#okay but jonas getting it on with martha while his other version is trying to stop his father and in that way ensuring that his father will | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

metawitches · 4 years

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The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. Michael dies again, Jonas startles awake again. Claudia explains it all, then convinces Jonas and Martha to take a star bridge into space.

Adam finally goes full Nosferatu.

I had to kill her! The fate of the multiverse depends on it!

Recap Episode 8: In Which Claudia Jonas Retcons It All

Pay No Attention to The 2 1/2 Seasons Behind the Curtain

The episode begins with a return to season 1, episode 1 and Michael Kahnwald’s suicide. Then Very Young Jonas startles awake in his bed after a nightmare about his father’s death.

He goes downstairs, sniffs the milk and tells his father about his nightmare. They hug it out, while in the background Hannah makes sure that Jonas has an appointment with his counselor, Peter Doppler, to treat his ongoing struggles with depression.

The whole series was just one of Jonas’ very vivid nightmares. He had a run in with Bartosz’s bitter old grandmother, Claudia, last week, who’s had it in for the Kahnwald family ever since Nurse Ines was instrumental in discovering that the increased cancer rate in Winden was caused by the nuclear power plant accident in ’86.

Claudia, who was the power plant director at the time, was fired and arrested when her part in the cover up of the accident was discovered. She did jail time and her career never recovered.

Old Claudia was so vicious with Jonas that he’s not sure when he’ll be ready to visit Bartosz again. Regina and Aleksander think it might be time to put her in an institution, since she’s driving business away from their luxury spa hotel and cancer rehab center. Since the power plant closed down, their spa and rehab resort hotel keeps much of Winden employed, so they’re very protective of the business.

Jonas feels much better after spending the day with his girlfriend, Martha, who he’s not related to in any way. He doesn’t dream at all that night. The End.

I can retcon the whole thing, too. If we’re going to do it, might as well go Full Dallas.

But let’s do it their way.

Recap

The episode begins with a return to season 1, episode 1 and Michael Kahnwald’s suicide. Then Very Young Jonas startles awake in his bed after a nightmare about his father’s death.

Claudia explains to Adam in 2053 that he is the dreamer and his nightmare will never end.

Unless he listens to her.

After all, listening to her has worked out so well for him in the past. It was his childhood dream to become a mass murdering, pedophilic vampire.

Jonas gets stuck on the fact that he had Claudia killed in the 1950s. I guess he forgot about time travel.

Living Past Your Expiration Date

The God particle has pickled Adam’s brain over the last several decades and he never gives it enough time to heal in between fatal accidents and suicide attempts. If he did, he would realize that many people are alive in the future after their death dates in the past. He sent Noah into the future more than a century past his technical death date.

The time periods that a traveler visits still need to play out in real time, in chronological order, in addition to the out of sync version time travelers experience. Thus, their visits to the future, no matter how long after their death date, will still play out, regardless of whether they are alive or dead in the past. And they will still meet people who watched them die. The Time Traveler’s Wife clearly illustrates this concept.

If you think it through, we already know this, because we watched Hannah die in 1911, yet her entire life prior to that was lived in the future.

Claudia tells him that he still doesn’t know how the game is played, another line they like to repeat, then scoffs at him for putting all of his energy into destroying the knot.

That would be the knot she discovered and told him was important.

She tells him that the origin isn’t in the bindings between the worlds. It’s outside the worlds. His world and Eva’s world should never have existed.

Claudia explains that their thinking is shaped by dualities – dark and light, good and evil, Adam and Eva- but the world actually works in threes. (Remember when she told Jonas in season 2 that there were two sides to the time war, and Adam was the dark and she was the light?)

He needs to stop thinking in dualities. The nature of reality requires three dimensions. Adam suddenly remembers the triquetra knot and figures out that there should be a third world.

Which should have been obvious to him from his talks with HG Tannhaus in S1, when HG essentially said that, but okay. Like I said, Jonas has clearly sustained some brain damage over the course of this cycle.

We go to HG Tannhaus in the bunker, where he’s preparing to turn on his room-sized time machine. This is the 3rd world. Claudia describes it as, “The world that gave birth to the knot, where everything originates, where a single mistake was made.” Tannhaus plugs cables into the machine then looks back at the photo of his son’s family on the wall.

