'Dark' season two drops on Netflix
June 21, 2019
As the second season of the acclaimed series Dark drops on Netflix today, viewers will again be left to ponder the show's core premise: Can time travelers change the past?
Germany's first ever series on the Netflix streaming service created a global buzz after it premiered in late 2017. The complex narrative strands and rich variety of characters pushed the mystery suspense genre in a compelling new direction. As the US entertainment website Indiewire wrote in a review, there's "an incredible amount of energy coursing through the show … as it thrusts new characters and information into the fray."
Read more: 'Dark': First German Netflix series reinvents an old theme
Lynchian inspiration
It also helped that the series, rightly or wrongly, was often billed by critics as Germany's answer to Stranger Things. But Dark's eerie supernatural plot echoes a host of TV series including the legendary Twin Peaks, directed by David Lynch, which began with the death of a young woman in a forests near an isolated town, and the eight-part German series Das Verschwinden (The Vanishing), also from 2017 and also built around the disappearance of a young girl, this time from a small town in Bavaria.
With Netflix posting all ten episodes of Season Two online on June 21, fans will be wondering how the time-bending mystery will evolve. What is known it that it begins a few months after the first season and traverses the years 1954, 1987 and 2020. In the new episodes, the characters travel even further into the past — and the future — but always in the 33-year cycle.
Turning back time?
Jördis Triebel, who also stars in the highly praised German series Babylon Berlin, again plays the mother mourning the loss of her missing son, Michael.
But be sure the denouement will be highly complex, introduce numerous extra characters and leave many unanswered questions. As the series explores why Michael might have killed himself, it asks whether people might have behaved differently if they had met their future self. And whether time travelers can intervene in the past.
"Dark" is not just for lovers of physics and wormholes. It will likely demand, like few other series, the attention and imagination of the viewer.