The streaming TV era has brought us many odd pleasures, and here’s one of them: a supernatural drama with the budget and global fanbase to go properly berserk. Dark, a German original drama for Netflix, sets itself in Winden, a small community deep in the dark woods. The 2017 debut episode kicked off with a suicide, an affair and a boy vanishing in circumstances similar to a disappearance 33 years earlier. By the end of the first run, it was revealed that Winden was a spacetime wormhole that some of its residents had learned to navigate.
Like Stranger Things and The OA, Dark offers teen viewers the fantasy of events with global or greater importance depending on their own actions: of course parents and authority figures are all liars, but they’re lying about something significant. The nowhere-town of Winden is the battleground for the eternal struggle between good and evil, carried out against a background of endless rain, dead birds in boxes, mysterious horology, Latin inscriptions and sinister priests, all of them the product of the show’s excellent, creepy art direction.
People say things like “It’s all connected” and “Everything happens when it must”. In the season one finale, vexed sixth-former Jonas (Louis Hofmann) discovers that some Winden residents are the same person at different ages, and remarks: “Now I have another grandma, and she’s the principal of my school! Her husband, who’s fucking my mom, is looking for his son, who’s my father! A few days ago, I kissed my aunt!”
How to follow that? Well, as season two begins, the big news is that Winden has been destroyed by a nuclear explosion. It is less devastating to the storytelling than it sounds, because the action is evenly shared between the 1920s, 50s, 80s (featuring some terrific back-combing, and a pair of high-waisted fuchsia slacks that deserve their own International Emmy), the present and the grumpy, irradiated 2050s. Protagonists start appearing in different decades with abandon.
Lest viewers start pinning mugshots of the characters to their walls and linking them with string, Netflix has taken the unusual step of producing an online guide to who the ruddy hellfire everyone is. That’s more necessary than ever as Dark continues to gaily fiddle with the established settings of TV time travel by allowing characters to converse with their younger selves. Halfway through season two, Jonas has bigger worries than getting off with his aunt: if he’s not careful, he’ll end up accidentally killing or having sex with himself.
The problem is one shared by other wilfully confusing sci-fi sagas. Characters do not typically have conflicts or goals beyond trying to figure out what’s going on. But that search for answers is all the dramatic impetus a show like Dark needs. The narrative is forbiddingly elaborate on purpose. What matters is how it feels to the members of this exclusive little club – and Dark, with its absolute sincerity and lush production, is a luxurious myth.
