German TV

Available on Netflix

The first season of Netflix’s Dark was probably the most quintessentially German TV show the country has given us. Not in terms of production values, since Dark had the full weight of Netflix’s budgeting behind it, and not because it was a crime show or featured a story by Rosamunde Pilcher.

But this appropriately named show had a whole bunch of concerns and themes that combined, indicated it could only have come from the land that gave us Goethe: is our fate predetermined? Does free will exist? Were “Atomkraft? Nein Danke” T-shirts ever cool?

Set in a small town called Winden – more or less the German equivalent of the US’s Springfield – Dark was a time travel drama like no other. As the producers of Avengers: Endgame recently discovered, the average person’s idea of time travel is based on Back To The Future, with people potentially able to go back in time and change their own pasts.

Dark, however, went in the exact opposite direction. What if you could change absolutely nothing if you went back in time? Even if you did change something, that change is what had always happened. Cause could be effect, effect could be cause, beginning end, end beginning. You might have a time machine, but you actually built it from some plans someone gave to you. Where did they get them from? Well, you give them to them in the future. So who actually invented the time machine? No one? God?

Smarter than the average Netflix show

As befits a country where basically everyone’s been to technical university for seven years and even the train timetables seem to require an in-depth working knowledge of calculus, season one of Dark was a complicated affair.

Set in three time zones 33 years apart – plus a bonus fourth time zone in the final episode – that meant a full roster of characters played by up to three sets of actors, all of whom can travel between years and meet each other and end up becoming one another’s/their own parents if they’re not careful. It didn’t help that half the time, they never introduced themselves, so it wasn’t until eight episodes in that you knew that “crazy white-haired lady” was actually the 66-year-older version of “cute little girl”.

Nevertheless, and despite the often alienating – not quite Brechtian alienating – characters, who were more than a little bit prone to shouting at all times, the first season of Dark was a marvellous piece of work, if you could follow it. Claustrophobic, with a great eye for period detail, a real attempt to address philosophical concerns and science, its one real-let down was its ending, which suggested a shark was about to be jumped.

Now here’s season two. Said shark has not been jumped, you’ll be glad to hear and this more streamlined season two is perhaps even better than season one.

But time appears to be repeating itself. Because guess what – I really hated that ending.