Dark: the German Netflix series that's like an amalgamation of Twin Peaks, Back to the Future, and X-Files (SPOILERS!)

I was going to post that if I were a time traveller trying to prevent the apocalypse I wouldn't spend most of my time going back to the past just to make cryptic pronouncements to old friends and family. Then I saw s2e6 and decided that snark is redundant, this show is incredible!

The last line of the last episode had me spontaneously doing jazz hands to an audience of none. Don't know if it was the best decision (the plot idea, not the jazz hands), just have to wait and see ;_;

Some of the revelations I saw coming, but that's good, because it makes me feel like the show is not just being clever-clever for the sake of it. We do spend a lot of time saying, "these German sitcoms are terrible" while watching it.
The relentless rain and the dourness just become really funny after a while.
I massively appreciate the little montage sequences where the show reminds you who's related to whom, and how the characters have changed over the course of their lives.
I'm still not 100% clear on the reason behind the dead children, and I honestly think the show would be better if it had found some other way to grab our attention initially. But I love it and am totally hooked and will 100% be doing a full rewatch before season three starts.

well, just finished season 2.
was rather good i thought.
the sheer scale of interconnections re the various time periods and various families must have taken a lot of very detailed planning.
my head is still spinning from trying to keep up with the excess of who/where/when (and, of course, why!) puzzlers.

It was good, but still a bit too portentous and dour for my taste. Apparently the third season will be the last one, which seems good, you can't really stretch a story like this too much. Though maybe the final twist in the season 2 finale means that the next season will have some proper sci-fi shenanigans. I was expecting them to already happen this season, but for the most part the tone was the same as in the first season.

I'm recently watching the French Netflix series Black Spot, which has kind of a similar setup, a smallish European town surrounded by creepy woods, a missing teenager, and the town elders harbouring some old secrets. The genre is a bit different than with Dark, as it's more police procedural with some horror mixed in, but what I like about it that it adds some black comedy to its grim tone, so the grimness doesn't feel as overbearring as with Dark. Haven't finished watching the first season yet, so I dunno how the plot pays out, but I wish Dark had some lighter moments too, like this one has.

I'm enjoying Black Spot, just seen episode 3 which was incredible. I don't think Dark missed out by not having a wisecracking police chief or whatever, though. And it was pretty funny when the daughter of the dad who'd been having an affair with the trans woman said "All your fucking secrets! You couldn't even talk to use when Dad screwed Benni! What incompetent assholes you are!"

use us

Yeah, I didn't mean Dark necessarily needed the same kind of humour as Black Spot, but at least some levity amidst all the gloom would've been appreciated.

the gretchen gag was p good

in s1 i mean

the other gag is everyone in the show charging backwards and forwards through the tunnels to bring an effect about that probably wouldn't happen even if only one person was crisscrossing back and forth

"magnus is right, we have to tell someone"

GOOD PLAN DUDES

(my guess is they don't go through with it tho)

lol we just reached the "everyone is now everyone else's aunt" moment, this is the best gloomy bleak germanic show abt dumb teens

the adults are dumb too, in fact dumber

unclear why tuomas thinks this show isn't funny enough, the increasing hilarious (and insane) plot is excellent balance for the extremely dour (and dumb) characters

as ledge quoted: "what incompetent assholes you are!"

The very seriousness of it makes it hilarious, too. The tenth time a scene opens with the rain pounding everything into submission, you have to just laugh.

I assume it's meant to be funny, right? I love this show, and do not want to think that I'm laughing at it rather than with it.

I've waded through two seasons of this and, despite all the frantic travelling, I feel like I've moved about six inches. I can't face a third series.

the ever-more frenzied stasis is exactly what i like about it, it's the only non-stupid time-travel drama ever attempted

shd have been called DESIRE PATH tho

Final season drops the end this month

\o/

Yay!

I'm sure it'll clear everything up and leave us with a satisfying and resolved finale.

lmao thats how I walked into the last season's finale and got punched in the face instead

I'd been wondering why this is dropping next Saturday instead of Netflix's usual Friday slot but up to S2 of my rewatch now and it's become crystal clear

Why is it, then? I don't remember S2 that well.

27 June 2020 is the date of the apocalypse

Apparently the third season will be the last one

Ah, very glad to hear this. With the season 2 finale drop I had visions of it just expanding forever into utter nonsense. I always think shows like this need a clear ending point.

Even on a rewatch I'm still having to consult that who's who chart every 5 minutes

i read episode recaps, s1 seemed pretty straightforward. s2... shit. pondering a rewatch of key episodes.

One of my favourite things was yelling at the TV about how people failed to recognise each other. I mean, yeah, you would never jump to the conclusion that a stranger was you from the future, but you might think there's a weird familial resemblance, right? Or how strange it is that your friends' son looks exactly like your husband did in school?

