It’s one of my favorite shows. As a German we have the problem that most of your own made TV is bad and dull and the same all the time. We never make SciFi only wierd quirky comedy and samey Tatort. I liked it because it felt distinctly German but was something very different.
SPOILERS I will preface this by saying that I love Dark very deeply and have watched it several times and have a very strong emotional connection with it. When I think about what Dark means, or what it's about, I have to think about German art's obsession, since the Nuremberg trials, with narratives in which characters have to attempt to fathom something we would normally consider morally unforgivable that their parents have done, typically when the character was a child or before they were born. This isn't always, in fact it usually isn't, in direct conversation with Germany's fascist history. You get stories about crime families, about abusers etc. etc. and the dilemma isn't just a matter of forgiving or condemning the parents, but attempting to understand how the thing could have happened in the first place, who is complicit in it and to what degree, and to what extent people who were children or not alive owe a debt because of it, if it is a debt that is ever payable. I'm interested in this question because I know that my existence, individually, personally, is contingent on the worst thing that ever happened to somebody. I wrestle with the same problem. When you add time travel to this cultural fascination, shit gets wild. Not only can you literally put the child in the position that their parents were in, you can also put the child on the receiving end of the crime, in the position to prevent it, you can make the child's existence dependent upon the crime, you can create a paradox in which the crime always happens. Dark does all of these things and is asking questions about it like the most visceral of trolley problems. Adam and Eve's factions are in tension and balance in that they consider it their role to pass judgement on this problem and offer a solution. Adam views the crime of the universe's existence to be an unbearable monstrosity, for which the only solution is to end the damn thing and prevent the past-present-future suffering. Nothing can be forgiven. Suffering outweighs love. Eve views the crime as a necessary evil the brought her a child whom she loves, regardless of their wrongs, and is vested in keeping the universe going, whatever the cost. Everything can be forgiven. Love outweighs suffering. The knot pulls tighter and tighter until everyone is implicated, everyone is criminal and victim both. The closed loop of time means that everything is always in the past and therefore set in stone. This is why Dark's finale impacts me so deeply, personally. It's spent so long setting up this world in which you can examine every possible hypothetical and still return to the awful, hideous truth. Existence is indelible. You cannot take back anything, nothing can be undone. Why do I torture myself with the question of if I could undo it, would I? It doesn't matter. I can't. Why do we sit there and try to fathom why someone did something morally reprehensible? What does justifying it matter? What does forgiving it matter? And only then, when we have fully digested this, does it send Jonas and Martha (the most idealistic and naive versions of themselves) to a world where the future isn't yoked to the past in ouroboros formation, where their actions can have meaningful and unknowable consequences and they elect to give that freedom of choice to the world, at the expense of their own existence. It is a decision to end their universes, but it's a decision born out of love for each other and for strangers. They are able to create an existence in which their is meaning, genuine meaning, and a future, rather than just one of mourning that things weren't different. tl;dr Dark's time travel thematically fits in with German culture's obsession with it's own past, which is typically expressed in fraught parent/child relationships. Its conclusion, ultimately, is that it does not matter if we forgive or condemn the moral failings/crimes of our parents, the past is unchangeable.
this is a really great read, thank you so much for sharing. i very much suspected (especially with egon tiedeman) that this show has a lot of recognizably german archetypes, varieties of guy you look at and go "oh i knew someone like that" which immediately contextualize the rest of the story in a way nothing else quite can. this is very much the reason why i avoided trying to read culturally specific meaning into the narrative, because i just don't have that context. what reads to me as broadly appealing to an american audience may read to a german audience as extremely, specifically german! your comment's given me stuff to think about, so thanks again
@letstalkaboutstuff i was about to comment something similiar! just because a show does appeal to a non-german audience as well doesn't necessarily mean it was made with that intent, otherwise arguably all american media is made with an international audience in mind when often its more of a second thought (and we get it pushed on us anyways). i do think it does take inspiration from international shows and to me it kinda read as a show for germans that like a lot of US shows. which, well, is a lot of us because we don't really get that much of media in the genre, at least not in the mainstream. unless you're watching like, the german equivalent of the BBC channels, which frankly only people of older generations do outside of watching the news, you grew up with US media. for a while also a lot of anime (partly commissioned by european broadcasters (like heidi), but also ones originally intended for japanese audiences) I also find it odd to point out the lack of nazis when none of the years relevant in the story are during that time - probably on purpose. im not sure if im maybe misunderstanding the point you were trying to make, were you trying to argue simply because its set in germany it HAS to touch on that subject to make it relevant to taking place in a german town? as the other commenter pointed out it does kinda dive into the theme (I'd also add the big mantra of our approach to ww2 being we need to learn about history so we do not repeat the past, which does often fail to go beyond the surface and look at root causes and how some of our institutions are still based on those times which can add another layer to everyone failing to change the outcome constantly despite "knowing better") (the use of latin can arguably also be tied in, see why its called the third reich) but also if it didn't thats... like, fine? and as mentioned you can talk about themes relating to it without spelling it directly out on a very surface level that could cheapen the message. there's also a lot of other things that make it "german", it kinda has the vibe of stranger things nostalgia but for germany. including the protests against the nuclear power plants, that was just a thing of the youth at the time period. its like asking to explain why a character during the 70s is wearing a peace sign. ulrich is a teen while punk was big so its not really failing to elaborate on the politics, there's just nothing to elaborate there, its signifying the time period. it can also add another layer of him going through that "phase" as a lot of teens do, but then become a cop because he himself failed to engage with what he's rebelling against further. i also honestly find the "maybe im asking too much of a german show when i want them to include more comedy" hilarious because most of our mainstream movie successes inside the country are mostly comedy (now id they're good or not is another thin) (like ulrich changing winden to wixen which certainly got a chuckle out of me but it is very cheap and immature) not that i fault you for it, it is a very common stereotype after all. one thats honestly been puzzling to me. in general i dont fault you for not thinking of the things pointed out here bc how would you honestly. i just found it very ironic the very things you pointed out as not explained enough are things a german audience doesn't need explained while saying it's not tied to it's location, a german town near a nuclear plant that was built during the cold war in a country literally divided by the major powers and with nuclear bombs in the back of their mind constantly, that we see in the same year that chernobyl happened as well, which i do think got mentioned. nuclear power plants have been a point of discussion for decades and we all know the general beats, including why winden is closing the plant down - because germany decided to close them all down slowly which is really hard not to know if you live here, especially if near a town that has to deal with consequences like unemployment of a lot of people at once in the recent years due to it
@@ruininomiya7785 yeah this all makes a lot of sense. for what it's worth, i wouldn't want there to be nazis on screen in this show, i only brought it up because the lack of historical specificity across the board seemed notable to me and the absence of nazis was a good shorthand to communicate that. i'm definitely coming at this from a very american perspective
@@ruininomiya7785 your comment is saying everything i wanted to say but couldn't articulate so thank you :) like yeah ironically i also thought dark was a very german narrative
This video was fantastic, it's great to see some solid praise and criticism of Dark! Me and my family were extremely into the show as it was airing, there's so much to chew on. One thing that gets lost watching Dark now and not when it first aired in late 2017, is that the "main" time period is two years in the future. Everything felt so much more unnerving because instead of being set in the present (2017) or a vague undefined present, the time period we start in is 2019. The 2050 setting is extremely speculative, but 2019's setting was speculative as well. It felt like the disturbing plot beats of Dark were on the horizon, and as I realized how messy the time knot was across 2019, 1986, and 1953, watching from 2017 made me feel trapped in the middle of the knot. It was a unique viewing experience that I haven't been able to fully recapture on rewatch.
OH MY GOD THANK YOU. I have not been able to find anyone who's made a video about DARK and i need to hear someone else talk abt it so i know it wasnt a lock-down induced fever dream
edit: omg i totally wrote this before you started talking about Lost and Homestuck! I also called it clockwork!! It inspired in me the idea of a counterpart to "mystery box" stories a la Lost, you can have a "clockwork box" story like Dark where every intricate piece is working precisely in sync
The German urge to write a convoluted, humourless time travel story with no real thematic impact that leaves you with both a feeling of great satisfaction and complete emptiness in the end. I loved this show but also felt so frustrated after finishing it. Thanks for helping me come to terms with that years later!
The first two seasons of Dark are top-tier TV. Third season is a slog that repeats the same "twists" over and over and you've no idea what anyone's actually trying to achieve. The biggest issue from a plot standpoint is the blue room should have been more significant in the long run, so much of the early episodes built up to it and then it wasn't really that important after all.
Perfect timing, cause I just finished watching Bodies yesterday and it made me miss Dark! I also watched both shows with my dad and can 100% confirm how much fun it is to watch shows like this with someone you can discuss them with. By the third season of Dark I was pausing the show and crouching in front of the TV to point out things on the family tree/knot.
My read, and who knows if this is intentional but I think it is, is that it IS about post WW2/Cold War/ Chernobyl paranoia. The time portal is created under the plant, and the shows solution to "how to stop time travelers from ending the world" is to never invent time travel. The same way that the way to stop mankind from destorying itself with nukes, is to not invent the nuke. Once you've split the atom, you've created the series of events that leads to the end of the world. Also an element of "the older generations made desicions that screwed the world, and now its left to the children to suffer the concequences of their actions" but you know, with time travel where some of those older generations are also the younger geneartions and also its stuff that happened in the future that fucked up the past. So yeah, I do think thats what the show is about, or at least one of the things the show is about along with the things you said. I'd put it in conversation with shows including Counterpart, The Americans, Stalker and Tales From the Loop.
