It’s been a while since the last season of Dark aired on Netflix & all the seasons garnered praises across the globe. Being amongst the people who weren’t following the show from the beginning got curious during the final season. The critics showered positive reviews, fans were overjoyed and in a way, it took the Internet by storm with memes. I decided to binge-watch the show, and got mixed feelings, an unpopular opinion about Dark.
The complexities
A science-fiction show spanning across many timelines and two worlds, a show convoluted to the extent that you can’t figure out anything or even find a plausible explanation for all the chaos taking place. The fictional world where you can’t even understand the family chart of the lead characters, not even if you look at the family chart.
This show explores relationships, friendships, accidental incest, and a whole lot of backstabbing by your friends, enemies, and frenemies. Sometimes you’ll find characters backstabbing their younger selves just not to disturb the cycle of time.
High points
The cinematography and the soundtrack of the show are stunning giving it a supernatural feel sometimes. Another thing that makes the time-travel shebangs more convincing was the casting done by the show creators. The older faces resemble the younger ones so much that you’ll be confused if these roles are played by two different actors or it’s some perfectly fine CGI.
The acting is flawless, the storyline is confusing, especially for casual watchers who don’t pay much attention to detail, and the cinematography is just as you’d expect from a perfect show. The show, at least for the first two seasons grips your mind so deep. That you can almost know what it feels like to be sucked into an infinitely massive black hole. The show takes the concept of theoretical physics seriously and explains everything along with the storyline, so even if you’re not a science person, you’d understand about Wormhole, Blackhole, Law of Conservation of Energy, Thermodynamics, Schrodinger’s Cat during the show. Every episode ends at a cliffhanger which makes the show binge-worthy.
The initial seasons of the Dark all due to the approach by Netflix are intriguing, and you don’t get any idea about what’s coming next. You try to connect the dots between the timelines and family tree to get the plot, and if you’re doing it right, you’ll eventually understand what’s happening and, to some extent, how that happened. It’s the second season which makes the show, what it’s known the best for; complexity.
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You’d probably think that you can connect the dots and be the smartest guy in the room, but you can’t. The show gets convoluted with every episode & after a point, you might stop trying to solve the puzzle with huge expectations. The first two seasons are nearly perfect and intricately edited that it’d be hard to understand the timelines, characters, and obviously, the family tree if you’re not paying attention.
Anticlimax
The finale of Dark is divisive and has a polarising ending & I belong to that sect which finds the finale underwhelming. It’s like the writers were supposed to untie the knots of a rope, but they couldn’t find a way to untie the knots so they burned the rope.
I’ve mentioned above that the first two seasons are near perfect, but when you begin to watch Season 3, the pacing is way too slow as compared to the previous seasons. In the first 6 episodes, there’s no explanation, no clues, slow pacing and on top of that, introducing the second world makes the experience frustrating.
Writers continue to complicate the show further and further just to have a final disentanglement in the very last episode, and it’s finally revealed what this immense time travel conspiracy holds at its core. The final plot twist which would make everything right doesn’t go well with the convoluted story the viewers are watching from Season 1. The finale oversimplifies the time travel loop and invalidates the previous 25 episodes just to disappoint us. After being so indulged in following the timelines, remembering all the different characters, not in just different timelines but two different mirrored worlds, you’re left with an outlook that is underwhelming and poorly written.
Legacy of Dark
The tagline of the show is, Everything is connected & in the 26 episode series, you can notice this pattern, but the finale disconnects everything. The finale should’ve tried solving the puzzles in a subtle way and concluded the show on a vague note instead of finding closure, as Christopher Nolan did in Inception.
In my opinion, Dark won’t be considered the greatest science fiction production of all time even when Netflix tried hard with all the seasons as there are loopholes, unsolved mysteries, because the writers wanted a closure, invalidating the previous episodes.