“Tannhaus, in the origin world- like you, he lost someone. And like you, he tried to bring that person back from the dead. But instead, he split and destroyed his world, thus creating our two worlds.”

Tannhaus goes to the wall switches and pushes all 3, turning on the machine. This is the third version of this event we’ve been shown. I assume we’re seeing Origin world Tannhaus’ last three tries at increasing the power of the machine, until with the 4th try he suddenly went too far and blew up his whole planet timeline. But the previous two attempts could have taken place on other worlds- the time machine rig is slightly different this time.

Choose your own adventure.

When Tannhaus pushes the red buttons, the machine reaction is much stronger than before. It has a new cylinder on top that sends out extra lightning. Tannhaus backs up against the wall in fear, just as the camera cuts away.

Claudia tells Jonas that he can destroy the knot by preventing the invention of space-time travel in the origin world.

Didn’t she just tell him he shouldn’t care about the knot?

Old Claudia and Adam return to Adam’s destroyed lair in the Sic Mundus Temple of Doom. Adam/Jonas must have left something behind that Claudia wants. Claudia pretends she would have bothered to spare him pain if she could, as if she’s ever gone out of her way to spare anyone anything. She explains that the cycles have to remain the same until she’s ready to change them. Jonas asks if the scene they’re acting out now has ever happened before.

She says the rest has happened an infinite number of times, but this conversation is happening for the first time, because now, for the first and only time ever, she’s really truly going to tell him the truth.

Imagine me banging my head against the wall. Then imagine it some more. Jonas’ father was the magician who taught us all the rules of magic, which I can see now were what I should have been repeating every other recap.

This show is a shell game. A very long, complicated shell game, played with Mikkel’s love of complexity, distraction and secrecy. But that’s all it is. A game to see which world ends up with the prize on it at the end. Claudia is the magician and Regina is the prize. Everything else is time wasting, repetitive, meaningless distraction that doesn’t matter to her. It’s only there to keep you from noticing what the magician is doing with the prize.

We’ve known all along that Claudia is the one who’s ultimately in charge. She’s said all along that she wants to save Regina, but we didn’t know what that would mean.

Claudia explains that Jonas and Eva singlehandedly keep the knot alive and regenerating.

Gaslighting, Nietzsche, the Enlightenment and Guilt

Let me remind you that we have been shown multiple scenes of multiple Claudias plotting together to keep Marthas, Jonases and Noahs busy and on the correct path for eternity. Claudia maintains these cycles and creates the schemes that the others enact. Without her, the rest would immediately fall apart.

I have no idea why Jonas and Martha are the chosen ones on these worlds, if the worlds are indeed Tannhaus’ fever dreams. You’d think the emanations of his mind would choose or create a couple who are closer to him to focus on, like Charlotte and Peter, Franziska and Magnus or Elisabeth and Hanno, his granddaughter and great granddaughters.

Claudia is the one who has reasons to center her focus on Jonas and Martha, two people who are instrumental in advancing the time travel techniques she needs to move her quest forward. I think they were colleagues or rivals who she trapped in these cycles, essentially enslaving them.

And now she’s done the same to Tannhaus on another world.

But that’s just me writing a second layer into the story again. If it helps you make sense of Dark, use my headcanon. Actual canon is a series of thrown together, cool but mind numbingly repetitive ideas that build into an explosion which weirdly turns out to be a dissolve and an out of place, feel good song, all meant to illustrate the metaphor that all that matters is your own point of view.

When you add up all of the philosophy we’ve been given, this is what you get- We are each living in our own heads, on our own little planets, and the rest of the world is there for us to experiment on as we see fit. If you’re strong enough, take and do what you want, without guilt. If you’re weak, you are guilty of lowering the overall quality of the world for the strong and should leave. Or maybe you should stay, as long as you understand that your place is to submit to the Will of the strong. The choice of genocide vs enslavement/oppression depends on which fascist psychopath you’re dealing with.

These views evolve from the biblical God giving Noah complete control over the Earth and come to fruition with Enlightenment and more recent philosophers such as Descartes, Nietzsche and the Existentialists. If the reality of the world is in question and individuals are given leave to use it as they see fit, when those ideas are combined and taken to their logical extremes, the end result is the disposable world we now live in and which Dark is showing.