I'm secretly hoping that season three is entirely dedicated to The Mystery of Wöller's Eye.

it's weird how they do such a good job of getting actors who look like each other across the generations, except for adam. weird, or a clue...

wow i totally do not remember elizabeth being her own mum's mum.

Watched the S2 finale last night and that one caught me by surprise too

ok I'm putting my wildly implausible fan theory out here just in case it turns out to be heroically correct: adam is lying, he isn't jonas. he's bartosz.

Please tell me they have an extensive recap available at the top of season three?

the episode summaries at https://dark-netflix.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Wiki are pretty good.

Ledge, I don't think that's wildly implausible at all - it has definitely occurred to me a few times. For one thing, Bartosz is the only one we haven't seen as an older version, despite being rescued along with Magnus and Franziska. My question would be why would Magnus and Franziska follow Bartosz in Sic Mundus, when they don't trust him? How would he fool them? (Aside from the trick of everybody in the show not being able to recognise anyone else if they're a different age.)

he'd also have to get a great deal wiser as he gets older as he's not the sharpest tool in the box right now.

but we see adam "seeing"/remembering martha and bartosz is the only other guy with a close connection to her, except for magnus and ulrich who are already accounted for.

Is Adam really that wise, or do people just think he is?

Adam being Bartosz would also track with his pronouncement about "some pain you never get over" or whatever it was he said, but referring to Jonas getting it on with Martha rather than anything else.

As I say, it's definitely crossed my mind more than once, but I'm withholding judgement as of yet. There are many convincing arguments for it actually being Jonas after all. We've also got a whole new batshit thing to bounce around in with the introduction of parallel worlds now, so who knows where the writers are going with this?

Parallel worlds are the only way out of it I think, otherwise the whole narrative comes falling down. I wonder if that's been the intention since the start.

Please tell me they have an extensive recap available at the top of season three?

They don't but YouTube does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnczoVbNsH4

Oh, very good. Thanks.

who says this show has no sense of humour? torben's two eyes one arm reveal was a lol for sure.

Only a couple of episodes in so far but the unknown trio (or whatever they're called) feel very Twin Peaks/Lynchian

oh man i somehow forgot all the episodes are released at once. i was sort of looking forward to eking this out week by week.

some nice symmetries between s3e1 and s1e1 - s1 ulrich climbs out of hannah's bedroom window, s3 franziska climbs of out magnus's (the same room). ulrich uses the same excuse about the queue at the bakers to katharina (s1) and hannah (s3). franziska gives a talk about black holes in s1, bartosz in s3.

it looks like everything is left-right reversed in the other world - jonas's (old) house, the school, the church - but not the nielsen's (old) house?

Yeah, I'm not a fan of bingeing shows but will probably try and watch this as quickly as possible because spoilers

Trying to keep this mostly spoiler-free

I got quite lost this season and should have watched a more extensive recap (the two minute recap NF provided was less than useless), but switching between worlds AND time periods was tough to follow, even with the visual cue. I often had to pause and think about what had last happened. My other problem was most things felt insignificant compared to Jonas and Martha's stories, but some of the gaps were interesting to see filled in. Still, nice finish to the show. I don't know if the story is 100% consistent (I'll leave that to people smarter than I) but I'm still a bit in awe that real people plotted this story out

Rewatching the first two seasons was a massive help for me and meant I could also appreciate all the (plenty of) callbacks this season.

There were obviously a few plot holes but generally it was tightly plotted and I can't wait to see the new character maps people come up with for this season

I mean, I guess it's possible Adam went back in time, stole the letter from Jonas, then returned it later to him so he could burn it. But what would be the point that, since Adam already knows what's in the letter?

This happens to a variety of objects in the show - the book, the device, the letter/suicide note from Michael - it's the paradox that once you start moving about in time you duplicate the item. I can't remember what happens specifically with Martha's letter, but at some point Michael's letter also gets destroyed but still exists.

Yeah, I got that, that's why I was wondering whether Adam acquired the letter via time travel... But with all the other objects that were "duplicated" via time travel, it was shown how that duplication came to be, and I don't think anything like that was shown with Martha's letter? And the scene of Jonas burning it was directly juxtaposed with Adam reading it, so clearly the show makers wanted to draw our attention to its paradoxical existence.

this show though... only partway through s2 but it's already top 5 best shows ever

Season 3 was a step too far for me in terms of complexity. I devoted so much attention to fruitlessly trying figure out what was going on that I began to lose sense of the character's motivations and the stakes. I definitely appreciate its ambition, but it was drifting into abstraction.

Conversely, the actual resolution seemed a little straightforward compared to what had gone before.

