October 19th, 2025
This is a science fiction television series made by a German team for Netflix. It has received rave reviews since it appeared some seven years ago.
This series is ideal for people who love Rubik’s Cubes, crossword puzzles using only proper names, or jigsaw puzzles with thousands of pieces. I’m sure that the authors of this story worked out all the details to construct a logical whole, but they tell the story in such tiny fragments scattered over such huge stretches that the only way to make sense of it is to take detailed notes on every single character who appears and what they say to each other.
This task is complicated by the fact that there are so many versions of each character. There are five flavors of Jonas, and most of the major characters have three versions. There are 23 unique characters, and with all the different time versions of each character, you have to keep track of at least 60 different characters. This kind of story requires a spreadsheet to understand. There’s a wiki about it that is intimidatingly big.
The series has 26 hour-long episodes, so it spans roughly 26 hours. Again, think of a jigsaw puzzle with 5000 pieces, or a Rubik’s Cube with five squares on a side and five different colors.
I was put off by the cinematic techniques. This is of course a German production, but it relies heavily on the French style of long, long silences. I swear, if they had just cut out the long silences and had people talk normally, the series would have lasted two seasons instead of three.
Moreover, the dialogue is frustratingly obtuse. In fact, it’s difficult to identify any actual dialogue in the series. Rather, each “dialogue” seems more like two interleaved monologues. “Why did you come here?” asks one character, to which the other, after ten or twenty seconds, says “What we know is but a drop.”
Symbolism is used like a sledge hammer. It’s usually raining, and people stand around in drenching rain as if being soaking wet is a normal experience. I recall only a few instances of anybody thinking to bring along an umbrella. Some characters always wear black (“hint, hint, audience!”). Tears drip down faces so often that I am surprised that the characters don’t die of dehydration. Maybe that’s why it has to rain all the time — to keep them hydrated.
Now, time travel is logically impossible, but I don’t object to stories using time travel as a way to introduce interesting ideas. Some great stories, such as “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, “Groundhog Day”, and some of the Star Trek time travel stories, use time travel brilliantly. But the creators of this series used a fundamentally illogical premise to pose a logical puzzle, which strikes me as just plain sadistic.
I credit the authors with great cleverness in assembling an intricate and detailed scheme, but making sense of the Mona Lisa after it’s been put through a shredder, or Michelangelo’s David after it has been blown up with dynamite just doesn’t seem a worthwhile effort to me.
