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Dhruv is a Lead Writer in Screen Rant's New TV division. He has been consistently contributing to the website for over two years and has written thousands of articles covering streaming trends, movie/TV analysis, and pop culture breakdowns.
Before Screen Rant, he was a Senior Writer for The Cinemaholic, covering everything from anime to television, from reality TV to movies.
After high school, he was on his way to become a Civil Engineer. However, he soon realized that writing was his true calling. As a result, he took a leap and never looked back.
The greatest opening line in sci-fi TV history is from Netflix's Dark:
"We trust that time is linear."
Getting time travel right in fictional storytelling is not an easy feat. Owing to this, most time travel shows and movies take the easier route by only using it as a narrative device to undo the past and create ripples of new futures. They care little about internal logic, paradoxes, and the long-term consequences of temporal manipulation.
Netflix's best sci-fi show, Dark, is not the same.
The genius time travel show sets up a well-rounded and complete story for viewers from its opening scene itself. Its first line alone perfectly captures how time is neither a diversion from the past nor an opportunity to build a new future. It is merely an inescapable loop where cause and effect endlessly fade into one another.
Dark’s Opening Line Attacks How You Perceive Time & Reality
We, as humans, perceive time as a flowing river where entropy increases the more we head towards the future. Dark's opening sentence attacks the very foundation of this belief when the narrator questions whether it is right to trust that time is linear.
It serves as an existential reminder that as much as we would like to believe we control our destiny, we should not dismiss the possibility of time being a closed loop.
To further elaborate how humanity's free will might be an illusion shaped by the limited understanding of cause and effect, the narrator in Dark's opening moments continues:
"We trust that time is linear. That it proceeds eternally, uniformly, into infinity. But the distinction between past, present, and future is nothing but an illusion. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected."
When I first watched Dark, I walked in blind, unaware of what the show was going to be about. The opening intrigued me, but I struggled to figure out what it meant. However, as the show progressed, the dots connected themselves. As a result, it became evident that, as the quote suggests, Dark is not a story where the past necessarily preceeds the future.
It is, instead, a skewed and intentionally convoluted portrayal of time where chronology does not exist and events on a timeline bleed into one another like reflections in house of mirrors.
The Opening Quote Connects To An Emotional Albert Einstein Letter
The opening quote from Netflix's Dark also carries a lot of real-world weight. It comes off as the perfect callback to a heartfelt condolence letter Einstein wrote to the family of his deceased friend, Michele Besso, in which he wrote:
"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
It is hard not to see how this perfectly ties into the show's story, given how the characters in Netflix's Dark are constantly battling against the "stubbornly persistent illusion" we call time to reach their dead loved ones.
Just like Einstein emphasizes how one's departure from our "strange world" means nothing, the show captures how no one ever truly ends up dead. Even the deceased eternally exist in different "coordinates" after they depart from one.
Dark’s Opening Quote Brilliantly Spoils The Netflix Time Travel Show
Dark's opening quote also hides the Netflix sci-fi show's ending in plain sight. By saying "everything is connected," the narrator hints at how the show's complex family tree will eventually intertwine all relationships in the weirdest and most twisted ways possible. Meanwhile, the part about the "illusion" in the quote gives away the truth about the 3rd (Origin) world.
By emphasizing how yesterday, today, and tomorrow are connected "in a never-ending circle," the narrator also hints at the bootstrap paradox and casuality loop that define the show’s time-travel mechanics.
Since a story's opening is one of its most crucial elements, many shows feature memorable quotes in the beginning. However, Dark's ability to set the stage for a perfect "I told you so" moment for audiences and draw connections to Einstein famous lines about the nature of time makes its opening truly exceptional.
English (US) ·