Netflix is the streaming home of an incredible science fiction series that seems to master the art of time travel storytelling. The show in question does not shy away from adopting many existing time travel tropes, but what makes it one of the best additions to the genre is how it portrays time travel as a tightly constructed temporal puzzle.
Time travel shows and movies rarely take their own central narrative device too seriously. They treat time travel more as a convenient plot engine or gimmick and end up bending their own established rules.
Netflix’s best time travel show deals with its own set of inconsistencies. For the most part, though, it delivers a brilliantly constructed time travel story that not only seems narratively sound almost throughout its runtime but also deeply human with its themes of grief and generational trauma.
Netflix’s Dark Is A Masterclass In Time Travel Storytelling
In most time travel narratives, dynamic timelines are introduced as “easy escapes” for characters to erase the past and trigger a new future. Dark goes against the grain and embraces determinism by employing a Causal Loop. This becomes more and more evident as the show progresses because almost every event somehow becomes its own cause.
Dark almost comes off as a Greek myth where all characters are bound by the inescapable nature of time. It is often their pursuit to seek free will that eventually leads to their bleak fates.
At the same time, though, there is something quietly optimistic about Dark‘s grim portrayal of time. In its opening moments, its narrator recites the following lines:
“We trust that time is linear. That it proceeds eternally, uniformly, into infinity. But the distinction between past, present, and future is nothing but an illusion. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected.”
As the show progresses, these lines become reminiscent of one of Albert Einstein’s most memorable quotes about how “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” This allows the show to become a reminder of how we never truly end up losing something or someone. Every moment and person continues to exist somewhere along the timeline, eternally preserved beyond our limited perception.
The Netflix sci-fi show‘s casting is also so brilliantly precise that you instinctively recognize the younger and older versions of the same characters. The show’s immersive sci-fi drama is complemented by Ben Frost’s hauntingly ethereal scores that add more heft to its gloomy atmosphere.
More than anything else, Dark allows viewers to do a lot of thinking and respects their intelligence. It can be overly convoluted and complex at times, but it brilliantly drops enough clues and details for viewers to decode its complicated family trees and timelines.
Dark’s Creators’ Second Netflix Show Deserved A Better Fate
Dark‘s critical and commercial success on Netflix proved that its creators, Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, were absolute powerhouses in sci-fi storytelling. Owing to this, there was a lot of excitement surrounding their next Netflix show, 1899. While it is arguable whether 1899 is as good as Dark, the show did have immense storytelling potential.
As seen in Dark, the two creators only seemed to have laid the foundation for a larger and more twisted narrative in 1899‘s season 1.
Unfortunately, 1899 did not meet the same fate as Dark on Netflix and was canceled after one season. In hindsight, it is hard not to see how 1899, too, could have grown into something far more groundbreaking and brilliant if it was given the opportunity to return. Hopefully, Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese’s future creations will get the same treatment as Dark and last longer than 1899.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
