Mid-20th Century Americana in Season Two of Umbrella Academy

Having finished Dark, a show that wove a meticulous and deadly serious, heartbreakingly bleak (even if there's a note of... not exactly hope, but a kind of redemption - I should write a post about it) time travel narrative, jumping into the brightly-colored, over-the-top Umbrella Academy is a nice sort of palette cleanser - some ice cream after a fancy dinner.

Umbrella Academy's first season left me with the following impression: this is fun, enjoyable, and also something I can't imagine ever becoming part of my canon of favorite shows. The show explodes with style - the art direction and overall tone is a dizzying thrill ride - but it never felt like it was saying anything that profound, its themes of adult imposter syndrome and the way that parents leave us scarred always seemed to serve the true purpose - which is the stylistic flourish.

But that can be fun, and the show, for all its flaws, was entertaining.

I'm now two episodes into the second season, and I can't say it's all that different. Interestingly, the sort of mid-century (which is going to become an outdated term in about ten or twenty years) aesthetic the show played with - especially in its evil "Commission" - now becomes not just style, but setting, as the dysfunctional Hargreeves family escapes the Vanya-induced apocalypse that they just sort of failed to prevent in the end of the first season by voiping back in time to the 1960s.

The various characters get scattered to different times that range from 1960 to 1963 in Dallas, with Number Five emerging the latest, just in time to see the Soviet army driving tanks down the road and fighting the US Army. We get one cool shot of each of the Hargreeves using their powers to fight the invaders (including, horrifically, Allison using her "rumor" to explode three dudes' heads, which feels like a serious upgrade over simple mind control) only for an older Hazel to appear and inform them that there are nukes heading for the city, so Number Five has got to come with him.

They pop in 10 days earlier, prior to the Kennedy assassination (one that, given a newspaper that reads "Kennedy Declares War on USSR" suggests was thwarted). So we once again have a ticking clock to prevent another apocalyptic event.

Naturally, the show is hinting strongly that they'll wind up stopping Oswald from killing Kennedy, only for this to result in nuclear war, though I wonder if that's a red herring.

While the others are trapped in 1960s Dallas for as many as three years, Number Five shows up only ten days before his original arrival, which means we have some catching up to do.

Luther is working as muscle for none other than Jack Ruby, the mobster who shot Oswald after he was arrested (and I believe died shortly thereafter as well, which has really fueled the conspiracy theories).

Diego is in an insane asylum after he tried to kill Lee Harvey Oswald shortly after he figured out when he was.

Allison is married, and to a charismatic civil rights activist named Raymond Chestnut, who is trying to organize a demonstration in Dallas to coincide with the presidential visit to draw Kennedy's attention to the evils of segregation. Clearly this plotline was written prior to the George Floyd killing and the protests that have followed (and the brutal crackdown on those protests that continues as I write this,) but it remains to be seen if this plot works well or feels tone deaf given the current national mood.

Klaus is still haunted by Ben, and essentially has Ben's ghost anchored to him everywhere he goes. And it appears that in this time, he's become some kind of hippie guru cult leader (a little ahead of schedule, if my understanding on 1960s culture is accurate,) apparently with some friends in high places.

Finally, Vanya gets hit by a car and loses her memory, living with a family outside the city, where she's formed a bond with Sissy, the woman who hit her with the car, that seems to be leading somewhere romantic (though likely to be hard to pursue in the 1960s).

So once again, Five has to reassemble his siblings. In the meantime, however, a trio of never-speaking killers from the Commission known only as The Swedes is coming after them. And in the meantime, the Hargreeves begin to suspect that their father, still very much alive in the 1960s, has something to do with the assassination.

Yeah, it's another time travel show, but dear lord could it not be any more different from Dark. While I really liked Dark (despite not liking the third season as much as the previous ones, it was like the first two were A-'s and the last was a B/B+ - nothing to be ashamed of) I think this is the perfect palette cleanser, and actually helps to show how the time-travel subgenre of sci-fi can really come in profoundly different shapes and sizes.

Partway Through Dark's Third Season, An Already Complex Narrative Gets Trickier

If you watch a show like Dark, you've made a deal with the creators of the show - you'll do your best to follow, and they promise that it will all make sense in the end. I haven't finished the series, but the third and final season takes the difficulty slider and kicks it up to 11.

