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The keys to Dark, the coiled German series that returned to say goodbye

A black noise emerged from the forest cave, next to the nuclear power plant, and a rain of dead birds hit the inhabitants of Winden, Germany. The electric light flickered nervously and four families remembered their hatreds and love crusades: the Kahnwald, the Nielsen, the Doppler, and the Tiedemman. “What if everything that comes from the past is influenced by the future?” is the design of Dark, the science-fiction, suspense and time travel drama series that this Saturday 27 launched its third and final season on Netflix: the date of its supposed and publicized Apocalypse.

The multiple genres of this production (the first German original of the platform) son his charming power. Since it was released in December 2017, it has been successful worldwide. If many say their plot is cryptic (or unintelligible), millions of young and old see and study it with scientific fascination. What is it really about Dark? Of fate and its escapes. Someone asked him in the first season: “Is it possible to change things? Or is time an eternal beast that cannot be defeated? Do we have free will or is it all an eternally recurring cycle? ”

These concerns are not presumptuous in Dark, created by obsessive Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese (he is a director and screenwriter, like his wife, also a producer). Those philosophical questions continued to furrow season two, in June 2019, and must have been resolved with very specific explanations this Saturday, in the remaining eight episodes. The plot, once again, happens on different intermixed dates: 1921, 1953, 1986, 2019, and even in 2052 and 2085.

Jonas Kanhwald (Louis Hofmann) and Martha Nielsen (Lisa Vicari), his beloved … and at the same time his aunt, thanks to the ups and downs of time that “Dark” proposes.


Beyond the scientific justifications – clear or obtuse – about the dark cave that allows passages to other times, Dark’s true engine is more earthy. The hidden and denied in this German town with a nuclear power plant generated ramifications as harmful as those same four families linked (by ambition, sex and death) for decades, until the announced fatality of the Planet. Not so far away.

Fans, critics and YouTubers who produce countless videos theorizing about every detail or symbol of the series will remember that astonishing rain of birds and its repercussions until today. “Do you think the Apocalypse has arrived?”, young Ulrich Nielsen (Ludger Bökelmann) told Hannah Krüger (actress Ella Lee) in 1986. “I imagined it much louder, more dazzling,” she replied. If the world ended today and it all started again, what would you ask for? “Hannah retorted. And Ulrich did not hesitate: “Nothing is understood here. I would ask for a world without Winden. ”

The scene takes place three episodes after the start of the first season: The day of 2019, Michael Khanwald (Sebastian Rudolph), the father of the protagonist of Dark, the blonde teenager Jonas (Louis Hofmann), who never takes off his famous yellow hooded pilot, hanged himself at his home. His father’s suicide caused him post-traumatic stress and he ended up in an asylum, one summer. When he came out, Jonas saw Winden again suffer a trauma that recurs every 33 years: the disappearance of children.

The one missing now was Mikkel Nielsen (Daan Lennard Liebrenz), the son of the adult Ulrich (Oliver Masucci). Jonas would discover that MIkkel had entered the cave and that it ended in 1986. He was adopted by a nurse, renamed himself Michael Khanwald, married Hannah, and had a son – Jonas himself. Sound confusing so far? This was only the beginning: 33 years earlier, Mads Nielsen, Ulrich’s brother, had disappeared under similar circumstances. But his corpse reappeared in the forest, in the present, with his eyes burned the same night that Mikkel disappeared. Who took the children and for what purpose?

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With his yellow pilotin, Jonas set out to travel in time to decipher these coordinates. Then he thought he was going crazy when a strange adult, whom he crossed in every age, revealed to him that he was himself.: The Adult Jonas (Andreas Pietschmann), Who Fans Identify As “The Stranger” (“The Stranger”). “I want Mikkel to go back to 2019 and everything to be like before,” implored Jonas. And his older version answered him: “Don’t you understand? Things happen for a reason, even if they are terrible. If everything went back, Mikkel would not marry Hannah and you would not exist. “

This problem seems akin to a melodrama, although the apocalyptic dread added to curl up the narrative.. In the 1950s, 1980s and 2019 there was a wicked priest named Noah (Mark Waschke), always the same age, who must have had to do with kidnappings. Of course, the story got even more complicated. Due to these temporary loops, it was learned that another girl (key in the facts) was the mother of her own mother. And in the closing episode of the second season it was revealed that there was another Jonas from the future: the villain Adam, with a burned face, and who was pulling all the terrible threads of Dark.