While I know Jonas and Martha’s worlds are metaphors for the worlds inside their heads and therefore theoretically it’s no big deal to erase those worlds, this is the exact same philosophy that has been used to exploit and pollute our world almost to death, so I’m not going to excuse it.

At a certain point, metaphors become reality. This is that point. We can’t throw away the timeline or world we live on and go live in another reality. Magical thinking won’t save us.

We need to throw out Enlightenment era thinking, because it’s killing everything and we only have access to one reality. Even if we could access other realities, it’s not okay to continue the habit of colonization and destruction.

Claudia will gaslight Jonas about the knot and the cycles all episode, but what she says isn’t true. I have no idea anymore if the showrunners intended to portray Claudia continuing to gaslight Jonas, or if we are now supposed to believe everything she says, but gaslighting is what’s on screen. Maybe they just hoped we wouldn’t notice that she’s lying about so many things.

Maybe this is their attempt to have it both ways- the story is real and not real. Since they never verbally acknowledge the lies, whatever they might have been attempting didn’t work all that well for me. They coyly leave it in the realm of a midsummer night’s dream, but if you don’t know Shakespeare, you miss this. In the play, everything really happened. It wasn’t a dream. The characters just wish it was, because that would erase their mistakes.

Shakespeare’s characters can start over in the morning as if the world is new and the overnight changes happened naturally. But in real life, we have to deal with the way things are. We can’t undo what’s happened, but we can admit that the rest of the world is as real and deserving of respect as we are. We can ere on the side of believing in a cosmic consciousness that has a purpose for everything instead of repeating the self-serving mistakes of the past.

Over in the Alt world, Eva is explaining to Martha that everyone has to die so that they can be born again correctly. The Unknown trio join Eva and Martha. Eva says that he’s waited a long time to meet her. All three hug Martha.

Claudia explains that Martha and Jonas just won’t stop fighting over their kid and the knot.

They act out of love, but bring only pain and suffering.

Claudia is talking about herself here.

On screen, Martha tries not to shrink away while the Unknown touches her. She’s not excited about this baby.

Then Stranger Martha brings in the gun and clothes that Martha will use to kill Young Jonas. Eva tells her that in order for Jonas to live, he has to die, just like he always has.

Okay, now we’re back in territory I recognize. He’s the dying and reborn god again. Eva just wants to send him home to his own world without paying the time sphere fare. And Claudia probably convinced her this was necessary, for some reason.

Claudia: “Both of you have done unimaginable things on your journey, because you can’t let go of your deepest desires. You have been trying to escape what you will become, but that’s impossible. You will end up facing yourselves again and again.”

So, this right here is the breakpoint for me. As we hear Claudia say this, we watch Martha kill Jonas. And we watch Jonas die without fighting death or blaming Martha. He gives her the St Christopher medal because he loves her, but he’s able to give up his attachment to her and to his life, leaving this world behind. He leaves his deepest desires behind without a struggle.

Martha shoots him because even though she loves him, she’s able to give up her attachment to him and do what’s necessary. She also lets go of her deepest desire without a struggle. Neither of them worry about their son. Always and forever, they are the primary attachment for each other, but they both give up that attachment, and all other attachments, constantly, throughout the series and this episode.

Claudia has to constantly push them into fighting over attachments. They only become Adam and Eva because of Claudia.

The struggle to give up or protect attachments is only important because Claudia created it as a distraction.

Claudia is the one who never, ever gives up her attachments. Bernd taught her to take what she wants, by any means necessary, and that’s what she’s doing. If the showrunners wanted me to believe Claudia’s argument, they needed to make Jonas and Martha less selfless and Claudia less devious. Because what I see are two people who become evil because they are purposely corrupted and exploited by a woman who has all the information and power at her disposal. Claudia is as Machiavellian as they come- she’s proven that there are no boundaries to her ambition.

Claudia tells Adam that Jonas and Martha and their two worlds should never have existed. He asks her how she came by this information. Especially her detailed information about the origin world.

Lol. Silly Jonas. Expecting Claudia to give a straight answer to questions like that.

She never answers the questions. We never find out.

She tells him that she’s spent 33 years looking for the answers in both worlds.

