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Dark, the television series
I had mentioned watching
After the first two seasons the scale of the problem is significant. There are maybe four main families across which other relationships exist, both personal and professional. For some characters we have maybe three different actors playing them because the story is stretched across five time periods spanning more than a century. Increasingly many of the characters travel back and forth in time so we have family trees with the same person at multiple levels. A set of scenes or meetings often don't happen in the same order for all the participants, including the viewer who may see what happened just before or after in a different season of the show.
Stringing the story together is a lot of work. We see plenty of different people using a device and I think there is only one of that kind but at this point I have no way to tell. This makes me wonder how well-plotted the show is. Did the writers have to work everything out meticulously or is my difficulty in following it allowing them to mask the degree to which the premise allows them to get away with filling it in as they go?
It has occurred to me that were I to try to write such a story I would probably find myself attempting to code the plot in a language like Mercury. I would want to represent everybody's timeline: travels, meetings, accumulated knowledge, scars, etc. Then I might be able to ensure that the plot is consistent and find ways that desired scenes could happen.
The show explores philosophy about the nature of time, fate, etc. For me this generates some great quotes. For example, a recent episode started with a scene including,
Update: Moving on to watching more
Dark(2017). One can't watch it casually, at least to useful effect, because there is too much going on. Yesterday I realized how very much it would take to explain the background to just a couple of scenes and decided that its increasing complexity deserves some comment.
After the first two seasons the scale of the problem is significant. There are maybe four main families across which other relationships exist, both personal and professional. For some characters we have maybe three different actors playing them because the story is stretched across five time periods spanning more than a century. Increasingly many of the characters travel back and forth in time so we have family trees with the same person at multiple levels. A set of scenes or meetings often don't happen in the same order for all the participants, including the viewer who may see what happened just before or after in a different season of the show.
Stringing the story together is a lot of work. We see plenty of different people using a device and I think there is only one of that kind but at this point I have no way to tell. This makes me wonder how well-plotted the show is. Did the writers have to work everything out meticulously or is my difficulty in following it allowing them to mask the degree to which the premise allows them to get away with filling it in as they go?
It has occurred to me that were I to try to write such a story I would probably find myself attempting to code the plot in a language like Mercury. I would want to represent everybody's timeline: travels, meetings, accumulated knowledge, scars, etc. Then I might be able to ensure that the plot is consistent and find ways that desired scenes could happen.
The show explores philosophy about the nature of time, fate, etc. For me this generates some great quotes. For example, a recent episode started with a scene including,
Pain is their ship, desire their compass.Later on another character reflected that,
Sometimes I think that that's my problem. That I can't see the world as it truly is.These sentences get subtly different translations if one watches the
(CC)English track instead but I think both correspond reasonably to the spoken words,
Der Schmerz sein Schiff, das Verlangen sein Kompass.Also,
Manchmal denke ich, dass das mein Problem ist. Dass ich die Welt nicht so sehen kann, wie sie wirklich ist.
Update: Moving on to watching more
Jessica Jones(2015) is a striking contrast. There is only a handful of characters, always played by the same actors, for all of whom we see their timeline in order! So far it's no more challenging than, say, each of the first two episodes showing a similar period but from different characters' perspective. It feels so easy in comparison.