#alpha's watchlog

I really like a good simulated reality plot! I'm a big fan of a Philip K. Dick style plot. But in this case.... I honestly think it was one of the least interesting possible explanations for what was happening? I was initially leaning towards purgatory, given the way most of these people had a troubled past in which they killed someone or did something otherwise morally questionable, or else something like an alternate dimension, given the triangle imagery and the way it recalled the Bermuda triangle. Simulation - and especially the reveal that they're on a spaceship called the Prometheus - just felt kind of rote as far as sci fi twists go.

And the thing that Odar and Friese did really well with Dark was put a fresh twist on a familiar sci fi concept - in that case, time travel. In that show, the stable time loop, and the notion of making something happen via trying to prevent it from happening, perpetuating the loop while trying to break it, were imagined as a cycle of trauma that the character were trapped in. It dug into the emotional ramifications of that scenario, and gestured at philosophically engaging questions, like the nature of free will, as well as entirely mundane themes, like growing up to be the worst iteration of yourself, despite all attempts to do otherwise.

But here, the philosophical inquiry that they mined from the simulation scenario was.... kind of the definition of fake-deep, like with Daniel's overly sentimental and content-less line about how reality isn't about what's inside our minds, but what's outside of us. Otherwise, I felt like Odar and Friese were retreading a lot of the same territory they covered in Dark, and in a way that didn't fit as well with the premise of this show. Once again, we had characters stuck in a perpetuating loop - this is why the purgatory theory would have worked so well! - but the emotional effects of that don't come through for the viewer on a storytelling level, because we only get the barest hints of the repetitive nature of the events. In Dark, having multiple perspectives from different versions of each character really made me feel the oppressive weight of the time loop cycles, but here that aspect was underutilized. I think part of what makes a simulated reality scenario effective is actually showing the multiple loops, leaning into the uncanny effect of seeing the same scenes starting to happen again, feeling the pain of one of the characters not remembering the emotional development they've gone through before. Devoting an entire season to just one loop was a waste, in my opinion, especially since the early episodes were so slow - restarting things partway through would have been more effective, I think.

Like Dark, this show also gestured towards people's emotional tendencies keeping them trapped in the same loops over and over, but I think that sentiment in Dark - that we can't escape our fate because we can't escape our desires - landed much better and felt more earned. Here, it's unclear exactly what the constraints for the simulation scenario, and the desired outcome, were supposed to be, so it's hard to understand exactly how this concept comes to play. Again, this is why showing multiple loops would have worked better.

(It's possible that they're going to expand more on the emotional stakes in this way in later seasons, as certainly worldbuilding and character motivations will be revealed more, and the finale implies there's a lot we still don't know. But.... as a season in and of itself, I'm a bit under-satisfied with a finale that effectively undoes the characterization and emotional context we've had built up for us all season.)