You want it darker. You really do
The apocalypse, in case you missed it what with the pandemic and the lashings of mass global social upheaval, happened two Saturdays ago. On June 27. And then it happened again and again and again. Fortunately for us, given our present fulltime occupational grapple with an almighty bag of dystopian shit, this particular end game is only set on repeat in the third and final German Netflix series Dark. The third series started on the 27th. Obviously.
Conceived as a three-part invention by director Baran bo Odar and writer Jantje Friese,
Dark, as in dark matter, plays thick and fast with the concepts of time, space and uber German dollops of existential sturm und drang. If the passage of time has felt a little off kilter in the course of the Covid lockdown as it stretches and contracts to the tune of social isolation, in Dark time becomes a significant player on the stage of life. Einstein and Bohr would have had a field day with this show as relativity and quantum mechanics are deployed like show ponies in this mind-bending game of a series.
The “nuclear” town of Winden is set up like a tragic Shakespearian portal “a stage, and all the men and women merely players, they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts”. The would-be Jonas, an awkward brooding teenager, manifests from 1880 through to 2056 in various iterations across multiple platforms as a victim to his endlessly pre-determined fate, and at others a master of the game. His teenage Ariadne, who alternately leads and misleads him through this existential maze, is Martha. Together they seek to find Mikkel, Martha’s younger disappeared sibling. I fear I must warn you that they are doomed to reenact a Manichean dance of light and dark, good and evil, through time and space. And play out an endless loop in search of original sin and some idealised notion of Paradise. Until they don’t. I say no more.
Keeping up with the Windenites is an almost Sisyphean ask as the average small-town shenanigans, affairs, murders, gossip and curtain twitching spin out into eternal narrative threads and incestuous twists that make the mind spin and the grey matter work overtime. The narrator makes sure you get it as he quotes Heidegger and Shrodinger with knowing omniscience. I imagine Bo Odan and Friese read Einstein’s letter to his friend Michele Besso’s sister after he had died: “Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” And then they ran with it. So should you.