Agree. Maybe they could have executed it better, but I got the same impression. Also the stuff about the power plant- protests, closing, etc is very much a nod to the german politics around it, if you are familiar with it
I love this show! I live in Germany, and my ex actually took me to see some of the filming locations, which was a huge treat. I watched the first season when I was barely A1 in German, and by the second, I understood almost everything they said (even if it's still confusing AF). It's so nostalgic for me now. Editing to add: I think Dark is actually very German, and it felt this way to me as I watched, especially as someone who immigrated to Germany and observed the culture as an outsider (especially being Jewish). So while I agree the series could have given characters more room to breathe, I saw it as simply an interpretation of the cultural emotional mindset. Germany has a very post-traumatic relationship to its own history and to big changes or upheavals, and it can often show via an excess of caution to the point of passivity. It's a very Americanized POV, in my opinion (saying this as a non-American who studies at a North American graduate school), to neglect that keen awareness because it wasn't more blatant about the politics of Germany at the time. It is absolutely steeped in the horror of inevitable catastrophe and its dedication to the bleak sense that people are merely pawns in dark systems with ideologies that are genuinely pointless to some degree. I would add that most of the show was filmed in Brandenburg, and I was fortunate enough to see quite a bit of it, so to me the setting communicated the small town claustrophobia that people outside of Germany rarely associate with it. I also really enjoyed reading the other comments talking about the sociopolitical commentary that could be gleaned from it. It's such a great show to jump off of!
i very much suspected that this show would read differently to someone more familiar with german culture, i know i'm speaking from a profoundly american perspective here lol
DARK is an amazing show and im so glad you made a video about it. trying to explain it to anyone and why they should watch it *without* spoiling it has been. frustrating.
this is several days late, but i was SO excited to see you were talking about this show and hate that i've only NOW had time to sit and watch this vid i definitely agree that something that seems sorely missing from Dark is even the slightest bit of levity- there are characters i deeply love (claudia tiedemann, hard agree there), but it is very difficult to see ANY character as much more than a vehicle for plot progression. the mystery of the series is very engaging, i enjoyed quite a bit of it, but there were definitely instances where i found myself on the edge of my seat NOT because i was concerned for characters' arcs/lives/what have you but because i was dialed in SO incredibly hard to figure out how this death or action taken by a character were going to fit into the broader clockwork mechanism of the time loop it was something i hardly noticed while watching the show (assumedly because i WAS so dialed into that purpose), but now that i've gone through the series, i have a somewhat difficult time grasping onto characters as more than puzzle pieces. i haven't watched Lost, but your comparison to Homestuck feels very appropriate here precisely because HS does present a complicated time loop plot while still creating some of the most memorable characters maybe EVER, something that seems like it shouldn't make sense because HS has a much larger cast (i think?? i guess maybe if you consider the past/present/future versions of each character as different beings, that may not be the case..) anyway, thank you for taking time out to talk about this series! i think i fall in a similar situation to you: i did really enjoy it and think it's a great addition to the genre and should get recognition for that, but there's room for improvement that feels somewhat sorely missed
I loved this show. Why is no one taking about DARK? Why is there only one person online talking about DARK? When are we getting more videos about DARK? I NEED ALL THE CONTENT ABOUT THIS SHOW!!! It's the kind of show that you try to talk to your friends who didn't watch it about it and they look at you in a very concerned manner...
Thank you so much for making this video! Having watched Dark only recently, I feel a little out of time myself, because most of the discussions around the show have died down. It's nice to know I'm not the only one digesting this for the first time right now. And I find it fascinating to hear about it from an international perspective. To me, a German, Dark reads as a story rooted in a very German view on history/time and identity. Still the level of abstraction that the creators achieve using SciFi storytelling seems to mask this pretty well to international viewers. What I mean is, that the core idea of Dark can also be considered a horror concept, actually. The show revolves around the fundamental fear of modern-day Germans. Namely that our history could repeat itself, that we could turn into our own (great-) grandparents. In connection with this fear Dark depicts and mirrors many emotions which are not at all speculative to me. I know them intimately. In a way it's even kind of a coming-of-age-story that many German teens go through. (Not all, obviously, but I did.) When Magnus, Franziska and Martha rage against the silence, secrets and lies in their families, I know how that feels. I can relate to the heart-hammering dread with which Jonas and Charlotte go through (or rather into) the past of their families, digging up the crimes of people they know, maybe even love, or are connected to. The show's ever-present question of "Wer bist du?"/Who are you? is one I wanted to ask some of my ancestors so many times! And of course I wonder, how they and their actions reflect on or in me. There is this moment in Return of the Jedi when Luke Skywalker recognizes himself in his father Vader through their shared loss of a prosthetic hand. Dark does the horror-version of this moment when Jonas and Martha recognize themselves in Adam and Eva. The series puts haunting images to the realization that despite all our knowing-better, we modern day people would most likely not be able to act much different than our ancestors where we stuck in their place and time. And Dark shows in excruciating detail why that is the case. There is a system of social pressure, blackmail, ideological manipulation, family hostage taking, abuse and violence in place, set up by the people who also suffer from it, to make everyone complicit and mould normal people into perpetrators of violence. To me the twin time-loop-knots are miniature models of totalitarian societies. Besides their crimes against time, the methods and mechanics of social control and highly organized abuse as Adam and Eva enforce them, are scarily similar to realistic depictions of life in historical totalitarian societies. (The second season of Charité does a stellar job of illustrating the historical reality in Germany in case you would like to make direct comparisons.) The fact that the time-loop-worlds have been stripped of all direct historical or ideological signifiers achieves two things for the show, I think. For the German audience the horror just gets heightened because these are modern day people who are still not immune to this, who can't save themselves from becoming the villains they hate. And for an international audience (especially for other Europeans) a connection becomes possible to their feelings regarding their own traumatic past. May that also be fascist like in Portugal, Spain and Italy or Stalinist like in so many eastern European countries. I think just like a really good horror movie, Dark uses a metaphor - the time-loop-knot - to remove an issue far enough from reality so that we in the audience can feel and process some of the crushing negative emotions associated with it in a safe and bearable way.
10:55: As a tangent, I'd like to point out how often innocence and naivety are conflated. Claiming that naivety is unrelated to innocence, and furthermore that innocence is maintained well into adulthood...sounds neat! 29:55: If you'll permit another tangent: I've noticed similar things happening in other media. It seems like any company funding a variety of serial media is focusing on quantity, on debuting as many new stories as possible and wrapping up ones that don't provide the desired results. So authors adapt to this, cramming more of their story into the first episodes/chapters/whatever. They adapt to changing circumstances, and the media ecosystem as a whole evolves to trimmer stories-ones that can reach some kind of conclusion with limited resources, but without the fat it needs to endure cold winters. In this analogy, I think the fat is the thematic threads and emotional beats that a story needs if it'll stick in your head for longer than it takes to reach the end. 0:35: I'd make a joke about how _Dark_ is a Wildbow title, but the four-letter nouns/adjectives he picks are _not_ horribly overused for titles and have specific thematic connections to the stories they name.
I watched this show as one of its seasons was being released with my friend, a German major in college, who was watching it in a group of other German majors, so I got to talk about it after each episode which was so helpful to understanding wtf was happening. 😂 Of course, I forget most of it now. I remember enough about Claudia to be very excited upon hearing her name, so it's safe to say she was probably my favorite character. It's also worth noting that the title is so forgettable that I did not realize that's what this video was about. No fault on your part- "Dark" is indeed the title of the show! I clicked to hear you talk and was pleasantly surprised to realize the topic was a show I was actually familiar with!
I fing love long-ass, complex, film theory -steeped Sarah Zeddig video essays, and it brightens my day to see a new one. We had such a drought for a while. Thanks for taking us down this particular dark (ha ha) rabbit-hole.
I love you, I love what you represent, I love that you are stiil putting your ideas out there, I love that you continue picking your brain for us, thank for existing and still being here with us, now after leaving this comment I'll proceed to watch the video.
That was excellent! Man, this channel is always a fucking gift. I appreciate so strongly the articulation of why that "emotionally empty pocketwatch" method of storytelling always leaves me cold, despite how fantastic the mechanism may be. The comparison to Homestuck was deeply satisfying, I saw it coming from ten miles away and I got a good hearty laugh from it. I love this channel, I love your work, I fucking love it all. Great job.
I respect and admire Dark's commitment to moody flatness and coldness, how thoroughly uninterested it seems in the characters' feelings about the situations they're in, in part because for most of events of the series, it doesn't matter how they feel. And yeah that does put it in the Twilight Zone "see that shit? wasn't that fucked up?" two astronaut moon rock murder speculative fiction but honestly that leaves me feeling more endeared to Dark instead of less. I'll admit to being one of those annoying and tedious people that really prefers when a piece of speculative fiction does not preoccupy itself with "but how will this affect [character]'s relationship with [other character]?". I like the dial turned pretty far in the other direction. Which builds resentment towards shows that do that, even really well. It's tiring to be interested in one thing but then be delivered another thing. So when a show comes along and doesn't do that at all, I like it more than I probably would have otherwise, because it's refreshing. It's an entirely irrational and unfair assessment both positively towards Dark and negatively towards, say, Lost. I found Lost exhausting for the same reason that The Walking Dead is exhausting. The interminable squabbling. Characters arguing about things that already happened or what they should do next vastly outweighing the amount of non-argument-based things that happen. Interpersonal conflict good for storytelling, yes, but the proportions were just way off for me.
Just hit the Lost + Homestuck turn and the sheer amount of glee I felt was unreal. This video is a gem already, thank you for making it. EDIT: Yes. Yes good. Thank you for putting into words the reasons I tend to get on far better with older, longer shows.
Sarah!!! I've been waiting for you to make another Lost video since your Twin Peaks video, this was such a joy and a delight! Definitely would love even more discussion but media in conversation is always so much more rewarding. I don't actually know if I'll go on to watch Dark but I'm definitely already rewatching Lost again 😂
i honestly kind of forgot that the show didn't have much intentional humor because personally i tend to find things to laugh at anyways and this show was so full of unintentionally funny moments. from bangers like "yesterday I kissed my AUNT" or bartozs realizing who his kid is and jonas just always doing stuff that is a bit stupid while thinking he's always 3 steps ahead. honestly havent laughed this hard at a show that isn't a comedy series in years despite it not actively working it into the text. and realising all these ironic twists myself and laughing abt it really added to the enjoyment. but well, i do acknowledge im probably the odd one out there (though i was laughing along with another german speaking friend watching it at the same time). i do also think there's other methods to let a show breathe other than comedic moments - which is a super american thing to add into everything honestly. not that i mind it in all shows, like you said lost did a great job there, but i also disagree with the need to have to work it in, and other shows and movies do get worse due to it. but i did also very much laugh A LOT during dark.
The 33 year cycle is interesting. It's the time it takes Saturn to perform a lap around the ecliptic from earth's POV. A planet associated with both restriction, transcendence, and the limits of mortality the crystallization of people because of age
"I don't only have nice things to say about this show" That's the proper attitude to have to all things German, because that's the attitude we Germans have ourselves!
I think I might finally watch Lost for the first time after this :D and someday you might get me to experience Homestuck too. You make it sound really wonderful!
FINALLY! I watched this when it came out and was intrigued but found no one really talking about it. when you said it's good television i agree. SOLID SCI FI even if it was like 10/10 my fave etc
I love Dark, but you're right that the overly self-serious nature of TV series has become far too common. Humor and drama and even trauma go hand in hand in real life in really interesting and powerful ways. This holds true for storytelling as well. Following up something seriously dramatic with a great joke that relieves the tension can make that joke so much more memorable and funny than just having joke after joke. And in reverse, making people laugh before making them cry makes the tears that much more powerful. I cannot understand why so few Hollywood writers seem to grasp this. It's why I find most TV so boring these days.
I haven't really watched Lost, but talking about the episode format of past and present for a singular character, I was reminded of Once Upon A Time and how BADLY they did that format. OP talks about Lost using it to explore different genres and setups in the same episode, and it sounds kind of like they are working together as a catharsis for each other. In Once, they are telling the exact same story in different settings, which results in you knowing this character has learned nothing and being bored of the repitition. It lended to an air of hopelessness and stagnation that you could argue worked thematically in early seasons but really hurt the characters as they never seem to grow, which is the opposite of what the writers seemed to actually be trying to do. It was infinitely frustrating, so much so I gave up and never finished the show.
