Season 1 - 8 episodes
Watch 1899 on Netflix
Created by: Baran bo Odar, Jantje Friese
Starring: Emily Beecham, Aneurin Barnard, Andreas Pietschmann
Rated: TV-MA
Watch the trailer
Plot
Multinational immigrants traveling from the old continent to the new encounter a nightmarish riddle aboard a second ship adrift on the open sea.
Verdict
It's a twisting mystery that pushes the questions nearly as far as they'll go. Each episode is intriguing and this show is made to binge as you want to find the answers. With each episode this becomes more confounding. While episodes provide some answers, it just leads to more questions. Unfortunately the ultimate answer is a bit disappointing as it receives so little time or development that it seems more like an afterthought with the careful planning of this puzzle box season. The ending is tacked on, but with a little more planning it could have been better integrated. Despite the ending, the ride up until the end of the final episode is quite a bit of fun.
Watch It.
Review
This is from the creators of Dark, three seasons of a dense and sprawling time travel story.
The first episode creates a great mood as we're introduced to a missing shipping, the class divide among passengers on this ship, and later a survivor of a lost boat. This show intrigues as we get a lot of questions. In the second episode this triangle starts showing up everywhere. This show becomes more dense with each episode. The end of the second episodes will send you for a real loop. It's meant to be a puzzle.
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| The Kerberos steam ship |
Half way in I began to wonder what would happen. While the creators did a great job with Dark, this show started to become so convoluted that I wasn't sure they could unravel it, but I did have hope. Once this got to the next to the last episode, I wondered if we would get solid answers. Up to this point any answer just generates new questions.
The passenger succumb to group terror and that only makes this more bewildering. On top of that, we start to realize the passengers are interconnected and there may have been forces at work that lured them to this ship.
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| Emily Beecham, Andreas Pietschmann play Maura, Eyk |
The music in this show works so well. Every episode ends with a well know song that in almost any other context I would say has been overused. I don't know what it is about this show, but it just works incredibly effectively in this context.
This show builds the mystery into the final episode. It builds for so long and it ends so quickly. I really wanted more out of this ending. I think if this had one more episode to better piece the ending together it could have worked really well. We see these connections with passengers throughout the series, and after the big answer is revealed I wanted to see how that altered their connections and relationships.
This is a fun ride, and despite the ending it's worth checking out. The idea of how this end is great, it's just that the execution seems rushed. The creators have stated they would like three seasons, but with the frequent cancellation of series in the streaming era, that is never guaranteed. Could the show resolve my issue with the ending in season two? Possibly, but even if they do, season one will still feel incomplete.
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