Dark - Netflix

Mike Litoris

Drumpot wrote: »

I enjoyed the previous two seasons, it just feels like a rehash and the story is setting itself up to repeat itself endlessly (which the characters who know what’s going on literally said).

What’s probably most damning is I don’t really care anymore what happens. The one thing that keeps bugging me is what happened to that guys eye and arm. The rest seems a bit gibberish. Move the cheaters around, oh Martha lives in Jonas house. It just doesn’t have the same originality I felt was in 1/2. Don’t care much about the 3 guys (I presume the same person) going around killing people.

It’s a shame cause I really like it. Maybe some day I will finish it off.

Ah man, do! If you've enjoyed it up to s03 then God dammit finish it. Given how you've reacted to this season be prepared for it to get worse before it gets better though! It'll all make sense at the end.

FWIW I hated S02 when I watched it first and pretty much switched off watching it. I rewatched the whole series again and loved it now that it made a bit more sense. I had missed so much the first time around it was like watching a new show.

Also Starring LeVar Burton

Personally, I think it's possibly the greatest show ever made, because its so complex and the ending is just superb. Doesn't dumb things down or treat the audience like idiots. It's TV for people who want to engage in television on not just something to have on in the background while people scroll through their phones and don't actually pay attention to what's going on, which seems to be who most shows are aimed at these days.

NIMAN

Just started series 3 tonight.

And again wondering why characters won't tell people info they need to know.

At the start Martha says something like 'Sorry I have to send you back' and leaves it at that. She could take a few more seconds and tell Jonas why. Then when he lands in his new world he wouldn't be completely lost.

AllForIt

Also Starring LeVar Burton wrote: »

Personally, I think it's possibly the greatest show ever made, because its so complex and the ending is just superb. Doesn't dumb things down or treat the audience like idiots. It's TV for people who want to engage in television on not just something to have on in the background while people scroll through their phones and don't actually pay attention to what's going on, which seems to be who most shows are aimed at these days.

Whatever one thinks of the narrative, it was one of the most excellently produced shows I've ever watched. Visually it was stunning and I loved the sound effect's as well. And I really liked that all the characters as actors were unfamiliar to me, because we're so used to watching American dramas with that American look about them.

riffmongous

NIMAN wrote: »

Just started series 3 tonight.

And again wondering why characters won't tell people info they need to know.

At the start Martha says something like 'Sorry I have to send you back' and leaves it at that. She could take a few more seconds and tell Jonas why. Then when he lands in his new world he wouldn't be completely lost.

I think none of the future people say anything because they usually want things to happen as they have already happened, and saying something else would change things (although it mightn't actually even be possible but I'm not sure if the characters actually know that, they know what to say because they've already heard it spoken to them).

AllForIt

I saw a woman that looked exactly like 1986 Claudia in my locality today I'd never seen before. Big heavy hair, hippy frumpy walk, long full length dress, and she was carrying a weighty bag.

Not sure if this is all over yet.

Hodors Appletart

AllForIt wrote: »

I saw a woman that looked exactly like 1986 Claudia in my locality today I'd never seen before. Big heavy hair, hippy frumpy walk, long full length dress, and she was carrying a weighty bag.

Not sure if this is all over yet.

sounds like you encountered Ruth Coppinger

Brock Turnpike

AllForIt wrote: »

I saw a woman that looked exactly like 1986 Claudia in my locality today I'd never seen before. Big heavy hair, hippy frumpy walk, long full length dress, and she was carrying a weighty bag.

Not sure if this is all over yet.

Pretty sure I saw HG Tannhaus celebrating with Antonio Conte on the Inter Milan bench last night after the third goal.

4:50 in this vid:

https://www.bt.com/sport/watch/video/clips/2020/august/highlights-inter-milan-5-0-shakhtar-donetsk[url][/url]

AllForIt

I'm feeling a bit bereft of something as good as this to watch now.

Maybe I should watch DARK again and again and again...

human 19

AllForIt wrote: »

I'm feeling a bit bereft of something as good as this to watch now.

Maybe I should watch DARK again and again and again...

