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.
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