One of the oddest things about Time Travel narratives is the notion of cycles. Instinctively, we want to put things in a certain order. If we see an older and a younger version of a character (as we do frequently in Dark, often interacting with one another) there are certain instincts that are hard to fight:

I'm going to just use character names here, which means it's spoiler time.

Why Are Time Travel Stories So Often Depressing?

I've been obsessed with time travel narratives ever since I was a kid, watching Back to the Future and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. But it's an extraordinarily tricky trope to really pull off, and so writers will often avoid it given the thorniness of its philosophical implications.

Naturally, what inspired this post is my recent watchthrough (I'm one episode into the third and final season) of Dark, Netflix's teutonic time travel television show. One of my favorite movies is 12 Monkeys, which is itself removed from the giddiness of Back to the Future or the exploits of Theodore Logan and William S. Preston. Fringe, the less popular but ultimately more satisfying Bad Robot project that followed Lost, delved into its own time-travel and alternate-universes (and alternate history on top of that - as a separate thing from alternate universes) in a way that was ultimately quite bittersweet at best.

I was thinking, though, about how things seem to get more dire and serious the more seriously you take the rules of time travel.

Of course, the "rules" of time travel are little more than our own theories on a hypothetical scenario. In the massive finale to what had come of the MCU so far (obviously they're not stopping the movies, but the "first era" of them is firmly over,) Avengers Endgame, they have fun by making fun of people who claim to understand how time travel works because of the movies they've seen.

Einstein showed us (though I leave it to the reader to decide if you understand it) that time and space are related, and that our terrestrial notions of things like simultaneity are actually just false on large scales - depending on your reference point, events occurring in the universe don't have to happen in the same order they do if you're standing somewhere else, as long as there's no causal relationship between those events.

Basically, the universe is profoundly weirder than it looks from a human perspective. A great analogy comes, if I remember correctly, from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, where he explains that a lion understands Newtonian physics on an instinctive level, because it helps her hunt her prey. But none of us have an innate understanding of relativity, or of quantum physics, because it's just not relevant at the scale at which our brains evolved.

I don't know if time travel as conceived of in science fiction is possible. It seems likely it isn't, if for the very fact that nowhere in history do we have any confirmed examples of travelers arriving from the future. It's a lack of evidence, rather than evidence against, but it leaves the likelihood low.

And yet, there's something very compelling about the notion of returning to earlier times. Indeed, it's rare (though not unheard of) for a time travel narrative to include multiple futures at different points. Typically, we see various points in history - in Dark, for example, we get 1986, 1953, 1921, and 1888 - but we tend to just get one view of the future - 2052 in Dark's case.

Narratively, the future tends to be terrible, and this sets up a motivation for our protagonist to fix it.

But many narratives avoid the future entirely. From a writer's perspective, this can make things easier because you don't have to worry about extrapolating what will occur any number of years, decades, centuries from now (for example, in our current state, I wonder if a decade from now America will be a fascistic hellscape or will have grown and fixed some of the problems that our current "leadership" has caused.)

As I see it, time travel narratives often come in two scales - the personal and the historical. We can actually look to Bill and Ted and Back to the Future as examples for these.

Bill and Ted ludicrously decide to kidnap various historical figures so that they can pass their history class and go on to be the founders of a future utopia (one of the rare cases of a good future in a time travel story.)

Despite their meddling seeming to potentially change the course of history, the narrative is more about the amusing fish-out-of-water nature both of these two doofy teens from San Dimas in other historical eras as well as these figures of history going to a (then-) modern mall before safely being plopped back in their own times, apparently never thinking to share their memory of this experience with anyone.

Time travel of this historical scale can lead to major repercussions - consider the alternate history book the Guns of the South (written by my dad's college roommate, actually) in which apartheidists from 1980s South Africa go back in time and give the Confederates AK-47s so that they'll win the war and not pressure South Africa to end apartheid. The entire history of the US is changed, but the time travel element of this story (as far as I understand) is more of a jumping-off point than an ongoing element of the story.

Either way, the stakes are less personal than global in this case.

Back to the Future, however, gives us a narrower, personal story. Marty McFly goes back to the 50s and inadvertently prevents his parents from getting together. Not only is his own existence at stake (though by what mechanism the ticking clock is ticking is, I think intentionally, a question that remains ignored) but he's basically creating the grandfather paradox.

