Dark And The Illusion Of Choice.

Dark is a sci-fi drama and it is just as dark as it proclaims to be.

On the surface, Dark appears to be about time travel, but underneath that there’s a story about control and free will. The futility of change within a structure larger than yourself, it’s about trying your best and failing. Every character is trying to take control of their life and change something or struggles to keep things the same. All of them fail.

You spend an awful lot of time with these characters, you get to know their lives and feel for them. When things finally unfold, you’re conflicted. You feel conflicted with every new piece of information, every turn of events leads you to evaluate and re-evaluate everything. There’s a constant sense of upheaval and the suspense continues throughout without causing fatigue.

This is because you’re allowed time to know, understand and even like the characters, the stakes are always high and the decisions always matter. The characters are forced to make decisions one way or the other, the is no other option. But at the end, it seems as though their choices never really mattered, which is an interesting philosophy to explore.

What if you were able to go back in time and change whatever you wanted, but when you came back to the present nothing had changed? What if time was a circle that you couldn’t break?

There’s a force, one you see and meet but never get to understand that is possibly behind everything and possibly has all the answers, but perhaps that is not so.

At the end of the season, Jonas sends himself on an errand. The errand may be a fool’s one, but what other choice does he really have if any at all?