The German sci-fi series Dark was voted the best series on the entire Netflix platform by the prestigious portal Rotten Tomatoes. Dark was created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese in 2017.
This recognition is not surprising, since this series contains very good ingredients, makes us fantasize about the idea of time in a scientific and metaphysical way that has never been explored before by any film production.
- The plot presents the conception of time as cyclic.
- Based on the idea of Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return in his works A Gaia Ciancia e So spoke Zarathustra.
- But.
- Contrary to the purely philosophical.
- Dark poses the real possibility of the operation of time as an eternal loop.
- Which produces the elimination of classic conceptions of the past.
- Present and future.
- So that the characters can move between these moments and influence facts that occur before or after.
The central plot that dominates the entire plot of the series is to explain how time travel has affected the fictional German city of Winden. La first season begins with the disappearance of a child in 2019, Mikkel, who disappears into a cave in a similar forest. to the German Black Forest.
This forest is full of underground caves and a nuclear power plant that hides certain mysteries, including a scientific discovery that could change the course of humanity.
One of the teenagers involved in the incident, Jonas, decides to investigate what happened, his first investigations lead him to discover that everything is connected, first the suicide of his father, Michael, a few months earlier, then the cave’s ability to alter his temporal capacity.
In addition to this temporary hole in the cave, there are other methods of time travel, some related to the cave and the nuclear power plant and others slightly different that will gradually be revealed in an exciting scenario.
The story revolves around four families in the city: Kahnwald, Nielsen, Doppler and Tiedemann, in three different chronologies: 1953, 1986 and 2019. The year 2019 is the starting point of narrative action and the main arc, that is, the gift. of the series.
The deadlines are separated by 33 years and the characters interact with each other as they move between each of these three lines, through a wormhole that may have been created by a leak from a substance from the Winden nuclear power plant.
Dark is a series that deals with the cyclic theory of time, but there are many theories related to this topic, to place them let’s review some currents of thought that have dealt with the conception of time:
In Dark, the wormhole figure is used to explain the journey between the three dimensions of time. The release of energy from the nuclear power plant may have given activity to this hole found in the maze of caves that cross the city.
Dark raises the idea of time not as a linear dimension, but as an infinite loop based on Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. It is also the view that civilizations such as the Maya, Indians, Chinese, and ancient Egyptians had the time.
Although the plot of the series does not specify that it is possible to travel beyond the periods depicted, there are two characters (Jonas Kahnwald and Claudia Tiedemann) who go back in time, the goal is to change the facts and destroy the mechanism that allows the different protagonists of the series to move between the three seasons.
Thus, one of the most important issues defended by the series is justified: the past influences the future and the future influences the past. It’s about each other. There is no beginning or end; time is like a circle where all events coexist and all temporal realities are interconnected.