@@letstalkaboutstuff oh no. they did a summer camp murder mystery too and... it was okay, but it did the EXACT SAME THING with the flashbacks. Do they not have any other ideas?
@@IanNotChris unfortunately a lot of people who were involved with LOST took many of the worst lessons from that show. idk what the deal is with these guys in particular, maybe this is the best work they can get? idk
once upon a time, ok it had great actors, decent characters and , i think a lot of they time they made it enjoyable campy fun. Well most, it took way too long to reboot massivly enough to have new characters and old gone reasonable. But once works as fun if not always good show, ok i enjoy it for whats fun. And lost is, honestly do you lik characters, then maybe, and its fine.
LOVE this show!!!!!!!!! and i know 1899 was even less of a hit than dark, but i loved that one too!! i hope these creators get another chance at this sort of thing. i think apple trying to corner the scifi market would really be a good spot for them after they finish Tyll
As somebody who is trying to find ways to stop people from constantly misreading my gender (because I'm also trans and I also know how I look), I think it's very cool that you give your pronouns at the beginning of every video
When this came out I saw the first 3 minutes of the video, then decided to watch the show, thought "Huh, this feels similar to Homestuck and Lost in many ways", then came back to watch the video and who would have thought that notorious Homestuck and Lost enjoyer Sarah Zedig also thinks this feels similar to Homestuck and Lost in many ways. What I mostly got from Dark as some kind of "theme" was an extreme nihilism about determinism and just being completely at the mercy of the geometry of spacetime ("Doomed by the narrative" on steroids). Every single character is led on by lies to do things they don't want to do. They literally but also symbolically lie to themselves about the consequences of their actions. Adam tells Jonah that he can save Winden, then turns out he wants to destroy it, then Claudia tells him actually he can save Winden, but of course this also ends up with him destroying it, then Eve tells Martha, etc. By the end Jonah is this empty husk of a person which of course perfectly explains Adam's worldview. Every season finale is "the moment we break the time loop" which of course inevitably ends up being an integral part of the timeloop. When Jonah and Martha finally travel to the original timeline I was fully expecting them to actually be the cause of the car crash, tying everything back together into the asphyxiating knot that characterizes the whole show. In a way I found myself a bit disappointed with the actual ending. Either way the show ends up vindicating Adam's nihilism and desire for an end of everything, answering Hamlet's monolgue on the negative, which is not the answer I'd give, but definitely fits what I think is the theme of the show: An inability not only to change ones past, but ones future, due to external forces but also sometimes by yourself. Thats pretty Dark. Homestuck's retcon feels "deserved" to me in a way that Dark's retcon isn't. by the end of the second season Dark had fully convinced me that there was no escaping the narrative. Meanwhile Homestuck's whole deal is constantly escaping the narrative at every opportunity. The retcon makes sense because the scratch happened before it, and the scratch makes sense because Davesprite happened before it, etc. There is a recurring theme in Homestuck of breaking the rules, while Dark's recurring theme is the exact opposite, so it feels jarring when it suddenly goes "oh wait, actually you _can_ break the rules, nevermind". If the show is so Dark, they should have gone full Dark. Don't give me a bittersweet ending, I want a bitter end, which is also the beginning, because the end is never the end is never the end. I would love to hear more about your thoughts on the ending. Basically what I'm saying is that if Dark has a theme, it's extremely nihilistic, which results in a very bleak story with an awe inspiring and extremely complex execution. But then they don't manage to fully commit to Dark's Darkness, which leaves me more conflicted about whatever this show even tried to say if anything at all, fitting the final "very interesting pocketwatch" analogy.
Weird thing to mention but I think that Planet With is a show title that hits the same completely in searchable SEO as Dark while meaning more about the story. It’s got scifi, it’s about a planet, it’s about being with people and being with the planet. Planet with you😊
i am glad i forced the demigod’s hand by subscribing a while back. when people say some show or movie “takes itself too seriously” it never means that much to me anymore but i think you get at what some people are trying to say with that phrase when you made the point about DARK feeling constipated by the third season because there was no comedic release valve or other emotional layers. it is interesting to reframe “takes itself too seriously” as an expression of feeling unnerved by watching humans not act like humans.
I'm going to have to rewatch it I think. I remember it as so much funnier in a dark acerbic almost britishy stilted way than it sounds. That may have been me paying too much attention to people's eyebrows again
also, my favorite episode of LOST is the one where we follow two side characters who get bitten by venomous spiders that paralyze them. it's a brilliant tension filled side story with such a good twist and it doesn't impact the "plot" at all
I gave up watching around half way through season 2... I enjoyed it, but found it too confusing to watch casually. I felt like i needed to be taking notes. I always intended to go back and watch it again, in full, but then i cancelled my netflix subscription.
First I was really taken in by the series and surprised that fellow Germans managed to produce a TV series I actually like which doesn’t happen too often. We were being kept in the… dark on purpose and yet it wasn’t frustrating. The key for me was that I liked the characters starting out but gradually the plot just took over everything which is admittedly a fitting theme in itself and television I had to bring myself to watch by the end. Okay, now to watch the video, this will be interesting!
It appears like I‘m not alone in perceiving the show as unnecessarily empty although I even gradually lost the plot because I just didn’t care anymore. One could say that I only watched it mechanically then. I started it so I had to end it… Which is fitting.
this is the thing, i do find it INTERESTING how the lack of character depth over time fits in with the overall themes of the show... but i still had to watch it, know?
I really appreciate the announcement of the pronouns! Trying to find out what CJ the X’s were was very stressful lol (also JD has his in the bottom right of the screen if you don’t want to do the whole announcement thing, if that helps)
Dark reminded me a lot of the tendency that exists in Polish storytelling, which is almost pathological strive for realism. Polish media seems almost allergic to making characters explain their emotions bc in our "I'll talk about my emotions when I'm dead/have an emotional breakdown" culture it is realistic. Most of the character development happens through character's changing actions and shots of character brooding so you can make up for yourself how their thinking process shifted to make them change as a person. Most people are not good or bad, things happen for no reason bc thats how it is, American films and tv shows have so many existing structures to choose from on which they build their storytelling that Polish media just doesnt use. Even Dark's time travel can be an example of that kind stive for realism, there is no magic portal there is a cave that you yourself could go through, that you've seen before, that you know how it would feel if you touched it. Hannah is sometimes cruel to the point its comical and there isnt really a reason behind it, bc thats just how some people are. The only way we can learn these people's story is to literally go back in time because they will not say shit. We cannot learn the deep workings of character's mind bc in real life we can't read people's minds and in some way our family and friends will always remain strangers to us. But that realism isn't subjective no matter how the author believes it, which is why I found the attempted rape unsurprising. A girl was almost raped bc women are often raped and that's just how the world is, and if there is trans woman in the show she is a prostitute bc thats just how the world is. Or rather, thats how the author's world is.
Me, before turning the video on: "I wonder what the lady who wrote that extremely popular homestuck fanwork will tell me about a German Netflix show" Me now: ah,
33:56 i fully understand the desire to have more character moments and melodrama in Dark (i freakin loved both it and LOST) but i think the writers of Dark accounted for this with the endgame reveals in Season 3. the fact that the characters start to realize themselves that their narratives are so plot-heavy and -focused and aim to break The Knot were rather satisfying to me in that way.
i absolutely agree! that's kind of what i'm getting at when i talk about "filling in the blanks for yourself." pretty much every specific complaint i have about this show IS addressed somewhere in the text. that's what makes it so fun to think about! the show draws your attention to the things that don't make sense and practically demands you to figure it out for yourself, and it's so so so so SO rare to get a story that's planned out enough to support that kind of thing. but i can't shake the feeling that they only give us the bare minimum at every possible opportunity, so while it IS satisfying to untangle on your own, i ultimately end up feeling like... man, couldn't you have put a little bit more of this on screen though?
im three days late, time to comment without watching! (then watch) I watched dark, I watched a good chunk of season 1, then my mom joined in for the whole series, we watched the 2 that existed and waited until the third season was out and were very excited. For episode one, it defaulted to english for me, I assume because my dads netflix account (even if different profile) recongnizes he is unwilling to read subtitles and thus has not seen several things ive recommended, anyways... I watched a decent chunk in english, with subtitles on. I got to the police station scene, where in english a mother somberly and politely asks why the police havent found her kid for 2 weeks, and the subtitles had her screaming at them, I was like "wait wtf?" so I watched the scene in german, and was like "ahhhhh, ok" so I rewatched from the beginning in german and for the rest of the series it was that way, my mom read subtitles despite not quite being comfortable with it, I rewinded a few times for her to catch up, and showed her the english part that made me swap to the german, she enjoyed it and has since been trying to get my dad to accept some shows in their native tongue which has been nice. I now see jonas as yonas tho so that was a downside... ranting onwards, I enjoyed the show, weirdness and all, it was very satisfying to click pieces together even if the show wasnt a mystery that gave you all the pieces to put together yourself fully. I had fun guessing at what would happen, and also had fun noticing details on our rewatch of season 1 and 2 in preparation for season 3. Overall, lots of love for the show, I recommend it to plenty of people if I think they can stomach some of the weirder bits, and sometimes even without that, and id love to see/hear your thoughts on it for good or bad, because im sure on a more critical look we might find some things to pick at. and thus I watch.
I got three, four minutes into this essay twoish weeks ago and then said, no wait I actually do care about spoilers, and then spent all that time shotgunning the series at a go. I gotta agree that 3rd season is constipated as hell and I eventually lost patience and started watching the episodes at 1.5x speed because I was just tired of the characters not having an ounce of self-awareness. Unlike your assessment, I think the show could have lost 4 hours and not really missed much. Character plotlines and beats are fine, but so many are just red herrings or are squashed down into hammer-beaten cut offs that I wondered why I ever bothered to give a fuck. By the time we get to the Eva-verse relationship musical chairs I was wondering why they made a decision to introduce more microplots on a story that was already expanding macro and wobbling out of control. Ultimately, I think as you do, I liked the show as a whole. For me, though, eventually the structural design of the final season drained too much of the pleasure I got out of the show and made it laborious to endure.
the back half of season 3 salvaged it for me but those first few episodes had me really wondering if this thing had any chance of landing on its feet. i like the eva-verse but they give it way too much Plot for not enough screentime. there's a lot of stuff i wish they'd just shown us instead of leaving it to be implied
Have you played the Zero Escape trilogy? I think you'd like it a lot. It sells itself as "anime Saw" but it's very much akin to Lost and HS tonally and thematically, particularly in the second game.