Claudia: “I’ve tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together, to understand how everything can continually be reborn from the same family tree. Until I realized that we’re not all part of the knot. Both worlds are a cancer that must have grown from something else. If you remove it, you destroy everything that was born of it. But you keep everything alive that already existed in the origin world.”

Let me point out here that Claudia never gives any reason why the people who are part of the knot shouldn’t exist. She just says that she figured out she could get rid of them and keep everyone else alive. The knot contains all of her/Regina’s enemies and her rivals in the development of time travel.

If she gets Jonas to wipe out time travel on the 3rd world and everyone related to the Nielsens, she can save Regina, sure, but she can also reinvent time travel all by herself and take all of the credit for the scientific achievement. Taking sole credit for developing time travel, or maybe sharing it with Bernd, is much more in character for Claudia than making Regina her sole priority for an infinite number of cycles.

As Old Claudia speaks, Aging Adult Claudia finishes decorating Prime Regina’s grave with a cross and a photo. Tronte says that he always thought Regina was his daughter. Claudia tells him that she used to wish he was Regina’s father, but it’s better this way. Since Regina’s not part of the knot, she will live.

Then she sends him off to kill Regina, who’s suffering and barely alive. She tells him that it has to be done, in order to motivate Claudia.

With the way the timelines are out of sync, Alt Regina must not be dead yet. Or we’re on a 3rd or 4th world. I can’t be bothered to make sense of the timelines anymore. They’ll all be dead or undone in a little while, so what does any of this matter?

Wonder who Regina’s father could be? Maybe the man she inherited that giant mansion from? The mansion that should have gone to Peter when Helge became incapacitated?

But let’s go back to the first parts of what Claudia said. She didn’t tell Jonas how she figured out anything about the origin world. The magician uses distraction to keep her secrets about how the magic is done.

Claudia says she wanted “to understand how everything can continually be reborn from the same family tree.” That sounds like she’s referring to the knot and the Nielsens, but it could also be referring to the fact that cancer recurs in her family. And in fact, then she refers to the two worlds as cancer worlds that came from a cancer-free world. That’s what she’s looking for- a cancer-free world for Regina.

In case you missed it, Claudia put the pieces of the puzzle together in a way that means Jonas and Martha’s worlds are just nightmare worlds created by the time apocalypse Tannhaus created on the Origin world. She essentially likens them to tumors attached to space-time where the origin world should be or fever dreams that Time has created out of the remnants of the origin world combined with Tannhaus’ longing for the return of his son’s family.

We’re apparently going to just throw all previous time and multiverse theory out the window in favor of Claudia’s cancer world theory. It doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs to save Regina. I’m not sure why they bothered with the whole clunky and confusing Schrodinger’s cat explanation in the previous episode, if none of it mattered. You’d think the fact that they explained that theory, what, 3 or 4 times, would make it the way the universe actually works. Which would mean Claudia is either wrong or lying.

But Tannhaus is now the evil out of control villain who destroyed his own world because he selfishly tried to bring back his family members, while Claudia is the benevolent, selfless mother who’s just trying to put things back to rights. If you don’t pay attention to the fact that Claudia is destroying two worlds in order to bring her own daughter back to life, you’ll be fine with accepting this scenario.

There’s also the fact that the way she describes Jonas and Martha’s worlds as tumors doesn’t really fit the way timeline creation works, using the Schrodinger’s cat theory of the multiverse. Joans and Martha’s worlds should just be 2 alternate timelines which came from that moment, with the destruction of Tannhaus’ world being a 3rd potential reality.

If his world was really even destroyed. Without more explanation and another point of view, it’s hard to judge the truth of Claudia’s assertion that Tannhaus’ world is gone. I’m willing to believe it is, but it’s hard not to notice that we see him turn his time machine on 4 times, with no sign of planetary destruction.

The closest thing to destruction we see is the creation of an Einstein Rosen bridge, which might create a shockwave, but we’ve already seen planets survive similar events- the apocalypses made life difficult, but they didn’t destroy Time or the planet. Maybe something in the power plant data leads to the conclusion that the original accident was actually on a 3rd world and then reverberated out into its clone worlds.

