This contains so many spoilers you may need to tighten your belts...
I suppose the best thing to do is get Dark out of the way. Mainly by real time blogging about it as I finish each season knowing that by the time I get to the end of the week and have finished it much of what you're about to read in these opening paragraphs is probably going to be bollocks, but as I make a point of this later you'll possibly understand my logic behind it...
Without wishing to sound like I'm dismissing out of hand something a friend said about this series, but Dark isn't 'weird' and it's especially not weird for the sake of it. On the contrary, it is labyrinthine and extremely complex - the apparent weirdness comes from the fact it deals almost entirely in paradoxes, which to anyone who might not understand the strangeness of paradoxes might seem weird.
In fact, while Dark is three seasons and 26 episodes long it's probably going to be the first 25 episodes that are the padding - the meat inside the sandwich. As it's a tale about paradoxes, nothing will be resolved at all until the final episode, if, indeed, there is a conclusion and the paradoxes simply don't reset themselves and the time loops they cause begin again. The reason I don't think that will happen is because there are certain characters in this - Jonas and Claudia to name two - who now know they're in a paradox, whether this is the first time the loop has happened or the umpteenth is the key issue here. If it's the latter then we might end up having a very unsatisfactory and frustrating finale.
What I find totally brilliant about this series is the fact that it's all up front; it isn't like an episode of Star Trek where it takes Data to work out they're in a paradox; this is about people who do things that simply fuck up the paradox even more, usually by finding out what is going on and thinking they can fix it. So we have people from different 33 year cycles wandering into younger or older versions of their own pasts or futures either trying to work out what's going on or trying to fix it and, of course, it just makes matters worse. To confuse matters, there appears to be some kind of doomsday cult that may or may not be responsible for the grizzly part of the story and also probably responsible for the creation of the portals into the past and future - although how they do/did that isn't clear and is only hinted at in the opening episodes of season two.
My biggest problem with the series is because it's in German, you spend a lot of time following the dialogue, which means that you kind of need a notebook to explain who is who in whatever timeline they're in - although to be fair, I don't know if it would be any easier if it was in English. I have some theories about it, but these have just become slightly murky by the addition of 1920 and 2052 to the equation - when it was just 1953, 1986 and 2019 it seemed neat and well tied up. I also think there are a bunch of red herrings, as I said last week, but because of the astounding writing I'm no longer sure that everything isn't connected - after all, one of the characters has already said, a number of times, that it's all interconnected so even the 'human interest' bits, the fleshing out of characters, might all be relevant in the grand scheme of things. However, the number of paradoxes at play here have just made this such an addiction for me.
I have to admit that as a fan of the entire concept of time travel stories there have been times in the episodes I've watched so far where I've almost punched the air in elation and astonishment. It's a quite remarkable and, at the moment, unique approach to the entire genre. However, I'd just like to say I think I've sussed it out; I think I know how this will be resolved or at least how it will ultimately be resolved and what specific incident was the cause of all the paradoxes. I don't want to say because a) I might be wrong and b) if I'm right then it will spoil it for others and c) people who have seen it might tell me I'm right therefore possibly spoiling my enjoyment of it...
[2 days later]
Anyhow... Disregard what I said in the opening paragraph of this blog; Dark is weird. I didn't think it was but after season two - which we watched over two days and nights - I'm no longer even sure that it's got a simple explanation. I do believe that I'm right with my theory about how it ends, despite being constantly told - in the series - that my solution won't work any more, but it does start to get a wee bit strange about half way through.
Hannah Kahnwald - the mother of Jonas and wife of Michael who is also Mikkel - is a raving psychopath and arguably the loose cannon in this series. The wife thinks she might be the key to the conclusion because she's arguably the only character that isn't following the time loop but pursuing her own agenda. There are at least three different Jonas's, except they're all the same one and I'm not convinced any of them are sincere, some might be misguided and at least one of them is stark raving bonkers. Considering Jonas's mother is Hannah and his father is also the brother of his girlfriend, who is also his aunt and her father is Jonas's grandfather you'd think this was weird enough, but no, this doesn't even come close to fucking fucked up.
Charlotte - the chief of police is Elizabeth's (the deaf girl) mother, but by the end of season two we also discover that Charlotte is also Elizabeth's daughter by Noah who we all thought was a serial killer but might actually have been a half decent chap had he realised what a psychopath Adam aka Jonas would become; just the fact we have a character who is both the mother and the daughter of the daughter who is also her mother and ... BOOM! Mind blown...
