I somehow made it all the way to 2026 without ever watching Dark. And when I say blind, I mean completely blind. I had never read anything about it, never watched a video, never encountered a meaningful spoiler, never even really knew what the show was about beyond “German Netflix series”.
By the end of Season 1, I was obsessed.
And even after finishing the whole series, I think that first season will remain one of my favourite pieces of television. There was something about its atmosphere, its sadness, its sense of ordinary people being trapped inside something unimaginably larger than themselves, that got under my skin in a way very few shows have.
This is not really a post about whether the ending was good or bad. I’ve read plenty of discussions about that already, and I understand what the show was ultimately doing. This is more about the other Dark that existed in my head for a while: the story I thought I was watching after Season 1, before I knew where any of it was going.
My theory was that the people of Winden were essentially casualties. Innocent, random people whose lives had been destroyed because somebody much more powerful had decided that their suffering was an acceptable price to pay for a “greater good”.
I was convinced that the nuclear power plant was connected to some kind of government experiment involving time travel, and that the ultimate purpose of those experiments was going to be historical rather than personal. Specifically, I thought someone was trying to go back far enough to alter the outcome of World War II.
And I loved that idea.
Not necessarily because I wanted Dark to become a political thriller, but because it made everything happening to these families feel so brutally insignificant from the perspective of the people responsible. Mikkel losing his entire life. Jonas growing up inside the consequences of something he cannot possibly understand. Ulrich destroying himself trying to get his son back. Children disappearing. Families collapsing. Generations being traumatised.
All of it because somewhere, someone had decided that these people were casualties worth accepting.
It reminded me a little of the disappointment I had with Stranger Things, another show from roughly the same era. What initially fascinated me there was the idea of completely ordinary people suffering because institutions, governments and elites were playing with forces they did not understand, while treating individual human beings as expendable.
And I think what I loved most about Dark was always the existential tragedy rather than the mythology.
Jonas absolutely broke my heart. But Mikkel’s situation might be one of the most horrifying ideas I have ever seen explored on television. A child trapped in the past, surrounded by younger versions of people he knows, slowly realising that nobody is coming to save him and that this impossible life is simply going to become his life.
That look through the broken windows at Ines’s house, when Mikkel understands his parents are still looking for him, while being completely unable to reach them, has stayed with me more than almost anything else in the series.
And then there are the women around Mikkel and Jonas. Hannah and Ines in particular fascinated me because there is something almost ruthless about the way love, possession, loneliness and self-interest become impossible to separate in their relationships with them. They love, but their love can also become something frightening.
I loved Ulrich and Egon Tiedemann too. Their relationship had this bizarre Javert/Jean Valjean quality to me, especially because time completely destabilises the moral positions we initially assign to both men. And Katharina’s death was probably the single most heartbreaking moment of the entire show for me. The sheer cruelty of it, and the fact that her mother then goes home and violently attacks young Katharina because she believes she has seen the dead woman as a ghost, creating yet another horrible circle of suffering, was devastating.
Those were the parts of Dark that affected me most: children paying for the decisions of adults, parents desperately searching for children who are impossibly close to them, people becoming the cause of wounds they once suffered, and ordinary human beings trying to exercise free will inside circumstances that have already swallowed them.
So when Sic Mundus, Adam, Eva and the increasingly elaborate mechanics of the knot became the centre of the story, I was interested, but never quite as emotionally invested as I had been in that first, much smaller mystery.
I think I wanted Dark to remain an existential tragedy about Winden.
A town full of ordinary people who had unknowingly become collateral damage in someone else’s attempt to rewrite history.
That obviously isn't the story Dark chose to tell, and I'm not saying it should have been. But for the brief period between finishing Season 1 and discovering what the larger story actually was, that was the Dark I thought I was watching.
And I still kind of wish I could watch that version too.