I mentioned this already, but try Deutschland 83 on channel4.com, for free. It may not be sci-fi but it will get you back into the German vibe, with real-looking actors rather than the usual Hollywood look. A cold war drama based around an East German spy sent into the west. Excellent 80's music soundtrack also.

Mike Litoris

human 19 wrote: »

I mentioned this already, but try Deutschland 83 on channel4.com, for free. It may not be sci-fi but it will get you back into the German vibe, with real-looking actors rather than the usual Hollywood look. A cold war drama based around an East German spy sent into the west. Excellent 80's music soundtrack also.

Agreed. It's exceptionally well made on all levels. Didn't care much for 86 but I'd rank 83 up there with the best.

NIMAN

I watched Series 3 Episode 6 tonight, 2 more to go.

I'll be honest, only the fact that I am now so close to the end, I would have given up. Totally lost me for most of Series 3 and I sort of don't care how it finishes now.

raclle

I watched the first episode of season 3 tonight and I'm starting to lose interest. The introduction of this second parallel universe is stretching things a bit

NIMAN

I thought I was following it ok for Series 1 & 2.

But Series 3 totally lost me. I couldn't remember who was in what parallel universe or who belonged where.

I'll be honest, for most of Series 3 I have simply been watching cos I am committed to it.

Hodors Appletart

Season 3 is a mess.

Talisman

Season 3 is all about placing the various pieces where they need to be in order for the loop events to occur. It doesn't have the same intensity as the previous two seasons as we already know how the loop plays out and keeping track of who's who is mind numbing.

Time travel and multiverses are not simple to comprehend and I think the series conveyed that well. I enjoyed the finale and looking back at the entire series I couldn't find a hole in the plot.

The family lines and plot devices:

Jonas brought Bartosz Tiedemann, Franziska Doppler, and Magnus Nielsen to 1888 to avoid the apocalypse. They became the Sic Mundus organisation.

Mikkel Nielsen was adopted by Ines Kahnwald and named Michael Kahnwald

Michael Kahnwald + Hannah = Jonas

Agnes + ??? = Tronte Nielsen
Agnes left her son Tronte with Egon and Doris Tiedemann in the 1950s

Egon + Doris Tiedemann = Claudia

Claudia + ??? = Regina Tiedemann

Regina Tiedemann + Aleksander (Boris Niewald) = Bartosz

Tronte Nielsen + Lana = Mads and Ulrich

Ulrich Nielsen + Katharina Albers = Magnus, Martha, and Mikkel

Hannah Kahnwald + Egon Tiedemann/Ulrich Nielsen = Silja
Hannah + Ulrich Nielsen = Silja (Martha's alternative world)

Bartosz + Silja = Hanno Tauber and Agnes Nielsen

Hanno is Noah
Elisabeth Doppler + Noah = Charlotte

Elisabeth and Charlotte kidnapped Charlotte as a baby and gave her to H.G. Tannhaus in the 1970s

Charlotte + Peter Doppler = Elisabeth and Franzsika

Jonas + Martha = The Origin

The only questions I'm left with unanswered are who are the fathers of Tronte and Regina but I don't think the answers are relevant to the plot. I used to think that Noah was Tronte's father but that's obviously not the case.

wyrn

Tronte's father

the unknown man in the trio. It's not outrightly said but it's heavily implied when he talked about being there to name him

Regina's father is

Bernd Doppler, the guy in the wheelchair who opened the nuclear plant. That's shown at the end scene of Bernd, Regina and Claudia in a family photo.

pixelburp

Talisman wrote: »

Season 3 is all about placing the various pieces where they need to be in order for the loop events to occur. It doesn't have the same intensity as the previous two seasons as we already know how the loop plays out and keeping track of who's who is mind numbing.

I think that's how it has panned out for me & gets to the nub of Season 3's lesser season: am only finished episode 5 and that's very much the vibe of things overall: that parts of the clock are finally being placed into position, so events can snowball to their pre-ordained conclusion.

