While “Stranger Things meets Twin Peaks” might sound like a high bar for any TV show to clear, one underrated Netflix sci-fi series pulled this mashup off with its perfect three-season run. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks is one of the most influential TV shows ever made. The small-town murder mystery, which blended elements of Dynasty-style soap opera with intense psychological horror and some surprisingly trippy fantasy/sci-fi twists, was a sprawling saga that influenced everything from Desperate Housewives, Pretty Little Liars, and Lost to ‘90s TV classics like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
As such, a show that mixes Twin Peaks with the Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things would have a tall order to fill. However, the German series Dark managed just this feat with its slow-burning sci-fi mystery plot. The story of Dark begins with a child’s mysterious disappearance from the small town of Winden, an event that, like the disappearance of Will Byers or the discovery of Laura Palmer’s body, prompts a string of revelations among the tight-knit local community. As the show’s multi-generational cast of characters comes to terms with this disappearance, a local cave takes on unexpected importance in the plot.
It is not a major spoiler to say that Winden’s cave harbours a major secret, and four interlinked families soon find themselves crossing paths across time as they delve further into the show’s mysteries. Compared to the family-friendly later seasons of Stranger Things, Dark lives up to its name, as the German series can be grim, downbeat, and outright tragic at times. However, Dark also clearly cares about its characters and, as a result, has a stronger storyline than Netflix’s more bombastic small-town sci-fi mystery franchise.
Unlike Stranger Things, Dark has a great finale that brought together all the show’s lingering disparate plot threads. Even the original run of Twin Peaks couldn’t boast this, as the show infamously fell apart after the revelation of Laura Palmer’s killer early in season 2. Twin Peaks: The Return did provide the show with a fitting ending some years later, but Dark’s tidy three-season run gave viewers a wholly satisfying story, beginning, middle, and end, all in its original run.
While a lot of Netflix shows are based on books and therefore don’t struggle with running out of potential plots, many more have to start anew whenever they are renewed for another season. Stranger Things was a particularly acute case of this, since the show was originally intended to be a standalone, single-season miniseries. The popularity of Stranger Things led to its season 2 renewal, but it soon became clear that the show had no grand overarching plan for the story of Hawkins.
The reason viewers were so comparatively forgiving of Twin Peaks season 2 is that, since David Lynch’s feature debut Eraserhead, the director was always infamous for creating works that were inscrutable, complex, and defiantly obscure. This meant that the strange diversions that Twin Peaks took felt, like Dark’s twists, as if they were all in service of a larger story. In contrast, Netflix’s Stranger Things never shared the surreal edge of Twin Peaks or the meticulous plotting of Dark, so the show’s plot holes were harder to excuse.
