2020.06.24
rewatched seasons 1-2. avoiding spoilers of 3.
* spoilers below *
2020.07.05
watched 6/8.
this feels tacked on.
seasons 1-2 feel like part of a whole.
most tv shows feel, at best, like 2d chess.
seasons 1-2 feel like 3d chess. when you finally get to the end and understand all the parts of the whole it is satisfying to get there.
then you get to the end of season 2 and it hints at 4d chess to come.
then you get to season 3 and it is absolutely 4d chess; you can't help but wonder if its maybe 5d chess.
only 2 episodes to go. can they make this work?
2020.07.09
answer to the above question: no
No ratings, no stars, no likes, no rankings - the only rating I am interested in is "do I still think about it?" And maybe "how does this change things."
Saw the end of Season 3 a few days ago and it leaves me with little to think about (or feel about).
The end of Season 2 left me feeling a curious sense of hope (Martha and Jonas reconcile with their fate, and decide to try and make it work), and a sudden punch in the gut (no they won't, as Adam kills Martha). That would have been fine, but then amazingly alt Martha walks in to rescue Jonas from the Apocalypse with a yet unseen time machine. We are on the ride as Jonas goes from hope to grief to bewilderment to gone and into a new mystery.
That's one of my favorite few minutes of TV I have seen in years. So many things are wrapped up, concluded, and explained, and then ripped apart as new questions are raised. It set a high bar for Season 3, and raised the bar of expectation on an already great TV show. I should have expected disappointment, but I was hopeful.
Not that Season 3 ends with a whimper, but it kind of does. I like the idea that your universe is not the prime universe at all, but just one of several forks. I like that a lot. I like the idea that to fix the fork they need to go back to the prime universe to prevent the fork from ever happening. I like that its a Claudia that figures this out, as she was the scientist who studied and experimented on it for decades. So far this all sounds good.
Unfortunately the first 7 or 8 episodes and this last episode don't seem to be parts of a whole. There's no hint that an older Claudia is figuring out this problem, and coming to this great realization. Most of the season is spent just exploring the other fork universe, showing characters and connections that are all about to be unceremoniously undone anyway.
In retrospect it feels like filler, because all the clues and reasons that come in to play at the end are just dumped on you out of nowhere at the end, and has little to do with all that you've been learning.
There are other problems, like who was in the truck that ran Tannhaus' family of the road in universe prime? Why deliberately set it up that way if its just some bad random thing that happened. The way the culture of the show has been building up you know its going to be important who's in that truck and why they are doing this. But no, its nothing, unless it was supposed to be a red herring, but it turns out there's nothing its distracting you from. It was just an accident.
So how does Tannhaus create such a sophisticated time machine, when the first two seasons take care to set up that nobody invented the machine, it took multiple time travels, delivered blueprints, a future book, and a mobile phone to make it work (i.e. time magic). And yet a bereaved Tannhaus just cooks one up out of sheer will. It's a bit of a mixed message.
The time travel gets faster and looser as we go along. In the early seasons we are shown that time travel requires a device (which requires fuel), or a hard won map of the cave system, and/or being in the right place at the right time, etc. By the end characters are deciding they want to go somewhere and somewhen, and are basically just walking off one set, and then shown walking back on to the next set. It starts to cheapen the time travel.
Also cheapening time travel, in the early seasons it was a moment of wonder when characters met their other time selves. Now routinely you are getting three of a kind characters in one room, and sometimes four. One character (Martha and Jonas' kid, 'the knot'?) seems to only walk around with his older and younger self in tow. And he's set up early as some major character that will be important to the story, but no, he's just a henchman of old alt Martha. Nothing special, really, she could have sent anyone. The assassin 'team' doesn't even end up being something that needs to be dealt with at the end. You can really just cut them out of the story; its as if they were added just show off cool new 3 and 4 same person time travel meetings.
So much effort in the first seasons was put into making good characters. Even the jerkiest and most annoying characters have a back story that develops and makes them seem like they could be actual people. It creates empathy, even as the characters struggle against each other.
And it removes simplistic concepts like good and evil.
As for Jonas and alt Martha's mission, wouldn't it be more effective (though ruthless) to just kill Tannhaus? Sure, you save his family and prevent this forking of the universe, but what if something bad happens later? Part of the appeal of this show is the lengths to which people will go when pushed. But not this time. The lasting solution to this multiverse problem that has been building over three seasons is to simply give somebody in a car some false road condition info so they'll just go home. It's so underwhelming its almost ridiculous. I do see the value in it though, as it makes a wonderful contrast to all the heaviness and violence that got us here.
The show is called Dark; if you didn't get a dark ending that would be the surprise. So of course, everyone in the fork universes dies. Well, not dies, just disappears into glowing light. So yeah, dies. The fork has been prevented, there is only the truly prime universe again - so why do Jonas and Martha disappear? The physics of this show allows your matter to go to another time and interact with the same matter, even allowing exact duplicates of things to exist side by side. So why would anything that already exists be undone now?
It would have been far more interesting if the fork universes have been closed (or rather, just blink out of existence), but Martha and Jonas still exist in the prime universe, as refugees from places that no longer exist (and its the 80s?). Probably that wouldn't be considered Dark enough.
For a show that almost certainly would reject a happy ending, why show all the other versions dissolving into golden light, and everyone being OK with it? Yeah, sure, to give them (and us) closure, but it is heavy handed.
I guess the show made me feel something, if only frustration at the end. Instead of mostly filler and one wrap up episode, the last season might have been told better as a single movie. They could have boiled all that down to 2-3 hours, and better set up how Claudia was always working on the problem, discovers the nature of the prime and fork universes somehow, and make how to travel there a bigger part of the plot.
Maybe I'll see it again, or read about it, and change my mind. For now I am underwhelmed. Seasons 1-2 were so well done, and there was such a great heavy dark ambiance to the story, and the third season is just a lot of confusion and senseless struggle, just to end on a rather casual solution.
Time travel stories are hard, and Dark did very well for most of it. The oppressive mood and struggle against fate in the first two seasons is very strong and memorable, and that's what I will hold onto.