Friese and Odar's 1899 hits Netflix today

Dark was pretty disastrous by the end but I’m excited for this. The vibe was always good even when the story went off the rails.

I was impressed how sufficiently they were able to wrap it up, in spite of how confusing the final season was.

I got lost with the multiple parallel Marthas and felt like they never made a convincing case that Jonas could become EVIL (as opposed to just a little whiny). Also IMO it just got too sad! Too many likeable characters snuffed it in deeply depressing ways.

Still great though - having something so immersive and intricate to watch during Trump-era lockdowns was a godsend

It was a billion times better than most of the Things-Like clones that have been on Netflix in recetn years. High hopes for this

Odd how much of a comfort watch it was given its ongoing bleakness. Probably the hyper attractive euro cast didn’t hurt

just watched the trailer, i'm in.

wait ledge, maybe i’m in a Dark loop, but didn’t you watch Dark before?

yes, I was replying to the revive re: 1899 and ignoring all the intervening posts!

lol i missed (somehow) the 1899 context and got v confused.

Just like watching Dark lol

Thought Dark kept its plates spinning brilliantly until the end of the second series, third series lol

third series more like Dork lol

Strong opening episode. Great music and sound effects (except for white rabbit, find other tunes), lots of (not so) hidden symbols - triangles hexagons and tetrahedra, and beetles - the french wife had triangle earrings and a large emroidered beetle on her collar.

Oh and a superb bit where everyone in the dining room drank their tea at the same time.

finished '1899' earlier today.
better than Dark ?

i think so.

watched the first half of the 'making of .. ' thing after,
they clearly had a much larger budget.

Just seen episode 5. Not that I necessarily would have wanted it to ramp things up any quicker, but finally! The content I crave!

I work on a database system that has an option to archive things. At the moment it's just a checkbox and a database flag, maybe I'll redesign it to involve an enormous tempestuous gravity defying whirlpool.

really struggling with this. only persisting cos of ledge and mark e itt.

the environment is heavily synthetic and claustrophobic, not at all like being on a boat. i get that this is almost certainly deliberate - effectively this is some sort of mental state or synthetic construct. but the effect is unappealing and monotonous. some sort of sense of the outside world, some sort of sense of realism going gradually awry, and unravelling completely - something Dark did well - would imo have been far more effective. more than once i've been watching and thinking 'i shd just go and play obra dinn'. i recommend something more like the Artemis 81 approach.

i do love how incongruous the musical selections are. but for a different, bad, form of incongruity, the two 'comedy' stokers really are the pits.

also far far too much of this face being made by everyone in every episode:

https://minhaseriefavorita.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2-temp-1899.jpg

also: is it required that anton lesser is in *everything* these days? i don't mind particularly. he's always very good. but he's *everywhere*.

the environment is heavily synthetic and claustrophobic, not at all like being on a boat

i could argue that boats, especially ones designed for long voyages, are exactly those things - they are simulacra of normal living spaces, often dark or cramped, and you can't leave!

effectively this is some sort of mental state or synthetic construct. but the effect is unappealing and monotonous. some sort of sense of the outside world, some sort of sense of realism going gradually awry, and unravelling completely - something Dark did well - would imo have been far more effective.

i'm reserving judgment till i've finished - probably tonight or tomorrow - but i think they try for the gradual unravelling, and that's clearly how the characters are experiencing it, but once the show has tipped its hand even slightly you can just go oh it's a simulation, and though lot may remain mysterious you completely lose any empathy with the characters. (personally i wouldn't recommend the artemis 81 approach for anything!)

i think the music and sound design is fantastic - ben frost again. comedy stokers appalling, yes. i didn't recognised anton lesser from anything else when i saw him in andor, so was amused to find him playing an almost identical character here.

lol wikipedia tells me that those are the only two things he's been in recently, so maybe he's just haunting my dreams

Finished. Unlike Dark it's not going in to my list of best shows of all time. Not enough headfuckery. They tried to amp it at the end with all the oooh whose simulation is it really? but too little too late. Not a patch on classic ST:TNG headfuck episodes like Frame of Mind, or Adult Swim's Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough. And I just didn't care about any of the characters, half of them we scarcely had a clue who they were or what they were escaping from and the main character remained a total mystery right up to the end.

Obviously if there's a season 2 I'll watch it like the sucker I am.

I was enjoying but fairly indifferent to it as I was watching but the last two episodes made me more on board and excited to see a second season even if that twist ending wasn't particularly original

No second season, axed by Netflix :(

tough crowd

crap - only saw the start of the pilot and seemed intriguing

worth the effort knowing that's all there is?

i think the story is quite self contained and does not require a second season.

Perhaps Dark wouldve been better off ending at the start of the first season!

Yeah, it works as a one off season so still worth watching