Then there's Clausen who arrives in Winden to investigate all the disappearances but is also investigating his own personal tragedy as his brother disappeared 33 years prior to this and the head of the nuclear power plant has adopted his brother's name and he's married to Regina who is Claudia's daughter and Claudia is the White Devil - Adam/Jonas's enemy - who is killed by Noah, who then regrets doing it as he starts to realise that anyone with the surname Kahnwald (apart from Michael/Mikkel, but he's really a Nielsen) is absolutely fucking barking mad.
Meanwhile, Ulrich Nielsen is stuck in 1953/4 and is believed to be a murderer of young boys - all killed by Adam/Jonas and Noah (who just happens to be a pastor) and his son is trapped in 1986 and living with Ines Kahnwald who is about as mad as her own daughter-in-law and the weirdest thing? Everything I've told you or given away doesn't even scratch the surface of this series. I'll tell you who I feel sorry for, that's Egon Tiedeman, Claudia's father and Regina's grandfather because he just about works out what's going on before being accidentally killed by the person who is there to try and stop him from being mysteriously killed...
Do you remember the comedy from the 1970s with Billy Crystal called Soap? That had a strapline, 'Confused? You soon will be.' Well Dark is as confusing as I hinted at in earlier reviews and then some. Seriously, if you haven't seen it and you have Netflix, don't be put off by the subtitles (you can get a dubbed version apparently), just watch it and feel your mind get blown to smithereens.
[A further 2 days later]
Meanwhile in Germany (and it's alternate world counterpart)...
We're in the home stretch of Dark and you could argue that I should simply wait until tomorrow to write and conclude this review, but what's the point of that? I mean, we all enjoy a running commentary; don't we?
Let's put it this way, a lot of things have got to happen in the final three episodes for this to make any kind of sense at all. If anything season three has stopped blowing my mind and become somewhat... tedious. There just seems to be too much going on and the end of season two threw a spanner into the work - big time. Up till then this was a fascinating and crazy time travel story full of paradoxes and then we appeared to be introduced to another world - an alternative Winden, in a slightly different universe, with mostly similar characters but with some notable exceptions.
What made series one and two so brilliant was this concept of a character that only existed because of something that happened 17 years after his birth but created a paradox that allowed him to be conceived and born only to discover that his father was actually his girlfriend's brother who disappeared back into the past, who grew up to have his own life and family while keeping his own secrets hidden - and trust me when I say that what I've told you is probably how the series was originally sold; it might be a spoiler, but by the time you get to series three it no longer seems to matter.
Now, as well as having a 1921, a 1954, a 1987, a 2020 and a 2053, we also have an 1888 and things don't become more clear they become murkier and very grey. Just who is the villain here, is there a hero and who are the three people - all the same but from different parts of their histories - going around killing off characters, who may or may not be able to prevent this whacky time loop from happening? Is it/are they the child of alternative Martha or maybe they're the child of the clockmaker's son and daughter-in-law who disappeared without a trace when the parents were killed in a car accident?
We're going to conclude watching it tomorrow - which according to time means nothing to someone who's reading this; I mean, tomorrow is a relative term. What I will say about this is that time is linear and if today is the 5th of January 2023, then if you travel back in time 33 years it can only be to the 5th of January 1990. If you want to travel back to the 4th of January 1990, you have to travel back to the 4th of January 1957 and then wait 33 years and the same applies if you're going into the future. This may or may not have something to do with anything, but it makes the concept of time travel a very fixed thing and one that you can't simply play around with; so you can't travel back in time, fail to achieve what you set out to do and then try again - linear time doesn't work like that...
[A day later]
Dark could easily have outstayed its welcome, especially as the final season felt like it was all over the place at times, but when you're juggling numerous timelines, various incarnations of the main characters and all of the paradoxes, which in the end might not have been paradoxes at all, it's not surprising.
As we entered the final three episodes, I really hoped that it would start to make some sense, but the two episodes before the finale just seemed to make everything very... dark and not in a menacing way. It wasn't until the final episode that things started to make some sense, but when I say 'sense' even I'm not sure what I mean.
For starters, I was 100% completely wrong about my theory, which involved preventing Mikkel from staying in 1986 and bringing him back to 2019 so that he didn't stay long enough to end up fathering Jonas. It became quite clear that what I thought was a red herring - even if you change the past the future already exists so nothing will be changed - wasn't at all, given that the younger versions of certain characters simply could not die - there's a massive ongoing clue there that like, say The Sixth Sense, makes perfect sense once you understood what was going on. But my theory had been pretty much blown out of the water by the time the idea of multiple worlds became an issue. That said, the only element of deus ex machina in it is the fact that a subplot that almost looks shoehorned in ends up being the thing that causes everything, but once you understand the relevance it makes sense - not perfect sense, just sense.