But Back to the Future is far from depressing - it's a rollicking good time and a lot of fun (though as many have pointed out, how 1980s is it that the movie basically has a white kid invent rock and roll? I know it's more complicated than that, but still). So what of my thesis?

Dark is, perhaps in true German fashion, pretty depressing (they warn you about it in the title).

While the mechanism of the plot becomes more and more the show's focus over time - you could watch the first episode and not realize that it was even a time-travel show, but by the point I'm at, that's the whole thing - there is some thematic poignancy to be found in the use of time travel.

The 33-year cycle that the show (at least at first) uses to separate its time periods is sort of the perfect period of time for human nostalgia. When we are introduced to the world in 2019 (the show started in 2017, setting itself slightly in the future, which starts to look inaccurate once people are in the middle of 2020 with no masks on) we have a generation of adults with teenaged kids, but as we hop back to 1986 (my birth year, which is sort of a trip for me watching the show) we see those very same adults as the teenagers they once were.

Filled with trauma or peaceful happiness, our childhoods are crucially important to the way that we identify ourselves. Upsetting the way that works is a way to make a person feel untethered to their own self. (BIG SPOILER FOR SEASON ONE) So when one of our main characters discovers that his late father was actually his friend's little brother, having been lost in the 80s and getting back to 2019 the long way, it throws everything he thought he knew about himself into turmoil (not to mention the fact that the friend he's in love with is actually his aunt).

Invariably, the world when we are young appears simpler than it turns out to be - even a precocious kid who prides themself on having a nuanced view of the world will find that there are deeper problems and deeper complexities as they grow older (hell, the same is true for adults. I don't think I was quite aware how deeply rotten our police are as an institution until this year).

There's something melancholy about the idea of going back to the past, even as we yearn to do so. For example, I have a lot of nostalgia for the 1990s - a sort of triumphant period for our country, the decade after the Cold War ended but before 9/11, when it seemed obvious that progress would continue unabated (we had three Star Trek shows during that time, folks). Coming back as an adult would force me to confront some of the less pleasant aspects of that time, including rolling back the progress we've made as a culture in certain aspects, such as in fighting homophobia.

I also think that we sometimes forget the hardships we endured. Even if I have nostalgia for the 90s, I also remember that as a kid I was pretty unhappy a lot, feeling picked on in school and having a hard time establishing a real identity for myself.

Indeed, there might be bad things that we don't fully remember about that time, like parents who, over time, learned to be kinder and more empathetic, being reset to old ways.

And here is where the speculative-fiction type of existential angst - the fear of erasing yourself from the timeline, for example - meets a more real, more real-life version. By visiting the past, would we not then be forced to confront the notion that the past we imagined we came from was not as we remember it? Sure, we might not discover our father to be the gawky kid who goes to the same school we do, but in a similar way, we might find that the memory around which we built our identity is a false one.

There's a thing I heard about neurology, which is that every time we access a memory in our brains, we rewire the neural connections that are the recording of that memory, so each time we think of it, we are rewriting it. The consequence, then, is that the more we remember something, the less likely our memory is accurate. And if that's not a mindfuck, I don't know what is.

The truth is that the memories we have are only a copy that exists in the present. Time travel, then, suggests not simply recalling what it was like to be there, but to have the ability to form new memories from the same "master copy," aka actual reality.

So we have both an extremely appealing possibility (before we even get into the idea of fixing things that "went wrong" by changing the course of time) but also a terrifying notion that we might reveal our own memories to be false, the foundation of our identities and our sense of reality shown to be faulty.

Again, this is before we even get into the idea of whether time is a fixed course or if it can be bent (and the paradoxes that occur as a result.) In 2017, my mother died of cancer and a friend from college who was very important to me killed herself. If I had the capability, I'd try to prevent either from occurring (I'd hope that I could just go to my mom a few years earlier and say "hey, it's future me, get a hysterectomy asap") and obviously I'd also feel some responsibility to prevent larger disasters that go beyond my personal life's scope. And the potential obstacles to such tactics - an unchangeable timeline in which these tragic events are now simply foreknown - or just the unseen consequences of meddling with how things happen - worse thing happening despite good intentions - have the potential for angst.

