It is one of our time’s animal-brain comforts, if also one of its moral challenges, that our smartphones are always at hand, offering distraction. But look down for a moment while watching “Dark,” whose second season recently premièred, on Netflix, and you’ll find yourself lost. Some of that has to do with the fact that the series is in German, and so you’ll probably need to read the subtitles to follow along. But it’s also because of the intricacy of the plot, which centers on a handful of families in the fictional town of Winden, whose secrets and betrayals unfold in the course of multiple time lines, going back to 1921 and forward to a postapocalyptic future in 2052. There’s time travel, nuclear physics, Christian mysticism, and good old teen drama. All the actors are strikingly handsome, though it’s sometimes hard to remember who is who, or how anyone is related. Language fails to do this time-warped series justice. At one point, a mother discovers that she is the daughter of her own daughter. Maybe there’s a word for that in German.

True to the show’s title, the first season takes place in cloistered rooms and pitch-black caves, with the motif of soaked northern forests bringing to mind all those sober, rainy days on “The Killing,” another show about missing children and buried secrets. The new season, however, is largely set in bright sunlight, giving the eerie feeling, similar to that of HBO’s “Chernobyl,” that terrible things, atomic or otherwise, are happening, invisibly, right before your eyes. (The two towers of Winden’s nuclear power plant loom over the proceedings, waiting to blow.)

When the first season débuted, in 2017, the line on the series was that it was a German “Stranger Things”—a stylish mood show about imperilled kids, which, thanks to its time-travel elements, including a trip back to the nineteen-eighties, gave off similar nostalgia vibes. Since then, its wider ambitions have become apparent—and viewing is, frankly, a bit of work. There’s a chance that none of it makes sense, although I’m cautiously optimistic that the series’ creators, Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, have it figured out. (Production of the third and final season is under way, and they’ve promised a clear resolution.) Regardless, recent television (“True Detective,” “Game of Thrones”) has proved that devoting too much mental energy to predicting a show’s next step or deeper meaning may be effort misspent. Perhaps the best way to enjoy “Dark” is just to let it pass over you, as weightily satisfying as the thunk that the doors of the show’s many German station wagons make when they’re shut.