Dark (Season 3)
Jul. 1st, 2020 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe third and final season of of the series offers all the good and bad sides of it in abundance. The dialogue is still often stilted (especially the philosophical monologues, good grief), most characters walk around with permanently shocked and dazed expression (for good plot reasons), and if the actors playing teens already were the tv type of teens at the start of the show, many of them now, years later, look nearer 40 than 30 .
And yet I marathoned, again, and did not regret one bit, despite the occasional urge to strangle whichever character was monologueing. (And Ulrich. Always Ulrich. Who the first two eps made me believe would be inflicted on me again as often as he had been the first season, but no, thankfully this turned out not to be true. Since Ulrich is a jerk in any time line, this was a big relief, along with the fact that he also gets bad karma served in any timeline. Anyway, Ulrich: still one of my most despised characters of all time.) By season 3, this show juggles not juist multiple eras, but multiple timelines, thus even more versions of its core characters at various ages, and it still somehow pulls it off. Early on, I had one big objection - other than Ulrich's existence, which is always an objection - to wit, in the frst half of the seaosn, there's not much Claudia, and I like Claudia and consider her one of the best characters. I was afraid that her part of the story had been given to Martha, what with "Eva" doing stuff we've previously seen old Claudia doing. But no! Come the second half, she's there again, and it becomes apparant what the finale delivers: Claudia as the wild card, working outside the dualty most of the other characters fall into and eventually finding a solution.
Considering that I ended season 2 having lost my sympathy for the teenagers of 2019/2020, it's a good thing that s3 introduced alt!versions of them, because this was definitely Martha's season, and you needed to feel for her. It was also the season hammering on what turns out one main theme of the entire show: can you prevent yourself from becoming a monster if you've seen where you're heading, and if you can't, is your eventual answer nihilism or are you still capable of acting differently? For all that the series really justifies the title - you could do a cynical drinking game for each time a character kills or at least harms another character they've been trying to save - it ends up with the humane conviction that yes, ending the literal cycle of violence and hurt (more literal than most due to all the time travel) is possible, not via the apocalypse but via reaching out and saving lives. Just not the ones the characters in question first assumed they would.
It's also a show that plays fair by not making one type of relationship the eternal good failsafe. There are toxic parent/child relationships, and there are supportive ones. Romance can produce disaster or happiness or both, and if Jonas and Martha fulfill the star-crossed lovers trope, they do so in a way that by the end has nothing to do with teen angst or "their society comes between them" anymore. Being motivated by love for a parent, a child, a lover, can get you through incredible obstacles, but it can also warp you and do great damage to other people. And because you get to know the characters in so many age variations and at different stages in their lives, it's hard not to understand where they are coming from. For example: S1 introduced 2019! Katharina as a sympathetic character, then revealed that 1986!Katharina was a teenage bully, something s2 elaborated on, while also showing these traits coming to the fore again in 2019; s3 shows she had an abusive mother, but then we also get to know her mother as a scared teenager having an abortion.
It's definitely a myopic show; if earlier seasons had very rarely some news tidbits outside of the fictional town of Winnden the series takes place in - like, obviously given the nuclear fear, Chernobyl -, s3 gets through the season without once telling us what the hell happened to the rest of the world in any timeline. We're stuck in our small town with nuclear power plant microcosmos, though the big reveal of the finale provides a Watsonian justification for this in addition to the Doylist one. And it works for the story it tells.
Overall: very earnest, sometimes tries your patience, sometimes surprisingly touching, definitely nothing for casual viewers but expects you to remember who is who in any time zone, and proves a German production can do small town fantasy (no suburbia, that's another trope) and time travel. Go home team?
P.S. If anyone can tell me whom Hanna is married to in the last timeline, please do, I failed at actor recognition.
And yet I marathoned, again, and did not regret one bit, despite the occasional urge to strangle whichever character was monologueing. (And Ulrich. Always Ulrich. Who the first two eps made me believe would be inflicted on me again as often as he had been the first season, but no, thankfully this turned out not to be true. Since Ulrich is a jerk in any time line, this was a big relief, along with the fact that he also gets bad karma served in any timeline. Anyway, Ulrich: still one of my most despised characters of all time.) By season 3, this show juggles not juist multiple eras, but multiple timelines, thus even more versions of its core characters at various ages, and it still somehow pulls it off. Early on, I had one big objection - other than Ulrich's existence, which is always an objection - to wit, in the frst half of the seaosn, there's not much Claudia, and I like Claudia and consider her one of the best characters. I was afraid that her part of the story had been given to Martha, what with "Eva" doing stuff we've previously seen old Claudia doing. But no! Come the second half, she's there again, and it becomes apparant what the finale delivers: Claudia as the wild card, working outside the dualty most of the other characters fall into and eventually finding a solution.