Dark deals with all of these things.

Dark Season 3 Changes the Rules

Having bowled my way through the second season, I'm now on Dark's final season, and boy have things changed.

This is a very twisty, very complex show, and so I really think you'll be best off if you watch it yourself before reading spoileriffic content. I'm one episode into the third season, and the show has just jumped exponentially in complexity.

Let's go over it past the spoiler cut, shall we?

Dark is as Complicated as a Time Travel Story Needs to Be

Where to begin, when writing about Time Travel?

For instance, you could say that Dark begins with the disappearance of Mikkel Nielsen in 2019. But that's only the first event from our (and the show's) perspective. Because we are, currently, in roughly that time period (though holy crap does 2019 feel like a totally different world from 2020) and that's around when this show came out, it makes sense that that's our "normative year."

Such a concept is important when thinking about time travel.

One of the first stories that got me fascinated by time travel was Back to the Future, a rather silly but clever comedy about a modern kid going back in time 30 years and seeing what his small town was like when his parents were his age.

I was born in 1986, and Back to the Future came out in 1985, meaning "modern" was, at the time, 1985. In the second movie in the Back to the Future trilogy, Marty McFly goes forward in time to 2015, imagining a world with flying cars (no) and hoverboards (no... at least not in that way) and, well, just a very late-80s/early-90s version of what "futuristic" looked like. When 2015 came about, we all had a good laugh at the way that the future looked, but in the same way, any speculation about the future tends to wind up looking a bit silly. After all, even as meticulously put together 2001: A Space Odyssey was, there were some very clear errors made in making its predictions.

Another thing that is really kind of profound is the way that the "baseline, modern" timeframe in time travel stories ages. I mean, I wasn't alive yet, but was Huey Lewis and the News really the "cool music for cool teenagers" in 1985?

But I'm getting off-track here.

At least at this point in the first season (I've got one episode to go,) there are three key time periods. The way that time travel works in this world is that there's a sort of portal that takes people through 33-year cycles. I'm not sure if, had you left from 2011 instead, for example, that you'd wind up in 1978, or if the 3 periods that the show focuses on are particularly important, but we see people travel from 2019 to 1986, and then also to 1953.

It's interesting to note that Dark's Winden is a bit like Back to the Future's Hill Valley - a small town where people stick around. It's sort of odd, and maybe the consequence of having a more urban, or at least suburban upbringing, but I don't think any of my friends still live in the town I grew up in, and I don't believe any of my friends' parents grew up there either, so this sort of small-town sticking-around is a bit foreign to me.

Narratively, though, it helps, and boy do we need the help. Essentially, the show focuses on the Nielsen, Doppler, Tiedelmann, and Kahnwald families (can you tell it's set in Germany?) Because of its decades-spanning nature, we see old folks in 2019 who are children in the 1950s, raising their kids in the 1980s.

Of course, because this is a show about time travel, things get more complicated than that - with things like children and adults in the same time period who are actually the same person.

The disorienting nature of time travel lends the show some dramatic and horrifying moments as well, such as when an adult man assaults a child with a rock believing that far in the future, that child will be responsible for the death of his son.

This is definitely a show that encourages note-taking, or at least following along with a list of characters. Sometimes, the actual identity of its characters can be a spoiler, but just having a cast list with names can help sort out who is related to whom.

Structurally, time travel poses a very tricky problem for writers to work through, but it also gives us a lens to look at the way we perceive the past and each other. For example, a police officer who has become sort of cynical and rough around the edges in the 1980s, and is largely an antagonistic presence for the teenaged version of a character we know from 2019, appears as a diligent and disciplined young officer in the 1950s. Which version of this character is the real him? It's both.

And really, I think that the thing that's so mind-bending about stories like this is that it exposes how the way that we perceive time is itself sort of misleading.

Remember, in Back to the Future, the "present" is 1985. And when they made that movie, a future like 2015 felt totally in flux. But from our perspective in the future, the 30 years that passed between those times now feels locked in place, an immutable block of time.

It's one of the great philosophical questions (and also one for physics). Is the future any different from the past? Is the present unique in any way? And to be fair, my (layman's) understanding of quantum physics suggests that at a profoundly small scale, the universe is not deterministic, with probabilities that aren't actually resolved into binary "yes" or "no"s until we force them to do so.