I agree, and yet the computer scientist in me gets SUCH A KICK out of the clockwork. It reminds me of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow (more human and more gay but a bit less intricate). Really love the genre of mechanical stories
oh me too, i LOVE a good clockwork story. i always struggle to talk about them as a critic because i'm all about drama and character, and these types of stories aren't really about that... and yet, as i said in the video, i can only look at these things from the perspective of my own dramatic orthodoxy, so i can't help but feel a little let down when character drama gets sidelined. but like, i watched Primer probably 20 times before i was old enough to drink, soooo
@@letstalkaboutstuff oooh I'll add primer to my watchlist! I think this is similar to how I enjoy marvel because of all the fanfiction I read back in the day: the concepts, characters and situations spark the imagination enough to ignore the execution. On the other hand, knowing beforehand an intricate mystery isn't planned out (a la Sherlock) ruins the whole thing from the very start
Overall enjoyed the video, but the extremely bass-heavy... ambiance? was bad enough I muted and just read the subtitles for most of it. But also I generally use subtitles in addition to audio anyway, so *thank you for good subtitles!*
HELL YEAH DARK. So glad to see you talking about it! If you liked this, I would encourage you to try 12 Monkeys if you haven't? I feel like it flew under everyone's radar, and its time travel mechanics and what they do with all of it is something I so deeply love. It got to end on it's own terms, and the showrunnner went on to work on Star Trek. It's not a *perfect* show (I wish it had more diversity/lgbtq) but it has such heart, and a story that while it expands, still makes sense, imo. I know ymmv, but yeah.
i never watched the show, in part because i always quite liked the terry gilliam movie and didn't see the point of an expanded tv version. but i also heard pretty good things about it, so maybe i should give it a shot! definitely didn't know it ended on its own terms, that's a big selling point
@@letstalkaboutstuff I really like the way they give nods to the film but go their own way--I think one doesn't take away from the other. the first season *is* a little rocky, but I hope you do try it out! Syfy gave the showrunner the heads up he wasn't going to get another season, so he was able to wrap up the story. [Also there were times I was surprised the show *looked* as good as it did, given syfy's budgets are usually a paperclip and a piece of chewing gum] I just have a real soft spot for it (I picked it up when s2 was airing and followed it from there on), so I always encourage people to try it. Again always appreciate your videos; this one definitely makes me want to finish lost which I have stalled halfway through s2.
Yes!!! I was ready to hate 12 Monkeys, and the start was rough, but it was such a wild, cool show! Feels like they really had fun writing this. I didn't expect to care that much about those characters too.
Great video, as always! I had a similar experience with DARK, I heard people thought it was cool, but nothing about the marketing around it appealed to me. Thought it was like Stranger Things meets nordic-noir, which...... Being from a nordic country I'm so fucking tired of nordic-noir hahah. Just as it became played out in Scandinavia, English speaking countries got a whiff of it and started making more of it (but often worse). I don't want to see a german or french show look like it's been shot in the Arctic. I live here, I don't see the sun for 6 months of the year, can I please just see it on tv, at least??? Anyway, hahah. I was wondering if you have checked out the other show made by the guys behind DARK, 1899? Would be interesting to hear your thoughts about it. For me it did sort of illuminate and maybe help explain DARK's weaknesses as a show, if that makes sense.
i've definitely been curious about 1899, but the fact that it got canceled after 1 season has kept me away. i probably will give it a shot someday. also it's very funny that nordic-noir is played out in scandinavia but very successful in the US these days, considering at least like 70% of nordic-noir's DNA comes from Twin Peaks. everything comes full circle
I loved this show. Your criticisms are fair, and I wanted more ideology in particular. But I also don't want you to criticise it as it deserves more attention.
When you described the way that genre media is so joyless, and then showed The Haunting of Hill House, my brain got defensive because that’s one of my favorite shows. But then I realized that honestly, you are right. Doesn’t make me love the show any less, but maybe that makes me the fool.
This is a great video, so we’re clear. That wasn’t a criticism of your video, just my thoughts. I do love Hill House for being an exploration of very human emotions through horror that made me cry, but I won’t deny that it can be a little too humorless.
i liked hill house too! i'm not a huge fan of the ending, but that's how i feel about pretty much everything on netflix and/or made by mike flanagan. mostly i picked it as illustrative of how flatly lit everything looks now
ima just do what I do sometimes and rant midsentence... I actually liked the title Dark (with a backwards K) it drew me in to the show haha, but I guess thinking on it, I can see how it would be "too generic" for plenty of people to want to give it a chance. I knew nothing of the show tho, nothing at all, not even that it was german
I actually watched all of Dark and enjoyed it well enough, and then like a year later I was like “huh I wonder what this is” and put on the first episode again. I realized what happened pretty quickly but there’s no overemphasizing how forgettable this show is made by its title and promotional material.
it's genuinely kind of astonishing how much the title alone completely undermines this show's ability to last! which of course was not helped at all by the streaming model of releasing entire seasons in a single day, forcing the window for relevant cultural conversation to be VERY brief. it's such a shame honestly
I really didn't like Dark, mostly for the reasons you talked about in the second half, but also because I don't think any of it is well constructed. The hard part about writing time travel isn't to create boostrap paradoxes, it's to justify them in the story, and Dark really didn't do this imo. I also found it was a pain to watch because it clearly held answer only to build twists for the audience, which in turns made characters act in unnatural way. Not to disagree too much I though you made some great point. Anyways, I'm mostly commenting to say I found your insistance on the nicheness (?) of the show a little weird. It was super popular? People definitely care(d?) about it! Like for what it's worth on IMDB it has 4 times the number of reviews The Leftovers has (and it's arguable/factually the best TV show ever made), and Lost only has 25% more than Dark, to stay in the Lindelof-verse. (stuff like Mandalorian, The Last of Us or Mr Robot also are around the 400-600k reviews). If I hadn't watched the show yet, the repeated "it's a show you don't care about" might have put me off more than anything? Maybe that's just me though
algorithm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I shared my thoughts in the godfeels server already but this video is great. i can FEEL the words "meat/candy dynamic" on the tip of your tongue sgffksjfjlsb
My mom got into this when it came out n dang that's cooler than her bailing on twin peaks during the initial airing for x files n northern exposure like, right after. Or maybe that's really cool idk. Great video again [×alot] also!
nvm i dont want to be left feeling "cold" and also i can only handle SA scenes in the best of circumstances and these do not seem to be the best of circumstances lol
For me dark became a narrative about the inability to let things go. I mean as far as we see, the whole time loop only exists in Winden. What happens in the rest of Germany or the world. After a while I just got the impression that everyone just went on without one irrelevant little town that noone seemed to leave and only one person notably entered in 100 years. Some characters state how badly they want to leave Winden and then they just don't. After a while it all seems so immature. Upending your entire live to maybe save your high-school sweetheart, which everyone tells you is impossible. You have seen often enough that every action you take to change things just reinforce the status quo so just leave. Stop playing this stupid game. Maybe that's the most German thing to do though.... 😐
I watched an episode and a half of dark and put it off. My main gripe was the show seems like it has nothing to say (which you confirmed) and the characters feel the same, like someone took one person, cloned them, and assigned each clone attributes until they were different enough to be considered a different characters. I'm not saying the characters weren't complex or are one-note, but I'm saying I don't understand why the writers chose to put them in a such sterile world where they can't move out of their designated space. The characters felt like robots, not their acting, but the interactions and actions felt robotic. Maybe this is an extension of the fact that the show is very plot heavy and has no time to humanise characters. But I digress. And to top it off, the show felt extremely white, like completely divorced from it's environment and made in an ideal vacuum. So yea. I do want to watch the show but I hate getting upset at watching something that is so meaningless that I feel like I wasted my time. If any1 wants to convince me, please do, I would like to have my opinion changed.
i think it does become much more compelling once you pass episode 4. i really wasn't sure what to expect from the first few hours, but once it gets going it's very much worth the time. how much you get out of it, though, is very much up to your own tastes
i think dark is the kind of show that a lot of people just cant really get into (like my mom lol) and thats completely fine, i'm just surprised you felt the show was divorced from its environment? maybe this is just a cultural disconnect because as a german the show felt very grounded in reality to me. like winden is not a real town so i obviously haven't been there but it _feels_ like i have because it's like any other small german town, complete with the claustrophobic feeling like the characters keep talking about wanting to get the fuck out of this town but no one ever does (depressingly relatable) just like they keep trying to get out of the time loop and can't the reason the show is extremely white is because that's genuinely what a lot of rural germany is like (which is part of the reason it sucks to live here) iwbh the rural parts of germany tend to be a lot more right wing maybe the characters just feel more realistic to me bec i know a lot of people who are like that a different commenter phrased this much better but dark does play a lot with the staple of german media that is historical responsibility / atoning for the sins of your parents / making the same mistakes because you didnt learn from them and i do think it gets lost in translation i'm sorry, i didn't mean to write you a novel, i just had a lot of thoughts about this show ultimately sometimes you just don't vibe with a show and that's fine, there are other good shows out there
Stating your pronouns at the start is a great practice honestly. People who want to refer to you in the comments know which pronouns to use and you avoid tiresome back-and-forths when someone gets corrected. And it's a nice bonus that the bigots reveal themselves right off the bat so you don't need to guess. Win win.
Well iiiiiii cared about dark 😢 I like clocks. On the other hand, homestuck is too long for me to get into, and I never watched the last episode of lost in protest.
It’s one of my favorite shows. As a German we have the problem that most of your own made TV is bad and dull and the same all the time. We never make SciFi only wierd quirky comedy and samey Tatort. I liked it because it felt distinctly German but was something very different.
the german media landscape is DIRE, i agree
SPOILERS
I will preface this by saying that I love Dark very deeply and have watched it several times and have a very strong emotional connection with it. When I think about what Dark means, or what it's about, I have to think about German art's obsession, since the Nuremberg trials, with narratives in which characters have to attempt to fathom something we would normally consider morally unforgivable that their parents have done, typically when the character was a child or before they were born. This isn't always, in fact it usually isn't, in direct conversation with Germany's fascist history. You get stories about crime families, about abusers etc. etc. and the dilemma isn't just a matter of forgiving or condemning the parents, but attempting to understand how the thing could have happened in the first place, who is complicit in it and to what degree, and to what extent people who were children or not alive owe a debt because of it, if it is a debt that is ever payable. I'm interested in this question because I know that my existence, individually, personally, is contingent on the worst thing that ever happened to somebody. I wrestle with the same problem.
When you add time travel to this cultural fascination, shit gets wild. Not only can you literally put the child in the position that their parents were in, you can also put the child on the receiving end of the crime, in the position to prevent it, you can make the child's existence dependent upon the crime, you can create a paradox in which the crime always happens. Dark does all of these things and is asking questions about it like the most visceral of trolley problems. Adam and Eve's factions are in tension and balance in that they consider it their role to pass judgement on this problem and offer a solution. Adam views the crime of the universe's existence to be an unbearable monstrosity, for which the only solution is to end the damn thing and prevent the past-present-future suffering. Nothing can be forgiven. Suffering outweighs love. Eve views the crime as a necessary evil the brought her a child whom she loves, regardless of their wrongs, and is vested in keeping the universe going, whatever the cost. Everything can be forgiven. Love outweighs suffering. The knot pulls tighter and tighter until everyone is implicated, everyone is criminal and victim both. The closed loop of time means that everything is always in the past and therefore set in stone.
