I am you ?

DARK is not just a series; it’s a state of mind. When I started watching it, I honestly thought I was mentally clear and sorted. That confidence didn’t last long. If you feel very sure about how life works, watching DARK slowly dismantles that certainty. And if you are already a little confused about life, this show doesn’t make things easier either. Yet, strangely, no matter how lost or mentally exhausted you feel, you don’t stop watching. I didn’t. There is something about DARK that keeps pulling you back even when your head feels heavy, because it is genuinely worth the effort. What surprised me the most was discovering that the writer of this series is Jantje Friese. I had to pause there. A woman writing a time-travel science fiction story with this level of depth, structure, and attention to detail felt both surprising and deeply impressive. Time travel mixed with science fiction, philosophy, and extreme detailing has been attempted before, but I personally haven’t seen it executed this precisely anywhere else. Time-travel stories usually bend logic when it becomes inconvenient, but DARK does the opposite. It pushes logic to its limits. The story moves across timelines like 1888, 1953, 1986, 2019, and 2053, while also introducing parallel worlds that exist side by side. Every action has a consequence, and every consequence triggers another event, creating a continuous chain reaction that drives the narrative forward. At some point, I stopped trying to perfectly track every timeline and simply let the story unfold, and that’s when it became overwhelming in the best way. Each major character exists in three versions: young, middle-aged, and old, and this happens across both worlds. Characters deceive others, deceive themselves, and relationships become tangled in ways that time itself cannot easily fix. There were moments when I had to stop and think, and moments I am still not sure I fully understand, but that uncertainty feels intentional. The familiar story of Adam and Eva, usually seen as heroic figures, is completely reversed here. In DARK, they are lovers and enemies at the same time, fighting to protect their own version of reality even if it means destroying another. Just writing about it makes my head spin, and imagining how someone even conceived this story feels unreal. My only real disappointment was the budget. If DARK had the scale and visual resources of shows like Stranger Things or Squid Game, it could have been even more visually terrifying. But what stayed with me after finishing the series was not the science fiction itself; it was a question. We often say we shouldn’t trust anyone and that we only have ourselves. But what if time challenges that belief? What if, as time moves forward, the person we cannot trust anymore is not someone else but ourselves? So here is a question I keep thinking about: if your older self met your younger self and they refused to believe you, what is the one thing you would say to make them trust that you are truly them?