Ariadne’s Thread: Netflix’s Dark and the Trouble with Overcomplicated TV
Photo: Julia Terjung/Netflix
In Greek legend, Ariadne, Goddess of the Labyrinth, unspools her thread for the Athenian, Theseus: She is an accomplice in his escape from her father’s maze, after he’s gone in to slay the Minotaur. In the new German legend, Dark, which debuted on Netflix in December, Ariadne appears as a form of stagecraft, clutching a blood-red segment of rope: She is a metaphor for our entrapment in the series’ maze, its drama of overcomplication. For “Ariadne’s thread” is also a term from the realm of logic, an approach to multivalent problems in which each path to a potential solution—each thread—is followed to its conclusion. “Trace every step, inch by inch, point by point,” as Carole Maso describes the process in her novel Mother & Child. “Blindly exhaust the search space completely.” This, to my mind, is the trouble with Dark: It asks us to follow its threads as far as we can bear, but in the end its problems may not be worth solving.
Even dashing off a synopsis of Dark, co-created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, is no simple task. The first episode opens with the promise that “everything is connected”—intoned over photographs of the same people at different ages, in different fashions, pinned to the wall of an underground fallout shelter and connected by stretches of twine—and on this, at least, the series keeps its word. In the remote outpost of Winden, Germany, in 2019, Jonas Kahnwald (Louis Hofmann), reeling from his father’s suicide and the disappearance of a high-school classmate, embarks on a search for the missing boy and becomes embroiled in a supernatural mystery that’s been compared to Stranger Things, Twin Peaks, and The OA, one that reaches back to 1986—six months after the Chernobyl disaster—and thence to 1953—when Winden’s own nuclear power plant, slated to go offline in 2020, is under construction.
If its initial allusions—Einstein, The Matrix, A Clockwork Orange, Goethe, Back to the Future—feel as threadbare as those of Stranger Things, albeit with a certain “highbrow” gloss, Dark nonetheless succeeds in drawing one in; as with countless sci-fi, horror and crime dramas of recent vintage, it suggests the pleasures of puzzles and riddles, plopping us down in the center of its very own Carcosa and inviting us to scrabble our way out. As the series toggles among the three timelines, the intertwined fates of four families come into focus: In addition to the Kahnwalds, headed by an estranged matriarch named Ines (Angela Winkler), there’s local cop Ulrich Nielsen (Oliver Masucci), whose brother, Mads, disappeared 33 years prior, and his wife, Katharina (Jördis Triebel), the high school principal; police chief Charlotte Doppler (Karoline Eichhorn) and her husband, a rather suspicious-looking psychologist named Peter (Stephan Kampwirth); and unhappy hotel manager Regina Tiedemann (Deborah Kaufmann) and her son, Bartosz (Paul Lux), Jonas’ best friend. Add to this the other adolescents of Jonas’ generation, the 1986 and 1953 iterations of their parents and grandparents, and a handful of other shadowy figures—a man in a black hood, an expert on black holes, a janitor, a priest—and Dark is as tortuous as Minos’ labyrinth. The problem, though, is not that the series tosses these threads to the four winds and expects us to gather them together. It’s that what it delivers, when we tie it all up, has the heft of an empty package.