Perhaps it was a new misleading fact to disturb and confuse viewers. What new elements will have turned the time curves in the finale this weekend? Who embodies evil? Far from the nonsense, the evidence of Dark They combine the predictions of Nostradamus, Nietzsche’s “theory of the eternal return”, that of the “machine of God” (the particle accelerator that seeks to decipher the enigmas of the universe), the “wormholes” (the shortcut between space and the time that Albert Einstein intuited), and even the analogies with this coronavirus pandemic, as implausible as it is real.

“Everything is connected in some way, although I don’t know how,” said Hannah Krüger: the wife in the past who was a child 33 years later. The adult Ulrich Nielsen became a police officer and also set about discovering where (or when) his son Mikkel had ended up.

But behind this intricate script, which requires tracing an inexhaustible family tree, in Dark there are constant themes: the search for the father; the urgency to amend the mistakes of the past to generate a less distressing tomorrow; love that has no logic and therefore exists, and children as messengers from another plane of existence.

The Winden Forest Cave, a meeting place (or disagreement) of the past and the future.

The Winden Forest Cave, a meeting place (or disagreement) of the past and the future.


If the Apocalypse were to restart daily life, the greatest wish would be to see loved ones who are no longer. To the loves, the parents, the lost children. And to those who could not overcome their trauma, their illnesses or their loneliness. Already at the end of the previous season they added to the danger of cataclysm an even more complex argument: the parallel worlds. “In life everything is cycles and this will be the last”, announced the official trailer, in May, with cameos of new characters and colorful advances of a lavish production.

As this June 27 approached Online publications were crowded with an inevitable commonplace: contrasting the Dark Apocalypse with the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless, the Netflix series teaches something categorical about mass calamities. Salvation – in fiction as well as in reality – will be guaranteed by the cooperation of Humanity. The future that reverses these technological and social tragedies will come when you look, with sincerity, at all the bad that was left behind.

The third season added characters and alternative versions of the previous ones, with amazing revelations.

The third season added characters and alternative versions of the previous ones, with amazing revelations.


And here Dark offers several more caveats. Today’s children should not pay for the folly of those who sought to control global expansion (industrial and financial) without measuring its consequences. The collective challenge really awaits. So that the days stop appearing eternal, and for better airs to circulate that help to clear so much darkness.

With which series and films does Dark dialogue

Since the end of 2017, Dark when it captivates unanimously, but was compared to other fictions from which it seems to pick up winks, scenes, topics and even hues. Undoubtedly, on the podium is Stranger Things: the trigger of a missing boy and a group of young people who, in their search, enter another world (or the reverse of the current one), reminds us of the Duffer Brothers series, also from Netflix. An irrefutable fact reduces suspicion: Dark was already written before Stranger Things came out.

Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven, key character in

Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven, key character in “Stranger Things”.


What secret ties will connect the times of both, on Netflix? Undeniably, the weight of the ’80s, with its iconography and nostalgic power (the famous “retromania”) is vital in today’s series, and it is fed by it Dark. Not to exalt the consumer goods of the United States, but remembering how the 80s were lived in federal Germany, with its Soviet back so close and with a fear in the air that breathes in Dark: the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

The German way of treasuring legacies is not guilty. The Netflix series brings remarkable echoes of movies that adapt the mysteries and horrors of Stephen King, from David Fincher’s psychopaths and David Lynch’s 1990 series that mixed the police with the dreamlike and the paranormal to revolutionize television: Twin Peaks. AND Lost?

The obvious and the underground, in DarkIt may be another of your inheritances. Yes, it will be seen if this third season offers a less disappointing ending than that of the fiction of the castaways. Is it all in the imagination?

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