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Rating: Every shade of us you fade down to keep
them in the dark on who we are.
We live and wander in the darkness of the unknown. Time is the greatest of mysteries, in physics, in philosophy. Time is ignorance, says Rovelli.
"Why do we say 'I have time,' when it is time itself that cages us?"
"Time is not at all what it seems. It does not flow in only one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with the past." Einstein told us.
This world is made of energy, electricity, and atoms. "A single atom can change the world," as it is rightly said in the show itself.
It's estimated that about 69% of the universe consists of dark energy. The so-called dark matter, which we still know nothing about, and who knows for how long we won't. Maybe never.
Currently, as far as I'm concerned, there are no series with the same visionary and complex scope as Dark. Perhaps not even Twin Peaks The Return (but this doesn't mean that I consider Dark superior to the incomparable lynchian masterpiece, to which the German series repeatedly pays tribute in terms of homages).
"We commonly think of time as something simple, fundamental, flowing uniformly, from past to future, measured by clocks. Over time, events in the universe succeed one another in sequence: past, present, future; the past is fixed, the future is open. Well, all this has been proven false." - "What we call 'time' is a complex collection of structures, of layers" I quote Rovelli again in his "The Order of Time" (which I recommend).
"This human race that worships clocks and doesn’t know time" as someone else once said...
And indeed in Dark, there are more and more layers, hypotheses, physical, quantum, and existential implications. Cosmology, general relativity, gravitational waves, causality, the God particle, the multiverse. In this second season, paradoxes, symbolism, and theories multiply further. In particular, two paradoxes are pushed to the extreme: the Bootstrap Paradox and the most ancient and unsolvable of all, the chicken-and-egg paradox.
The beginning is the end, the end is the beginning. And no one will ever know when it all started, what triggered the decay, the birth of all Evil.
But if we consider the number of paradoxes and plots, intrinsic relationships and genuinely shocking twists, I think Dark has no equals to any other serial or cinematic product. Everything is connected.
But above all, what the series, and particularly this second season, revolves around is the time loop. However, it is treated in a vastly different and more imposing way compared to, for example, film products that often lightly deal with eternal repetition. Like the various Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, Groundhog Day, where the protagonists wake up at a given moment to start all over again in an infinite loop. In Dark, it is all less simplified and explicit.
To make a somewhat simplistic equation, if the first season was centered on Einstein (and Rosen, with whom he shared theories on wormholes), the second veers distinctly towards Nietzsche and the eternal return. Very significant in this regard are the quotes that open the respective seasons: the famous one from Einstein about time as an eternal illusion, in the first, the one from Nietzsche at the beginning of the second:
"Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein."
"And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you"
"This is a world where nothing is solved. Someone once told me, 'Time is a flat circle.' Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they’re gonna be in that room again and again and again forever."
Does it remind you of anything?
Personally, although I loved this S2 very much, I consider the first one as unparalleled in charm and atmosphere. But I tell you to watch Dark, watch it and love it, maybe stopping two or three times during the episode to reflect. Because it is a unique product, alien compared to any current Netflix series (and thinking how many, out of ignorance and carelessness, initially took or considered it as a copy of Stranger Things... it gives me chills!), after all, Dark is not American but German, and it couldn't be otherwise: besides Einstein and Nietzsche, obviously German is also Goethe, quoted in the first season, and German-speaking Kurt Gödel, theorist of loops. And because it is truly an experience worth living.
And also because, besides everything else mentioned above, and beyond the obviously sci-fi and dramatized aspect, it has the merit of reminding us that we are and know nothing, that what we know is but a drop in the ocean (to give some numbers, about 5% of our universe), that we live by wrong perspectives and conventions of the mind. That free will, just like time itself (as Einstein said), is just an illusion. That impulses and feelings have the domain. And that God exists: it is Time.
Time is beside you, wherever you go. You carry it within you, and it does the same. It sees and hears everything, everything you do and say. Tick tock, tick tock.
Sic Mundus Creatus Est.
(For the record: recently there was discussion, generating understandable and justified hype, about Chernobyl surpassing the IMDb rating of Breaking Bad: Dark S2 has in turn surpassed Chernobyl, with which, incidentally, it shares the fundamental atomic/nuclear issue. Personally, I care little, but given that this matters to many and that Dark is still watched by few...)
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