‘Dark’, a Netflix original made in German is perhaps the best work on time travel till date and will be regarded as one of the finest works on Science Fiction in the world. It plays with your mind, tricks your grey cells, teases your memory, and literally torments your belief system. And behind every eerie event shown in this 26 episode long series is a theory of science. Even though it has been categorized in the Horror genre by Imdb, it is practically an actual portrayal of scientific phenomenons perfectly blended with the highest level of imagination possible.

What happens when the events of life are repeated in a 33-year cycle and people are transported back and forth through a wormhole is the main subject of this mind-boggling series. The premises is wide and the experiments are ambitious. The characters shown in their mature ages have so much resemblances with their young age counterparts that you will simply be taken aback. The best aspect of the series is that it never tries to distinguish human characters as good or bad. It is the situation that makes them so or the belief system they have been raised in. Almost every character has a dark shade or secret in the show and at the same time, almost every one of them barring a few has positives as well. This makes ‘Dark’ so intriguing, complex and fascinating.

Since my childhood, I have been wondering what if we could break the dimension of time and could travel to the past or the future at will. What if we had the power to go to the past to change the course of the future that is the present. A lot of things could be repaired. This show takes this challenge of experimenting with this less trodden path and delivers something which remains alive in your brain hours or days after you have finished watching it. It has subtly raised a question that even if we could go back to our past and try to change one or two events, life would pay its price in a bigger way as time, life and the events are all interwoven like a spider web. To get back one in the course of time you must sacrifice another.

I would go on, on and on with the complexities so lucidly shown in ‘Dark’ . Every actor even the children have done marvelous jobs. As I have already said, all the characters have been developed with utmost care revealing their inner demons and the sleeping Gods. It is this struggle of evil and good that makes it so poignant, so very realistic and so much cerebral. At one point you start hating Ulrich, the very next moment when you see his vulnerabilities, you realize he was a victim of the situations or a slave of ‘Time’. The character of Helge even with all its negative activities has a positive part to play when the time was appropriate. The evolution of Mikkel and his relation with Jonas is so much complex, you will be left awestruck. Every single character has been developed with patience, time and utmost care.

The series has three seasons with season one having ten episodes and the rest two having eight episodes each. The plot takes time to develop. This is not like your ordinary cat and mouse thriller where even after the completion of the show, you do not have enough ideas about the characters. ‘Dark’ explores every character it has, gives enough screen time to each character crafted, shows their outer gloss and inner flaws, and makes them so real that you almost start living in their time. The pace gradually picks up as the series progresses and in the end, you actually start believing in the dualism of existence. To learn how to make a family tree, this show can be of great help. So you may need to sit with a pen and paper if you really want to connect the missing links. The only negative aspect, if it may be called so is the change of scenes between the interconnected stories is a bit fast-paced and it does not stick to one character for long. But that was a necessity as there are so many interwoven sub-plots therein. The background scores create such an eerie milieu that you will be horrified in certain scenes even without any ghost appearance. The interluding music is scintillating, too.

Overall, I would give it 10 out of 10 and take my words, in my whole career of reviewing, I have hardly given full marks to a maximum of ten works so far. If you do not watch ‘Dark’, when you die, you will be leaving this world without being witness to one of the finest works on science.

Available on – Netflix

My Rating- 10 out of 10.

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