screenshot from Dark

It has taken great self-control not to watch both seasons and all 18 episodes of Dark for a third time. First, I watched the dubbed version. (Avoid that.) Then I watched the original German version with English subtitles. Altogether a much better experience. It took me over two weeks and given my advancing years, I held out against wasting time by perennially repeating this experience.

“Time is always with us. Time sees everything”

(Yes, you can. Go to options and opt for the original German as the language and English subtitles. Don’t have options, you’ll have something like it, the same place where you can opt for closed captions. Never did that? You have a whole new world of experience to discover. You will even be able to understand The Wire afterwards.)

Initially, I couldn’t understand Dark’s complexity. (Face it, kid, ultimately you couldn’t understand it either.) It starts with the disappearance of a child in 2019. Well, no, it starts with the suicide of a 43-year-old man in 2019.

Four different families find themselves in tumult: the Kahnwalds, the Nielsons, the Dopplers and the Tiedemans. But wait, another child disappeared 33 years before in 1986. From the same family – the Nielsons. Policeman Egon was so ineffectual at solving the mystery that Ulrich Nielson, brother of the disappeared boy, has become a policeman in order to do better. Now his son is missing.

The town of Windem is set in the midst of a great evergreen forest, but rising from its centre, far from the red tile roofs of the tidy houses, is one of Germany’s first nuclear generators. Snugged up to the guarded perimeter of the plant is a cave, which all the children are warned against, so, of course, it is a child magnet.

Windem, we are told repeatedly is a town of secrets. Initially, these secrets seem to be adulterous, but then again they could be ecological or incestuous.

Why is there a door in the cave that is welded shut? What does Sic mundi creatus est mean? And, whoops, why has another and another person vanished? Who is the man dressed like a priest, lurking near the cave and chatting with children? Why does the body of a boy dressed in 1980’s clothes and dead only 16 hours suddenly appear? What is this book that keeps surfacing – Eine Reise durch die Zeit – A Journey Through Time? Could there be such a thing as time travel? Could the question be not ‘Where is Mikkel?’ but ‘When is Mikel’?

Is Charlotte Doppler, Winden’s police chief, the key to these mysteries?

Then we find ourselves back in 1986, same town, same school, same nuclear plant, same people, just younger.

So you have home work. Get well into this series because I need to keep writing about it and there will be spoilers.