2x04 The Travelers

What I find so compelling about Dark isn't just the veiled allegory for fascism and evil lurking behind society--although that's interesting. I love how the show pulls from a multitude of references, combining what has worked for other shows and films and making something unique from it. The first season was billed and marketed (at least in the US) as "Netflix's German Stranger Things. The further into this show I get, the more interesting of a selling point that becomes. Not just because it's not really true, but because it seems so aware of people having it as a point of comparison. There's similar elements--80s setting (although only partially here), children banding together, a veiled group behind the scenes covered up by an energy-related industrial complex--but for everything similar, the execution could not be more different. And I'm not even talking only about the time-travel versus monster stuff. Tonally, too.

Each show feels to be a product of it's country. Each show has something to say about the place it's produced. Stranger Things is more a twisted love letter for what we perceive as a period of American excellence and a subtle critique of how that period probably had more issues than we think of it. It's done in a very heavy allegorical context, aside from the whole governmental cover-up business--very similar to Hollywood Blockbuster filmmaking. There's the classic Stephen King paranoia about child disappearances, the small Anytown, USA vibe, etc. etc. It works well for the type of show that it wants to be, even if the later seasons have to radically change its tone to keep up with the rapidly expanding premise. There's some growing pains, but they're manageable.

Dark, however, seems to match its allegory with it's tone and subject matter. It's about paranoia on a more mass scale because the evil isn't just lurking within Winden, it's lurking within it's own citizens--and it only becomes more insidious as we learn that different characters are the same person, just at different times. It's scary to think that you can't trust yourself because you see what you will become. This slow, twisty, methodical burn of a sci-fi concept is as much about Winden as it is about cold-war fears and German history itself. It's really quite stunning.