DARK (Netflix series, 2017-2020): A Review
Spoiler alert.
In order to make sure this review of the Netflix series DARK was accurate and fair, I had to watch (and by ”watch” I mean ”endure”) all three seasons, beginning to end.
How do I describe that experience in a few words...
To quote Leslie Nielsen in one of his comedy movies: ”Do any of you understand how a man can hurt inside?”
The plot of DARK can be summed up as ”Back to the Future in Germany” – which also sounds like the premise of a hilarious parody sketch. Picture this hypothetical sketch as a send-up of the crudest German cultural stereotypes.
It would include the following features:
1. The entire story must take place in a single German town, surrounded by a forest so vast and dense, it seems the land has never been cultivated or farmed.
Why? Because a huge forest is ”mysterious” and ”laden with secrets,” just like every damn forest in every damn series ever made since Twin Peaks.
2. The atmosphere must be consistently dour, and overdone to the point of pomposity. The color scheme should be mainly gray.
3. Somber fatalism must control every single character. They will try to change the past and future, but it will always prove impossible. That point must be repeated, and repeated and repeated ad nauseam.
None of the characters are allowed to resist being manipulated and pushed around by a ridiculously convoluted plot, because ”follow orders” is the underlying philosophy.
4. Everyone must stare at each other in a very drawn-out, angsty way most of the time. It's called ”Serious Acting.” Stare, stare, stare...
Did I hear someone in the audience titter...? What are you tittering about?
5. What was a joking subplot (or dark undercurrent) in Back to the Future – that hopping back and forth in time might lead to someone becoming one's own parent – must be turned into a vast, dead-serious incest scheme.
Everyone must become everyone's father, mother, uncle, son, daughter... so that in the end there is really just one person ”effing around” with itself – figuratively and literally. Never mind the natural genetic consequences of all this inbreeding!
6. And remember, no laughing. Around the fifth or sixth time a character is ”revealed” to be related to another character through-time travel... or meets his/her own self from another time... this must still be presented as a surprise shocker, with the utmost seriousness.
This is serious drama! I will have no tittering in the audience!
7. The characters must increasingly act and talk in the same way, and since they are all biologically related due to the time-travel plot, there are no ”foreign races” in the story. None of Germany's real ethnic minorities seem to exist in this claustrophobic, incestuous Aryan microcosm – no Jews, Blacks, Muslims etc.
(Perhaps you can have one of the characters say out loud, without a trace of irony: ”Life in this town sucks – but at least there's no racism!”)
8. Heavy-handed references to Nietschze (the ”Eternal Return”) and other dour, very German philosophers should be everywhere to be found. None of them must offer a sliver of optimism.
9. Don't mention the war! There's time travel in Frickin' Germany – and not once must anyone be allowed to say out loud, ”What if we tried to stop Hitler?”
10. Is the whole edifice starting to collapse under the weight of its own pretentiousness? Is the plot getting so repetitive, the audience risks falling asleep?
Quick – play a pop song over the soundtrack to make things seem ”deep”! And a ”meaningful” montage. Sprinkle with some unnecessary slow-motion – the hallmark of a pretentious hack.
11. Uh-oh – it looks like people in the audience are so bored out of their minds, they're starting to think... about how convoluted and ridiculous the plot has become. Time for some distracting ”tell-don't-show."
Play a ponderous voiceover – accompained by a soundtrack sounding like mewing cats – that ”explains” how there is no free will, and the characters must obey the increasingly idiotic plot because...
Because...
...because we're saying, over and over, that they have no choice. (Yeah! Just repeat your big, bold bullshit until it is believed! That's writing advice straight from... I forgot who said it first.)
12. Throw in a passing reference to Back to the Future... but otherwise pretend that time-travel is something utterly new and totally incomprehensible, as if neither the characters nor the audience have ever heard about such a thing before.
Not one person in the series is allowed to read science fiction, watch science fiction, or be familiar with it. (This ”We-have-just-invented-the-Wheel-isn't-it-amazing?” attitude is a typical fallacy of mainstream writers who try their hand at speculative fiction.)
13. Finally, wrap up the third season... oh, but you can't wrap it up! All the time-hopping has destroyed any sense of a coherent, meaningful narrative. All you have is a dreary, depressing, meaningless tangle of puppet characters robbed of all agency.
