Dark

A consistently engaging genre effort in its own right, employing unsettling production values and an enormous cast of well-drawn characters for a narratively splintered investigation into questions of fate and free will. ... Come for the surface similarities to Stranger Things, stay for the unique time-travel insanity.

Even when Dark is clinical in its set-up of these interweaving story threads, there’s still an incredible amount of energy coursing through the show.

It’s beautiful, mysterious, and a little bit maddening, and you’d want to take in every little second of the show even if it wasn’t in German with English subtitles, because every aspect of it matters.

Dark’s acting is serviceable, the musical choices questionable and the location shooting in Berlin is ominous. The jump scares are out of an ’80s slasher film and get tiresome.

Like other shows that invite the viewer to try to solve them, Dark suffers a bit in the humanity department. With so many characters, and such attention on how their identities and actions fit into the plot, there isn’t much room to truly get to know these people on a deeper level, at least not in the six episodes that I watched out of the ten total.

I grew initially frustrated at how little Dark was showing me about its characters and how little investment I was feeling in them, though the middle of the season produced some sympathy that I can't explain without spoiling the twists.

Where Stranger Things is deft, Dark is heavy-handed; where Stranger Things is well-paced, Dark moves at the speed of a dump truck lost in a bog; where Stranger Things' kids are likeable and funny, Dark's are sullen and sour.

The non-stop grimness of Dark strains both credulity and interest. Over the course of the three episodes I watched, Dark became both more complex and more easy to disengage from.