Time-travel Tragedy: Netflix’s Dark and Athenian Drama

Abstract

The Netflix time-travel series Dark exhibits many motifs found in ancient Athenian tragedy, from themes to modes of presentation. These include the use of myth, emphasis on houses and family trauma, mirror scenes, and other techniques for showing parallel events across generations, acts of murder and incest, preoccupation with fate, and divine intervention in the form of deus-ex-machina appearances. Together these motifs encourage Dark to be viewed as a tragic enterprise for the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• Dark
• deus ex machina
• fate
• houses
• myth
• Netflix
• seriality
• tragedy
• violence

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the guest editors of this volume for their guidance and helpful advice, and to the journal editors for the same. Thanks also to my colleagues at The Supernatural and the Classics conference (Isle of Wight, UK, July 2022), where these ideas were first presented.

Notes

1. The appendix lists the Athenian tragedies referenced in this article, along with their authors and years of production.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dan Curley

Dan Curley is associate professor of classics at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. His teaching and research interests include ancient epic and Athenian tragedy, as well as classical myth in screen media. He is the author of Tragedy in Ovid (Cambridge UP, 2013). He is currently the Vice President of Antiquity in Media Studies (AIMS), a learned society committed to advocating for interdisciplinary reception studies within classics and other disciplines focused on the ancient world.