It's a classic problem of storytelling though, not limited to Dark & its convoluted plotting. Doesn't matter if it's time travel, a crime thriller, domestic drama or whatever. If there's a resting tension that's waiting for a particular shoe to drop, the aftermath or reveal is often more underwhelming than the build-up. The release can struggle to match the anticipation - and that's especially true IMO when it comes to mysteries. 'cos the payoff is all about the reveal, or truth.

AllForIt

Spoilers

The problem with series 3 for me wasn't so much the brutal revelation of the reality of what was going on, but the whole change of tone of the series thus far, which includes the omission of important characters. The detective woman for a start.

In the end, and I admit I was a bit tipsy when I watched the last episode, but on watching it again the explanation for the whole thing was clearly explained, but I'd kinda lost interest by the final episode.

You can't blame the series producer for the narrative, but it would have been nice to see a reunion of Mikkel and his farther*, somehow. And some kind of final meeting between Mikkel and Jonas, somehow. It all just seemed so incomplete in the end. It was a human story after all.


*edit: this did happen I recall now.

AllForIt

Some thinks I still don't get:

What was the point of killing the youths, or were they intentionally killing them at all? In what looked like a psychopaths restraining device, chair? Was it a time machine that went wrong, and if so what was the point of sending them through time in the first place.

Talisman

AllForIt wrote: »

Some thinks I still don't get:

What was the point of killing the youths, or were they intentionally killing them at all? In what looked like a psychopaths restraining device, chair? Was it a time machine that went wrong, and if so what was the point of sending them through time in the first place.

Presumably the chair served a purpose in an earlier iteration of the loop. It was a primitive version of the time machine but the effect of using it killed the occupant.

Mads died in the chair traveling from 1986 to 2019.
Erik died in the chair traveling from 1986 to 1953.

Noah and Claudia were following the content of the journal to ensure the paradox loop remained intact. They both had the bodies placed where they were previously reported to be found.

Ulrich had locked Helge in the bunker room in 1953 and he successfully traveled through the wormhole to 1986 in the finale of the first season, at the same time Jonas traveled forward to the future. This event suggests that it didn't require anyone to be strapped into the chair in order to travel through time.

Talisman

wyrn wrote: »

Tronte's father

the unknown man in the trio. It's not outrightly said but it's heavily implied when he talked about being there to name him

Is this from the scene where Tronte receives the bracelet?

Regina's father is

Bernd Doppler, the guy in the wheelchair who opened the nuclear plant. That's shown at the end scene of Bernd, Regina and Claudia in a family photo.

I totally missed that.

NIMAN

Hodors Appletart wrote: »

Season 3 is a mess.

I have just finished it all.

Very very disappointed, how people can do this one of the best t.v. shows ever is beyond me.

I enjoyed series 1 and 2, but I could have stopped watching at any point in series 3, I had that little interest. I only stuck with it as I had invested so much time in it.

And anyone who says they were able to follow it is lying. I'm not thick but most of season 3 had been completely confused. I also don't think watching it again would help, it's that convoluted.

I just wish I had a euro for every time Jonas or Martha stood in shot saying nothing with their eyes welling up with tears. I could retire.

Definitely not a show I'd be recommending to anyone. It could have been edited a lot better.

cdgalwegian

NIMAN wrote: »

I have just finished it all.

Very very disappointed, how people can do this one of the best t.v. shows ever is beyond me.

I enjoyed series 1 and 2, but I could have stopped watching at any point in series 3, I had that little interest. I only stuck with it as I had invested so much time in it.

And anyone who says they were able to follow it is lying. I'm not thick but most of season 3 had been completely confused. I also don't think watching it again would help, it's that convoluted.

I just wish I had a euro for every time Jonas or Martha stood in shot saying nothing with their eyes welling up with tears. I could retire.

Definitely not a show I'd be recommending to anyone. It could have been edited a lot better.

