Dark (Season 3)

 

GORE-TEX jackets are the best for keeping out rain AND God-particles!
GORE-TEX: the brand to wear when you have Seen Some Shit.

I'm taking a break from shipwreck narratives to celebrate the final season of Netflix's Dark, aka the German SF tv series that dares to ask: how many convoluted parallel universe plotlines can you remember?

Seriously, I can't remember the last time I watched a tv series less willing to pander to its audience's memory deficits. Admittedly, it's been a while since I last watched DARK, but still: I don't usually need to consult a Wikipedia entry to understand the dramatic reveals exploding across my tv screen. DARK SO 3 is that kind of show, and I am HERE FOR IT.

(Spoilers ahead, people.)

Series finales (and final seasons) can be tricky, and my hat's off to DARK's directors and writers for sticking the landing. The doomed romance of Jonas and Martha was resolved more-or-less happily, various plot threads were tied up, and two worlds were destroyed so that another could live on, oblivious to their existence. Half the characters on the show were eliminated in the Thanos-snap of multiverse collapse and that was okay, actually, because they were all tired of having to check their wiki entries too. Overall, the finale felt intellectually and emotionally satisfying, and it felt *right*, tonally and narratively, for the narrative that had preceded it.

Things I really liked in the final episode:

The amount of time that alt-Martha takes to make her decision. Part of me was irritated at the camera's lingering on her face, but that's because I'm a spoiled American viewer who's used to characters making monumental decisions at a speedy, plotty clip.  Sacrificing yourself and your entire freaking universe shouldn't be easy, and DARK didn't make me feel that it was. 

The actors. Can we just acknowledge that the caliber of acting on DARK is very high? There may have been some shaky child actors here and there, but for the most part every actor on the show has brought it. I look forward to seeing some of these actors again in other European tv and cinema. (I'd hope for Hollywood, but L.A. generally doesn't import actors unless they're already international stars or super, super hot.)

The final scene. I liked how short it was, and how it managed a bittersweet ending that played on viewers' awareness of the sacrifice that had been made to buy these oft-miserable, oft-murdered characters some ordinary happiness.

Yay! A happy (?) ending!

Now, about that scene. I liked that the show 'rewarded' Hannah the PsychoMom with a happy ending alongside the long-suffering Katharina. I'm not sure I agree with the finale's implication that 1) it was characters' desires that drove them to make bad choices, and 2) that a Hannah lacking an Ulrich-obsession would be a happier person. Uh... maybe?  Torben better sleep with that one eye open, is all I'm saying.

I appreciated that the show stayed away from a Christian balancing of good and evil in its final episode. Some of the nicest characters snapped out of existence along with their morally-compromised brethren. (Charlotte! Elizabeth! I wish those genetically-impossible paradoxes had got more mom-daughter hangout time back in the 1980s. They could have bought matching scrunchies.) The universe that remains isn't morally better than the ones that were destroyed, just less time-twisty.

That said: if there was a single character I would have liked to have chance at redemption in the new universe, it was Ulrich. Ulrich was possibly the character viewers seemed to dislike the most in Season 1 (arrogant adulterer that he was), but between his brother being murdered, his son being kidnapped, and his conflicted relationship with authority, I was willing to give him some sympathy. Ulrich had some stuff to sort out and -- by SO 2 --  an attempted child murder to make up for! And he never got a chance. Poof went the universe. Oh well.

On a related note, I really enjoyed the police procedural elements of Season 1, and the spectacle of Ulrich, Charlotte and Egon working the same case across decades (and later, universes). I know Jonas and Martha were the protagonists, but I do wish the cop characters had managed to accomplish something with all their investigations besides triggering the apocalypse. 

Re: the child murders: I want to honor the writers for making me feel sympathy for Noah (aka MurderPriest) in the final episodes. He and Ulrich ended up being parallels for each other in the end: two desperate fathers trying to save their child by killing someone else's kid. Damn.

One of the things DARK did very well is take on is the morality of time-travel. Basically, all DARK's  time travelers become corrupted by the conditions of their own existence. When you know that someone is doomed to die tomorrow, and that you'll see them alive again next week, what's so wrong with murdering them in the present to shift your time travel plot along? Plus, you're probably destined to do it anyway. None of the time travelers we see start out evil, but boy, do they do some awful things! 

Anyway, those are my thoughts on DARK. I think I'll remember this show for a long time, even if the precise details of who-killed-who slip my mind. 

Comments

  1. Hello! Sorry for being off-topic, but I couldn't have contacted you any other way - the link to your e-mail is broken, unfortunately.
    I conduct small research in linguisics and have a question regarding your Nebula and Eugie nominated work and simply fantastic novel "For He Can Creep". In the text, only the Devil has quotation marks in his speech, the speech of the Poet and Jeoffry is not quotated and the exchanges between cats are put in the brackets. Is there any particular reason why, or is it simply a stylistic choice? Thank you for responce in advance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've just learned about the broken link! Sorry about that.

      1) Grammar is power and authority; the devil has power and the mad poet and his cat do not
      2) In poetry and in the language of cats, speech and thought blur together
      3) cats can't be bothered with quotation marks.

      Delete
    2. Thank you kindly! Your swift response helped quite a lot! Can I hope for your help regarding your works in the future?

      Delete

Post a Comment