1899 features dialogue in English, French, Spanish, Cantonese, Danish, German, Polish, and Japanese. The opening credits list a lead cast larger than your average Game of Thrones episode. Creators Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar already proved, with their mind-melting, time-warping German-language science-fiction masterpiece Dark, that they know their way around a dark genre story with a sprawling cast; here, it’s as if they looked at themselves and said “Hold my beer.” You have to respect their ambition, and this pilot episode proves you have to respect their execution, too.
The premiere (“The Ship”) stars Emily Beecham as Maura Franklin, an Englishwoman trained as a doctor, specifically a neurologist, but barred from practicing by English laws against, you guessed it, women practicing medicine. Or is she a doctor? The show opens with an Emily Dickinson poem (“The Brain is wider than the Sky”) and a hallucinatory flashback, or flashforward, or nightmare, or just-plain hallucination of her being incarcerated in an insane asylum, screaming at her father (GoT and Andor heavy Anton Lesser) that she’s not insane. When she wakes up, her wrists bear ligature marks consistent with being restrained in, well, an insane asylum. Two minutes in, and the plot has already thickened.
It only gets thicker from there. The show cross-cuts between the three different classes aboard the giant steamship Kerberos — a sister ship to a vessel called the Prometheus, which mysteriously vanished four months ago. The Kerberos is captained by Eyk (Dark lead Andreas Pietschmann, looking haunted and handsome as ever), a German with a barely concealed drinking problem that doesn’t interfere with his air of authority, much as the passengers and crew — including his right-hand man, Franz (Isaak Dentler) — chafe at his commands.
Way down below in the chamber where coal gets shoveled into massive furnaces to fuel the ship, we meet the Polish laborer Olek (Maciej Musial), who cradles a Statue of Liberty postcard and the promise of a reunion with an emigrated loved one, presumably. While sneaking off for a break, he encounters Jérôme (Yann Gael), a Frenchman who is both Black and a stowaway, making him the lowest guy on the ship’s food chain — at least, if anyone were to out him as a stowaway, since he convincingly passes as a crew member.
In steerage, we meet Krester (The Rain’s Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), a scarred young man who seeks Maura’s help in treating his pregnant sister Tove (Clara Rosager) despite the disapproval of his father Anker (Alexandre Willaume) and mother Iben (Maria Erwolter); only the third sibling in the family, a young girl named Ada (Vida Sjørslev), seems to understand and approve.
It’s up in first class that we get a real rogues’ gallery. There’s Mrs. Wilson (Rosalie Craig), a chatty Englishwoman with cutting remarks about everyone else. There’s Lucien (Jonas Bloquet) and his new wife Clémence (Mathilde Ollivier), unhappy and sexually incompatible newlyweds from Paris. There’s the fidgety priest Ramiro (José Pimentão) and his sleazy (and seemingly queer?) brother Ángel, who calls himself a wolf in comparison to his sheepish brother. There’s the Cantonese woman Ling Yi (Isabella Wei) and her dour servant Yuk Je (Gabby Wong), who have some kind of secret relationship with Mrs. Wilson and who are play-acting as Japanese.
Things take a turn for the sinister when the ship receives a mysterious broadcast of coordinates, presumably from the Prometheus. Eyk — who for some reason has a nearly identical letter about the Prometheus as Maura has, though hers is addressed to “Henry”; both bear the phrase “What is lost, will be found” — turns the ship around to search for the missing vessel. This occurs to the chagrin of the first-class passengers — especially Lucien, who freaks out and tries to take some kind of drug before getting interrupted by his wife, and Ramiro and Ángel, who are clearly fleeing from something.
Eyk winds up with quite a motley crew when he goes to search the stranded, lightless, lifeless Prometheus on a lifeboat. Of his crew, only his first mate Franz agrees to go with him. Maura and Ramiro are brought along in case a doctor or a priest is required. Olek and Jérôme, who just happened to be near the lifeboats, come along for the ride as additional crew (or in Jérôme’s case, “crew”).
What they find on the apparently abandoned ship is disturbing: no signs of life, except for an incongruous green beetle that leads them to a cabinet where a small child (Fflyn Edwards) has been sealed inside. The boy proffers them a small black pyramid, very similar to a much larger structure we saw during the opening sequence that culminated in Maura’s dream/nightmare/flashback/flashforward/hallucination/whatever it was.
Meanwhile, a man crawls out of the ocean and boards the Kerberos, depositing a green beetle of his own that leads him to a cabin in which he can lurk. It’s giving “that part from Dracula where he kills the entire crew of a ship.”
Written by Friese and directed by bo Odar, this premiere wastes no time at all. There’s no White Lotus–style use of humor to gradually introduce us to the rich assholes; they’re all rich assholes from the jump. In fact, there’s basically no humor at all. Like the aptly named Dark, this thing is dark — gothic, sooty, rusted, wet from the deep sea. Even the comparatively airy and swanky first-class accommodations look tailor-made to be explored by James Cameron in a submersible a hundred years later. And the Prometheus itself is, to quote The Hobbit, “like a patch of midnight that had never been cleared away.”
Provided you’re down with that bleak tone, as I most certainly am, this is an engaging start. Each character is effectively sketched out and makes you want to know more of their mystery-shrouded backstory. The polyglot actors all seem like they’re having fun, despite the lack of fun on screen. There’s an overall sense of commitment to the bit, which is so key in dark genre work of any sort. Led by the showrunners, this crew is all sailing in the same direction despite their different points of origin. Let’s see where they sail us to.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.