Season 3 was always going to be a tough act to follow in terms of a 'spiralling out' form of story-telling, particularly within the self-imposed constraints of the use of symbols; it had to be three seasons for the sake of the symbology. That said, another season would also probably have been unnecessarily extending it; but having season 3 as 8 episodes instead of 10 did seem to compress it too much. However I think a balancing act was needed; the constant quasi-Homeric style of repetition would have been way too much if extended even further, but I can see why for some even as it was, it was too much. I didn’t mind it- it allowed certain elements to ‘click’, so that in the end, even if everything wasn’t fully comprehended at the time, most of it was intuited as right; the ending ‘felt’ right, even if some things leading up to it weren’t fully understood. In this way, I don’t think people are ‘lying’ if they say they understand it. It’s like finally finishing a cryptic puzzle with the centre word as the goal; some of the outlying words may not be completed, with some of the answers intuitively ‘felt’, rather than known for certain. Even getting the answers after you've finished it still gives you the 'mini-Eureka' moment.
Definitely a show I would recommend a certain cohort of people to avoid, and some to seek out if they want imaginative intelligent tv that needs lots of concentration, but need to be prepared to not have all the answers straight away; they are there, but there's a lot more thinking about it to be done afterwards.

Talisman

NIMAN wrote: »

Very very disappointed, how people can do this one of the best t.v. shows ever is beyond me.

I enjoyed series 1 and 2, but I could have stopped watching at any point in series 3, I had that little interest. I only stuck with it as I had invested so much time in it.

And anyone who says they were able to follow it is lying. I'm not thick but most of season 3 had been completely confused. I also don't think watching it again would help, it's that convoluted.

Perhaps you weren't in the right frame of mind for watching it.

I tried to binge watch the final series but it was too much. I managed to get through the first four episodes in one sitting but I was lost and ended up going back and watching the episodes individually. Figuring out the family tree that formed the paradox intrigued me and helped to me understand what was playing out in the series.

As an entire series it was very well constructed, if you go back to the first episode of series 1 there is a voice over at the start in combination with the camera panning over the photographs on the wall in the bunker which pretty much mirrors the closing scene of the final episode of series 3. The visuals are a nice touch but the voice over provides a key to the series.

We trust that time is linear.
That it proceeds eternally, uniformly.
Into infinity.
But the distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion.
Yesterday, today and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle.
Everything is connected.

That is exactly how the complete series played out. It was confusing at times but equally for me it was rewarding seeing how the paradox was constructed.

It's not a case of needing to be super clever to follow what was going on in the final series, it was confusing and there was a lot going on. Previously we weren't aware of the alternative realities. We had seen Jonas's story and the part Martha was to play wasn't given the same screen time. The final series felt very different to the first two for this reason and that added to the confusion. There was also the manipulation on the part of Adam and Eve - it no longer added to the mystery it was a necessary given. Claudia was the wildcard, but she fulfilled her part in ensuring the loop was completed. Immediately afterwards it was straight on to tearing it all down.

I don't think the story is for everyone and anyone who was expecting more of the same in the final season was bound to be disappointed.

AllForIt

The last series was very dark, literally.

NIMAN

AllForIt wrote: »

The last series was very dark, literally.

If by dark you mean sh1T then I agree with you.

AllForIt

human 19 wrote: »

I mentioned this already, but try Deutschland 83 on channel4.com, for free. It may not be sci-fi but it will get you back into the German vibe, with real-looking actors rather than the usual Hollywood look. A cold war drama based around an East German spy sent into the west. Excellent 80's music soundtrack also.

Not to get too off topic, but thanks for that. Watched the first episode and enjoyed it. I don't speak German but I've realised it's not as weird to me as I once though it was. Previously I though it quite harsh. And it seems the names Jonas and Ulrich are quite pop names in Deutschland.

NIMAN wrote: »

If by dark you mean sh1T then I agree with you.

I meant visually. Even Joans's distinctive yellow raincoat seemed to turn black in S3. Literally dark.

Homelander

Deutschland, Babylon Berlin and Dark are the holy trifecta of German TV with amazing production values.

Das Boot is worth a look as well. Two seasons so far.

ixoy

Homelander wrote: »

Deutschland, Babylon Berlin and Dark are the holy trifecta of German TV with amazing production values.

I just started Deustchland '83 yesterday (first season is on Prime). It seems to have a brighter colour palette than I expected.