Dark thoughts
Remember when this website used to bombard you will all kinds of enthusiasm and arcane observations about TV shows like Dark Shadows or Babylon 5 or Doctor Who? Bet you thought that was all in the past. To be honest, so did I.
It’s an interesting question—and one that has been pondered here before—what determines our favorite television shows, movies, songs, books or whatever in the course of our lives. My experience is that these things tend to get established early in one’s life, particularly in the teen and young adult years. We are likely to associate our favorite manifestations of pop culture with something formative going on in our lives, an especially happy—or carefree—time, perhaps a time when we were deliriously in love. Or maybe we are simply more impressionable when we’re young. Or are we just harder to impress the older we get?
A quick look at my top-ten list of English-language movies reveals that it has yet to embrace anything from the current century, now two decades old. One of the entries is from the 1930s, one is from the 1940s, four from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, two from the 1980s and one from the 1990s. My top-ten non-English flicks includes one from the 1940s, two from the 1950s, one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, four from the 1980s and one from the 1990s.
Does this mean that I am incapable of falling in love with, for example, any new TV show? The good news is that, at least as far as the small screen is concerned, there is definitely hope. After all, I did not actually become a Doctor Who fan until that BBC stalwart’s reboot in 2005, and it is a series that is still airing, depending of course on the vagaries of the Beeb’s year-to-year scheduling. Also, I was quite taken with J.J. Abrams’s, Alex Kurtzman’s and Roberto Orci’s sci-fi series Fringe, which ran from 2008 through 2013. It was chock-full of imagination and great characters and gave the old brain a real workout with its parallel-worlds theme. In a strange way, the parallel thing and the conceit of having the actors play multiple characters seemed to make it a successor to my cherished Dark Shadows.
Now I have a new favorite to include in my pantheon of television—well, technically, streaming—greats. Not surprisingly, much of the appeal is the way it reminds me of other favorite series but without feeling like a mere copy. It took me a while to get into it and even longer to shake the idea that it was a bit too slavish in its admiration for David Lynch. The good news is that, by the end of the first series, I was absolutely hooked. The bad news is that there were only three series in total, a mere 26 episodes. This was clearly by design, and the story was finished about as perfect as you could wish, but it is hard not to regret having no more new episodes to look forward to.
I am speaking of Dark, the German Netflix series that debuted in 2017 and which had its final series released in June. Created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, it is an amazing specimen of writing.
My early impression was that it was a Twin Peaks wannabe, and the Lynchian influence is definitely pervasive. The setting is a remote small town with dark, perhaps supernatural secrets and more than its share of strange, quirky characters. And there is definitely something creepy about the surrounding forest. As the story opens, the town is coping with the mysterious disappearance of a teenager, closely echoing something that had happened back in the 1980s. Looming over the town are the ominous cooling towers of a nuclear plant. From the first episode we begin to get acquainted with a large number of characters and the various, sometimes illicit, relationships among the local teenagers, their parents and their grandparents.
In the beginning, I had the feeling that the writers were making it up as they went along, making things overly complicated purely for the sake of piling complexity on top of complexity. Boy, was I wrong. This thing was plotted out with an intricate care for detail and puzzle-building rare even in this internet-cult-fanboy age. My other mistake was going with the default settings and watching it in dubbed English. By the time I got to the end of the second series, I knew I needed to start over with a fresh eye and with the original German soundtrack. Thanks to the divine intervention of Covid-19, I got my chance. With my kid sent home from college and locked down with us, she provided the perfect pretext for beginning anew. Not only was she steeped in all my favorite shows, she speaks German and could provide additional context. It is so much better in its original language, and I say that as someone whose German is pretty weak. It took a while to get through all three series (stupid college research project and novel-writing taking up valuable viewing time), but we did it.
Yes, it is a lot like Twin Peaks but with a wondrously metaphysical story that actually gets resolved rather than disintegrating into impenetrable metanarrative like Lynch’s stuff tends to do. It is also delightfully reminiscent of Fringe, and it seems heavily influenced by two of my favorite films, Chris Marker’s 1962 masterpiece La Jetée and Terry Gilliam’s wonderful 1995 remake of it, Twelve Monkeys. If you know those movies, then I have already given too much away.
That’s the frustrating thing about getting involved in Dark. You can’t really talk about it to someone who hasn’t seen it and might want to or who hasn’t finished watching—or someone who will never watch it for that matter. If, on the other hand, you are talking to someone who has also seen the whole thing, well, the discussions never end.
The cast is massive. Not only are there are a large number of characters, but many of the characters are portrayed at various ages, requiring more actors. The series has done an amazing job of finding players with uncanny resemblances to one another for those roles.
Of all the numerous character arcs and plot strands, two personages stand out. Busy young actor Louis Hoffman (Land of Mine, Center of My World) plays Jonas, the young man at the heart of the mysteries and, potentially, the savior of his world and perhaps others. He has recently returned from a mental institution after his father’s suicide, and his face is consistently haunted and haunting. Lisa Vicari plays his soulmate Martha, and while slower to come into her own as a character, she grows into a worthy counterpart in her own epic narrative. Together, they give a whole new meaning to the idea of star-crossed lovers.
It’s the kind of series where, after you’ve seen it, you can’t stop talking about it with the person you saw it with. There are too many things to think about and piece together afterwards. Too many small details that take on greater significance if and when you can remember them. It’s also the kind of series that you know, at some point in the future, you are going to have to watch again.
-S.L., 19 August 2020
If you would like to respond to this commentary or to anything else on this web site, please send a message to feedback@scottsmovies.com. Messages sent to this address will be considered for publishing on the Feedback Page without attribution. (That means your name, email address or anything else that might identify you won’t be included.) Messages published will be at my discretion and subject to editing. But I promise not to leave something out just because it’s unflattering.
If you would like to send me a message but not have it considered for publishing, you can send it to scott@scottsmovies.com.