Considering that I ended season 2 having lost my sympathy for the teenagers of 2019/2020, it's a good thing that s3 introduced alt!versions of them, because this was definitely Martha's season, and you needed to feel for her. It was also the season hammering on what turns out one main theme of the entire show: can you prevent yourself from becoming a monster if you've seen where you're heading, and if you can't, is your eventual answer nihilism or are you still capable of acting differently? For all that the series really justifies the title - you could do a cynical drinking game for each time a character kills or at least harms another character they've been trying to save - it ends up with the humane conviction that yes, ending the literal cycle of violence and hurt (more literal than most due to all the time travel) is possible, not via the apocalypse but via reaching out and saving lives. Just not the ones the characters in question first assumed they would.
It's also a show that plays fair by not making one type of relationship the eternal good failsafe. There are toxic parent/child relationships, and there are supportive ones. Romance can produce disaster or happiness or both, and if Jonas and Martha fulfill the star-crossed lovers trope, they do so in a way that by the end has nothing to do with teen angst or "their society comes between them" anymore. Being motivated by love for a parent, a child, a lover, can get you through incredible obstacles, but it can also warp you and do great damage to other people. And because you get to know the characters in so many age variations and at different stages in their lives, it's hard not to understand where they are coming from. For example: S1 introduced 2019! Katharina as a sympathetic character, then revealed that 1986!Katharina was a teenage bully, something s2 elaborated on, while also showing these traits coming to the fore again in 2019; s3 shows she had an abusive mother, but then we also get to know her mother as a scared teenager having an abortion.
It's definitely a myopic show; if earlier seasons had very rarely some news tidbits outside of the fictional town of Winnden the series takes place in - like, obviously given the nuclear fear, Chernobyl -, s3 gets through the season without once telling us what the hell happened to the rest of the world in any timeline. We're stuck in our small town with nuclear power plant microcosmos, though the big reveal of the finale provides a Watsonian justification for this in addition to the Doylist one. And it works for the story it tells.
Overall: very earnest, sometimes tries your patience, sometimes surprisingly touching, definitely nothing for casual viewers but expects you to remember who is who in any time zone, and proves a German production can do small town fantasy (no suburbia, that's another trope) and time travel. Go home team?
P.S. If anyone can tell me whom Hanna is married to in the last timeline, please do, I failed at actor recognition.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-01 10:02 pm (UTC)I can't remember the character's name, but it's the cop with the series of unexplained injuries -- a missing eye in the first timeline and a missing arm in the other. The brother of Bernadette, the trans sex worker who seems to be married to Peter in the final timeline.
I enjoyed the show, but frequently found myself shouting, YOU CAN MOVE OUT OF WINDEN, GET THERAPY AND NOT MARRY THE PERSON YOU WERE WITH AS A TEENAGER at the adults. It's a bit of a Harry Potter problem, I guess, but this isn't a tiny secret community, it's a town within a larger country.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-02 01:19 pm (UTC)Moving out of Winden: I know that once a season someone says Winden is like a black hole and you never can leave, but: didn't Ines Kahnwald and child!Mikkel do that for a short while at least?
NOT MARRY THE PERSON YOU WERE WITH AS A TEENAGER
Well, to be fair, Winden also offers the option of time travel and marry/romance your descendant/ancestor/even nearer relation instead. (Speaking of which, have figured out why Claudia pinned those family trees on the wall. She wanted to make sure Regina's existence did not depend in any way on the time loop.)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-27 02:52 am (UTC)The Unknown(s) were a bizarre creation. I don't know why it was necessary to have them in three stages of life working together. It made me curious as to how Martha and Jonas' child had been raised, because they seem to have no personality and to be used purely as human tools for Eve's purpose.
In the finale, I was sad to see Jonas and Martha fade, but the resolution felt justified, and not simply a fatal twist to shock the audience. And the last scene, with the unrelated persons having grown up together with none of Hannah's descendants in existence anywhere in the timeline, felt good, and a pleasing end to a challenging series.
BTW, thank you for correcting me on Jonas' name--the religious touches of dark versus light, Adam and Eve, their son as a literal sin, have made the closeness of Jonas and Martha to Josef and Mary a little stronger in my mind than may have been intended.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-27 06:53 am (UTC)Jonas vs Josef: Jonas, of course, has biblical overtones as well - surviving in the belly of the whale - but the obvious Adam and Eve implications aside, I don't think too many religious associations were intended. Especially since in the end the way Jonas and Martha could save the world was by sacrificing themselves to save the three people whose deaths originally triggered the invention of time travel, not via any of their descendants or acolytes.
Primeverse Jonas dead: I was surprised as well (and if you'll allow another Buffyverse comparison, the AU episode The Wish, where Cordelia is our pov character and gets killed twenty minutes in regardless comes to mind), but it made sense in terms of emotional balance, as the previous season had ended with Adam killing Primeverse Martha, and if both characters were supposed to be as guilty and innocent as each other, something like this needed to happen. Something the show managed extremely well, too, is attaching the audience to much of the ensemble in various time zones and universes, so the emotional investment into the unfolding story continued.