One of the obvious questions raised by time travel narratives is whether there is such a thing as free will. Looser works like Back to the Future suggest that you can absolutely change the past, but that this will cause existentially terrifying consequences, but that on the other hand, if you get things close enough, things will snap back.

At least so far, Dark seems to exist in a world of stable time loops - essentially, any change you wright in the past was always part of it - that's what makes it the past. But this also suggests, then, that you are fated to do various things a certain way, whether you want to or not.

Frankly, I've always had trouble with the concept of free will on a metaphysical level. We do make decisions based on our personalities (which are determined by experience and to an extent genetics) and our stimuli. If we are to make "free" decisions, what, then, determines those decisions? If you argue that we do it based on our own moral character or what have you, isn't that just saying your personality? And if it's free of any influence at all, how is that not just random? Randomness doesn't seem like free will. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics doesn't sound "free" to me. Instead, I think that free will is an illusion born of our ignorance of how we will, in fact, act in the moment.

But just because things are illusory doesn't mean that they're worthless. Consider that solid matter is really just incredibly tiny specks of stuff held together in electrical fields. The actual parts of an atom that are matter are a profoundly small part of the whole, yet we see something like a block of metal and think of it as solid matter through and through.

In a sense, the illusion of free will is one factor that contributes to our exercise of will.

To move back to Dark, one thing that is really interesting to me is the way that time freezes certain things. Consider, for example, that you could explain the way that time travel works to a person. You might then travel back into the past and meet them, and any progress you've made in explaining the way it works hasn't even happened yet.

There's a moment in the show that is the exact kind of crazy time travel stuff I love, where someone from our time approaches a clock-maker in 1953 and shows him a book on time travel - that the clock-maker will write some time in the next 33 years, with a picture of his older self on the back cover.

This sort of "stable" time travel, in which changes to the past were always part of that past, allows for ontological loops - I don't think that the clock-maker plagiarizes himself, but it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility for the way this show works.

The show does clearly have a villain - or at least someone who appears quite villainous - and his ultimate aims remain mysterious. But there are also questions about the nature of reality and the existence of God.

Time travel is probably not possible, at least not in the way that we've imagined it fictionally. But true mastery over time does seem like it would be the ultimate superpower. One does almost wonder if the ultimate mystery of creation is the the universe is self-created.

And this has been thoughts after 2 in the morning.

Dark

I've been, very slowly, getting into the Netflix show Dark, which you might recognize from the screensaver on the PS4 or other similar device Netflix app.

There's a lot to take in, and I don't know that I'll be able to give even my usual brief rundown on the premise, but here goes:

The show takes place in a small (fictional) town in Germany called Winden. Seemingly well-off, the town naturally has its fair share of dark secrets and underlying problems. The thing that sets the plot off is the disappearance of a kid named Mikkel, whose father Ulrich is a police officer.

Something about the kid's disappearance is related to this odd cave that seems to lead under the soon-to-be-decommissioned nuclear power plant.

There's something mysterious, something sinister, and something vaguely sci-fi-y that's suggested by the end of the first episode, but the big reveal is a couple episodes later, when we discover that Mikkel, while alive and unharmed, has traveled back to the mid-1980s.

The show appears to be constructed very elaborately, as a good time-travel story ought to, and I have not gotten any sort of handle on how exactly everything is connected.

There are a lot of characters, and I suspect that as the show goes on, the relationships between them will grow more complex as the twistiness of time travel becomes part of the narrative.

Being an American at a Time Like This

I wrote a post with the same title on the day that the current president was inaugurated. Sadly, many of the fears that I hoped were paranoia have been vindicated. We're currently awaiting an election a few months away that provides a sort of negative hope - not that things will suddenly become great, but that they'll become less terrible.

A deadly disease rampages through our country as a result of a politicized culture-war narrative that seeks to downplay the gravity of the situation. Health, and basic survival have become a binary political issue. Because we are for protecting our neighbors by wearing masks outside, the other side chooses to be against it. While the rest of the world appears to be recovering from this deadly pandemic, our country sees record-breaking new cases, and a national leadership that feels it is knowing that fact, not the fact itself, that is the greater threat to us.