(I mean literally robbed of agency; there's a ludicrous scene where a gun refuses to work only because the script – sorry, ”Fate” – says so.)
So just bail out of the whole mess. Burn it all down. And let the audience breathe a great sigh of relief that at long last, the pointless suffering is over – mainly for them, but also for the characters.
[Deep breath.]
So, have I picked every bone I had to pick with DARK?
What the hell, let's twist the knife in all the way... It's tempting to suspect that this painfully turgid drama is really about what isn't being said.
The proverbial dog that didn't bark in the DARK: World War II is never mentioned or even alluded to. Characters travel back in time to several periods in Germany's history – except the period 1933 - 1945.
What if one of the characters in this series did propose to use the available time travel devices to stop Adolf Hitler's rise to power? Following the basic premise of the whole narrative, that every event must happen the way it does, we'd get into some ”dark” waters indeed:
Angstful, Grave DARK Character #1: ”We could travel back in time to the 1920s and stop Hitler. We won't even have to kill him! Just cripple his capacity for speech. Damage his vocal chords or his tongue.”
Angstful, Grave DARK Character #2: ”No. We cannot prevent Hitler, nor any of all the horrors he caused, for it is predestined by Time. All of it. The mass hysteria, the war, the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the destruction, the death of millions, had to happen. If we try to prevent the Holocaust, we will only cause it to happen. We are merely following the orders of our supreme Fuehrer, fate itself... or we wouldn't exist. We are destiny... and that absolves us of all moral responsibility.”
One might respond that Germany's history has nothing at all to do with this fictional story – but that is simply not credible. This story is explicitly about about the impossibility of changing history, through repeated time travel, in a country that is very explicitly Germany.
If the scriptwriter had had the nerve to go that far – to really shock the audience by spelling out that these Germans wouldn't try to stop Hitler even if they could – then I would've been a bit impressed, perhaps enough to scrap this scathing review.
Instead, the ”Hitler is Fate” subtext (which, by the way, is bullshit) lies hidden between the lines. Where others might see ”intellectual” art, I see a piece of prententious art that poses as ”dark” but is actually a cop-out. If it hadn't cranked up the ”dark” posture to eleven, I wouldn't have been so harsh on it.
If the series had offered a morsel of humor, a crumb of irony, all would have been forgiven.
And let me disprove any idea that DARK had to be so humorless because ”Germans have no sense of humor." Before DARK, I watched a German movie on Netflix titled LOOK WHO'S BACK (2015) , wherein Adolf Hitler magically reappears in modern-day Berlin, and immediately continues his career as a dangerous demagogue.
That movie is not only a successful, timely satire, but quite funny – which proves that of course Germans are capable of dealing with difficult subjects and can even joke about them. The ”edge” in LOOK WHO'S BACK is that there's no diversionary talk about ”fate.” The responsibility for the rise of a demagogue is pointed squarely at his followers and those who did nothing to stop him.
To sum up: I would argue – and I'm only half joking – that the plot of DARK could be much simplified (and shortened – God, yes!) if it only involved a single snail (snails being hermaphrodites) that traveled back in time, impregnated its younger self... and then let that younger snail hatch the egg that would later become itself.
A snail would also make a superbly condensed character metaphor, bringing out the very essence of what the DARK scriptwriter apparently was striving for.
It is slimy to the touch... and it has no spine.
All done. I'll pull the knife out now.
But let's be nice – just a little: DARK wasn't the originator of the ”pretending-to-be-deep” TV series as a phenomenon. Before DARK there was LOST (as in ”We lost the plot and couldn't find it”)... and other shows built around hyping up a ”mystery” that in the end amounted to a big meh.
Like Rorschach tests, these ”blots-on-a-paper” stories mean very little except what we read into them. So what is their appeal? I have a hypothesis: Perhaps such TV shows exist to try and fill the spiritual needs that used to be satisifed by religion?
The medieval Catholic mystery play has been resurrected as the secular mystifying TV drama. It promises a revelation that will bring back spiritual mystery to modern life – except that for some reason (which you will have to figure out) it can't deliver.
Sic tedium creatus est.
If you’d like to read more of my book reviews — most of which are much nicer than this one — then you can find them on my blog aryngve.blogspot.com or my Instagram account instagram.com/aryngve.