Netflix’s ‘1899’ Is No ‘Dark,’ But It’s Still Worth Watching

On Thursday, Netflix released 1899, the new series from the creators of Dark, easily the best sci-fi show on Netflix and possibly one of its best offerings period. A true gem in the time travel genre, once that crafted a masterful, complicated and ultimately satisfying storyline across three seasons. So needless to say, whatever that team did next would be worth checking out.

1899 is wildly different from Dark other than being, for lack of a better term “really weird.” After one season I can’t say I like it as much as I did Dark, though I will admit I took a while to warm up to that series before I appreciated its genius.

It is…very hard to talk about 1899 and what works and doesn’t without getting into spoilers, but I’ll do my best. At baseline, the show follows a number of passengers on a cross-Atlantic ship, all fleeing Europe to escape various dark secrets in their past. Another ship owned by the same company, the Prometheus, has been lost in the ocean for four months, presumed sunk, but the new suddenly ship gets a signal from the Prometheus giving them its apparent location. What will they find there?

That’s…about as far as I can go with the actual storyline, and that’s really just the first episode. You will understand by the end of episode 2 that 1899 is not a remake of Season 1 of The Terror, another ship-based horror mystery, and is actually something far more strange and complicated, though I suppose I should not have expected anything less from the Dark team. It’s also not a “ghost ship” story in the traditional sense, at all.

You will probably not believe where the show ends based on where it started, and one issue I have is that it maybe even goes too far with its twists, turns and reveals about the true nature of the story, and once you understand what’s going on, it somehow manages to actually lower the stakes quite significantly so the end isn’t quite as tense as it needs to be.

Supposedly, like Dark, 1899 is supposed to have a three-season arc, though with the current state of Netflix, who knows if it will actually live to see that play out. Given that Dark would have been butchered if it was cut a season or two short, Netflix would be wise to let them do whatever they want here. And the way season 1 ends, I am incredibly curious to see what a second season is going to look like, as there’s no chance it will remotely resemble the first.

So yes, ultimately I recommend it. It’s engaging, deeply strange and unsettling, and something I want to see more of now that this bizarre first season has wrapped. Hopefully it gets to have its full run.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.