I’m in the second episode now and may give up until I hear from others in this thread if it’s worth it.
Dark had IMHO been a fun ride but ended without answering many of the questions. It wasn’t a big enough payoff for the effort of keeping all those interconnections straight.
This so far almost seems like a self parody of the overly ominous stylistics. A letter signed “your brother”? Really? Someone swims from one ship to the other and the magical beetle is safely still unharmed in his open pocket?
My wife and I are four episodes in and our guess is below. I’ll spoiler box it even though it is a pure guess.
Virtual reality experiment? They aren’t in 1899 and this is not happening. Maybe the little boy is a computer program and the guy from the Prometheus is one of the scientists running an experiment.
Finished it, as has my daughter. Won’t spoil it. I’m starting watching again with my girlfriend, my daughter is watching again with her husband. Strongly recommend.
ETA: really wow. Never expected the twists. But maybe I’m slow.
I watched the entire thing today( perfect for a dark, stormy day).
I can’t say enough about the production value, with the exception of some of the wave/ storm CGI.
I see some here and elsewhere think it was a bit too slow and I can understand that. I enjoy that but even I can see how this could be considered a little too slow.
Without getting too spoilery, I went from completely engaged to lost the plot by EP. 6. Perhaps when more have seen it someone can clarify for me.
Even though it went a bit more sci-fi than I usually consume I really enjoyed it.
That’s about where Mrs. solost and I are at now as well. I think your spoilered guess is on the right track since at the end of ep. 3 they revealed the guests on the ship being viewed on a number of TV monitors. The B/W TV monitors and the wooden panel they were set into looked old-fashioned as well though, so perhaps some Steampunk-style virtual reality experiment?
Given the recommendations I’ve been sticking with it. Just finished ep 7.
It’s been fun enough in a goofy takes itself too seriously sort of way. Can’t agree with the strong recommendations though.
Her “father” reminds me of the father in The Umbrella Academy and the whole resets after they destroy the world again concept seems reminiscent too. Without the characters having powers of course. Or the overt comedy.
I like this show four episodes in and loved Dark. Though I found myself frequently hitting the pause button so my very slow brain could recap who was who in the scenes I was watching. I believe Dark went back in time for three or four generations with characters from later gens in the confusing mix.
A discussion thread at another board was very helpful in addressing my many, many questions. Many questions.
I’m on the 7th(of 8) episodes and it is a really good show, though I am now wondering if this is intended to have a second season or if this is a miniseries with just these episodes.
OK, so I finished it. I mostly liked it. I mostly understand everything about the plot. I will now share what I know and ask questions about what I still don’t understand.
At first I didn’t quite get what the deal was with Maura’s son. At one point she says to him “this is the only way we can be together”. Reading a spoiler site, I found out a key detail I had missed: Maura and Daniel’s son died and they uploaded his consciousness into a simulation, their first simulation, which was the underground bunker that was the simulated son’s bedroom or playroom. So the original point of the simulation was to be able to still be together with their son, at least a simulated version of him.
But I still don’t get what the whole deal was with the repeating simulation on board the seagoing ship in 1899. I get that, while Maura was in the simulation, and her memory had been blocked or erased, her brother Ciaran had taken over the simulation. So, apparently many of the 1500-odd passengers on the spaceship Prometheus were put into the same simulation and their memories were wiped as well, so that they actually thought they were seagoing passengers in 1899. But to what purpose? Some sort of social experiment? Maura’s father said at one point “they keep letting emotion get in the way and make the same mistakes”. He was as much a prisoner of the simulation as Maura, but seemed to have no memory loss and understand what was actually happening.
Apparently the first mate kills Eyck in the last episode, for real. Does that mean all the passengers who jumped overboard earlier in the show all died in real life as well, Matrix-style? Or was that just a “game over” for the passengers in suspended animation? Or were those passengers in the 1899 simulations not actually real spaceship passengers but the equivalent of “Non-Player Characters”? And what was the point of that lemming-like die-off when they all tranced out and jumped overboard? Was that a side effect of Daniel hacking the code? I don’t know if he had even started hacking by that point yet.
I’m not sure if I missed key details, or some of these questions may still be unanswered in season one.
That’s a shame. I didn’t enjoy it as much as Dark; I think it got a little too try-hard with the “mind-bending puzzlebox mystery” stuff. I still have questions as to what exactly was going on with the whole steamship simulation thing, which I don’t know if I missed the answer to or they were going to be revealed next season. But the reveal that they were on a spaceship might have made for an interesting season 2.
So I guess that means in the future just don’t bother with first seasons of original content, and instead look forward to season 5 of Star Wars: Cantina Band, about the ongoing struggle of five intrepid musicians to finally learn a new song.
I guess I’m in the minority but when I saw the end of the last episode, I just assumed that that was the end of it. I honestly thought that I had read (before the season even started) that there was only going to be 1 season.
As convoluted as “Dark” ended up being, I’m a little relieved that there’s not another season. But I eagerly await to see what the creators come up with next.