Making the series about two people, ostensibly, was inspired if a little grating and what actual red herrings there were all got exposed in the closing episodes, although some of them seemed quite pointless or undeveloped, even if they were just ciphers for other things to happen. Ultimately, the ending was about one of the peripheral characters who had featured a lot throughout the story but didn't actually seem to be part of it and without giving too much away this character was instrumental [ahem] in all of the worlds' explored.
Was it a fulfilling finale? I'd have to say, yes, probably. I had issues with it that I can't really discuss without giving too much away, but if in the end some of the characters ceased to exist in the 'real' world, how come others did - specifically Claudia's daughter Regina if Claudia didn't exist... The thing is, all in all it was satisfying and incredibly well made considering the multitude of strands, timelines and concepts at play. It seems fitting that the entire series was actually about trying to prevent something from happening and it concludes with preventing something from happening that was simultaneously unrelated to but all about the actual story.
We were going to follow this up by watching 1899 because it's by the same creative team, but on discovering that it won't be getting renewed for a second season (it was only planned to be three series in total, like Dark) we have opted not to bother. I'd still urge people to watch the series, the second season alone is probably one of the greatest single seasons of a TV show I've ever seen because it never fails to blow your mind in almost every single one of the eight parts. This is still probably one of the most fulfilling TV shows I've ever watched, even if it made my head hurt.
***
Well, if I didn't know what was happening in Dark then I'm also clueless about Doom Patrol as we reach the half way point of season four. What I do know is that in this weird TV world of DC's oddest comic book we've reached the point where Grant Morrison's ultra-strange DP arrives, except it obviously doesn't because we've had three and a half series so far...
When the bonkers Scottish writer was given the chance to turn an oft failed superhero comic into something altogether different, it went from a straightforward DC superhero comic to became one of the leads in the Vertigo imprint and that happened in the four-part story arc called Crawling From the Wreckage. Obviously we're well into the lives and adventures of the TV Doom Patrol, but this current season is a loose adaptation of the story that defined this incarnation. Think of DC's original Doom Patrol as a bit like Marvel's X-Men (some similar creators were involved as well at times) - a failed concept that was reinvented and became huge... Except Doom Patrol never became huge.
I've struggled to like this series since the first season - as mentioned in previous blogs - but I saw some redemption in last week's episode that suggested the stupidity was being replaced with the weirdness that made season one so enjoyable; the problem is the baggage of the last three and a half series has reached overload and while this might be deliberate it's also really annoying and while Immortus and his Scissormen might be the biggest threat the team has faced so far, I'm beginning to think that maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if the villain won and that world was plunged into whatever vision he/she/it has planned for the it.
I think the problem DP has is it's very reliant on the past and you need to have a good memory to remember all of the references, characters and little clues left behind - that would normally be the sign of excellent writing, but this doesn't hold my interest the way most other shows have. This season's big bad and subplots all seem to be focused on things that have already been hinted at, which suggests to me that Dorothy's cameo episode is going to be relevant because she'll probably be this season's deus ex machina - as she is extremely powerful and she's on her way back to the mansion to hook back up with her dysfunctional 'family'.
I'm wondering if this show will see a fifth season. Most of the characters are dislikeable and only Larry seems to have a heart - literally and metaphorically - and even that has been sacrificed in aid of something I can't quite relate to. I appreciate I'm being vague and that isn't because I want to avoid spoilers, it's more to do with the fact that I probably haven't been as invested in the show as I once was so I'm slightly confused about where it's going, but Cliff, Jane, Rita and Victor are all just angry shouty people and while the addition of Michelle Gomez as Madame Rouge hasn't been a bad thing it hasn't exactly done anything to further the story. It just feels like a rambling mess now, whereas Grant Morrison's comic at least had a direction and for all its weirdness stuck to that direction and made some sense by the end of his run.
I'm simply no longer enjoying this show; it needs some kind of major overhaul.
***
There was a moment about 20 minutes into the third episode of 1923 when I started to wonder what it was all about. We have this nostalgic look at Montana in the USA 100 years ago with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren being old and parental, while their son/nephew is off having a wild adventure in colonial Africa and attracting stunningly beautiful socialites. In Montana, there's some soft focus love making and someone selling new fangled washing machines and refrigerators just to prove that we're actually in the 20th century and there's the feud between the cowboys and the sheepherders, but in terms of actual drama it's been quite tame, almost lame.