This is why Dark's finale impacts me so deeply, personally. It's spent so long setting up this world in which you can examine every possible hypothetical and still return to the awful, hideous truth. Existence is indelible. You cannot take back anything, nothing can be undone. Why do I torture myself with the question of if I could undo it, would I? It doesn't matter. I can't. Why do we sit there and try to fathom why someone did something morally reprehensible? What does justifying it matter? What does forgiving it matter? And only then, when we have fully digested this, does it send Jonas and Martha (the most idealistic and naive versions of themselves) to a world where the future isn't yoked to the past in ouroboros formation, where their actions can have meaningful and unknowable consequences and they elect to give that freedom of choice to the world, at the expense of their own existence. It is a decision to end their universes, but it's a decision born out of love for each other and for strangers. They are able to create an existence in which their is meaning, genuine meaning, and a future, rather than just one of mourning that things weren't different.
tl;dr Dark's time travel thematically fits in with German culture's obsession with it's own past, which is typically expressed in fraught parent/child relationships. Its conclusion, ultimately, is that it does not matter if we forgive or condemn the moral failings/crimes of our parents, the past is unchangeable.
this is a really great read, thank you so much for sharing. i very much suspected (especially with egon tiedeman) that this show has a lot of recognizably german archetypes, varieties of guy you look at and go "oh i knew someone like that" which immediately contextualize the rest of the story in a way nothing else quite can. this is very much the reason why i avoided trying to read culturally specific meaning into the narrative, because i just don't have that context. what reads to me as broadly appealing to an american audience may read to a german audience as extremely, specifically german! your comment's given me stuff to think about, so thanks again
Beautiful comment!
@letstalkaboutstuff i was about to comment something similiar! just because a show does appeal to a non-german audience as well doesn't necessarily mean it was made with that intent, otherwise arguably all american media is made with an international audience in mind when often its more of a second thought (and we get it pushed on us anyways). i do think it does take inspiration from international shows and to me it kinda read as a show for germans that like a lot of US shows. which, well, is a lot of us because we don't really get that much of media in the genre, at least not in the mainstream. unless you're watching like, the german equivalent of the BBC channels, which frankly only people of older generations do outside of watching the news, you grew up with US media. for a while also a lot of anime (partly commissioned by european broadcasters (like heidi), but also ones originally intended for japanese audiences)
I also find it odd to point out the lack of nazis when none of the years relevant in the story are during that time - probably on purpose. im not sure if im maybe misunderstanding the point you were trying to make, were you trying to argue simply because its set in germany it HAS to touch on that subject to make it relevant to taking place in a german town? as the other commenter pointed out it does kinda dive into the theme (I'd also add the big mantra of our approach to ww2 being we need to learn about history so we do not repeat the past, which does often fail to go beyond the surface and look at root causes and how some of our institutions are still based on those times which can add another layer to everyone failing to change the outcome constantly despite "knowing better") (the use of latin can arguably also be tied in, see why its called the third reich) but also if it didn't thats... like, fine? and as mentioned you can talk about themes relating to it without spelling it directly out on a very surface level that could cheapen the message. there's also a lot of other things that make it "german", it kinda has the vibe of stranger things nostalgia but for germany. including the protests against the nuclear power plants, that was just a thing of the youth at the time period. its like asking to explain why a character during the 70s is wearing a peace sign. ulrich is a teen while punk was big so its not really failing to elaborate on the politics, there's just nothing to elaborate there, its signifying the time period. it can also add another layer of him going through that "phase" as a lot of teens do, but then become a cop because he himself failed to engage with what he's rebelling against further.
i also honestly find the "maybe im asking too much of a german show when i want them to include more comedy" hilarious because most of our mainstream movie successes inside the country are mostly comedy (now id they're good or not is another thin) (like ulrich changing winden to wixen which certainly got a chuckle out of me but it is very cheap and immature) not that i fault you for it, it is a very common stereotype after all. one thats honestly been puzzling to me. in general i dont fault you for not thinking of the things pointed out here bc how would you honestly. i just found it very ironic the very things you pointed out as not explained enough are things a german audience doesn't need explained while saying it's not tied to it's location, a german town near a nuclear plant that was built during the cold war in a country literally divided by the major powers and with nuclear bombs in the back of their mind constantly, that we see in the same year that chernobyl happened as well, which i do think got mentioned. nuclear power plants have been a point of discussion for decades and we all know the general beats, including why winden is closing the plant down - because germany decided to close them all down slowly which is really hard not to know if you live here, especially if near a town that has to deal with consequences like unemployment of a lot of people at once in the recent years due to it
@@ruininomiya7785 yeah this all makes a lot of sense. for what it's worth, i wouldn't want there to be nazis on screen in this show, i only brought it up because the lack of historical specificity across the board seemed notable to me and the absence of nazis was a good shorthand to communicate that. i'm definitely coming at this from a very american perspective
@@ruininomiya7785 your comment is saying everything i wanted to say but couldn't articulate so thank you :) like yeah ironically i also thought dark was a very german narrative
This video was fantastic, it's great to see some solid praise and criticism of Dark! Me and my family were extremely into the show as it was airing, there's so much to chew on.
One thing that gets lost watching Dark now and not when it first aired in late 2017, is that the "main" time period is two years in the future. Everything felt so much more unnerving because instead of being set in the present (2017) or a vague undefined present, the time period we start in is 2019. The 2050 setting is extremely speculative, but 2019's setting was speculative as well. It felt like the disturbing plot beats of Dark were on the horizon, and as I realized how messy the time knot was across 2019, 1986, and 1953, watching from 2017 made me feel trapped in the middle of the knot. It was a unique viewing experience that I haven't been able to fully recapture on rewatch.
oh that's really cool
OH MY GOD THANK YOU. I have not been able to find anyone who's made a video about DARK and i need to hear someone else talk abt it so i know it wasnt a lock-down induced fever dream
oh good im so glad you liked it!! i just started the video and i got nervous for a sec lmao. yes the title is utter garbage
edit: omg i totally wrote this before you started talking about Lost and Homestuck!
I also called it clockwork!! It inspired in me the idea of a counterpart to "mystery box" stories a la Lost, you can have a "clockwork box" story like Dark where every intricate piece is working precisely in sync
The German urge to write a convoluted, humourless time travel story with no real thematic impact that leaves you with both a feeling of great satisfaction and complete emptiness in the end. I loved this show but also felt so frustrated after finishing it. Thanks for helping me come to terms with that years later!
Ah yes, the classic Sarah Z Homestuck jumpscare. Love it
The first two seasons of Dark are top-tier TV. Third season is a slog that repeats the same "twists" over and over and you've no idea what anyone's actually trying to achieve. The biggest issue from a plot standpoint is the blue room should have been more significant in the long run, so much of the early episodes built up to it and then it wasn't really that important after all.
Perfect timing, cause I just finished watching Bodies yesterday and it made me miss Dark! I also watched both shows with my dad and can 100% confirm how much fun it is to watch shows like this with someone you can discuss them with. By the third season of Dark I was pausing the show and crouching in front of the TV to point out things on the family tree/knot.
as you kept describing the nature of the time travel, I could feel the homestuck creeping up behind me XD solid vid!
My read, and who knows if this is intentional but I think it is, is that it IS about post WW2/Cold War/ Chernobyl paranoia. The time portal is created under the plant, and the shows solution to "how to stop time travelers from ending the world" is to never invent time travel. The same way that the way to stop mankind from destorying itself with nukes, is to not invent the nuke. Once you've split the atom, you've created the series of events that leads to the end of the world.
Also an element of "the older generations made desicions that screwed the world, and now its left to the children to suffer the concequences of their actions" but you know, with time travel where some of those older generations are also the younger geneartions and also its stuff that happened in the future that fucked up the past.
So yeah, I do think thats what the show is about, or at least one of the things the show is about along with the things you said. I'd put it in conversation with shows including Counterpart, The Americans, Stalker and Tales From the Loop.
Agree. Maybe they could have executed it better, but I got the same impression. Also the stuff about the power plant- protests, closing, etc is very much a nod to the german politics around it, if you are familiar with it
She even bleats like a goat unironically your videos have everything.
I love this show! I live in Germany, and my ex actually took me to see some of the filming locations, which was a huge treat. I watched the first season when I was barely A1 in German, and by the second, I understood almost everything they said (even if it's still confusing AF). It's so nostalgic for me now.
Editing to add: I think Dark is actually very German, and it felt this way to me as I watched, especially as someone who immigrated to Germany and observed the culture as an outsider (especially being Jewish). So while I agree the series could have given characters more room to breathe, I saw it as simply an interpretation of the cultural emotional mindset. Germany has a very post-traumatic relationship to its own history and to big changes or upheavals, and it can often show via an excess of caution to the point of passivity. It's a very Americanized POV, in my opinion (saying this as a non-American who studies at a North American graduate school), to neglect that keen awareness because it wasn't more blatant about the politics of Germany at the time. It is absolutely steeped in the horror of inevitable catastrophe and its dedication to the bleak sense that people are merely pawns in dark systems with ideologies that are genuinely pointless to some degree. I would add that most of the show was filmed in Brandenburg, and I was fortunate enough to see quite a bit of it, so to me the setting communicated the small town claustrophobia that people outside of Germany rarely associate with it.
I also really enjoyed reading the other comments talking about the sociopolitical commentary that could be gleaned from it. It's such a great show to jump off of!
i very much suspected that this show would read differently to someone more familiar with german culture, i know i'm speaking from a profoundly american perspective here lol
DARK is an amazing show and im so glad you made a video about it. trying to explain it to anyone and why they should watch it *without* spoiling it has been. frustrating.
this is several days late, but i was SO excited to see you were talking about this show and hate that i've only NOW had time to sit and watch this vid
i definitely agree that something that seems sorely missing from Dark is even the slightest bit of levity- there are characters i deeply love (claudia tiedemann, hard agree there), but it is very difficult to see ANY character as much more than a vehicle for plot progression. the mystery of the series is very engaging, i enjoyed quite a bit of it, but there were definitely instances where i found myself on the edge of my seat NOT because i was concerned for characters' arcs/lives/what have you but because i was dialed in SO incredibly hard to figure out how this death or action taken by a character were going to fit into the broader clockwork mechanism of the time loop
it was something i hardly noticed while watching the show (assumedly because i WAS so dialed into that purpose), but now that i've gone through the series, i have a somewhat difficult time grasping onto characters as more than puzzle pieces. i haven't watched Lost, but your comparison to Homestuck feels very appropriate here precisely because HS does present a complicated time loop plot while still creating some of the most memorable characters maybe EVER, something that seems like it shouldn't make sense because HS has a much larger cast (i think?? i guess maybe if you consider the past/present/future versions of each character as different beings, that may not be the case..)
anyway, thank you for taking time out to talk about this series! i think i fall in a similar situation to you: i did really enjoy it and think it's a great addition to the genre and should get recognition for that, but there's room for improvement that feels somewhat sorely missed
Dark is my favorite TV show of all time and as a German I am immensely proud
you really hit us with the "let me tell you about homestuck". i respect it.
