Hugin & Munin Journal

Dark is surprisingly difficult to review without spoilers. Almost anything meaningful you say risks revealing a thread that the series carefully wants you to pull for yourself. This review therefore discusses only the premise established during the opening episodes before stepping back to consider what the series does with time travel, mystery and causality. What makes Dark exceptional is not that it somehow avoids the paradoxes inherent in time-travel fiction. It chooses a largely deterministic model and treats those paradoxes as the conditions under which its characters live. Time travel is not an escape from consequence. It is the machinery that creates and preserves it. Promotional image for Netflix’s Dark , created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Winden and the First Impossible Fact The series is set in Winden, a small German town that initially appears unremarkable apart from the nuclear power ...

Thoughts before the final season of Stranger Things . Tomorrow morning in Europe, the first four episodes of the final season of Stranger Things arrive. It feels strange—appropriately so—to look back at how much the series came to represent, not only for Netflix but for the streaming era more broadly. When the first season appeared in 2016, Netflix had already demonstrated that streaming services could produce serious original television. House of Cards , Orange Is the New Black , Daredevil , Narcos and Sense8 had all arrived before it. Stranger Things did something slightly different. It showed that a streaming original could become a broad pop-cultural event: a series capable of producing instantly recognisable characters, imagery, music and mythology while still feeling like a coherent story rather than a calculated franchise. In that sense, it was a signal flare. Netflix was no longer merely a convenient library or even an ambitious television producer. It was becoming ...