Episode Guide
Deja-vu -| Review Score – 4.5/5 The Survivors -| Review Score – 4.5/5 Adam and Eva -| Review Score – 4.5/5 The Origin -| Review Score – 5/5 Life and Death -| Review Score – 4.5/5 Light and Shadow -| Review Score – 4.5/5 Between the Time -| Review Score – 5/5 The Paradise -| Review Score – 5/5 German Netflix Original Dark is unlike any other show on TV. With an intricate knot of timelines, family trees and layered timelines, Dark’s first season sneaked its way onto the streaming platform back in 2017 and has only grown in strength over time. Last year’s second season served up an almost-perfect effort and the intensity for some of those episodes, combined with the extra couple of timelines, gave Dark a much more complex feel and ended things on an almighty cliffhanger. With that cliffhanger comes this third and final season that not only wraps everything up in a satisfying way, it does so with enough finesse and thought provoking drama to make for one of – if not the best – TV series of 2020. There’s a lot of symbolism, depth and discussion points to dissect but suffice to say, Dark makes sure it ends on a triumphant roar to deliver a phenomenal achievement on the small screen. We won’t go into story spoilers within this review but suffice to say the narrative is all the more complicated this year with the inclusion of another world. These dual realities run parallel to one another for much of the season, and as the story progresses so too does the level of tension and high stakes that bleed through both worlds. The impending apocalypse is still here too and all of this boils down to Jonas and Martha doing their best to try and save their respective worlds no matter what. All the characters we’ve come to know and love over the previous seasons are still here too, with one new nameless character introduced with a cleft lip and a serious chip on his shoulder. This mans plays a pretty crucial part in the overall narrative too and the show does an excellent job keeping those layers of mystery going through the series. Toward the end of the season, when the drama and tension reaches fever pitch, Dark begins to answer some of the bigger questions that have hung over the series over all these years and the answers we receive are very much worth the wait. There’s some absolutely shocking twists within these episodes – more so than what we’ve witnessed before in the past – and all of this rounds things out to a sublime and pitch-perfect ending. Without going too much into specifics, Dark has a wonderful way of dealing with heavy themes and religious symbology in a way that feels like a natural fit to the show. While this has been teased in the past – Adam and Noah as two prime examples – this season really brings that into the foreground of everything that’s going on and weaves a story with a lot of connotations that gives this so much more meaning. The result is something that feels both instantly familiar and wholly original as the show rounds out 3 years of excellent television with a non-stop rollercoaster ride of emotion. The alternate world offers up some creative choices for a lot of the characters we’ve come to know over the season, and Martha in particular plays a far bigger role this year. All of this combines to make for a season of drama, mystery and shocking home truths. Dark’s third season manages to deliver one of the most comprehensive, complicated and utterly engrossing dramas seen in some time and for a lot of fans, this will be a difficult hole to fill when the final credits roll. Without doubt, Dark is the television show to beat this year and absolutely deserves top marks for what it’s managed to achieve on the small screen.