Why is she keeping so much information from Jonas? Because she’s still gaslighting him. His and Martha’s worlds aren’t cancerous tumors. They’re just alternate realities created in a destructive moment. Claudia wants to destroy them for her own purposes, so she needs to wind Jonas up.

I’m not sure if that’s what the show is trying to say or not, but it’s the logical conclusion, based on the canon that’s come before.

Claudia acknowledges that she’s also caused pain and suffering in others in her quest to save Regina. Everything she’s done has been part of her search for a way to break the chain of cause and effect. Her search to understand how everything is connected led her to the realization that their two worlds were created from a 3rd world and Regina will always die in the secondary worlds. Regina can only live in the primary world- Tannhaus’ world.

Claudia admits that she lied to Adam and Eva to keep the knot in place. She had to keep everyone else from finding out the truth and keep everything happening the way it always has, maintaining the chain of cause and effect in both worlds.

So, in her search for a way to break the chain of cause and effect, she had to make sure no one broke the chain of cause and effect? Because otherwise cause and effect would break all by itself? And it was imperative that only she perform this investigation, without any help from all of the intelligent scientists, police officers, etc. around her? In fact, she decided that the most effective way to perform the investigation was to declare herself supreme ruler of the universe, who was making changes all along in her attempts to save Regina.

Claudia tells Jonas that there’s no free will in either world. Everyone always automatically does what they’ve done before.

OMG. Then why does she have to work so hard to make sure that they do what they’ve done before???????

On screen, Alt Ulrich finds Adult Helge at the cabin. This is juxtaposed with scenes from S1 when Prime Ulrich found Child Helge at the mansion. The two scenes play out in a similar manner, ending with Ulrich murdering both Helges by beating their heads with rocks.

Really didn’t need to see the child murder again, never mind the murder of Adult Helge, but it reminds me of something. Somewhere in Ulrich’s adventures with stalking Helge, he tells Helge that he has to stand up to his bullies even if they’re bigger than him, or they’ll never stop. Ulrich says that Helge should bite the bigger boys to make them leave him alone. Following this advice, Child Helge bites Ulrich as Ulrich is murdering him, which doesn’t slow Ulrich down a bit, proving that it’s wrong to blame the victim when a bully attacks them.

But maybe I had it wrong. Maybe the showrunners’ point was that Helge deserved to lose because he couldn’t find a way to beat a grown man. And even as an adult, he’s not as large or smart as Ulrich, who’s a trained police officer. Maybe the point of Dark has always been to encourage taking what you want, ensuring survival of the most ruthless and physically strong. And to come up with a good story to fool anyone who might find another way to stop you.

Helge will eventually win, by waiting Ulrich out, sneaking up on him, bringing a bigger blunt object and using his fictional foreknowledge of events/being prepared. I’ve argued many times for the use of stealth techniques such as those of the femme fatale, which is what Helge uses.

But Helge really wins because he has a foreknowledge of events, so he knows to bring a better weapon. It’s the escalation of defensive tactics that wins the day.

So let me ask- are they arguing for a nuclear arms race? Because I thought these creators were against the use of nuclear devices? The events of this episode flip the message of the previous 25. As long as the nuclear devices aren’t close enough to Regina to give her cancer, it might be a good idea to keep them in reserve, right? Who cares if they give someone else’s kid cancer? We’ll just blow up bury discredit silence dissolve those neighborhoods when they get too polluted.

The inconvenient troublemakers who get in the way of success will become a dream, one way or another.

Alt Ulrich drags Adult Helge’s body down to the time chair room, which has bright yellow wallpaper in the Alt world. Claudia continues to babble on. She says, “No one can escape their fate.”

Alt Ulrich stands over Adult Helge’s body, admiring his work. Old Helge comes up behind him and says, “It was you!” He hits Ulrich in the head with an iron crow bar, knocking him out, then hits him a few more times to make sure he’s dead.

Guess what? Helge the Holy just escaped his fate.

In the Prime world, Helge and Ulrich have the opposite fates. Both live to be old, but Old Helge dies a violent death while attacking his adult self. The current scene negates everything Claudia is saying in her voiceover about everything always working out exactly the same in both worlds and finding its proper place, blah, blah, blah. It only happens that way because she makes it happen that way, so that she can tell Jonas this story.

