{"id":81073,"date":"2026-07-18T09:44:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T01:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=81073"},"modified":"2026-07-18T09:44:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T01:44:26","slug":"dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=81073","title":{"rendered":"Dark"},"content":{"rendered":"
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People keep talking up this German science-fiction series and how much of a mindbender it is. I was skeptical if it’s even really science-fiction for a long time and so held off. I’ve now taken the time to watch the first season and what do you know, I don’t really consider it to be science-fiction after all. Instead, it’s a mystery box show with time travel at its central conceit. What differentiates it is that it must have been meticulously planned out from the beginning whereas other such shows make shit up as they go along and pretend otherwise. I’m looking at you Lost<\/em>. This means that in principle, it’s possible to figure out the clues they provide before they drop the big reveals. The show has its issues but the mystery is a fair one so I’m very much down for the next season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Jonas Kahnwald is a teenager who grows up in Winden, a town dominated by the presence of a nuclear power plant. He returns to school after spending the past two months in psychiatric care following the suicide of his father. He is also aware that his mother Hannah is having an affair with police officer Ulrich Nielsen. The town is abuzz with the disappearance of a boy Erik who the other kids know is a drug dealer. Jonas, together with his best friend Bartosz Tiedemann, and the three children of Ulrich, Magnus, Mikkel and Martha, decide to search the caves in the woods where they believe Erik has hidden his stash. They are joined by fellow student Franziska Doppler who finds the stash first. But the kids are disturbed at night by strange sounds and the sudden failure of their electronic devices. They split up while fleeing the caves and in the process Mikkel goes missing. A search is organized and Ulrich is dismayed to find the corpse of a boy in the woods the next day. But then he realizes that the body is not Mikkel at all and is wearing clothes from the 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Used as we are to the faster pace and more complex psychological development of modern American shows, my wife and myself were frustrated by how slowly this series starts. Marital affairs, teenaged jealousies and even Jonas’ trauma over his father’s suicide feel like the mundane drama of a small town with little consequence. But then the time travel shenanigans start and we understand why the showrunners had to do it this way. It might all be set in the same small town but we revisit Winden across multiple eras and so we need to keep track of the characters at different ages as well as their relationships. It’s no wonder that there is a chart drawing lines between the characters. You need to remember who is related to who, and who is sleeping with who, and all of a sudden the intersecting storylines become a lot more complicated and interesting. Some relationships becomes downright incestous without the characters being aware of them, obsessions and secrets play out over decades and the central mystery of the missing and dead children becomes a huge conspiracy. A lot of the enjoyment of the show stems from finding and perhaps even figuring this out for yourself ahead of time. As far as I can tell, the show is meticulous about establishing the timeline of events correctly and fair about leaving the proper clues for the audience to pick up on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately the show also plays up the mysteriousness of the time travel too much for my tastes. If someone from the future time travels, of course it’s going to shape the past. It’s not that deep. There are moral implications to the characters’ actions but it’s not as philosophically inrteresting as the show pretends it is. Another issue is that the plot is sustained only by the characters’ unwillingness to openly share information with each other. There’s no real reason for example why Jonas needs to explore the cave on his own. It’s funny when Charlotte the police chief wants to ask her husband Peter something, he blows her off and then when he wants to confess something, she doesn’t have time for her. Obviously if everyone talked to each other, there would be no mystery and no show. Still, it’s noticeable that so many scenes feature just one character off on their own without interacting with anyone else. Finally it can be annoying how the show plays to German anxieties and fears over nuclear power. It’s basically telling them that the evil conspiracies, weirdnesses of radiation and so on are all true which comes close to being misinformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far I’ve been having fun with this mainly because I seem to have a decently good track record of guessing where the plot is going before the reveals are dropped. It can be a little tricky to keep track of who everyone is and how they’re all related but I wouldn’t consider this to be truly mindbending. It’s not as a good as it’s been hyped up to me and it’s particularly disapponting about simple the psychologies of its characters are. But I’m down for continuing it so long as the cleverly planned plot holds up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People keep talking up this German science-fiction series and how much of a mindbender it is. I was skeptical if it’s even really science-fiction for a long time and so held off. I’ve now taken the time to watch the first season and what do you know, I don’t really consider it to be science-fiction … Continue reading Dark<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81073"}],"version-history":[{"count":57,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81179,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81073\/revisions\/81179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}