I loved this show. Why is no one taking about DARK? Why is there only one person online talking about DARK? When are we getting more videos about DARK? I NEED ALL THE CONTENT ABOUT THIS SHOW!!! It's the kind of show that you try to talk to your friends who didn't watch it about it and they look at you in a very concerned manner...
There is a video Wisecrack made about it, so there's atleast two youtubers that talk about it
watching this and Lindsay Ellis's "BRIGHT" essay back to back to get the full spectrum of scifi
I love when you have a new video and they're always worth watching and learning from. Thanks for making this
Thank you so much for making this video!
Having watched Dark only recently, I feel a little out of time myself, because most of the discussions around the show have died down. It's nice to know I'm not the only one digesting this for the first time right now. And I find it fascinating to hear about it from an international perspective.
To me, a German, Dark reads as a story rooted in a very German view on history/time and identity. Still the level of abstraction that the creators achieve using SciFi storytelling seems to mask this pretty well to international viewers.
What I mean is, that the core idea of Dark can also be considered a horror concept, actually. The show revolves around the fundamental fear of modern-day Germans. Namely that our history could repeat itself, that we could turn into our own (great-) grandparents.
In connection with this fear Dark depicts and mirrors many emotions which are not at all speculative to me. I know them intimately. In a way it's even kind of a coming-of-age-story that many German teens go through. (Not all, obviously, but I did.)
When Magnus, Franziska and Martha rage against the silence, secrets and lies in their families, I know how that feels.
I can relate to the heart-hammering dread with which Jonas and Charlotte go through (or rather into) the past of their families, digging up the crimes of people they know, maybe even love, or are connected to. The show's ever-present question of "Wer bist du?"/Who are you? is one I wanted to ask some of my ancestors so many times! And of course I wonder, how they and their actions reflect on or in me.
There is this moment in Return of the Jedi when Luke Skywalker recognizes himself in his father Vader through their shared loss of a prosthetic hand. Dark does the horror-version of this moment when Jonas and Martha recognize themselves in Adam and Eva.
The series puts haunting images to the realization that despite all our knowing-better, we modern day people would most likely not be able to act much different than our ancestors where we stuck in their place and time.
And Dark shows in excruciating detail why that is the case. There is a system of social pressure, blackmail, ideological manipulation, family hostage taking, abuse and violence in place, set up by the people who also suffer from it, to make everyone complicit and mould normal people into perpetrators of violence.
To me the twin time-loop-knots are miniature models of totalitarian societies.
Besides their crimes against time, the methods and mechanics of social control and highly organized abuse as Adam and Eva enforce them, are scarily similar to realistic depictions of life in historical totalitarian societies. (The second season of Charité does a stellar job of illustrating the historical reality in Germany in case you would like to make direct comparisons.)
The fact that the time-loop-worlds have been stripped of all direct historical or ideological signifiers achieves two things for the show, I think.
For the German audience the horror just gets heightened because these are modern day people who are still not immune to this, who can't save themselves from becoming the villains they hate. And for an international audience (especially for other Europeans) a connection becomes possible to their feelings regarding their own traumatic past. May that also be fascist like in Portugal, Spain and Italy or Stalinist like in so many eastern European countries.
I think just like a really good horror movie, Dark uses a metaphor - the time-loop-knot - to remove an issue far enough from reality so that we in the audience can feel and process some of the crushing negative emotions associated with it in a safe and bearable way.
this is a great read and shines a new light on the show for me, thanks so much!
10:55: As a tangent, I'd like to point out how often innocence and naivety are conflated. Claiming that naivety is unrelated to innocence, and furthermore that innocence is maintained well into adulthood...sounds neat!
29:55: If you'll permit another tangent: I've noticed similar things happening in other media. It seems like any company funding a variety of serial media is focusing on quantity, on debuting as many new stories as possible and wrapping up ones that don't provide the desired results. So authors adapt to this, cramming more of their story into the first episodes/chapters/whatever. They adapt to changing circumstances, and the media ecosystem as a whole evolves to trimmer stories-ones that can reach some kind of conclusion with limited resources, but without the fat it needs to endure cold winters. In this analogy, I think the fat is the thematic threads and emotional beats that a story needs if it'll stick in your head for longer than it takes to reach the end.
0:35: I'd make a joke about how _Dark_ is a Wildbow title, but the four-letter nouns/adjectives he picks are _not_ horribly overused for titles and have specific thematic connections to the stories they name.
I watched this show as one of its seasons was being released with my friend, a German major in college, who was watching it in a group of other German majors, so I got to talk about it after each episode which was so helpful to understanding wtf was happening. 😂 Of course, I forget most of it now. I remember enough about Claudia to be very excited upon hearing her name, so it's safe to say she was probably my favorite character.
It's also worth noting that the title is so forgettable that I did not realize that's what this video was about. No fault on your part- "Dark" is indeed the title of the show! I clicked to hear you talk and was pleasantly surprised to realize the topic was a show I was actually familiar with!
I fing love long-ass, complex, film theory -steeped Sarah Zeddig video essays, and it brightens my day to see a new one. We had such a drought for a while. Thanks for taking us down this particular dark (ha ha) rabbit-hole.
hopefully there will be a more consistent quantity in the near future
I love you, I love what you represent, I love that you are stiil putting your ideas out there, I love that you continue picking your brain for us, thank for existing and still being here with us, now after leaving this comment I'll proceed to watch the video.
That was excellent! Man, this channel is always a fucking gift. I appreciate so strongly the articulation of why that "emotionally empty pocketwatch" method of storytelling always leaves me cold, despite how fantastic the mechanism may be. The comparison to Homestuck was deeply satisfying, I saw it coming from ten miles away and I got a good hearty laugh from it. I love this channel, I love your work, I fucking love it all. Great job.
I respect and admire Dark's commitment to moody flatness and coldness, how thoroughly uninterested it seems in the characters' feelings about the situations they're in, in part because for most of events of the series, it doesn't matter how they feel.
And yeah that does put it in the Twilight Zone "see that shit? wasn't that fucked up?" two astronaut moon rock murder speculative fiction but honestly that leaves me feeling more endeared to Dark instead of less. I'll admit to being one of those annoying and tedious people that really prefers when a piece of speculative fiction does not preoccupy itself with "but how will this affect [character]'s relationship with [other character]?". I like the dial turned pretty far in the other direction. Which builds resentment towards shows that do that, even really well. It's tiring to be interested in one thing but then be delivered another thing. So when a show comes along and doesn't do that at all, I like it more than I probably would have otherwise, because it's refreshing. It's an entirely irrational and unfair assessment both positively towards Dark and negatively towards, say, Lost.
I found Lost exhausting for the same reason that The Walking Dead is exhausting. The interminable squabbling. Characters arguing about things that already happened or what they should do next vastly outweighing the amount of non-argument-based things that happen. Interpersonal conflict good for storytelling, yes, but the proportions were just way off for me.
“If you care about spoilers, shut up no you dont” - fuck, you’re right 😂 *buckles in*
Just hit the Lost + Homestuck turn and the sheer amount of glee I felt was unreal. This video is a gem already, thank you for making it.
EDIT: Yes. Yes good. Thank you for putting into words the reasons I tend to get on far better with older, longer shows.
holy shit a video about dark! i remember loving this show so much it was such a trip
Sarah!!! I've been waiting for you to make another Lost video since your Twin Peaks video, this was such a joy and a delight! Definitely would love even more discussion but media in conversation is always so much more rewarding.
I don't actually know if I'll go on to watch Dark but I'm definitely already rewatching Lost again 😂
well the good news is i'm planning to release a lengthy video all about LOST later this year :)
@@letstalkaboutstuff aghh you just made my day!!! Can't wait!
i honestly kind of forgot that the show didn't have much intentional humor because personally i tend to find things to laugh at anyways and this show was so full of unintentionally funny moments. from bangers like "yesterday I kissed my AUNT" or bartozs realizing who his kid is and jonas just always doing stuff that is a bit stupid while thinking he's always 3 steps ahead. honestly havent laughed this hard at a show that isn't a comedy series in years despite it not actively working it into the text. and realising all these ironic twists myself and laughing abt it really added to the enjoyment. but well, i do acknowledge im probably the odd one out there (though i was laughing along with another german speaking friend watching it at the same time). i do also think there's other methods to let a show breathe other than comedic moments - which is a super american thing to add into everything honestly. not that i mind it in all shows, like you said lost did a great job there, but i also disagree with the need to have to work it in, and other shows and movies do get worse due to it. but i did also very much laugh A LOT during dark.
I laughed everytime Egon Tiedemann asked about satanists or animal sacrifice.
Always love to see your vids.
The 33 year cycle is interesting. It's the time it takes Saturn to perform a lap around the ecliptic from earth's POV.
A planet associated with both restriction, transcendence, and the limits of mortality the crystallization of people because of age
Saturn, or Chronos, is also a Roman/Greek god of *time* (or related to the passage of time), like the limits of mortality you mentioned.
Dark was quite popular in Europe! I remember everyone talking about it first season, but I disconnected after that
haha 3 things I'd heard of but not actually watched/read and so I didn't care but I like how you explained it x
"I don't only have nice things to say about this show" That's the proper attitude to have to all things German, because that's the attitude we Germans have ourselves!
I think I might finally watch Lost for the first time after this :D and someday you might get me to experience Homestuck too. You make it sound really wonderful!
FINALLY! I watched this when it came out and was intrigued but found no one really talking about it. when you said it's good television i agree. SOLID SCI FI even if it was like 10/10 my fave etc
I love Dark, but you're right that the overly self-serious nature of TV series has become far too common. Humor and drama and even trauma go hand in hand in real life in really interesting and powerful ways. This holds true for storytelling as well.
Following up something seriously dramatic with a great joke that relieves the tension can make that joke so much more memorable and funny than just having joke after joke.
And in reverse, making people laugh before making them cry makes the tears that much more powerful.
I cannot understand why so few Hollywood writers seem to grasp this.
It's why I find most TV so boring these days.
Great video as always!
I haven't really watched Lost, but talking about the episode format of past and present for a singular character, I was reminded of Once Upon A Time and how BADLY they did that format. OP talks about Lost using it to explore different genres and setups in the same episode, and it sounds kind of like they are working together as a catharsis for each other. In Once, they are telling the exact same story in different settings, which results in you knowing this character has learned nothing and being bored of the repitition. It lended to an air of hopelessness and stagnation that you could argue worked thematically in early seasons but really hurt the characters as they never seem to grow, which is the opposite of what the writers seemed to actually be trying to do. It was infinitely frustrating, so much so I gave up and never finished the show.
hilariously the showrunners of once upon a time were writers on LOST, they wrote a few annoying episodes (and also some great ones)
@@letstalkaboutstuff oh no. they did a summer camp murder mystery too and... it was okay, but it did the EXACT SAME THING with the flashbacks. Do they not have any other ideas?
@@IanNotChris unfortunately a lot of people who were involved with LOST took many of the worst lessons from that show. idk what the deal is with these guys in particular, maybe this is the best work they can get? idk
once upon a time, ok it had great actors, decent characters and , i think a lot of they time they made it enjoyable campy fun. Well most, it took way too long to reboot massivly enough to have new characters and old gone reasonable.