And so that she can achieve her scientific goals. Never forget that this is the woman who watched her father die so that the passage, as the greatest scientific discovery she’d ever encountered, would remain under her control- not so that Regina could live.

If she didn’t manipulate events, Jonas and Martha’s worlds would diverge into two normal timelines.

Helge takes back his pennies.

Prime Claudia comes into the yellow room and takes in the situation. Adult Helge comes back to life. (His pennies signify that he’s a version of the ferryman who escorts souls to the Underworld. Prime Helge escorted all three dead boys right back to the Winden of Jonas’ world. You do the math.)

Ulrich does not come back. Claudia knows what happened to Helge and Ulrich on the Prime world. She gets an idea about the Power of Three to get things done.

The 3rd Helge broke the chain of cause and effect that was supposedly written in stone. She can work with that- an old man who’s so determined to get back what’s his that he’ll break all the rules, the bunker, time travel, lost children, worlds that are out of control- the story elements are all right there in that room.

Old Claudia changes the focus of her story and tells Jonas that the real loophole is during the nanosecond of time that the world stops during the apocalypse. It momentarily breaks the chain of cause and effect. Claudia says that Eva uses this moment in time to send her younger self off in different directions. Claudia also used it for this visit to Adam. She takes out the sphere. Now she wants him to use the nanosecond loophole to send Jonas in a different direction, so they can break the cycle forever.

Claudia: “Jonas and Martha are to blame for everything happening over and over again. You must send them to the origin world, so they can finally put an end to this.”

Back to the moment of Prime Martha’s death, at the end of S2. Jonas promises to make everything right. Adam has just left. He walks back in. Jonas yells at him. Adam says they need to leave, right now, then they can talk. Jonas throws a hissy fit over the sphere, since this Jonas has never seen one before.

They reappear in the Alt world caves. Adam tells Jonas that he can avoid becoming Adam. But he has to trust Adam.

Jonas should have broken out into hysterical laughter here, since he’d just watched Adam kill Martha, narrowly avoided a panic attack, gotten turned into golden glitter and now this. A little hyperventilation would have been appropriate, at the very least.

But, next thing we know, JONAS HAS LURED THE VAMPIRE OUTSIDE! Before the weak sunlight burns him to ashes, Adam instructs Jonas to hurry up and save Alt Martha from Bartosz and Magnus and Franziska saving her. And saving him.

I haven’t been this worried about a vampire since True Blood ended. Geez, I really thought episode 7 had put me off the older Jonases, but NosferAdam is getting all tender with Jonas now. And that coat is still sharp, even when it’s muddy.

NosferAdam: “All these years, I thought that I alone had to change things. But it’s just as much her fault. You are two parts of the same whole. Only together can you return to the origin world. What we know is a drop. What we do not know is an ocean.”

Jonas: “What are you saying?”

He’s saying that in the 5 seconds he was away from Jonas, he’s mellowed and moved on from murder to kidnapping, but Martha is still his favorite victim. And planetary destruction is still the ultimate goal.

And Young Jonas will still do whatever anyone tells him to do. His main desire in life isn’t really Martha. It’s to follow orders and be absolved of all responsibility. Law and order are everything. The real problem with the knot is that it symbolizes chaos and the breakdown of traditional societal values.

Alt Old Helge and Ulrich come through on their way to the cave and murdering each other in 1986. Jonas and Adam hide behind the family stalking tree while they pass. Adam explains about the apocalypse and the nanosecond loophole and original sin and soulmates and having to repeatedly kill the thing you love until it stays dead… He hands Jonas the sphere and says this is really, really the last time Jonas gets to save the world by destroying it, okay?

It’s a bad habit to get into. Mass destruction is never the answer. It just feels satisfying at the time.

Meanwhile, back in the Prime world, in Adam’s destroyed lair, probably in the 2050s but who really knows, Old and Aging Claudia have one last meeting. Old Claudia fills Aging Claudia in on her day. As she talks, she closes her backpack and we get a glimpse of a rectangular time machine with a golden handle, that we’ve never seen before, probably made from the design Eva passed to Claudia for Tannhaus.

This must be how Claudia travels to worlds we’ve never heard about, where she found the “origin” world. Aging Claudia doesn’t seem to know about the machine. Old Claudia is supposed to be going off to the 50s to die now, so you’d think she’d leave it with her younger self. How many secret lives does she have? Maybe she drops it off with Adult Bernd while she’s in 1954. A bunch of his problems suddenly get solved around that time.

