May your coffee kick in, before reality does... 1899 is available to stream only on Netflix.
Heavy Spoilers Ahead, Tread Carefully...
One of the most anticipated shows of this year, 1899 is here for you to binge right now, this is your second reminder to stop reading this article but please be sure to come back as there are a lot of things to unpack here, that will surely interest you! The creators of Dark, Jantje Friese, and Baran bo Odar have partnered up once again with Netflix to bring us yet another mind-bending series of this era. If you are not alien to this showrunner's style you know how much the twists and turns addle your brain, so here is our feeble try to make sense of each frame in which Maura, Daniel, and Eyk left us as confused as one can get...
A ship traveling from Europe to America in the titular year is carrying 1,423 immigrants traveling to America in search of better prospects. On their way, they receive a signal from a ship that went missing four months ago, The Prometheus. The ship's captain decides to turn the course to rescue the probable survivors on the ship. Upon reaching they find the ship absolutely abandoned with only a single soul on board, a boy locked in a cabinet. They bring the boy back to their ship, and people suddenly start to die mysteriously. What follows is a series of unimaginable events. What sounds like a psychological thriller is also sci-fi, in my opinion.
This time around, the creators decided to take it a notch up and play with the notion of reality. While the storyline is far from its predecessor, eerie breath noises as background scores and flashy half-second scenes will instantly feel familiar. Some scenes of this series are undoubtedly darker than Dark ever was!
During the course of the first season, we learn that the whole voyage is a simulation and the fact that there have been many such simulations before. The Kerberos simulation is designed to run in a repeating eight-day loop. None of these ships have ever made it to their destinations, however, the version we see did reach the furthest as pointed out by Daniel. Nobody really dies, though, their physical bodies are set in a matrix-type setup and are still alive on board a spaceship. Yeah, that leap from ocean to space was a pretty sudden and steep escalation. Anton Lesser, who played the role of Henry Singleton, the protagonist Maura Franklin's father (who is known for playing the role of Grand Maester Qyburn from Game of Thrones), was deliberately portrayed as the key antagonist only for us to find out at the very end her brother, Ciaran, Maura Franklin was looking for was the real villain. At the end of the finale we learn that while Maura and her father were trapped in this simulation, her brother had gone rogue. We also see that Henry was trying to exit the simulation, which was actually created by Maura herself, who then forgot everything. The last episode shows Daniel successfully altering the program's structure and destroying the latest iteration of the simulation, in turn retrieving the code that'll make Maura wake up and return to reality.
We now know that in the real world, Maura and Daniel have been married for 12 years, and they have a son named Elliot, the boy they found on The Prometheus. At some point, Elliot falls sick because of a mysterious disease that is hinted at by Henry, and somewhat like Wanda from MCU, Maura creates a simulation to keep her son alive. While at no point in 1899 confirms it, it seems that Elliot may have died, which drove Maura to erase all the memories and plug herself into this simulation forever. There are still a lot of unanswered questions that Netflix and the showrunner have deliberately kept for the storylines of the coming seasons to answer. We don't have any official renewal announcement, but given the hype surrounding the show, nobody is worried!
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