But once works as fun if not always good show, ok i enjoy it for whats fun.
And lost is, honestly do you lik characters, then maybe, and its fine.
LOVE this show!!!!!!!!! and i know 1899 was even less of a hit than dark, but i loved that one too!! i hope these creators get another chance at this sort of thing. i think apple trying to corner the scifi market would really be a good spot for them after they finish Tyll
As somebody who is trying to find ways to stop people from constantly misreading my gender (because I'm also trans and I also know how I look), I think it's very cool that you give your pronouns at the beginning of every video
When this came out I saw the first 3 minutes of the video, then decided to watch the show, thought "Huh, this feels similar to Homestuck and Lost in many ways", then came back to watch the video and who would have thought that notorious Homestuck and Lost enjoyer Sarah Zedig also thinks this feels similar to Homestuck and Lost in many ways.
What I mostly got from Dark as some kind of "theme" was an extreme nihilism about determinism and just being completely at the mercy of the geometry of spacetime ("Doomed by the narrative" on steroids). Every single character is led on by lies to do things they don't want to do. They literally but also symbolically lie to themselves about the consequences of their actions. Adam tells Jonah that he can save Winden, then turns out he wants to destroy it, then Claudia tells him actually he can save Winden, but of course this also ends up with him destroying it, then Eve tells Martha, etc. By the end Jonah is this empty husk of a person which of course perfectly explains Adam's worldview. Every season finale is "the moment we break the time loop" which of course inevitably ends up being an integral part of the timeloop. When Jonah and Martha finally travel to the original timeline I was fully expecting them to actually be the cause of the car crash, tying everything back together into the asphyxiating knot that characterizes the whole show. In a way I found myself a bit disappointed with the actual ending. Either way the show ends up vindicating Adam's nihilism and desire for an end of everything, answering Hamlet's monolgue on the negative, which is not the answer I'd give, but definitely fits what I think is the theme of the show: An inability not only to change ones past, but ones future, due to external forces but also sometimes by yourself. Thats pretty Dark.
Homestuck's retcon feels "deserved" to me in a way that Dark's retcon isn't. by the end of the second season Dark had fully convinced me that there was no escaping the narrative. Meanwhile Homestuck's whole deal is constantly escaping the narrative at every opportunity. The retcon makes sense because the scratch happened before it, and the scratch makes sense because Davesprite happened before it, etc. There is a recurring theme in Homestuck of breaking the rules, while Dark's recurring theme is the exact opposite, so it feels jarring when it suddenly goes "oh wait, actually you _can_ break the rules, nevermind". If the show is so Dark, they should have gone full Dark. Don't give me a bittersweet ending, I want a bitter end, which is also the beginning, because the end is never the end is never the end. I would love to hear more about your thoughts on the ending.
Basically what I'm saying is that if Dark has a theme, it's extremely nihilistic, which results in a very bleak story with an awe inspiring and extremely complex execution. But then they don't manage to fully commit to Dark's Darkness, which leaves me more conflicted about whatever this show even tried to say if anything at all, fitting the final "very interesting pocketwatch" analogy.
9:06 - Ah, a never-ending story, you might say? Resulting in circumstantial simultaneity perhaps? Maybe not that last one, explicitely?
Weird thing to mention but I think that Planet With is a show title that hits the same completely in searchable SEO as Dark while meaning more about the story. It’s got scifi, it’s about a planet, it’s about being with people and being with the planet. Planet with you😊
never heard of this anime, and yeah, i think i have some ideas as to why
anyway this made me want to watch dark again and i honestly just might
i am glad i forced the demigod’s hand by subscribing a while back. when people say some show or movie “takes itself too seriously” it never means that much to me anymore but i think you get at what some people are trying to say with that phrase when you made the point about DARK feeling constipated by the third season because there was no comedic release valve or other emotional layers. it is interesting to reframe “takes itself too seriously” as an expression of feeling unnerved by watching humans not act like humans.
great video sarah!
thank you so much!
Ever since your Matrix videos with Sophie, I was waiting for this.
So thrilled when I saw you were diving into this show!
I'm going to have to rewatch it I think. I remember it as so much funnier in a dark acerbic almost britishy stilted way than it sounds. That may have been me paying too much attention to people's eyebrows again
What a lovely look at this pocket watch on my mantle piece. Enjoy the can munching!
You know it's complex work when I have to put it at 1.5 instead of the usual x2.0 😅
also, my favorite episode of LOST is the one where we follow two side characters who get bitten by venomous spiders that paralyze them. it's a brilliant tension filled side story with such a good twist and it doesn't impact the "plot" at all
I gave up watching around half way through season 2... I enjoyed it, but found it too confusing to watch casually. I felt like i needed to be taking notes. I always intended to go back and watch it again, in full, but then i cancelled my netflix subscription.
I need you to make a video on Lost it's such a good show and nobody appreciates it like you do these days
i have EXCELLENT news about my plans for this year :)
First I was really taken in by the series and surprised that fellow Germans managed to produce a TV series I actually like which doesn’t happen too often. We were being kept in the… dark on purpose and yet it wasn’t frustrating.
The key for me was that I liked the characters starting out but gradually the plot just took over everything which is admittedly a fitting theme in itself and television I had to bring myself to watch by the end.
Okay, now to watch the video, this will be interesting!
It appears like I‘m not alone in perceiving the show as unnecessarily empty although I even gradually lost the plot because I just didn’t care anymore. One could say that I only watched it mechanically then. I started it so I had to end it…
Which is fitting.
this is the thing, i do find it INTERESTING how the lack of character depth over time fits in with the overall themes of the show... but i still had to watch it, know?
I haven’t seen a video of yours in a couple years and was thinking about you just know when it popped up on my algorithm, thank you Susan
I love this show. Its philosophy is well dark but in a fresh and constructive way.
I really appreciate the announcement of the pronouns! Trying to find out what CJ the X’s were was very stressful lol (also JD has his in the bottom right of the screen if you don’t want to do the whole announcement thing, if that helps)
Dark reminded me a lot of the tendency that exists in Polish storytelling, which is almost pathological strive for realism. Polish media seems almost allergic to making characters explain their emotions bc in our "I'll talk about my emotions when I'm dead/have an emotional breakdown" culture it is realistic. Most of the character development happens through character's changing actions and shots of character brooding so you can make up for yourself how their thinking process shifted to make them change as a person. Most people are not good or bad, things happen for no reason bc thats how it is, American films and tv shows have so many existing structures to choose from on which they build their storytelling that Polish media just doesnt use.
Even Dark's time travel can be an example of that kind stive for realism, there is no magic portal there is a cave that you yourself could go through, that you've seen before, that you know how it would feel if you touched it. Hannah is sometimes cruel to the point its comical and there isnt really a reason behind it, bc thats just how some people are. The only way we can learn these people's story is to literally go back in time because they will not say shit. We cannot learn the deep workings of character's mind bc in real life we can't read people's minds and in some way our family and friends will always remain strangers to us. But that realism isn't subjective no matter how the author believes it, which is why I found the attempted rape unsurprising. A girl was almost raped bc women are often raped and that's just how the world is, and if there is trans woman in the show she is a prostitute bc thats just how the world is. Or rather, thats how the author's world is.
love the show, love your writing and analysis. subscribed!
I don't know what "Time Hole" is in German... But I bet it sounds better than naming something "DARK" because... Why? Cus it's dark???
hi sarah!! 💗
Me, before turning the video on: "I wonder what the lady who wrote that extremely popular homestuck fanwork will tell me about a German Netflix show"
Me now: ah,
33:56 i fully understand the desire to have more character moments and melodrama in Dark (i freakin loved both it and LOST) but i think the writers of Dark accounted for this with the endgame reveals in Season 3. the fact that the characters start to realize themselves that their narratives are so plot-heavy and -focused and aim to break The Knot were rather satisfying to me in that way.
i absolutely agree! that's kind of what i'm getting at when i talk about "filling in the blanks for yourself." pretty much every specific complaint i have about this show IS addressed somewhere in the text. that's what makes it so fun to think about! the show draws your attention to the things that don't make sense and practically demands you to figure it out for yourself, and it's so so so so SO rare to get a story that's planned out enough to support that kind of thing. but i can't shake the feeling that they only give us the bare minimum at every possible opportunity, so while it IS satisfying to untangle on your own, i ultimately end up feeling like... man, couldn't you have put a little bit more of this on screen though?
im three days late, time to comment without watching! (then watch)
I watched dark, I watched a good chunk of season 1, then my mom joined in for the whole series, we watched the 2 that existed and waited until the third season was out and were very excited.
For episode one, it defaulted to english for me, I assume because my dads netflix account (even if different profile) recongnizes he is unwilling to read subtitles and thus has not seen several things ive recommended, anyways... I watched a decent chunk in english, with subtitles on. I got to the police station scene, where in english a mother somberly and politely asks why the police havent found her kid for 2 weeks, and the subtitles had her screaming at them, I was like "wait wtf?" so I watched the scene in german, and was like "ahhhhh, ok" so I rewatched from the beginning in german and for the rest of the series it was that way, my mom read subtitles despite not quite being comfortable with it, I rewinded a few times for her to catch up, and showed her the english part that made me swap to the german, she enjoyed it and has since been trying to get my dad to accept some shows in their native tongue which has been nice. I now see jonas as yonas tho so that was a downside...
ranting onwards, I enjoyed the show, weirdness and all, it was very satisfying to click pieces together even if the show wasnt a mystery that gave you all the pieces to put together yourself fully. I had fun guessing at what would happen, and also had fun noticing details on our rewatch of season 1 and 2 in preparation for season 3.
Overall, lots of love for the show, I recommend it to plenty of people if I think they can stomach some of the weirder bits, and sometimes even without that, and id love to see/hear your thoughts on it for good or bad, because im sure on a more critical look we might find some things to pick at. and thus I watch.
I got three, four minutes into this essay twoish weeks ago and then said, no wait I actually do care about spoilers, and then spent all that time shotgunning the series at a go. I gotta agree that 3rd season is constipated as hell and I eventually lost patience and started watching the episodes at 1.5x speed because I was just tired of the characters not having an ounce of self-awareness. Unlike your assessment, I think the show could have lost 4 hours and not really missed much. Character plotlines and beats are fine, but so many are just red herrings or are squashed down into hammer-beaten cut offs that I wondered why I ever bothered to give a fuck. By the time we get to the Eva-verse relationship musical chairs I was wondering why they made a decision to introduce more microplots on a story that was already expanding macro and wobbling out of control. Ultimately, I think as you do, I liked the show as a whole. For me, though, eventually the structural design of the final season drained too much of the pleasure I got out of the show and made it laborious to endure.
the back half of season 3 salvaged it for me but those first few episodes had me really wondering if this thing had any chance of landing on its feet. i like the eva-verse but they give it way too much Plot for not enough screentime. there's a lot of stuff i wish they'd just shown us instead of leaving it to be implied
As a homestuck fan, I cheered when you said it!
