Dark: All the Time Travel Bases

Well, Dark on Netflix - which I binge-watched (all ten episodes over the past few days) - certainly covers all the bases, i.e., chestnut paradoxes, of time travel, including -

1. A grandson goes to the past to rescue a lost boy, whom everyone thinks has been kidnapped or worse, but the grandson realizes has been taken to or slipped into the past.  But the grandson learns that the lost boy is really his father, who stayed in the past and became his father.  And he's told (by someone more versed in time travel) not to rescue the lost boy, because that would result in the grandson ceasing to exist. And, just for good measure, the father of the lost boy, also (of course) the grandson's father, is running around in the past trying to find/save his lost son, too.

The present in Dark, by the way, is 2019.  The past is 1986.  And there's also some action in 1953.  All three are tied together by 33-year luni-solar cycles (Google it).  The three characters, in case you'd like to know their names, are grandson Jonas, kidnapped boy-father (of Jonas) Mikkel, grandfather-father Uhlrich of lost boy (Mikkel).

So, for starters, that's a pretty nifty presentation of the grandfather paradox - or, better, an attempt to avert it.

2. Uhlrich thinks he knows who kidnapped or killed Mikkel (he doesn't know Mikkel lived in 1983 and grew up), and tries to kill the kidnapper/killer.  It's a harrowing scene, but a powerful rendition of what would you do if you could travel back in time and kill Hitler as a boy?  (And, by the way, Dark is a German series with English subtitles).

3. And just for good measure, before the ten episodes are finished, Jonas has a crucial conversation with his older self.

And there are lots of other well rendered time travel gambits, with knowledge from the future influencing events in the past, to the point of bringing that future into being.  Dark has been compared to Stranger Things.  But other than lots of scenes of boys on bicycles, the two have little in common.  Instead, Dark looks to me to be up there as one of the finest time-travel series on television.


 

It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...