It's a German series, but the voices are dubbed into English. The voice actors do a very good job of it, not only in synching the words with the lips of the German actors, but also in the dramatic reading of the text. They're actually acting, not just translating.
Dark is one of the most complex series I've ever followed. I dare say it's the first and probably only series where I've actually written down notes to keep track of everything, and even sketched family trees before I found some on line. Without spoilers, the series tells the story of a fictional German town and focuses primarily on four families in that town. Not only do you have to keep track of four separate families, but the plot follows the families through three separate generations, with scenes set in 1953, 1986, and 2019, often with different actors playing child, young adult and elderly versions of the same character. And then there are other actors playing characters who were already elderly in the 1953 scenes or children in the 2019 scenes, and therefore don't appear during the other periods. So you have to keep track of who's who and who's who when, and how they all relate to one another. But the karma of a small town means that an affair in 1953 results in simmering tensions in 1986 and entrenched resentments in 2019.
The series does a good job of telling you who is who - it really wants you to follow along. And unlike some other series, say, HBO's Westworld, it doesn't try to "trick" you into thinking two different years are the same - 1986 is clearly 1986 and 2019 clearly 2019, and so on. Some characters may turn out to be liars and untrustworthy narrators, but the show itself is not one of them. But the show does expect you to pay attention and to keep a pretty large and complex cast of characters in your head. Hence, my notes and family trees. It takes a certain amount of work and concentration, but the effort, as it turns out, is well worth it.
The fact that it's a German series with German actors and no recognizable stars (at least to my American eyes) both makes the characters more believable but also harder to follow - no familiar faces, at least initially, to latch onto. Then all the characters have German names - all Jonas' and Ulrichs and Bartosz's - or biblical names, like Noah, and Adam and Eve. And the cast includes no small number of stern-faced, older German women who become difficult to distinguish from each another. But as I said, the show wants you to follow along and does its best to identify its cast, but that task does require some work and concentration on the viewer's part.
I'll admit that I've actually watched Episode 1 of Season 1 no less than five times. The first one was on me - I watched it late at night, and despite its quality, I nodded out near the end of it and missed important details. I saw enough to suffice for most other shows, but when I rewatched Episode 1 a second time, I was surprised at how much I had missed. So much so that I watched it a third time, and still picked up more. Then after I finally watched Episode 2 with all of its plot twists and revelations, I went back and rewatched Episode 1 a fourth time to confirm my understanding of what had just happened to who. And finally, after completing Season 1, I rewatched the entire ten episodes, including a fifth viewing of Episode 1, before taking on Season 2. Suffice it to say that each viewing revealed new nuances and clues that I had missed the previous times.
Some minor spoilers ahead. Just warning you - no big reveals, but minor spoilers. It's well known that Dark is a science-fiction series that involves time travel, so to complicate things even further, some characters "disappear" in one year only to turn up in another. This is apparent after the third or fourth episode of Season 1 (and possibly even in the trailers and promo material), so that's not as major a spoiler as you might guess. So a child in 2019 might disappear back to 1986, and then grow up in that town to become one of the adults of 2019 looking for the "missing" child. The series ingeniously plays around with the possibilities of that kind of situation.
What makes the show work, though, isn't the science-fiction mechanisms or the mind-boggling possibilities of time travel. The show resonates due to the well-written script and the fine quality of the acting. Those four families are portrayed as real, often complex, sometimes flawed, people, not just stock characters to make some theoretical point about time travel. The story is emotionally moving and you come to care deeply about the characters. Some fall in love, some betray each other, some are even driven to murder (the series isn't just titled Dark). But it all makes sense on an emotional level. And if you make the effort, you become invested in the characters and care about them, are glad for their romances, and hurt by their betrayals. And that's just Season 1.
Things get even more complex in Season 2, and exponentially more so in Season 3, when a new plot twist, which I won't reveal, throws almost everything into disarray. There are so many characters and so many story lines and so many mysteries that it's easy to lose your way. Hence my notes and family trees and multiple viewings. But the series doesn't use a smoke screen of complexity to hide shortcomings in the narrative or unresolved plots. Everything is eventually explained, assuming you can accept the concept of time travel (it involves quantum physics and wormholes, and there's a nuclear power plant on the edge of town).
Questions and mysteries in each season fall into one of three categories: 1) things the show explained but I was too dim to pick up on (the series can be subtle at times), 2) things the show already explained but I forgot, and 3) things the show hasn't explained yet and are the actual unexplained mysteries yet to be revealed.
If you're up for a little intellectual challenge and ready to work a little to follow a rewarding and richly detailed story, I can't recommend Dark enough. If you just want a few laughs and forgettable, disposal entertainment, this show is not for you. But personally, I consider it among the best television series ever, right up there with Mr. Robot and Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul.
Oh, and the soundtrack is outstanding. The series is scored by musician Ben Frost, and includes songs by artists as diverse as Agnes Obel, Roomful of Teeth, and Bang on a Can, and the soundtrack masterfully supports and even enhances the many moods and emotions of the scenes.
Two minor criticisms: it's probably realistic for a small German town, but there are no persons of color anywhere in the cast. Even the blondes and redheads are relatively few. I'm not sure how that could be resolved without obvious tokenism, but it's almost disorienting in this day and age to see such a singularly Caucasian cast. Secondly, and another minor spoiler here, the timeline eventually goes back even earlier than 1953 with episodes set in 1920 and 1897, and one episode, titled In Between Times, fills in dates between those years. But not one episode is set in the 1940s and nowhere does the show even hint at Germany's Nazi years. It's never explained if the prosperous family in 1953 was complicit in the Third Reich, or if any of the able-bodied men in 1920 or 1953 had fought in a war. Any war. It's as if WWI and WWII never happened, and I suspect the dates were carefully selected to avoid that very topic.
Still, a terrific show and I can't recommend it enough.
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