I really like the idea of Claudia and Bernd traveling the time universe together, like a pair of Indiana Jones, if only they would use their powers for good. Or not for evil.

They hug goodbye and Aging Claudia asks Old Claudia to tell their dad, Egon, she’s sorry. Old Claudia reminds her, “If all this works, Regina will live.”

Old Claudia does visit Adult Egon in 1954 to deliver the apology. He has no idea who she is or what she’s talking about until 32 years later, when she watches him die in 1986 without calling for help.

Back to the forest road scene. Bartosz peddles his bike for all he’s worth. Jonas runs to meet them. Old Franziska and Magnus stop Bartosz and Martha. Jonas hides behind a tree and watches.

He’s the Jonas they’re convincing Martha to go save. Did a replacement Jonas already pop into existence to grieve Prime Martha? If Jonas misses her at this junction, and she doesn’t go with Bartosz once she’s outside the house, it would be really awkward for her to find her own dead body alone on the floor when she goes inside. Would she then run to the basement and become a Stranger Martha who zapped the cosmic egg with Claudia for 30 years?

While Martha decides whether to stay or go, Jonas winds up the Time Snitch, puts it in his pocket and runs toward her at full speed. They disappear together just as he reaches her and grabs hold, reappearing in the middle of the bus stop intersection.

Martha is stunned, then extra stunned when she realizes it’s a live Jonas- but not the Jonas she just lost. He’s having his own moment, taking his first good look at Alt Martha. They go through the usual let down of each being a soulmate, but not the soulmate the other one was hoping for.

Jonas explains that they’re on the Prime world, June 21, 1986, the day that “his” world created their worlds.

Jonas: “Tannhaus the clockmaker will open the passage for the first time today. We don’t have much time. We have to stop it from ever happening.”

He looks over at the power plant stacks, then runs into the woods, toward the caves.

Martha: “Wait! What does that mean?”

Words are still bouncing off of ears, though to be fair, no one ever clearly tells anyone the whole truth.

And everyone rushes around, saying there isn’t much time, as if they don’t have time machines in their pockets.

Back to the Alt world. It’s finally the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Adam stands in the Erit Lux HQ, gun in one hand and a lit torch in the other. That’s right. It’s time to burn those poor tortured masterpieces.

Why go through with it, when Adam knows everything is changing? Why not, I ask you? There hasn’t been near enough symbolic fire in this show to suit my tastes (lightning just isn’t the same), though I’d rather see buildings burn than priceless works of art. Burning down the church and Bernd’s mansion every cycle might’ve reduced the tension in town and opened up some productive lines of communication. It always does wonders for the story in 19th century novels.

Anyway, Painting Adam and Eva take the hit. Adam goes back to Eva’s God particle room and prepares to return to his world. Then he pauses, looking thoughtful.

On the Prime world, Jonas and Martha reach the entrance to the cave. Martha asks where they’re going. Jonas says they’re bringing someone back from the dead. She asks what that means. He says it’s hard to explain.

These two need to learn to mindmeld.

He says they need to reach the person they’re saving before they die, a recurring theme. Martha grabs his arm, also a recurring theme between them. And asks again what exactly it is he plans to do.

Jonas finally slows down and treats her like a person, sort of. He doesn’t tell her the whole story. But he does make a more direct appeal, using language he knows she’ll respond to. He turns and stands face to face with her, looking her in the eye. “You and I- we’re the reason that all of this happens, time and time again. Because you can’t let go of what you want and I can’t let go of what I want. But we are the glitch. The glitch in the matrix.”

Martha: “You’re saying that they never existed. Your world and mine. That we never exist.”

He nods his head and turns toward the cave.

This is the truth that the characters haven’t wanted to see and hear, all season long, every time they’ve asked what someone was really saying. This is why the Unknown doesn’t have a name- because he’s simply representative of Tannhaus’ missing granddaughter, whose fate is- unknown. This is the nightmare that’s been underneath all of the other nightmares, from the first episode- the fear that nothing is real. That the origin is a nightmare and the end is nothingness.

