(2nd edit: I should have said in the title that 1899 is potentially so much better)

I really should have posted this months ago, since I binged Dark for the first time right after 1899 was canceled and I watched the last episode. And I canceled Netflix after binging Dark. Basically Dark is ruined by the multiple characters at multiple ages. Just look at its Wikipedia page; I count over 70 actors. It makes it ridiculously complex for little benefit. It didn’t help that two of the actresses had similar hair color and style; it took me all of the first season before I stopped confusing them, and still did occasionally in later seasons.

But it’s also weaker for me because it’s just a generalization of a very old SF trope, that of being one’s own ancestor. I’m familiar with Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies”, as well as Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. Extending the story to a bigger cast, and adding the conflict between two timelines (another trope) doesn’t help.

1899, on the other hand, has an interesting, manageable cast. The multilingual dialogue feels novel to me. And while “universe as a simulation” has been done before, it’s something that works much better visually than in print, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen one that had several layers of simulations presenting otherwise familiar scenarios.

(Edit: formatting)