Abstract
Netflix’s Dark is an interesting hybrid: It combines ultramodern aesthetics and atmospheric sound design that international audiences can relate to with a German small-town setting. As a ‘Family Science Fiction Fairytale’ (Beisel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2017) the show draws on traditional themes of SF when it introduces time travel as a central motif. But the time machines and portals do not lead to brave new worlds. Instead, the characters find themselves going to their own pasts and futures over and over again, stuck in the same place. Going round in circles, or as the show proclaims, in cycles of 33 years, the characters always return to the same fundamental problem of human existence: “We are not free in our actions because we are not free in what we desire” (S01E10). This chapter focuses on how the show relies on tropes of time travel in SF, for example in its depiction of the time machine(s) and its reference to problems of time travel as popularized by films and TV shows. This connection to international and transmedial SF forms a contrast to the small-town family narrative that is intertwined with (pseudo-)scientific discussions of nuclear energy and black holes. Referring to a structural principle and a central motif of the show, this chapter analyzes the concept of cycles in the context of a philosophical debate on determinism and fate that informs time travel and the family narrative.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The ten episodes of the first season were published on 1 December 2017. It was well received in Germany and with international audiences, mainly in the USA. In 2018, the show was awarded the renowned TV award Grimme Preis in the category ‘fiction’. The second season was released on 21 June 2019. The third and final season, which will not be analyzed in this chapter, was released on 27 June 2020.
- 2.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations of German text are mine.
- 3.
In her Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon (2013, 20) states that “adaptation is an act of appropriating or salvaging, and this is always a double process of interpreting and then creating something new”.
- 4.
Several reviewers comment on the addictive nature of the show and attribute it to the increasing complexity and the number of meaningful details which often turn out to be red herrings (cf. Beisel 2017), although it has been criticized as ‘overly intricate’.
- 5.
Hard SF usually refers to SF with an “emphasis on science and technology” (Baker 2014, 18).
- 6.
There are quite a number of recent television shows that revolve around time travel, for example the revival of Doctor Who (2005–), its Spin-off Torchwood (2006–11), Life on Mars (2006–07), Fringe (2008–13), Continuum (2012–15), Outlander (2014–), El ministerio del tiempo (2015–), Timeless (2016–18), Erased (2017), and Undone (2019–). For a more extensive list, see Nieter (2018). While many of these shows have a more episodic ‘case of the week’ structure (Nesselhauf and Schleich 2016, 134f.), Dark takes the time travel narrative to a progressive structure (cf. ibid., 127) of ever-increasing complexity and expanding historical scope. Time travel also plays a role in almost all long-running SF shows, the examples being too many to name them.
- 7.
The great number of characters and their complex interconnections are notorious. The Wikipedia page of the show provides several family trees. In the show itself, photographs of the characters are repeatedly arranged on walls to visualize the connections.
- 8.
English translation of the show provided by Netflix through subtitles.
- 9.
The association with Ariadne’s thread is supported by the fact that the cave scenes are alternating with scenes from a school play in which Martha Nielsen, Jonas’s love interest, performs the role of Ariadne (S01E06).
- 10.
The inscription is part of the so-called tabula smaragdina (emerald tablet). It is attributed to Hermes Trismegistos and considered to be one of the most influential texts in hermetic and alchemist traditions. It invokes a connection between above and below, beginning and end, microcosm and macrocosm (Seegers 2002, 37f.). Throughout the show, an engraving from Heinrich Kuenrath’s alchemist book Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Eternae (1609), containing the phrase “Sic mundus creatus est,” and the triquetra symbol are used as a visual catchphrase of the secret society Sic mundus who want to gain control over time travel.
- 11.
“Hätten Sie mir nicht gezeigt, wie der Apparat in der Zukunft aussieht, hätte ich ihn nicht so bauen können” (S01E10).
- 12.
See also S04E01 of Futurama (‘Roswell that ends well’) in which Philip J. Fry travels back in time to 1947 and accidentally kills the man he believed to be his grandfather—only to become his own grandfather. I am indebted to Ingo Cornils for pointing out this ironic variation of the grandfather paradox.
- 13.
