TV Review: Dark Season 3 (2020)

Dark Season 3 (2020) created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese

As if things were not complicated enough on this show, an alternate reality is introduced quite early in this season. Another world has all the time travel and scheming and heartache, but no Jonas. The one moment of time travel where a character goes back from 2019 and winds up as the father of Jonas does not happen. So the set of characters has almost doubled and their lives are somewhat different. The new world has a lot of mist and different hairstyles, so viewers have plenty of clues for which world they are seeing. The cross-reality interaction makes for even more interesting (and confusing) drama. The old folks, Adam and Eva, are still trying to manipulate events to what they think is their advantage, though even that falls apart under the weight of what's going on. I don't mean to be cryptic or unclear, that's just the way this show is.

Intellectually, the show is very ambitious. It deals with the inherent problems with time travel--paradoxes loom large, coherent narrative is in peril, characters intentionally lie (though sometimes they are genuinely mistaken), and viewers can wind up in just as much confusion as the characters they are watching. Toward the end, a character says that what he knows is just a drop and what he doesn't know is an ocean. Reality is far too big for any one person to grasp, let alone try to control. Such ambitions are the path to madness and destruction, even when one is trying to save sanity, people or the world. This insight is very important and easily forgotten. The characters do express some metaphysical nonsense, like being trapped in an eternal cycle of repeating events but that is easy to write off as their limited worldview. I was worried during the last episode that the show creators couldn't bring all the shaggy bits of the plot to resolution. They do find an ending that is satisfying and results in a better world.

The production values remain high. The special effects look good. Each episode in this season has a song montage toward the end which is used very affectively in the final episode. The series looks and sounds great.

Recommended.