In the last few weeks, I started watching "Dark" because I'd heard enough people say it was cool, or something. I just wanted something interesting to watch. I suspected it might be bullshit, but I gave it a try. And the first season, like so many first seasons of television, was pretty interesting! The entire time I was thinking, "Okay, this has some neat stuff in it, but they'd better be going somewhere interesting! Don't jerk me around for no reason, TV people!"
Well, the second season started to drag out, repeat itself, and then indulged in big-time prequelitis — when a story thinks it needs to show you the things it's been suggesting, but it really doesn't. And this one super didn't need to do it!
I don't know whether it was badly-written in the beginning, and just felt interesting because it was unfamiliar, or if the writing got bad during the second season, because... why? I know it must be terribly difficult to write and produce an entire season of television in a year. I don't want that particular job! But it's a horrible thing to watch someone run out of ideas right before your eyes. The camerawork grew less interesting, the plot lost its spark, the dialogue... the fucking DIALOGUE. WHAT the FUCK happeNEDDD??????
What is wrong with TV people? Why is manufactured drama, which fails to resemble real human conversation in any regard, the standard for television? What the fuck is wrong with us? And why do people SAY that it is GOOD???
At the end of the second season, I was shouting at the television every five minutes that it was too stupid to exist. Against my better judgment, I watched s3 e1 just to see. And even then, I was ready to say, "Okay, maybe this is interesting! Maybe the insipid philosophy, the nihilistic fatalism, the corrupt ideology of predestination that's being wrung out of every moment of this cursed entertainment product is at least going to do something interesting."
So I looked up some reviews. I didn't learn what happens. But I did learn that the 3rd season is the last, and there were a number of reviews where people said, "It's a mess, but it somehow works out to land somewhere really good."
Well, I just watched episodes 2, 3, and 4 of the 8. And I tell you what!!! I already hate it so much that there's no way it can be redeemed. But I'm going to watch it anyway, because fuck me, I guess! I am compelled to endure media I despise so that I can think about it, fruitlessly, to no one's benefit. Perhaps I am fated to do so. What the heart wants, etc. But holy shit, the lifeless, dour, ennnnndlessssss draaaaaagiiiiiing onnnnn and onnnnnnn, repeating the same vapid, faux meaningful bullshit lines over and over again. Every time someone says, "The end is the beginning," I groan SO loudly, to drown out the 60th time I have to hear someone say, "... and the beginning is the end." Jeezus fuck.
If you watched this, and said it was good, and wrote a review that was anything other than a beam of hot fire intended to destroy its memory and re-write time itself so that the show never existed in the first place (and I know no one reading this is the target of this question, so forgive me for wasting your time, too) —
Fuck, I don't know. How? Why? What the fuck? It's so frustrating to hear people talking about how interesting and compelling something is, and then have every minute of it be excruciating in its inhumanity and plot-bulldozer mechanical horseshit. At one point, I said out loud, "I hate this stupid planet and the people who inhabit it, myself included, because of how stupid this is and how stupid so many of us are so much of the time, and it's bad for a television program to make me feel this way!!!"
IN summary, any argument for predetermination is a philosophical excuse for oppression of all kinds, written by fascists and consumed by idiots. And if the show tries to end on some fucking note of the possibility of change, after spending its entire length reiterating the ineluctable nature of time, if it tries to do some weak-kneed late-script fight club "but really what I said the whole time is wrong" bullshit, I will remain, as I am now, furious and powerless to change anything about it, and it will simply join the ranks of "things other people like that I'm the asshole for thinking was empty and poorly-made but somehow people were paid to make."
the rubik's cube of, "but how can we prove there's free will" is a baby toy for baby thinkers. get fucked