The complex plot begets lessons that lend themselves to adaptation into daily life.

By Claire Ferris ’21

Back in March, I wrote about turning to a familiar source of comfort – Netflix – during trimester breaks. At the behest of my unrelenting yet endearing friends, I had embarked on a journey through the popular comedy series The Good Place, and, in addition to becoming (arguably) my favorite TV show, it had encouraged me to think profoundly about its philosophical teachings and how they can be applied to daily life, and more specifically, life at CA.

Now, I offer a similar experience – one recounted through the lens of a seemingly never-ending trimester break (the last few months of the 2019-2020 school year and the ensuing summer vacation) with academics peppered in. Perhaps it was a result of borders closing due to COVID-19, or possibly a consequence of my general difficulty processing the current state of the U.S., but in early August, I found myself on international Netflix. Longing for a show that would pique my interest as well as give me some sense of comfort and familiarity, I began watching the German drama series Dark.

To preface, I must insist that (coming from a German student) if you watch the show, it’s really best enjoyed in German with English subtitles. This option also lends itself to fellow subtitle enthusiasts – I know you’re out there. Set in the fictional German town of Winden, Dark requires your full attention to understand the plot; it revolves around four families – Nielsen, Kahnwald, Doppler, and Tiedemann – who become increasingly interconnected as the plot unfolds. Focusing the show primarily on four time periods – 2019 (centrally), 1986, 1953, and 2052 – allows many of the characters to be shown at multiple points throughout their lifetimes, and helps to elucidate the town’s history and the connections between the four families.

Dark also deals with time travel, an element that serves to complicate the characters’ identities, as well as the familial relationships themselves. The show’s main character is Jonas Kahnwald, a 16 year old boy in 2019 who spends most of his life time traveling. Jonas’s time traveling is a combination of attempts to both control the influence of two supposedly opposing time travel groups – both groups’ moral compasses are questionable – and prevent the apocalypse that is revealed to happen in 2020 (another fitting aspect of the show), a fault of the town’s nuclear power plant. As expected, time travel complicates the characters’ understandings of reality and life as we know it. Though there are a seemingly infinite number of details and events relating to time travel that pose interesting physical questions (I’ll leave those to you, physics fanatics), the show also evokes many philosophical questions.

Dark makes clear importance of the interconnectedness of these four time periods. “Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle” (Ep 1.1 “Secrets”). Because of this “never-ending circle”, the residents of the town are left wondering: can they really change their fate through time travel, as they so desperately yearn to do? After years of time travel, one character’s answers relate back to the philosophical concept of determinism, which suggests that everything that happens is the only possible thing that could happen. Nothing occurs by chance, and everything is determined by inevitable preceding events (hence, the name determinism). Other time travelers see the phenomenon differently; to varying degrees, they believe in the power of free will and thus the ability to change their fates, a concept that is directly incompatible with the theory of determinism due to its suggestion of choice, which would require multiple possible outcomes – a no-no for determinists.

As the two groups battle to control the fate of Winden through time travel, one of the characters suggests that “our thinking is shaped by dualism. Entrance, exit. Black, white. Good, evil. Everything appears as opposite pairs. But that’s wrong” (Ep: 1.8 “As You Sow, so You Shall Reap”). As the characters’ intentions with time travel become morally twisted and complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell if there are truly two separate schools of thinking in regard to time travel. The concept of dualism manifests itself abundantly in our world, most notably in the form of good and evil, as one character explains, and in many cases, alleviates the mental toll that thinking about the complexity of many modern issues takes. But can anything truly be good or evil? What concepts can’t be classified on a spectrum, and, for that matter, can spectrums even begin to capture the complexity of certain issues in our world?

“The mistake in all of our thinking is that we each believe ourselves to be an independent entity. While in reality, we’re all just fractions of an infinite whole” (Ep 3.3 “Adam and Eva”).

On the surface, this quote forces us to think about our smallness in the universe; truly, though, I believe it serves to remind us of our connections to and impact on each other. And being part of an “infinite whole” requires a thorough understanding of our interconnectedness (something that the characters of Dark grapple with); it requires diligence and care. In the chaos that is 2020, diligence and care means wearing masks in public and at CA as we move into orange mode, as well as remembering to keep physical distance from others, while retaining emotional closeness. Question the binaries that exist around you (though you can take this with a grain of salt, I suggest starting with the political binary); what makes those two categories special or opposing, and what exists in the middle? Finally, remember that, even 10 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, uncertainty is sometimes still one of our only certainties. Fear it, and familiarity — whether morally just or not – will prevail. Embrace it, and the meaning of “fractions of an infinite whole” will become ever clearer as it adapts itself to you, reader.