DARK : 2020, A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX?

Dark was a TV show that was discovered by me in the end of the year 2017. At that time, the show did not have a global audience and probably catered to mostly the audience of Netflix Deustchland and to a few people like me who had made a simple search on the Google Search Engine "Popular German TV shows and movies." This was the first show by Netflix that was suggested by Google with an IMDb rating above 9, although it had just released very recently. 

I went into the show pretty much with no knowledge of the plot and soon I ended up binging the entire first season over a weekend. The intricate twists and turns in the story had me hooked and I felt very uncomfortable once the season had ended, because the cliffhanger in the last episode made me crave for the second season like a drug addict. I was so interested in this television series that I remember walking into my friend's hostel room and taking a pen and paper and explained her the multiple timelines, the incest and the concepts of time travel and the concept of time as a vicious loop . So now as the show is finally at its end, I would like to give a glimpse of the thoughts the show has left me with.

Dark explores the theme of time travel and how once certain events are set into motion and have already been predetermined by some future events, they are bound to repeat themselves in an endless loop for infinity. The show tells the story of four families - Kahnwald, Tiedemann, Nielsen and Doppler and how their fates have been interconnected due to multiple instances of time travel and many extra marital affairs and affairs had in different timelines. What makes the show even a better watch is the fact that the showrunners have actually taken into concern the debatable opinions of different quantum physicists and the hypotheses that exist amongst the scientific community regarding time as a dimension. There's also a YouTube video where a physicist had been interviewed regarding the themes of relativity and time travel that has been explored on the show, and her thoughts on the same were fascinating. As a biologist who has close to minimum knowledge on quantum physics, there have truly been moments in the third season that have been difficult for me to grasp. The concept of multiple parallel realities have been explored in Marvel and DC universe and now also in Dark. There are concepts where one nuclear apocalypse or the creation of a time portal is able to stop time and even though I think its close to impossible, the show also deals with interfaces between multiple realities which can lead to a character having chosen parallel paths at equal probabilities, and the death of any such character in one reality does not ensure their death in other parallel paths and such concepts are a beauty of the imagination when one explores possibilities of travelling through worm holes to other parallel worlds and time portals. I say this because such ideas have not been scientifically proven and hence allows the creators to use their own imagination to fill up the gaps. 

However some details have been very much spot on and accurate. Especially when it comes to time travel to the past. Mentions of German expeditions to Antartica to study ozone holes and also the newspaper clippings of the events of the Chernobyl disaster have been highlighted and it gave me delight to see that the showrunners paid equal attention to highlight such background historical details in radio broadcasts or newspaper articles when characters time travelled to the past. Other than the historical accuracy of the show, the other theme that gets highlighted again and again is the amalgamation of quantum physics and Biblical concepts of creationism. The entire concept of a creator who created time and split his world into two realities and also the creation of two people Adam and Eva as the guardians of that timeline and later on Noah to be the saviour of the timeline to ensure the survival of the anomalies caused due to time travel comes from the Biblical concept of Creation. The show basically hands over to a scientist in the 1970s the power to create a time machine which gives him the ability to create a different reality and hence the concept of man having enough power to play God. The show equally highlights the theme of dualism by bringing into conversation at every point how there's licht und schatten (Light and Shadow, or good and evil) and the characters have to choose a side. Although Noah is highlighted as an antihero in the first season his motives become clear (well somewhat clearer) in the third season very much as how the Noah who had taken animals onto his arc was misunderstood by humans but later on he turned out to be the saviour of life in its essence. There are also instances where it appears as if Adam and Eva seem to deceive everyone in the show (they are deceived by the Devil and humanity?) even themselves and are punished by a God which is none other than Time by having to go through the same pain and suffering again and again and not be able to escape the loop into something that the show calls Paradise. The son and daughter of God had to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the origin and atone for their sins.

Finally, the theme of family relationships. Let's not get into that because it ultimately does not matter, if you are your mother's daughter and your own grandmother at the same time right? It took me a while to see if the previous sentence is correct or not. Such time anomalies cease to exist if there is only a single world in existence and super intelligent humans do not try to play God. It leaves you with the thought that - What was the point of the entire show when the main characters don't even exist in the end? But it matters. The show highlights that there's a very fine line between wrong and right. It also shows that one cannot run from one's future once it has been determined. Time doesn't allow death if your path has already been determined. There are also loopholes in time loops very much like the break command in a never ending while loop while coding an algorithm. Overall the show opens up a conversation about time travel, worm holes, dilation of time in accordance to the theory of relativity and also certain concepts in theology. 

For these reasons, I have enjoyed the show and it has left me with the thought that 2020 really turned out to be the year of the apocalypse probably because a glitch in the matrix has been created by a time traveller.