Dark

SOTTREADER

The Living Force
I'm not sure if anyone here has seen this Netflix original show? What did you think?

My recommendation to those who haven't is quite high.

The show is German and the premise is set around a small German village. It essentially plays out the drama of the people who live in the village. Beyond this, it's very difficult to describe the plot.

The trailer below will give the impression that it's about missing kids, or murder mystery or some sort of horror. Well, it kind of encapsulates elements from all these but it isn't particularly about any of them.

To put it simply without spoiling the plot, the show is about TIME. The story of time is told through the characters. The narrative is very intricate, the characters very carefully constructed, including their motivations, desires, fears etc.

The story is almost told in a circular fashion, where there's no beginning... or end for that matter. The past influences the future and the future influences the past. Make of that what you will, you have to watch to understand.

Questions of determinism are explored, and free will. How much free will do you have? How can you make choices differently if the future is already there, materialised? Surely every single choice you make will lead to that future and you won't know it until the future has materialised for you. But that future would have materialised for your future self before it did for you, the one making the decisions now. So how much free will do you really have? The future and past are not out there, in some far off distance, but are placed right next to the present. They don't exist independent from each other but are connected by this thing we call time.

We think of things having a beginning and an end. But what if the beginning is also the end? Where does the story begin and where does it end? We think the story begins in the past and ends in the future... But what if that isn't true?

Dark is essentially about all I said above after I mentioned it's a story, where the premise is set in a small German village.

If you want to watch something that is interesting, intriguing, entertaining, full of metaphysical concepts, like a puzzle, something which gets you thinking constantly throughout then this is the show for you.

Happy viewing.

 
Was too much work for me by the second season. In my opinion, a show shouldn't be that hard to follow. I literally had to write down on a piece of paper the characters and who was related to who and why and from what time period.

Maybe others cup of tea, but not mine. There's too much content out there to enjoy that doesn't require that level of mental gymnastics.
 
Actually, I think it was the third season where I threw in the towel, so to speak. BTW, I would say the title is apropos, Dark, with really no redeeming qualities. The entire caste is essentially in a negative time loop.

Unless some redeeming quality manifested in the third season that I never made it to.
 
Was too much work for me by the second season. In my opinion, a show shouldn't be that hard to follow. I literally had to write down on a piece of paper the characters and who was related to who and why and from what time period.

Maybe others cup of tea, but not mine. There's too much content out there to enjoy that doesn't require that level of mental gymnastics.
I agree with what SOTTREADER said aboit this show, but after watching season 1 and 2 some months ago, had similar problems to those of genaro81 which kind of spoiled my interest.
When season 3 came out here in France I had already forgotten a lot of the story's details and I didn't feel like getting back into it at all. Maybe one day i will give another try, don't know.
 
My friend that lives in Ireland recomended it to me I think last year when she was visiting. I know she has a good taste, and she was eager to talked to someone who watches is, but she didn't know anybody and started to talk to a cab guy somewhere from Eastern Europe who drove her to airport. But I don't have Netflix. I didn't watch of follow shows of movies since college. But what I realized is most of younger people I know mostly talk what they saw on Netflix when we go on a coffee and then I'm just a good listener.
 
I enjoyed the time travel part of it and some of the characters were well done. What I didn't like were the seemingly forced "grimdark" aspects of it, though the show seemed to light up more in the second season when it became fully about time travel.
 
I saw Dark. Since I'm originally from Germany, there are of course a lot of nostalgic moments that I really enjoyed. But it's true, it's incredibly exhausting and I had to repeat the entire first season when the second season was released to understand it better. And now with Season 3, even I gave up. My brain became like a pudding 🤯🤣. But I'll definitely start all over again because I think it's worth it. The quality of the series is simply outstanding!

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Exactly what I did, which is when I began taking notes. By season three I was like, forget it! Might be interesting to see the statistics on how many people made it through all three seasons.

Yes that would actually be interesting. I don't know a single one. I'll seriously consider the notes. There is a blank wall in my living room. After 3 episodes it would look like Sherlock in "Elementary". She would be part of my investigation ...😱
 
I personally loved it. Maybe it's because I was looking for something a bit different.

