"Dark" -an alternative assessment.

He?/She?/They?'s on a roll:

Lugubrus Van der Thi tackles “Dark”.

It's springtime in Germany and the living is easy. Martta, Jonas and assorted Germanic side-kicks are messing about in the woods. They bounce on busted discarded sofas, cheerfully tie terrified girlies to tree trunks and generally shoot shit happy like Larry.

Jonas and Martta take to playing hide-and-seek in the caves (truth be told, Martta's got some serious hots for angel-face Jonas). Jonas, pure of heart and fresh of face, behaves like all sixteen-year old boys do. (=He's fucking clueless.)

Teasing Martta: 'Ich lieb' dich nicht...”

Fuckwit Jonas: “Du liebst mich nicht.”

Sighing, Martta suggests taking a train to enter a tunnel, draws his attention to the birds and the bees, sucks a golf ball through a straw. Nothing doing. Finally, Martta musters the courage to challenge him directly: “Here, loverboy, I'll show you mine if you show me yours...”

Sadly Jonas chooses this moment to fall backwards into a time travel tunnel thingie that takes him to the eighties.

End of the first scene.

Jonas-in-the-eighties spots his bitch of a mum: “Hallo Mum, it's me!”

His mum: “Get away from me ya perrverrt! Herr Policeman, Herr Policeman, here is the man's been chatting up all the eight-year olds in town!”

Otto the policeman gives chase. He slips on a banana skin, smashes through a fruit cart unexpectedly crossing the road, trips over street sprinter Lola, slides down a toboggan or two, and is just about to nab the perrverrt good and proper when he bangs his head against the doorframe of the bunker where Jonas has taken refuge. He wakes up 33 years later.

Otto the policeman: “Wait a second, what do you mean I can't smoke indoors? Call that a pair of trousers?? There's more holes in them than jeans you Jezebelled floozie!! And why does everyone keeps staring at me like I haven't got a hand phone?? -I don't even know what a hand phone is!!”

Meanwhile, Martta has swapped decades with Otto the policeman and gone in search of Jonas. Coming up empty-handed (and increasingly antsy in the panties department), she settles down to run the nucular plant where she gives birth, in the middle of a solar flare triggered reactor meltdown, to a beautiful angel faced boy. She names him... Jonah.

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. A creepy priest -aren't they all?- is roaming the woods, kidnapping children to ask them whether they have heard The News. Naturally they haven't. He duly informs them that The End of Days is upon them and dispatches them back to the fifties for salvation or redemption (tick where applicable). The kids go forth and multiply, founding the town in the process. Miklausz begets Stronze who begets Solweig who begets Jonas's dad, Agnesz begets Florian who begets Ralph who begets Fritz who begets Agnesz. The priest doesn't age.

Back to Jonas. Stuck in limbo, our boy avails himself of the opportunity to peruse the town's library. Admirably keeping well clear of the jazz mags (“Health and Nature”, “Naturism for All”, “Healthy is Natural”), he scours the science manuals. Bish bosh like mcGiver never happened, he knocks up a time travelling machine.

Martta -who is now married to her son's future brother- steals back to the present in order to recover her incriminating diary. Sneaking in Jonas's musk stenched study (Don't go looking under the mattress Martta, don't!!), she chances upon mysteriously dated (1920, 1953, 1986, 2019, 2052) plans for a “t-t (??) machine”... Would you Adam-and-Eve-it, the wench swipes them.

Alas! On her way back to the cave, Martta gets knocked down by her aunt's grand-son (her first son and future brother-in-law, then) practising a three-point turn while inebriated on Schnapps and Fanta. Technically dead, she can't have given birth to who will become the nucular plant Safety Officer! Meaning: them damn lurking uranium thieves will have a field day, thereby compromising the safety of the town, thereby scuppering the sale of the Grand Northern Hotel, thereby preventing Agnesz from revealing her secret to the amateur clockmaker undertaker! All is lost and Ben Frost unleashes some shit-hot deep bass hi-NRJ electro-drone like it's nobody's business, Derrick goes fetch the car himself, and Blixa Bargeld appears in a bubble floating over the town to intone lines off “Macbeth” and “Unnerkannt durchs Märchenland”. Mid-season break.

Mid-season break.

We're back in Winden and night-time is ominously creeping as only German night-time can (ominously, that is). Shadows gather, luminosity declines and sinister figures in the background make sure not to switch on the effing light (that would be too easy!) when entering collapsing old chapels. Benni, the town tranny prozzie, turns tricks in the Aldi car-park.

Recovering from his amnesia, the copper not unreasonably sets about explaining to all and sundry that he's been the unfortunate victim of a time travel glitch. To his surprise, nobody gives credence to his protestations and he ends up in the loony bin. (A-ha, but could it be that the other inmates are in the same proverbial soup... could it be that they too have fallen down the rabbit hole with no paddle... - The show's crafty creators sow a few clues to that effect and leave it at that.) Otto -that many consider to be the one tragic figure in the show, never mind the beheaded dolls and electrocuted doves- righfully loses it. Doctor M. decides to try some hypnosis on him...

Intermission. Fade to black.

Jonas's bitch of a mother Martha (not to be confused with Martta) has not been idle. Inbetween sleeping with the sexually confused carrot top research scientist and flogging his notes to the shadowy characters hanging around the central bar recycling bins, she has managed to sow division within the Habsburg-K0rnstein household. The problem is... the Habsburg-K0rnstein spontaneously sprouted dynasty are in charge of the nucular plant, the very heart of the community!?!

Hapless bachelor librarian Fritz, who never managed to reach local hero Florian's level as an amateur bicyclist, sinks his sorrows in bottles of bitter every night. The word soon spreads.