The term ‘bootstrap paradox’ that Tannhaus himself uses (S02E03) is derived from Robert A. Heinlein’s novella ‘By His Bootstraps’ (1959b), in which the protagonist Bob Wilson is repeatedly confronted with his later selves but fails to recognize them. Time travel seems to be initiated by a mysterious ruler from the future called Diktor who uses his time gate to manipulate Bob Wilson to bring him to the future but seems to withhold information. In order to prevent Diktor’s schemes, Bob Wilson learns to navigate the time gate and travels to a time before Diktor’s reign. With the help of a notebook he found, he settles down in the future and jokingly calls himself Diktor. As the years go by, he realizes that the leader he has been waiting for will never arrive because he himself is, or rather, has become Diktor. ‘By His Bootstraps’ features two instances of the so-called bootstrap paradox: an object that has no clear origin because of a time travel paradox (the notebook) and a person whose development can no longer be understood as a chain of cause and effect (Gleick 2017, 230).
- 14.
Another example of a bootstrap paradox is the family history of minor characters Elisabeth and Charlotte Doppler that is uncovered in Season Three. Due to time travel paradoxes, Charlotte is both Elisabeth’s mother and her daughter.
- 15.
In S01 there are only three destinations of time travel: 2019, 1986, and 1953. In the last episode, Jonas 1 travels to ‘the future’ (S01E09) and apparently stays there for a few months, thus slightly contradicting the theory of only three connected points in time. S02 is set in 2053, 2020, 1987, 1954, and 1921, establishing new temporal reference points, indicating that time has passed between S01 and S02, but also expanding the scope of time travel destinations. Season Three introduces 1888 as a point in time in which some of the characters are stuck after having escaped the apocalypse in 2019. Furthermore, the final season explores the possibility of a parallel world (‘Martha’s/Eva’s world’) in which things turned out differently yet led to the same end result of imminent destruction.
- 16.
Tannhaus obscurely mentions the 33 miracles of Jesus and the 33 litanies of the angels; Jonas 2 remarks that the Anti-Christ is said to begin his rule at the age of 33 (S01E08).
- 17.
In 1953, Bernd Doppler is represented as an agent of change and progress, promoting the project of the new nuclear power plant, yet his family seems to be haunted by the recent past. While Bernd is walking with a limp (possibly a war injury), his wife indicates that her son is the result of rape, which may have happened during the allied advances in German territory in 1945.
- 18.
The aphorism also seems to evoke Einstein’s fascination with Arthur Schopenhauer’s denial of free will. In his Credo, the physicist wrote in 1932: “Schopenhauer’s words: ‘Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,’ accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me” (Einstein 1932).
- 19.
The print seems to be based on the illustration of the Copernican system in Andreas Cellarius’ Harmonia macrocosmica (1708).
- 20.
The necessity to sacrifice one’s own existence in order to allow the world to heal itself from the consequences of time travel is a leitmotif of the show. As such, it anticipates the final solution of the multiple worlds problem. In Season Three, Claudia Tiedemann discovers that the two mirroring worlds of Adam and Eva originate from a third world, in which the inventor H. G. Tannhaus built a time machine to prevent his family’s death by car accident. Together, Jonas 1 and the young Martha travel to the original world and save Tannhaus’ family. As a consequence, only the original world survives—all characters whose existence is a consequence of time travel cease to exist.
References
Assmann, Aleida. 2006. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: Beck.
Assmann, Jan. 2017. Ouroboros: Der altägyptische Mythos vom Sonnenlauf. In Never Ending Stories: Der Loop in Kunst, Film, Architektur, Musik, Literatur und Kulturgeschichte, ed. Ralf Beil, 58–63, Berlin: Cantz.
Attebery, Brian. 2013. Science Fictional Parabolas: Jazz, Geometry, and Generation Starships. In Parabolas of Science Fiction, ed. Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger, 3–23, Middletown: Wesleyan UP.
Attebery, Brian, and Veronica Hollinger. 2013. Parabolas of Science Fiction. In Parabolas of Science Fiction, ed. Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger, vii–xv, Middletown: Wesleyan UP.
Back to the Future. 1985. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, USA.
Baker, Brian. 2014. Science Fiction. Oxford: Palgrave.
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bazin, André. 1967. What is Cinema? ed. Hugh Gray, vol. 1, Berkeley: U of California P.
Beisel, Karoline Meta. 2017. ‘Dark’ hält nur zum Teil, was es verspricht. In Süddeutsche Zeitung, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/medien/dark-auf-netflix-dark-haelt-nur-zum-teil-was-es-verspricht-1.3772370. Accessed 15 August 2019.
Blank, Juliane. 2021. Katastrophe und Kontingenz in der Literatur: Zufall als Problem der Sinngebung im Diskurs über Lissabon, die Shoah und 9/11. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Broderick, Damien. 1995. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. London: Routledge.
Corner, John. 1999. Critical Ideas in Television Studies. Oxford: Clarendon.
