History, as you know, repeats itself twice: the first time – in the form of a tragedy, the second – in the form of a farce. And this farce is much more terrible than the original drama. And yet – let’s remember the source – not only great historical events are repeated, but also personalities. Great and terrible. About this – the experience of the past, the paradoxes of time, family secrets and attempts to rewrite history – the German series “Darkness”, the second season of which was released this summer. And if you have not heard anything about him, it’s time to fix it.
“Darkness” is not one of those series that you watch while looking at your smartphone: being distracted for a minute, you risk missing the storyline. Describing what happens in it is like retelling Wagner’s music: it is almost impossible, and it is not necessary, so we will limit ourselves to some introductory ones.
Time is our days (at the time of filming the first season of the series, in 2017, the near future). The scene is the fictional German town of Winden, gloomy and rainy. The main points on the map around which the plot revolves are the local nuclear power plant, an extensive system of caves and the surrounding forests. And, of course, the houses of several families are more closely related than it might seem at first glance.
Under the roof of one of these houses, the artist and father of the family, Michael, writes a suicide note with a clear order to open it in a few months and climbs into the noose. For his son Jonas, this turns into a serious psychological trauma, and when the teenager comes to his senses, new emergencies occur one after another in the city: the boys disappear. And, as it turns out, not for the first time: similar disappearances occurred 33 years ago.
“Maybe big things can’t be changed, but small things can. A grain of sand will change, and with it, the whole world.”
And as soon as it begins to seem to the viewer that the plot is about to turn into the mainstream of True Detective and the masses of series like it, time intervenes in the course of history. Like a giant wave, it brings terrible “greetings” from the past to the shore of the present. And from that moment on, it, the past, begins to be closely intertwined with the future, and too much depends on the choice that the characters make.
The intervention of time takes place quite literally: in “Darkness” there is an element of the supernatural, fantastic (the series was even dubbed a darker and more existential analogue of “Stranger Things”), and the viewer is required to limit concentration in order to follow what is happening, especially the parallels between the characters. But this element, by and large, is secondary. The main thing is family stories with all their crises, secrets and fears.
And yet – something suggests that this is relevant not only for Germany, where the series was filmed, but also for any country – the possibility of repeating the past in an even more terrible version. The countdown to the Apocalypse has already begun, and “perhaps the big things cannot be changed, but the small ones can. A grain of sand will change, and with it, the whole world.”
For those who watched the first season of “Darkness”
The release of the second season of the series two years after the first seems to be the only mistake that its creators made. The plot is complex and multi-layered, and in order to understand what is happening on the screen, most likely, you will have to revise the first “Darkness”. Or at least prepared by Netflix what happened two years ago. If there is absolutely no time for this, you can try to restore connections between the characters using one of the many developed by fans of the series.