Snigger his curtain twitching neighbours:

“H'a! Why don't you go and console him!”

“Men don't need consoling, they can manage perfectly well on their own!”

But his neighbours are lying to themselves. Men need consoling just as much as women. Benni moves in with Fritz.

Meanwhile the local Chief of Police (Agnesz) has a problem: all over town, suspiciously familiar looking eighty-year olds have taken to riding their pushbikes on the kerb and are refusing to disclose their identity when questioned. She can't possibly spare the time to run background checks on them as her deputies have gone missing one by one. Two more to go and the police department will simply comprise of her and a sybillic parrot given to definitive prophecies (“We are governed by the very unspoken wishes that we can never wish to be spoken of”, “If God is time and not the other way round, why do you miss me?”, “I've got a dick-ah, you've got a pussey, so what's the problem?”). Would you believe it, her last two deputies disappear just as two suspiciously familiar looking eighty-year old newcomers are caught shoplifting batteries and soda. Agnesz is vexed, she is nonplussed. Puzzled, quizzical and perplexed, she wonders, lonely as a cloud. Baffled, she goes out walking and falls into a hole. This is how she discovers the trench dug by the priest whipped prisoners of war glimpsed earlier during the dream of the blue turtle.

“Bang!” goes the series back to 1920. A mummy-like burgher in a fetching bottle-green uniform is holding forth on his struggles against God to an audience of children, prisoners of war and indentured labourers. He is very ugly and not a little scary, his eyes are like piss holes in the snow. He does not appear to be capable of perspiration. “Gasp!” if one of the children does not have pointed ears like Florian's father (ie Solweigh's uncle and Miklausz's son) and -”Look!”- if the shifty looking third prisoner from the right is not a dead ringer for the priest! But the mummy-like burgher does not notice, he's on a roll. He hints at a fantastical revelation owed to his captive (in more ways than one) audience. But first, they will each have to buy him a pint of bitter (Do we detect a troubling reference to an aforementioned character here?) and build him a chapel -on the very grounds that will host the nucular plant sixty-six years from now!!

The moment is tense. Your man clears his throat. And he whips out a gold watch to announce:

“Thirteen more minutes and He will arrive to reveal it all!”

The dogs scamper away, whimpering.

Back to angel-face Jonas and your man has broken free of the chains of servitude, only to find himself transported to 2052 where -as chance would have it (but at this stage who is still keeping count eh)- he crashes onto his son's pat-i-o just as his son is about to light the baaarbie -and one naturally wonders: yes yes, but who mothered his son? Who? Could it be.................... Martta?? The show's sadistic creators are keeping us in suspenders.

By now forty-something Jonas apologises profusely, all the more embarrassed as he can't possibly disclose his identity to his son.

'Scene goes something like this:

“Look here old chap, I do believe you've broken my concentration, what!”

“I'm so sorry, I don't know what to say”

“Not to mention my darling cup of Viennese china, dowry of my dear old Mum”

“Your mum??”

“Quite so. But how come you've chosen to teleport in the middle of my pat-i-o, how most extremely queer...”

“Never mind your pat-i-o, you was saying something about your mother?”

“Most unusual indeed, what! Since when do people appear out of nowhere? I say, this is most uncivil of you, I've got a good mind to”

Follow twelve more minutes of will-he won't-he back-and-forth that will leave everyone in stiches in a welcome break from the usual doom and gloom of the general shebangs and assorted crazy japes that we have come to know and expect from this rip-roaring topsy-turvy white-knuckled ride of a no-holes barred fireworks. Eventually, Jonas excuses himself back to whenever with his tail between his legs.

No matter how many life-cycles you cheat, you're always a ten-year old in front of your dad.*

Things get a little bit heated at this stage, what with the heart-of-gold accidentally overhearing what the bitch-of-a-mother confides in the-creepy-Bible-basher right after Tim-nice-but-dim opens the door on ants-in-her-pants (er, nice-but-dim from the eighties eh, not nice-but-dim from the 21^st century, otherwise that wouldn't make sense!) engaged in Ugandan politics with the tragic figure who has finally caught on, at the fifth time of asking, the fact that the troubled Chief of Police may happen to be his mother thirty years down the line -and that's before the shock arrival of Frosty the Snowman, wafted up on the wrong kind of cloud with Mr Catastrophe, still looking for his keyfob, in hot pursuit. Could it be it's all related?? Huh?? I've got a monkey on it 'says they will all turn out to be the same person.

That yoke jumps to 1920 and your favourite living mummy is getting seriously cheesed off. Sweats he in his tunic: “I don't understand, He should have been here twelve minutes ago precisely, what could have possibly held Him? That doesn't make sense!”

Back to 2019 and Otto has been plugged in. The tubes out of his temples will convey his memories into electric signals. A white coat is counting down seconds and Otto breaks into a beatific smile. “5, 8, 666”

David Hasselhoff has had a few. Caught short before the curfew, he undoes his fly and leans on The Wall...

It's 1953, OK all over the Federal Republic. “A-ha!” triumphs the nosy journalist “So you were having an affair with the local drug dealer!” just as the nucular plant Safety Chief Officer dangles his keyfob above the recycling reservoir.

Frank Rijkaard is miffed yeah. He glares at Rudi Voller and subrepticiously creeps up behind him...

1986 (the year of “Atomizer” -Geddit???). Martta is up a tree, in a shed. She is cranking up a dynamo and you won't believe what happens next (three dentists out of five hate her).

End of “Dark”'s first season.

*It has become increasingly clear that his son is in fact his dad.