1986, finding that his dad is still a school-going boy in his teens. If you ask me what Dark is about, I will be at a loss for words, and you would have been too, placed in my position. IMDb describes it as a ‘family saga with a supernatural twist’; somebody else might say that it is like an adult ‘Stranger Things’ or that it is reminiscent of the 1990 drama ‘Twin Peaks’. Yes, I agree – it might be all those things, but it is so much more, an excess that cannot be expressed in words but can

only be experienced when one watches the show for oneself. However, I would like to say that Dark, in all its complexity, is, at its very core, an exploration of human relationships and character, shown completely and truly in its ground reality, replete with the lies that we tell each other for our own selfish gains.

“Our thinking is shaped by dualism… Good, evil. Everything appears as opposite pairs. But that’s wrong.

One of the most effective portrayals of Dark lies at its demonstration of human beings as not just good or bad, but rather layered. Certain actions of somebody might come across as favourable, while others of the same somebody might be deemed extremely detrimental to society. One of the characters, while explaining that nature necessitates events in groups of three, says ‘Our thinking is shaped by dualism… Good, evil. Everything appears as opposite pairs. But that’s wrong.’ With the introduction of two new time periods in season 2 (making a total of five), the implications of show-creators Baran Bo Odar and Jantje Friese- of human character being a spectrum from good to evil- is hard to miss. As revealed by the events in the new season: characters might not be as good or bad as they seemed in the previous season,

and those of you who had rallied behind ‘Team Claudia’ as the saviours of Winden might want to reconsider your choices as her actions in this season might make you want to agree with the nickname given to her by ‘Team Noah’. Not only does Dark portray these differences in each of its characters, but it also goes further by giving rise to conflict among its viewers with regards to the identification of good and evil, implying that these, in themselves, ‘are a question of perspective’. While I may be completely averse to somebody’s actions, you might argue that it was the best alternative in those circumstances, a dilemma that many of you might be trapped in after watching the events of ‘The White Devil’.

19 Dark propagates the idea of time being ‘a stubbornly persistent illusion’, with the series continually switching between different time periods through a wormhole located in the Winden caves; implying that all that one experiences is just a cycle, which renews again and again. While its scientific accuracy is certainly questionable (Einstein’s field equations do provide wormholes as solutions, though certainly not as passages of time travel in the middle of a forest), I believe that this constant time-switching is just a vehicle for the show creators to portray an evolution of characters that, though very real if the circumstances are considered, might seem extremely surprising. Season 2 begins with a quote from Nietzsche (Aphorism 146 from ‘Beyond Good and Evil’) that,

when completed, states ‘He who fights with Monsters should take care that he himself does not become a Monster/And if you gaze long enough into an Abyss, the Abyss also gazes at you’, something that becomes so relevant as well as extremely ironic when one evaluates the surprising evolution of characters (most notably a certain ,Ich bin du‘ (I am you) in the episode ‘The Travelers’) such as Jonas and Claudia as all three of their selves – the child, the adult, and the old person – reveal themselves by the end of season 2.

In that sense, though not defeatist, Dark is fatalistic; throughout the series, a constant trope is the inevitability of one’s destiny as the lives of the people of Winden keep going round and round in the same cycles as they have for eternity – Michael always commits suicide, Mikkel always goes back in time to 1986, and so on. The reason for this view is encapsulated by ‘The Stranger’

when he says that ‘We’re not free in what we do, because we’re not free in what we want’. Interestingly, Adam, almost diametrically opposed to him, also preaches something similar: ‘Pain is [man’s] vessel, desire his compass’. What this means is that because we are all just driven by our own desires and selfish gains, if everything was to begin again, destiny would unfold as it always has, propelled by the same lies and fractured relationships as ever. Thus, the show creators, through Dark, provide a cynical though very realistic commentary on human society and its predictable nature, wherein lies to further self-good are so rampant that they become normalised. To that end, it might be an exaggeration, but as long as it even just hints at the truth of these lies, it might be effective in achieving this purpose apart from the superficial one of plain entertainment.

That is not to say, Dark is void

“Dark, in all its complexity, is, at its very core, an exploration of human relationships and character, shown completely and truly in its ground reality, replete with the lies that we tell each other for our own selfish gains.

of any faults whatsoever. While direction involving juxtaposition of different versions of the same character often clears doubts as to who is who, the huge family tree of the four main families, along with their different selves in different times can often be too much to handle for the inattentive viewer. Moreover, the dense storyline requires your complete focus and even as much as missing a dialogue might make you lose out on an important plot detail. However, I believe that with the high tension built by the show, coupled with amazing direction and quite literally, dark underlying music, it is very difficult to lose attention. My only fear now is the making of the third and final season of the series, where sudden bad writing might signal the show’s ‘Apocalypse’ (as it did for another major show this year). A new layer of complexity hinted at in the last dialogue could be too much for the show to handle. But you never know, and we’ll just have to wait.