While the first season of 1899 gave us enough to chew on for a while, there are still many unanswered questions fans want to see explored in future seasons. Fortunately, creators and showrunners Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar have a long-term plan for the show, which should end in Season 3.
1899 follows the international passengers and crew of the Kerberos, a ship going from Europe to New York in 1899. From the show's very first episode, it’s clear that not everything is as it seems aboard the Kerberos, and all the people on the ship might be part of some kind of weird experiment. The season has many twists and turns, and while it does an excellent job of solving some mysteries, there’s still a lot to explore in the 1899 universe. Talking to Indiewire about their successful show, Friese and bo Odar explained that was always the plan. Friede explains, “Season 1 is about establishing a big theme, a big thing. Let’s see if there’s a Season 2, and then we’ll start playing with that theme and have a resolution ideally in the third season. Again it’s, like Dark, meant to be told in three seasons.”
While Friede and bo Odar set a course for the Kerberos through three seasons, not everything is set in stone. In fact, while the duo has a fair idea of where 1899 characters should go next, they also leave some wiggle room to write the show’s future seasons. In Friese’s words:
“We always know the endpoint, the ending of the journey, the biggest reveal of them all. Apart from that, during the process, you just find pieces that aren’t included in Season 1 yet, but you know that you want them to be incorporated at some point. It’s having some cornerstones to go to and knowing where you’re heading, but also being flexible to the things that happen around you to act as input.”
How Dark Influenced 1899's Writing?
Before releasing 1899 on Netflix, Friese and bo Odar developed the three-season series Dark, a critically-acclaimed time-traveling story that gathered a legion of fans worldwide. As the duo points out, their experience with Dark helped to set their goals for 1899, as they learned not to underestimate the audience. As bo Odar says, “From Dark, we really think the audience is smart and can have fun with puzzles. So we don’t want to fool them. We rather want to play a trick in front of them, showing them that, of course, it’s a trick. You just still haven’t figured out what the trick is.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that finding every answer in 1899 is going to be easy, as people who watched Dark know how easy it is to jump to the wrong conclusions. Friese underlines that “there are a lot of people who watched Dark who are used to the way that we code things and how we hide things. We had lots of readers on the scripts already saying, ‘Okay, so Daniel (Aneurin Barnard) is actually The Boy (Fflyn Edwards).’ But guess what? That’s not what it is.” In the end, 1899 is all about finding clues and piecing things together in unexpected ways, and Friese and bo Odar hope to keep the mystery going until Season 3. As Friese explains it:
“What we constantly do is play with expectations. You read a code and you expect something and you feel safe in that. You think you figured it out. We’re breaking that expectation, and then hopefully giving you a satisfactory answer. At least at the end of Season 3, but hopefully already during the very first season.”
The first season of 1899 is available right now on Netflix. Check out the series trailer below.