Have you played the Zero Escape trilogy? I think you'd like it a lot. It sells itself as "anime Saw" but it's very much akin to Lost and HS tonally and thematically, particularly in the second game.
I loved DARK and yet never finished it. I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
I agree, and yet the computer scientist in me gets SUCH A KICK out of the clockwork. It reminds me of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow (more human and more gay but a bit less intricate). Really love the genre of mechanical stories
oh me too, i LOVE a good clockwork story. i always struggle to talk about them as a critic because i'm all about drama and character, and these types of stories aren't really about that... and yet, as i said in the video, i can only look at these things from the perspective of my own dramatic orthodoxy, so i can't help but feel a little let down when character drama gets sidelined. but like, i watched Primer probably 20 times before i was old enough to drink, soooo
@@letstalkaboutstuff oooh I'll add primer to my watchlist! I think this is similar to how I enjoy marvel because of all the fanfiction I read back in the day: the concepts, characters and situations spark the imagination enough to ignore the execution. On the other hand, knowing beforehand an intricate mystery isn't planned out (a la Sherlock) ruins the whole thing from the very start
Overall enjoyed the video, but the extremely bass-heavy... ambiance? was bad enough I muted and just read the subtitles for most of it. But also I generally use subtitles in addition to audio anyway, so *thank you for good subtitles!*
HELL YEAH DARK. So glad to see you talking about it!
If you liked this, I would encourage you to try 12 Monkeys if you haven't? I feel like it flew under everyone's radar, and its time travel mechanics and what they do with all of it is something I so deeply love. It got to end on it's own terms, and the showrunnner went on to work on Star Trek. It's not a *perfect* show (I wish it had more diversity/lgbtq) but it has such heart, and a story that while it expands, still makes sense, imo. I know ymmv, but yeah.
i never watched the show, in part because i always quite liked the terry gilliam movie and didn't see the point of an expanded tv version. but i also heard pretty good things about it, so maybe i should give it a shot! definitely didn't know it ended on its own terms, that's a big selling point
@@letstalkaboutstuff I really like the way they give nods to the film but go their own way--I think one doesn't take away from the other. the first season *is* a little rocky, but I hope you do try it out! Syfy gave the showrunner the heads up he wasn't going to get another season, so he was able to wrap up the story. [Also there were times I was surprised the show *looked* as good as it did, given syfy's budgets are usually a paperclip and a piece of chewing gum] I just have a real soft spot for it (I picked it up when s2 was airing and followed it from there on), so I always encourage people to try it.
Again always appreciate your videos; this one definitely makes me want to finish lost which I have stalled halfway through s2.
Yes!!! I was ready to hate 12 Monkeys, and the start was rough, but it was such a wild, cool show! Feels like they really had fun writing this. I didn't expect to care that much about those characters too.
Great video, as always!
I had a similar experience with DARK, I heard people thought it was cool, but nothing about the marketing around it appealed to me. Thought it was like Stranger Things meets nordic-noir, which...... Being from a nordic country I'm so fucking tired of nordic-noir hahah. Just as it became played out in Scandinavia, English speaking countries got a whiff of it and started making more of it (but often worse). I don't want to see a german or french show look like it's been shot in the Arctic. I live here, I don't see the sun for 6 months of the year, can I please just see it on tv, at least???
Anyway, hahah. I was wondering if you have checked out the other show made by the guys behind DARK, 1899? Would be interesting to hear your thoughts about it. For me it did sort of illuminate and maybe help explain DARK's weaknesses as a show, if that makes sense.
i've definitely been curious about 1899, but the fact that it got canceled after 1 season has kept me away. i probably will give it a shot someday.
also it's very funny that nordic-noir is played out in scandinavia but very successful in the US these days, considering at least like 70% of nordic-noir's DNA comes from Twin Peaks. everything comes full circle
Okay soo im convinced I should watch Lost(again). I watched 2 season when I was 11😅
I loved this show. Your criticisms are fair, and I wanted more ideology in particular. But I also don't want you to criticise it as it deserves more attention.
I really need to try Homestuck again. I loved it but then got adhd distracted
Dark is a great show and yes it's not written to American taste.
When you described the way that genre media is so joyless, and then showed The Haunting of Hill House, my brain got defensive because that’s one of my favorite shows. But then I realized that honestly, you are right. Doesn’t make me love the show any less, but maybe that makes me the fool.
This is a great video, so we’re clear. That wasn’t a criticism of your video, just my thoughts. I do love Hill House for being an exploration of very human emotions through horror that made me cry, but I won’t deny that it can be a little too humorless.
i liked hill house too! i'm not a huge fan of the ending, but that's how i feel about pretty much everything on netflix and/or made by mike flanagan. mostly i picked it as illustrative of how flatly lit everything looks now
@@letstalkaboutstuff Totally fair! Personally I cried at Nell’s speech at the end, but different strokes for different folks!
42:57 oh look that's the guy that introduced me to your channel.
nice!
would you ever make a twin peaks video? i really love your videos and would love to hear what you have to say
i already made one years ago! i intend to come back to the subject sooner or later
th-cam.com/video/F65CshZsoQI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=PkWCCjg2gqTmqzS6
ima just do what I do sometimes and rant midsentence... I actually liked the title Dark (with a backwards K) it drew me in to the show haha, but I guess thinking on it, I can see how it would be "too generic" for plenty of people to want to give it a chance. I knew nothing of the show tho, nothing at all, not even that it was german
I actually watched all of Dark and enjoyed it well enough, and then like a year later I was like “huh I wonder what this is” and put on the first episode again. I realized what happened pretty quickly but there’s no overemphasizing how forgettable this show is made by its title and promotional material.
it's genuinely kind of astonishing how much the title alone completely undermines this show's ability to last! which of course was not helped at all by the streaming model of releasing entire seasons in a single day, forcing the window for relevant cultural conversation to be VERY brief. it's such a shame honestly
I really didn't like Dark, mostly for the reasons you talked about in the second half, but also because I don't think any of it is well constructed. The hard part about writing time travel isn't to create boostrap paradoxes, it's to justify them in the story, and Dark really didn't do this imo. I also found it was a pain to watch because it clearly held answer only to build twists for the audience, which in turns made characters act in unnatural way. Not to disagree too much I though you made some great point.
Anyways, I'm mostly commenting to say I found your insistance on the nicheness (?) of the show a little weird. It was super popular? People definitely care(d?) about it! Like for what it's worth on IMDB it has 4 times the number of reviews The Leftovers has (and it's arguable/factually the best TV show ever made), and Lost only has 25% more than Dark, to stay in the Lindelof-verse. (stuff like Mandalorian, The Last of Us or Mr Robot also are around the 400-600k reviews). If I hadn't watched the show yet, the repeated "it's a show you don't care about" might have put me off more than anything? Maybe that's just me though
Engagement for the engagement god!
algorithm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I shared my thoughts in the godfeels server already but this video is great. i can FEEL the words "meat/candy dynamic" on the tip of your tongue sgffksjfjlsb
Severance is good is you haven’t already
oh yeah severance is incredible
My mom got into this when it came out n dang that's cooler than her bailing on twin peaks during the initial airing for x files n northern exposure like, right after. Or maybe that's really cool idk.
Great video again [×alot] also!
A perfect show. Never believe anything else.
alas, there is no such thing
i was gonna go watch Dark but sarah said " shut up you don't care about spoilers.".....and she's right
I hope you never have to quit.
ok im halfway thru this vid and i wanna watch the show so BAD im goin insane
nvm i dont want to be left feeling "cold" and also i can only handle SA scenes in the best of circumstances and these do not seem to be the best of circumstances lol
For me dark became a narrative about the inability to let things go. I mean as far as we see, the whole time loop only exists in Winden. What happens in the rest of Germany or the world. After a while I just got the impression that everyone just went on without one irrelevant little town that noone seemed to leave and only one person notably entered in 100 years. Some characters state how badly they want to leave Winden and then they just don't.
After a while it all seems so immature. Upending your entire live to maybe save your high-school sweetheart, which everyone tells you is impossible. You have seen often enough that every action you take to change things just reinforce the status quo so just leave. Stop playing this stupid game. Maybe that's the most German thing to do though.... 😐
tbh the thing that made me stop thinking fondly of homestuck is ALSO the sexual assault scene
bimbo brain watching this review: oh hey, i have the same mug that says check meowt
‘lotta germans in this show’ lol
I watched an episode and a half of dark and put it off. My main gripe was the show seems like it has nothing to say (which you confirmed) and the characters feel the same, like someone took one person, cloned them, and assigned each clone attributes until they were different enough to be considered a different characters. I'm not saying the characters weren't complex or are one-note, but I'm saying I don't understand why the writers chose to put them in a such sterile world where they can't move out of their designated space. The characters felt like robots, not their acting, but the interactions and actions felt robotic. Maybe this is an extension of the fact that the show is very plot heavy and has no time to humanise characters. But I digress. And to top it off, the show felt extremely white, like completely divorced from it's environment and made in an ideal vacuum. So yea. I do want to watch the show but I hate getting upset at watching something that is so meaningless that I feel like I wasted my time. If any1 wants to convince me, please do, I would like to have my opinion changed.
i think it does become much more compelling once you pass episode 4. i really wasn't sure what to expect from the first few hours, but once it gets going it's very much worth the time. how much you get out of it, though, is very much up to your own tastes
i think dark is the kind of show that a lot of people just cant really get into (like my mom lol) and thats completely fine, i'm just surprised you felt the show was divorced from its environment? maybe this is just a cultural disconnect because as a german the show felt very grounded in reality to me. like winden is not a real town so i obviously haven't been there but it _feels_ like i have because it's like any other small german town, complete with the claustrophobic feeling
like the characters keep talking about wanting to get the fuck out of this town but no one ever does (depressingly relatable) just like they keep trying to get out of the time loop and can't
the reason the show is extremely white is because that's genuinely what a lot of rural germany is like (which is part of the reason it sucks to live here) iwbh the rural parts of germany tend to be a lot more right wing
maybe the characters just feel more realistic to me bec i know a lot of people who are like that
a different commenter phrased this much better but dark does play a lot with the staple of german media that is historical responsibility / atoning for the sins of your parents / making the same mistakes because you didnt learn from them and i do think it gets lost in translation
i'm sorry, i didn't mean to write you a novel, i just had a lot of thoughts about this show
ultimately sometimes you just don't vibe with a show and that's fine, there are other good shows out there
Stating your pronouns at the start is a great practice honestly. People who want to refer to you in the comments know which pronouns to use and you avoid tiresome back-and-forths when someone gets corrected. And it's a nice bonus that the bigots reveal themselves right off the bat so you don't need to guess. Win win.
Hi, random straight, cis guy. I really appreciate that you drop your pronouns in the beginning of stuff.
Well iiiiiii cared about dark 😢 I like clocks. On the other hand, homestuck is too long for me to get into, and I never watched the last episode of lost in protest.
well, unfortunately, you were probably protesting something that was factually inaccurate