Today is the 244th anniversary of our nation's Declaration of Independence. We are always in a cycle of reckoning with this country's history. In early June, a restless and pent-up energy saw the beginning of massive protests against the impunity with which our law enforcement agencies kill unarmed people of color. There has come a certain cultural understanding, it seems, that this problem is deep-rooted. After all, the very man who wrote "All men are created equal" participated in the "peculiar institution" of slavery. Some, nay most, of our founding fathers were hypocrites - that's just an undeniable fact. A nation born to the ideal of liberty that contained within it the legally recognized practice of chattel slavery.

Progress has certainly been made, though it has always been paid for with blood. Another Jefferson quote is that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Unfortunately, this quote is often embraced by fascistic death cultists who fail to see that they are, in fact, the tyrants.

I have a deep love, and a sort of painful faith in America. My grandparents on my father's side were Jewish Hungarians who still lived there during World War II. The Nazis took them, and both of them lost their first spouses. My grandfather lost his first son, who was then only a small child, I believe only 1 or 2, when the Nazis murdered him. While my grandparents were profoundly lucky to survive the Holocaust, the Communist regime that took over was another authoritarian police state.

After the failed revolution of 1956, my grandparents risked everything to get out of the country with my dad, and two years waiting in Austria, they came to America.

And when they got here, they lived the American dream, working hard and saving up so that my Dad could go to a good college and eventually wind up a respected college professor at a leading international institution.

This country allowed my dad's family to dig their way out of the most dreadful situation and emerge with prosperity, safety, and peace. When he was sent at gunpoint to freeze and die in Russia as part of a forced-labor battalion, I doubt my grandfather expected he'd die peacefully at age 90 in a warm bed in Massachusetts.

America is, on paper, a champion for many things I hold dearly. The notion that all people are equal under the law, that the government serves at the peoples' pleasure, and that there are rights that the government cannot take away from you.

What I have come to understand, however, is that in practice the country has always been at best a partial success. It has failed people of color, particularly black and indigenous people. The impunity with which the police commit violence against these groups in particular (though not exclusively limited to them) is the very sort of practice that characterized the tyranny that my grandparents came here to escape.

When I think about how I grew up - when the worst things the cops would do is call your parents if you got in trouble - it's remarkable the kind of mirror-reality that my black countrymen know.

For all our groundbreaking ideas of liberty and equality, I don't feel that America spent all that much time at any point in history actually leading in that category. There is a cult of greed and white supremacy that is at times overt and yet often subtle and insidious, and it has always held the country back from fulfilling its promise.

That, really, is what I believe in. I have faith in the promise of America. It's one we continually, heartbreakingly fail.

There is some hyper-optimistic hope that in our current era, when the cult is at its most overt, that we will finally be able to exorcise its influence on us. I'm skeptical it will be that easy, and I have my doubts that we're even en route to a successful confrontation at all.

It is hard to be overtly patriotic, though I've felt that way since the Bush administration turned hyper-patriotism into a jingoistic cultural signifier for warmongering (at least that's when I first felt the symbolism was tainted) and this holiday, which is a celebration of this messy, self-contradicting but also beautiful country's birth, comes with some asterisks.

For the last three years, of course, it has also taken on a personal note of grief. Three years ago yesterday, my mother died of cancer. While I still hold, somewhat obsessively, that the 3rd is my day to grieve, she died only half an hour before midnight, and so officially her date of death is the 4th. My mom, who was not an immigrant, and had ancestors going back to the Mayflower, had pride in America, but that pride meant that she could not tolerate those who abused it - those like Bush, or our current unmentionable abomination. By the time he came into office, my mom was in the last few months of her life, and I think was, rightfully, more concerned with her own existential questions and the way she wanted to spend the last time she had with her loved ones.

I think now about how many people in this country are in a similar state, but even worse, because while my Mom had about a year and a half to prepare, and her disease did not prevent her from being close to us, the people dying of Covid-19 are forced to do so in isolation. It's heartbreaking that we, this country that prides itself on being so great, the greatest country on Earth, as we seem to hold as a national creed, has failed so miserably to handle this crisis.

If I celebrate this holiday and this country, I do so as a yearning hope that we will, one day, live up to the standard we set for ourselves 244 years ago.