You join me once again as I’m getting close to the finishing line as I talk about some of my favourite bits of scary and horror fiction every day during October.
The clocks have gone back in the UK so it’s fitting that today’s topic is the German Netflix TV show, Dark.
Dark is set in a fictional German town based around a nuclear power plant in several different timelines. The principal timeline takes place in the present day when a schoolboy, Mikkel, goes missing on Hallowe’en around a strange and sinister cave in the woods.
His disappearance is not the first in the area, but more attention is drawn to it as he is the son of a detective, who signed up to the police after his brother went missing in 1986.
It turns out Mikkel went through a gate which is able to transport people 33 years into the past or future and he is now stranded in 1986, where the town’s nuclear plant is facing controversy due to the recent meltdown of Chernobyl.
Other timelines visited by the main cast are in 1953 and 2052, but to avoid too many spoilers, I’ll leave the plot summary with the opening setting for you.
Unlike Doctor Who or Back to the Future, which portray time travel as a fun little jaunt, Dark is very conscious of the cost of time travel. Each of the characters and families in the series are afflicted in some way by this phenomenon even if they are unaware of it at the beginning.
Even more troubling is the nature of the town and its area as it seems the characters are unable to escape it. They don’t specifically try to leave but there is little mention of a universe outside the town and the burden of everything happening there seems to keep people stuck.
It reminds me of a recurring nightmare I had as a child where there were only two roads leading out of the town I grew up in and they both just circled around, leaving me stranded in a closed loop.
This is how the characters in Dark seem to exist, whether travelling through space or time, doomed to forever follow a loop. One of the recurring themes throughout the series is that you cannot substantively alter the past.
The characters attempt to do this, but are unable to – going back and attempting to stop something from happening inevitable ends up being the cause of the incident in the first place.
It might not be scary or horror in the more obvious, creepy sense, but as a mind-bending and disturbing thesis on the themes of fate and free will it’s got plenty to keep you hooked for a while if you’re struggling to find things to watch as lockdown crawls inexorably on!
Matt Hartless Blog 