Dark. 2017–20. Created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, Netflix, Germany.
Deutsch, David and Michael Lockwood. 2009. The Quantum Physics of Time Travel. In Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, ed. Susan Schneider, 322–34. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2009.
Crouch, Ian. 2019. In Praise of ‘Dark’, Subtitles, and Mind-Bending Time Travel Plots. In The New Yorker. 1 July, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/recommends/watch/in-praise-of-dark-subtitles-and-mind-bending-time-travel-plots. Accessed 11 June 2020.
Einstein, Albert. 1932. My Credo, https://www.einstein-website.de/z_biography/credo.html. Accessed 31 March 2020.
Ganz-Blättler, Ursula. 2018. Signs of Time: Cumulative Narrative in Broadcast Television Fiction. Berlin: LIT.
Gleick, James. 2017. Time Travel: A History. London: 4th Estate.
Heinlein, Robert A. 1959a. —All you Zombies—. In The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, 143–56. New York: Gnome Press.
Heinlein, Robert A. 1959b. By his Bootstraps. In The Menace from Earth, 49–115. New York: Gnome Press.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge.
Laplace, Pierre-Simon. 1902. A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Translated by Frederick W. Truscott and Frederick L. Emory. New York: Dover.
Lewis, David. 2009. The Paradoxes of Time Travel. In Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, ed. Susan Schneider, 310–21. Malden: Wiley.
Monaco, James. 1981. How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History and Theory of Film and Media. New York: Oxford UP.
Nesselhauf, Jonas and Markus Schleich. 2016. Fernsehserien: Geschichte, Theorie, Narration. Tübingen: Francke.
Netflix. 2017. Dark Aftershow. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/scFjLF2y6VM. Accessed 20 Jun 2020.
Nieter, Margaret. 2018. 42 Best Time Travel TV Series. IMDB, https://www.imdb.com/list/ls023648040/. Accessed 1 Jun 2020.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. The Gay Science. With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Nowak, Christine. 2013. Menschen, Märkte, Möglichkeiten: Der Topos Kleinstadt in deutschen Romanen zwischen 1900 und 1933. Bielefeld: Aisthesis.
Planka, Sabine. 2014. Einleitung. In Die Zeitreise: Ein Motiv in Literatur und Film für Kinder und Jugendliche, ed. Sabine Planka, 9–27. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Radebold, Hartmut. 2000. Abwesende Väter: Folgen der Kriegskindheit in Psychoanalysen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Rodenwald, Henriette. 2017. Die Zeit ist nur eine Illusion. Kino-Zeit.de, https://www.kino-zeit.de/film-kritiken-trailer/dark-2017. Accessed 6 Mar 2020.
Rusinek, Bernd-A. 2013. Atomkraft. In Angst: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Lars Koch, 331–41. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Schmeink, Lars and Simon Spiegel. 2018. Science Fiction. In Handbuch Filmgenre, ed. Marcus Stiglegger, 1–12. Wiesbaden: Springer, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-09631-1_26-2.
Schneider, Vanessa. 2017. Interview mit den Machern von ‘DARK’. BR Puls, https://www.br.de/puls/themen/popkultur/tv-serie-dark-netflix-interview-friese-odar-100.html. Accessed 31 Mar 2020.
Seegers, Ulrike. 2002. Transformatio energetica: Hermetische Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Von der Repräsentation zur Gegenwart der Hermetik im Werk von Antonin Artaud, Yves Klein und Sigmar Polke. PhD thesis, Universität Stuttgart; https://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/bitstream/11682/5244/2/seegers.pdf. Accessed 10 Mar 2020.
Stranger Things. 2015. Created by Matt and Ross Duffer, Netflix, USA.
The Terminator. 1984. Directed by James Cameron, USA.
The Time Machine. 1960. Directed by George Pal, USA.
Vint, Sherryl. 2014. A Guide for the Perplexed: Science Fiction. London: Bloomsbury.
Weisbrod, Lars. 2019. The Creators of Netflix’s Dark on Why Writing Time-Travel Stories Is Like Playing Jazz. Vulture, https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/dark-netflix-season-two-time-travel-interview.html. Accessed 31 Mar 2020.
Wells, H. G. 2003 [1895]. The Time Machine. New York: Bantam.
Wittenberg, David. 2013. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. New York: Fordham UP.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Blank, J. (2022). Going Round in Cycles: Time Travel and Determinism in the Netflix Show Dark. In: Schmeink, L., Cornils, I. (eds) New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction . Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95963-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95963-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-95962-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-95963-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)