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Reviews
Dark (2017)
Great! (but at times pretentious and stilted)
Dark is a really fascinating show. Its script is masterfully crafted to deliver a seemingly coherent narrative over several time periods, time jumps and time loops.
The story is so complex, that I made frequent use of its companion website, to remember characters, their (crazy!) relations to each other, and their place in this whole spider web of a show. It delivered a lot of personal speculations and "wtf" moments.
It's pure drama.
And sometimes, that felt like a problem, because very often I found myself saying: "Nobody talks like that!" Especially in scenes that are supposed to depict the day-to-day lives of our characters, I found that the overly dramatic dialogue very much hampered my enjoyment (particularly as a native German speaker).
Add to that, the fact, that the show is constantly repeating itself, which, being kind of part of the whole theme, still felt rather annoying and pretentious at times. Sentences like "the beginning is the end" and a bunch of bible references had me eye rolling quite a bit. It felt like the show didn't trust its audience at all in understanding the concept of a time loop and tried to hammer in its themes.
While the soundtrack was mostly appropriate, there were also several instances where it just felt heavy-handed and overdramatic with its booming stings.
Unfortunately, the last season also broke most of the established rules by introducing split timelines into the mix, which felt less elegant in its execution and kind of forced, taking the original complexity of a simpler premise and turning it into something more messy and complicated. I kept wondering if this plot point was planned from the beginning or inserted later to make room for a happy ending.
I'm not gonna lie, the ending felt emotionally satisfying. But the rational part of my brain, which wanted to (and still wants to) entangle everything into a neat line of causality, was kind of disappointed by the introduction of less hard-SCIFI elements.
The cinematography was mostly great, but again, I would have enjoyed a bit more subtlety.
Still, the show, and especially its characters, stuck with me. And if you accept the rule bending elements, the pure complexity of the story can overshadow a lot of its flaws.
Bodies (2023)
Loved the first half. Very annoyed by the second half.
I really like time travel mysteries and at first Bodies really delivers in that regard. Interesting characters and good performances, interconnecting timelines, and one big mystery to solve. The first half of the series really shines with that.
But the mystery gets obvious rather too quickly. With more than half of the episodes left, it was already apparent to me what happened here. At this point, the only really open question I had was: Will there be some kind of happy ending, or will the show stick to the determinism that was very strongly alluded to.
I think I would have preferred the latter.
Unfortunately, at this point it felt like the show wasted my time. Especially episode 7 seemed like it was just repeating plot points we already knew. Then the last episode threw the whole concept of a closed loop out of the window, which introduced too many potholes and inconsistencies for my liking. Furthermore, I was waiting for a bunch of explanations that never came, which therefore made the whole plot kind of nonsensical at the end.
But still, the story stuck with me. Mostly because of the strong beginning and the wasted potential.