ABSTRACT
Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019) is a prequel to Jim Hensen’s 1982 film The Dark Crystal. The original film opens to an apocalyptic scene and the narrator’s voice introducing “another world, another time …” where only two Gelflings have survived the SkekSis rule. In Age of Resistance (AoR), audiences return to the pre-genocidal world of Thra and follow the Gelflings’ struggles against the unjust and exploitative rule of the SkekSis—who literally consume the life force of Gelflings to retain power. The series uses strategies of binary-rejection to bring audiences into a world where everything both is, and is not, as starkly black-and-white as it appears. This chapter examines three key strategies of binary-rejection: the use of non-linear temporalities of narration, which reject a teleological progression of political history; composite visual techniques, featuring uncanny and grotesque puppetry alongside computer-generated landscapes; and the use of the genre of children’s television as a vehicle for the narration of apocalyptic stories. In using these strategies of binary-rejection, Age of Resistance narrates a journey where hope and despair, ruin and renewal, and world endings and beginnings are not easily disentangled.