Then Spencer, in Africa, and his debutante love interest get pounced on by a rogue bull elephant and from that point on it goes full tilt into action adventure before switching back to Montana where the Dutton family's day out in the local town/city suddenly telegraphs us the fact that something is going to go horribly wrong when Ford tells his team of cowboys that they won't need an escort on the way home because the cowboys are out front and they're likely to run into trouble first. I mean, if you want to make the obvious bleeding obvious just do that, why don't you?
From that point on you start to wonder just whose show this is and whether your big names are just the draw to get you into the series. I will say this about it, from the midway point of this episode you suddenly want to know what's going to happen. What has been a pedestrian but very well made series so far has taken off and now promises to be intriguing.
***
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is a lot of fun, even if you somehow feel a little cheated by the end of it. It's really a film in two halves - everything up to as point is the first film and everything after it is the first half explained from the point of Benoit Blanc and his unexpected 'assistant'.
Edward Norton is an Elon Musk type billionaire who every year gets his five best buddies together for a weekend of hijinks and fun and games; this year it's a delicious murder mystery on his island in Greece where his pals have to work out who 'killed' him. His pals are a group of people who all got friendly before Ed became rich and famous - at a bar called the Glass Onion and then helped all of them become rich and famous in their own way. There's a social media misogynist, an influencer with a line in dodgy sportswear, a politician and a tech wizard and there's the woman who brought them all together but then got fleeced and shafted by all of them looking after their own interests; add in a couple of assistants and a walking talking red herring who has little or no explanation and is there as nothing more than a comedy distraction and you have the perfect set up for a proper crime to be committed.
It's all very up front and in your face, more so than the original Knives Out film, and like any great Agatha Christie mystery all the clues are hidden in plain sight. Ed Norton's billionaire is a buffoon and as thick as pig shit, which means Benoit pretty much sees through him very quickly and there's a fortuitous twist half way through that neither he or us saw coming and a riotous ending that leaves you with that feeling of being cheated I mentioned at the beginning; but it is satisfying and has a few neat twists and a little bit of karmic redemption.
It's a fun film with lots of larger than life and sexy people in it; fabulous settings, great sets - including Norton's very own fantastic 'glass onion' and is dripping in the kind of cash you'd expect from an Elon Musk type dickwad and I'd probably recommend it for that alone.
***
Next time... I have a number of TV series lined up: The Rig, The English, Wednesday and Blackbird, as well as Chernobyl, which while now a few years old is one of the highest rated shows of all time according to both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. Then there's a bunch of films... 13 from the last 18 months and a further 20 from as long ago as 1976. Obviously I won't be reviewing them all as there isn't enough time...
However, here's an interesting thing (or at least I found it interesting); there's a meme floating around with a list of 150 top rated TV series from 2000 (including ones that started in the 1990s but finished in the 2000s) and you have to tick the amount you've watched; several of my friends have scored in the 30s and one in the 40s, so I had a go and mine was just 25, which surprised me a little because we often think we watch too much TV. Perhaps we do, because this list of shows doesn't include things we watch every week when they're on, like Only Connect, Pointless or QI or news programs, some sport or documentaries.
The thing I was taken with was out of the 150 'top rated' US TV shows of the last 25 years, it was the 125 we haven't watched or didn't stick with because almost all of them still don't appeal. In my list of 25 there were at least 3 series we maybe watched the first season of and never went back to it - The Good Place is a perfect example; it was okay but not okay enough for us to want to sit through two more seasons. I know a few of my friends who absolutely adored it and couldn't understand why we didn't stick with it, but equally we've watched some things that others have given up on.
"Why don't you watch much British TV?" asked a friend recently; things like, say, Happy Valley or The Bodyguard or any number of top rated homegrown hits and I can't really give you a definitive answer; possibly because I always feel that British TV struggles to hold my attention because there is a distinct difference between US and UK styles. That's not to say I don't watch British TV dramas and comedies, I just don't seem to want to be drawn into the hype of certain things. During the 90s, everyone was watching Lynda La Plant programmes and none of them interested me in the slightest; I suppose it boils down to what I fancy watching, which might explain why I had so few US series listed in the first place.
As a mate of mine - who probably watches more film and TV than anyone I know often says, it's all down to taste, innit?
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