This blog cycle contains spoilers for Dark, Paradise Lost, and the future of our planet.
“The beginning is the end.”
That phrase, along with many other vague wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey lines, is eternally recurring in Netflix’s German sci-fi show Dark. The show takes place in three different time periods, 33 years apart from one another, in the small town of Winden, whose distinguishing feature is a giant nuclear power plant.
Oh, and it also has a cave that transports people back and forth through time.
At the end of the first season, someone from 2019 crawls through that cave and arrives in the year 2052. Everything he finds there is grey. Ash blows through the air; trees wither without leaves, their bark scorched black; small bands of rugged, ragged humans scramble in packs through the remains.
You can guess what had happened to the town’s biggest feature.
The show describes the nuclear plant’s explosion as the ‘Apocalypse’, a word that refers to the complete final destruction of the world, as described in the Biblical book of Revelation. In the Bible, it’s the end. But, in the time-travelling world of Dark, it’s also the beginning.
***
“It was dark. It seemed like it was night-time, because the smoke had blocked out the sun. Ash and embers were raining down. And as the fire grew closer, there was this real sense of it being hell on Earth.”
That’s how Kory Honea, County Sheriff of a small town in California named Paradise, described the wildfire that ravaged his town in 2018. That fire was the largest in California’s modern history, killing 86 people, destroying more than 13,900 homes and clearing an area of woodland so large it could be seen from space. It had expanded by the size of one football field every second, practically exploding across the state, propelled by 52 mph winds.
It was an ambush: the fire started on the other side of a mountain from the small town, so most of the residents had no warning at all before the fire descended upon them.
Early that morning, a nurse named Nicole Jolly opened her phone to a text from her husband. It was one word: ‘Fire’. A minute later, he sent a follow-up: ‘Huge.’
By the time Jolly and the other nurses had evacuated all 67 patients from Paradise’s hospital, its human resources building was already ablaze. She looked back on a wall of flames as she pulled out of the parking lot, heading towards Pentz Road, one of the town’s four evacuation routes.
The road was jammed.
It was no use trying any of the other routes, because all of those were also gridlocked. Popping tyres banged above the crackling sound of combustion, over the shouts and screams of the trapped herd; people abandoned their melting vehicles to stumble through the thick orange haze in any direction they thought would lead to safety.
Jolly was still in her car, attempting to drive through it all, with the steering wheel literally melting in her hands. Once her car caught fire, though, she joined the others on foot.
Hundreds of residents were stranded in the middle of the fire, with no exit. Some had stayed in their houses the entire time, while others were forced to shelter in car parks and commercial buildings that had not been designed for such a purpose. The whole event was a disaster of city planning.
In 2005, the state fire management plan for the ridge had warned that canyon winds posed a ‘serious threat’ to Paradise. And yet, 13 years later, those foretold winds met no resistance whatsoever from the town. Those in charge of Paradise had ignored every single warning given to them about the East winds, outright rejecting the idea that something so disastrous could possibly happen in Paradise.
A year after some serious fires in 2008, the Butte County grand jury had warned Paradise’s leaders that the town must address its evacuation route problem, or face disastrous consequences. And yet again, even after large costly fires, these threats were ignored.
A fire specialist named Zeke Lunder says that towns like Paradise are “set up for disaster”. It’s in their “DNA”. Their destruction is encoded right there in their construction. Their beginning is their end…
***
Genesis, the first book of the Bible and the story of the universe’s creation, features prominently in Dark. Three of the central characters are called Adam, Eve, and Noah, and ‘Paradise’ is something at least two of the characters are attempting to create.
Adam’s idea of ‘Paradise’ is the same as his idea of the ‘Apocalypse’ (or ‘Apokalypse’ in German). He wants a dead, empty universe. Only a universe that is devoid of life can be devoid of suffering. This is how, for him, the end and the beginning are one and the same. The end of reality is the beginning of Paradise.
Before there was Dark, though, and after the Bible, there was John Milton. Most of us, whether we’ve read it or not, view the tale of Adam and Eve through the lens of Milton’s Bible fan-fiction story, Paradise Lost.
In the poem, Milton takes the tiny but iconic fable of the first two humans ever to exist, and explodes it into a twelve-book epic with psychologically complex characters and scenes where angels and demons chuck mountains at each other in Heaven. It’s a lot of fun.
The main story goes like this: Adam and Eve, ignoring warnings from a higher authority, thinking they couldn’t possibly be punished so horribly for such a minor digression, eat an apple, and then climate change happens. This is widely considered a bad move.
Milton puts that all a little more poetically: for example, in book 10, after Adam eats the forbidden fruit, God gives out his vengeful commands, starting by addressing the star at the centre of our solar system:
The Sun
Had first his precept so to move, so shine,
As might affect the Earth with cold and heat
Scarce tollerable, and from the North to call
Decrepit Winter, from the South to bring
Solstitial summers heat.
Do ‘cold and heat / Scarce tollerable’ sound familiar?
Paradise lost, and all for what? Arrogance. Adam’s arrogance, Eve’s arrogance, that God couldn’t possibly...
‘Nor can I think that God, Creator wise,
Though threatning, will in earnest so destroy
Us his prime Creatures’
If that was the tale of the first humans, it says a lot about our ability to learn from our own mistakes. Perhaps our narcissistic self-destructive tendencies are a part of us, encoded in our DNA.
Perhaps our beginning…
You get where I’m going.
***
Former FEMA administrator Craig Fugate has a name for all the mistakes governors make when they fail to prepare for the worst possible outcome: he calls them “Deadly sins”.
And they really are deadly: every survivor of the tragedy has a story to tell, of witnessing some human-shaped figure on fire in a car, or an old lady dying of a heart attack in the terrifying heat, or corpses appearing on the road ahead.
Nicole Jolly was asked at 10:02 AM to return to the fire; somewhere on the road, a woman was in labour, and fire officials had radioed Jolly to ask her to perform a caesarean section. Jolly returned to the hospital, which was still mostly intact, to fetch supplies and await her patient’s arrival.
The pregnant woman never arrived.
***
Not a single building in Paradise was left unscathed. Drone footage showed the land flattened, reduced to ash, after the fire. The fire had destroyed about 90% of the structures in the town; it was as if a nuclear explosion had just levelled it. It looked like the end.
But if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll be aware by now that endings aren’t just endings.
Two blog posts from now, in the third part of this cycle, I’m going to explore the notion of the “Eternal recurrence”, the idea that life will continually repeat itself, forcing us to relive the same destructive beginnings and productive endings over and over again.
As if one ending wasn’t enough.
This blog is the first part of a series called Losing Another Day in Paradise. To see the other entries, click the words 'Blogging Volumes' at the top of the page to return to the main menu. The next entry is called Paradise Regained...
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