DARK
Well, I never write about myself.
You don’t even know me. Maybe I’m an awful person whose words you shouldn’t even be reading. (Not that it matters, right? Turn on the news and the world seems to be run by terrible people anyway, but who’s to say what’s truly bad or good? That’s a story for another time).
So yeah, a blog. Hi.
I’m not young, but I’m not old either. As anyone reading my stories probably gathers—I’m from Israel. Yes, I know a lot of you are probably wishing me a miserable death right now. But we don’t get to choose where we’re born, and God, believe me, I’ve tried to do something about it. I even lived in London for two years, trying to escape my home and my life in Israel by working as a stripper. And I write about it to shed light on an experience that, for many, is kept completely in the dark.
Today, I’m getting my Master’s in screenwriting, and as weird as it sounds, I don’t totally feel like I belong in this world. I grew up on books—they’re easy to drag around on buses, on flights, or in the middle of a shift. But watching TV shows and movies requires a setup. A home. I’ve spent most of my life on the run, wandering, and it’s really only in the last three years that I’ve had a place I can actually call home.
The more I read and watch, the better I feel as a person. Because of that, and maybe to make this experience accessible to others who are still looking for their “home,” I want to write about the shows I’m watching and the things I’m learning in my screenwriting MA. And I’m going to do it here, in English. (Which is tough for me, because English is absolutely not my first language. I was a really shy kid who barely participated in English class, so I really only learned the language in my twenties when I started traveling the world).
I’m going to start from the beginning. Or the end. Because the end is the beginning, and life is just an endless loop of parallel universes existing side-by-side, colliding for a fraction of a second while time stands still, where the present affects the future which affects the past which affects the present, over and over again.
If that sounds familiar, yep, I just finished watching Dark on Netflix. And Jesus. I have a lot to say.
Dark is a German show that kicks off with a kid going missing in the small town of Winden. Through this disappearance, we unravel a mystery spanning four generations, involving time travel, parallel universes, a dash of physics, and a whole lot of incest (sorry, but someone had to say it!).
Jonas is the protagonist, a teenager who starts time-traveling following his father’s suicide. He was also the only character I actually cared about. It sucks to write that, because there are a lot of characters in this show, but unfortunately, I felt very little empathy for most of them.
Why? Most American screenwriting gurus preach a very specific, linear structure. A hero has a problem, gets pushed out of their comfort zone into a new world, tries to solve the problem, and is fundamentally changed by the end. If the hero doesn’t change—the American writers will say—the show is boring. They’ll usually point to Breaking Bad as the holy grail of character development and the ultimate critique of American capitalism.
And here’s the amazing part: I completely bought into that rule, until I watched Dark, which is the exact opposite. It’s not an American show, and it’s not American writing. Out of habit, I spent the first few episodes searching for that linear hero’s journey where I could see myself in the protagonist, but that’s just not what this show is doing.
The characters are thrown into a massive time-travel mystery, but they barely change. Instead, we see them at different stages of their lives, focusing on the non-linear, tangled webs of their families bound together by fate. The perspective is horizontal, spanning across families rather than diving deep into one specific individual.
It’s hard to get into at first, especially if you’re used to American shows that desperately try to hook you from the very first frame. (Which is probably why Dark opens with the shock of Jonas’s dad dying by suicide—it keeps you watching just so you can ask yourself, how the hell did we get here?)
But once it grabs you, the thought process goes something like this: What the hell just happened? Oh, okay, that makes sense. But how are they going to explain this other thing? Wait, no. No way! OMG. Alright, I have no choice, I need to rewatch this from the beginning to actually understand everything.
The plotting is insanely meticulous. It’s mind-blowing how precise and calculated the creators are (a German duo with their first international hit, if I’m not mistaken). The tone, the atmospheric cinematography, and the deep historical research poured into designing four distinct eras is something I haven’t really seen before, definitely not on Netflix. It’s incredibly satisfying to watch these characters across different points in history and get completely sucked in because the world-building is just that authentic, both narratively and visually.
The acting is great, and the casting? Wow! You immediately know who is who during the time jumps simply because the child actors look exactly like the younger versions of the adults. I really can’t praise the casting enough.
But here’s the catch: the emotional connection to the characters is paper-thin, and the dialogue is honestly pretty bad. Almost every episode opens with a heavy, philosophical voiceover. It sounds smart and connects to the theme of the episode, but that heaviness ruins the actual interpersonal dialogue. The conversations function purely to drive the plot forward, rather than deepening our understanding of who these people are. We are left with highly functional characters; any empathy we feel for them comes purely from the momentum of the plot dragging us through the different stages of their lives, from childhood to old age.
So, what can we learn from this? Maybe that a brilliantly plotted world can actually compensate for flat characters and clunky dialogue. It proves that creating a flawless tone and universe is sometimes enough to carry a great show, contrasting sharply with the intense focus on individual character arcs typical of American writing.
But as a writer, my biggest takeaway is a renewed appreciation for creating emotional connections and distinct character voices. Alongside a brilliant, multi-generational plot, you still need to know what a character is good at, what they suck at, what they love, how they sound, and how their choices change them along the way. Honestly, I’d rather have that than a massive ensemble of characters who all sound exactly the same.
Score on the Rubin Scale (which I just invented right this second, even though I hate rating things, but on the other hand I love reading ratings so here I am falling for it myself): 7.5/10