I loved that the story was non-linear but not in a way that you can't understand. I loved that the writers weaved very intricate story arcs for each character and each arc was neatly closed off. In addition I loved how everything was interconnected so that time lost all meaning. It was like a rich tapestry, a labyrinth that as many have pointed out, can be quite exhausting to follow.

Personally I didn't find it exhausting.... more stimulating, constantly engaging my mind. It was like a very complex puzzle where you tried to anticipate where the story was going but you couldn't.

I didn't particularly like the series finale as I'm not sure the puzzle was ever solved. In any case I felt that in season 3 it got too complicated as the writers were hammering home the point that we're bound by time, by our actions, by cause and effect. The main characters were trying to break the never ending loops but in so doing, they actually kept the loops in place... Their actions caused the reality they were experiencing and there was no escaping this. I thought it was quite interesting philosophically.

In any case, I found it to be quite unique and easier to follow than similarly made shows or movies.

As an example I went to see tenet during the summer and found that to be a jumbled up mess. It wasn't made with care, with diligence the way I was expecting. More often than not, the audience got lost in the story unaware of what's going on.

If anyone has any recommendations for similar type shows or movies, I'm all ears :)
 
Exactly what I did, which is when I began taking notes. By season three I was like, forget it! Might be interesting to see the statistics on how many people made it through all three seasons.
For about the last 4 or 5 episodes in season 3 I just stopped trying to understand and was just awaiting for the finale. I wholeheartedly agree that a TV series shouldn't be THAT complicated to follow, a little is fun and piques interest, but this was just so purposely disorienting that I wouldn't recommend it just for that.

**spoiler alert**

Anyhow, the message in the end was nice, it was a lesson for the protagonists to let go, that by clinging to their limiting emotions they were bringing unnecessary suffering to their loved ones, and when they realized that -- after a lifetime --, the third force, personified by the man who lost his son to a terrible accident, was then able also to let go.

This letting go meant that the protagonists wouldn't have never existed in that plane, so I thought that it had a whiff of materialism in which existence beyond the physical realm (although the Dark universe had no problem with the concept of dimensions) wasn't possible, though contributed to making the sacrifice of the protagonists more dramatic.
 
If anyone has any recommendations for similar type shows or movies, I'm all ears :)
My Husband and I just finished watching a series on Amazon Prime called "Tales from the Loop" that is based on a collection of interlocking, overlapping stories created from the artwork of Simon Stalenhag.
Here are a couple of pictures:

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The Alternative reality small town in Ohio is the fictional base for the "Loop", which is rather like the mysterious CERN project in our present time.
The strange Mechanical artifacts, random robots and Tesla power tech is more of a backdrop, rather than the subject of the series. The very human emotional and familial interactions are the main focus.
The ordinary mundane day to day life, is made valuable and worth living by the deep love shown by the characters.
It's is very well done, in my opinion.
My husband was very impressed with it, as it enabled him to feel and process some interesting emotional stuff that he apparently needed a motivator or trigger to release and process.
There are only 8 episodes so far, but from the Fan response, there will be a season 2 soon!
 

The dialogue in this show is quite poetic. One of the best, hands down.
The show's portrayal of time travel looks quite amazing. It really questions the publicly-accepted 3D nature of time, and what "time" really is in the grand scheme of things.

As a disclaimer, I've not seen any of the episodes. But I did take a look at the video you mentioned here. There are satanic elements to the dialogue, for example here: "Only when we're free of all emotion are we truly free. Only when one is ready to sacrifice what one holds dearest." To be ready to sacrifice whatever one holds dearest to me sounds incredibly dark given the context of some of the scenes in the tribute. I've come across the displeasure of reading online of a satanic ritual where one kills his/her dog after cultivating a bond with him/her. The supposed idea is to take the life of someone who sees you with love, similar to that of a child. The satanic person and the dog feel that love and to break that bond so brutally requires that they free themselves from that positive emotion.

I'd imagine there's much more graceful ways of letting someone go, and concerning emotions, they are integral to learning and the path towards STO.

Again, I've not seen the show so please correct me if I'm wrong. As with anything it would be wise to practice vigilance and to practice awareness in the essences that you may encounter in the show. The Cs said that one can watch and read a great many things when we have our proper defenses up.
 
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