While the genre of time travel in film is robust, including everything from Donnie Darko to 13 Going on 30, there has possibly never been something so comprehensive as the TV show that is Netflix’s Dark. Addressing phenomena as wide-ranging as the bootstrap paradox to the thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat, the German town of Winden is a veritable microcosm of time travel theory and instruction at its most in-depth. Indeed, if schools can’t allow students back in for next year, studies of quantum physics and mechanics (not to mention philosophy) can simply be learned via Dark. As well as the fact that we’re never as “free” as we think we are–and that doesn’t merely apply to political oppression, but the increasingly unshakeable notion that everything has already been predetermined. Or, as the title card featuring Albert Einstein’s words of wisdom to set the tone for the entire show in episode one, “Secrets,” emphasizes: “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Very persistent indeed, yet it is a slow build for both the lead characters in the show and viewers of Dark to apprehend as the narrative starts out with a focus on the disappearance of Mikkel Nielsen (Daan Lennard Liebrenz), hence the frequent comparison to another popular Netflix show, Stranger Things. But to reduce it to this “parallel” for the sake of marketing or making it more palatable to an otherwise easily distracted audience is to do a disservice to the intricacies of Dark. Co-created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese–yes, it surely helps that the two have a romantic relationship as well in terms of synergy–the inspiration behind Dark stemmed in part from their experience with the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a pall being cast over the entire continent when it happened, 1986–which is precisely why that year plays so heavily into the narrative. As Odar put it, “It’s a very German, or European, feeling that Americans don’t get because they never had fallout like that. My mom told me, ‘You can’t play outside anymore, especially if it’s raining, it will kill you.’” Well, Americans at least know what that’s like now with coronavirus.
As for “the rule of threes,” it is everywhere in Dark, not just in past, present and future, but in the worlds that exist–borne entirely of one incident that leads the narrator in the opening to the show to warn us, “We trust that time is linear. That it proceeds eternally and uniformly. Into infinity. But… yesterday, today and tomorrow are not consecutive. They are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected.”
Yet we will still not fully grasp just how connected until we get through the entire series, each episode gradually revealing a time-related mind fuck that unveils to us just how literally incestuous everything can get when one is trapped in a loop, forever trying to repair the damage that’s been done by somehow only seeming to cause more. In many respects, Dark offers plenty of correlations to Twin Peaks, not just in the time loop factor that becomes prominent in the series reboot, but also in respect to how macabre (and, again, incestuous) things can get when you’re at the mercy of cruel fate intermixed with supernatural forces.
For Jonas Kahnwald (Louis Hofmann), these forces are seemingly kept at bay until he comes face to face with them as a result of his father Michael’s (Sebastian Rudolph) suicide, which coincides with the day of Mikkel’s disappearance near an ominous cave in the woods. Along with Mikkel, another student at Gesamtschule, Erik Obendorf (Paul Radom), the local drug dealer, has also mysteriously vanished, leaving those investigating the case, Charlotte Doppler (Karoline Eichhorn) and Ulrich Nielsen (Oliver Masucci), scratching their heads. Ulrich himself has already suffered the trauma of losing his brother, Mads (Valentin Oppermann), the same way back in 1986–the year Claudia Tiedemann (Julika Jenkins) took over Winden’s power plant (the construction of which began in 1953, for the 50s were nothing if not the ultimate time to shine for “nuclear energy”). It is this year that we’ll come into contact with first in regard to the tunnel’s time traveling properties before the “knot” of which Jonas will speak of becomes increasingly complex in terms of finding one’s way out of it, as well as tracing the core of it that can undo the entire quagmire within the triquetra (luckily for Dark, Charmed happened long enough ago not to have too much of a monopoly on this symbol).
Part of that core, naturally, is Martha Nielsen (Lisa Vicari). For even more than a show about time travel, Dark is one about a pair of star-crossed lovers, both doomed and destined to forever be drawn to one another as Jonas tells her in most worlds and incarnations, “We’re a perfect match. Never believe anything else.” Obviously, that match isn’t so perfect when Jonas comes to find that, within the time travel-based family tree, Martha is his aunt. At least in “Adam’s” world. Later, in season three, there will also be “Eva’s”–the illustration of this manifest at a “lodge” (kind of like the Black one in Twin Peaks, but not quite as creepy) in which the painted images of Adam and Eve (as imagined by Albrecht Dürer) dominate the focal point–along with, at one point, the Peter Paul Reubens rendering known as “The Fall of the Damned.”
The show’s title (which, in this climate, could be deemed to somehow have racist undertones) reveals its meaning as Jonas’ ultimate aim becomes to stamp out Winden’s very existence–to achieve total darkness, as it were–as a means to save everyone in it from being condemned to repeat the same horrific destinies. In other words, non-existence is the only salvation (so yeah, it all goes back to that angst-ridden cliche directed at Mom and Dad, “I never asked to be born”). In some regard, many of us wish we had our own Jonas to protect us from the same things. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to know this kind of suffering which, yes, has been on a bloodline loop ever since the inception of our own respective family trees.
We might also avoid the tragedy of true (often meaning first) love. Because attaining it–knowing it–inevitably means that you will come to lose it. Of the show’s end, Friese commented on Odar’s reaction, “You were really, like, lovesick after filming was done. You really had a problem letting go…” Odar somberly returned, “Yes. But now I’m fine. It’s over. Like letting go of some love affair.” That turn of phrase, in the case of this particular show, is almost too melancholically poignant.