What happens, in an existentialist universe, when you discover that you are nothing more than an object in someone else’s world? What if, like Ariadne, you accidentally took center stage, believing you deserved equal time? Do you listen to the one who tells you it’s their world and you need to get out or do you fight for the right to exist?

In the world of Dark, you move over and allow that person to become the star of the world. And then, you allow them to convince you that your entire world should never have existed, because they need to destroy it to save their own world, which they messed up.

In other words, 2 worlds become disposable so that a 3rd world can survive.

Does it actually matter how the 2 worlds were born? They exist now. Why do they matter less than the one world where Claudia wants her daughter to live a beautiful, cancer-free life? In season 1, Jonas’ world wasn’t any more unfixable than ours.

There are real world implications here- this is what happens when poor regions are colonized and polluted so that wealthy regions can maintain their lifestyles without compromising their own environments. This show is encouraging our current model of late stage capitalism that destroys the planet and maintains social inequalities while trying to hide what’s happening behind a poof of golden glitter.

Martha takes a moment to accept the totality of the planetary death sentence Jonas has just shared with her. Then she follows him. Fascism and elitism win again.

Adam walks back into Eva’s lair. She’s waiting for him, since this is how their game usually plays out. He’s decided to mess with her one last time, rather than dying alone. Their love has become a toxic addiction, but it is still love. Fire and lightning burn, but they are still Light.

Try as she might, Claudia has never fully removed them from Love or Light. That’s why they are the ones to cross the bridge, not her. Her connections aren’t True in the same way, not even to herself. The knot may be chaos, but it is also a deepening of familial connections that refuse to be broken. It’s an intensifying of everything that families and love are, creating unbreakable bonds. Claudia’s method is to erase bonds, even within her own family.

We have never seen Regina with her father.

Adam strolls over to Eva, gun in hand. She says she knows why he’s here, and she’s excited to become Young Martha again.

Joke’s on her.

Adam stares at her silently. She tells him to shoot her, reminding him of the steps they take at this point in the cycle. She even pulls the trigger for him, but, like Noah before him, he’s cleverly removed the bullets.

Martha is stunned. It’s as if she doesn’t know that changes can be made in the cycles.

Adam assures her that they’ll both die, along with everything else.

Does NosferAdam ever die, in the normal course of things?

Martha asks what he did this time to screw up her life. Or, actually, her death.

I’m going to transcribe this speech for old time’s sake, because S1 Stranger Jonas is the best of all the Strangers. I will always remember him and Young Jonas as they were on that bench in the graveyard, a pair of sweet guys remembering their beloved dad.

At least Mikkel wasn’t retconned into someone terrible. He is the Sun King to the end.

Adam: Life is a labyrinth. Some wander around inside it until their death, in search of a way out. But there is only one path and it leads ever deeper inside. Only when one reaches the center, will they understand. Death is incomprehensible. But one can reconcile themselves with it.”

Next is the part that normally encourages the listener toward self reflection. That’s not going to happen here, because we are now living out a lie. Apparently we have been for a while, depending on what interpretation you want to take away from the whole thing. As a minotaur and the twisted king of the dying light, Adam goes for the extreme guilt and self-loathing that Claudia and Bartosz spent almost 7 decades instilling in him.

It’s a lovely thing, being a selfless, self-sacrificing person, which Jonas, Martha and Mikkel all have in common. Until a psychopath comes along and exploits you and your lover into becoming suicide bombers who take out a couple of planets. Y’all should go look up Stockholm Syndrome and Patty Hearst.

“All that we’ve done will ultimately be forgotten. We are responsible for this never-ending deja vu. And we’re the ones who have to end it. We are the mistake. You and I. Both of our fates are bound together in eternal damnation. Across both worlds. Everything is cause and effect. Every pain tempts us to act, shapes our will.”

While Adam speaks, Jonas and Martha make their way to the center of the passage. Adam continues, telling Eva about the car accident that drowned Tannhaus’ son and his family. (We’ve never been shown a river in Winden [the body of water is a lake]. The one bridge we’re frequently shown goes over railroad tracks. I don’t know what to make of the idea that their car went off the bridge and into a river.)

Adam: “Jonas and Martha must take his pain away so that he never looks for a way to undo everything. They must go to the origin world and prevent our two worlds from ever being created.”

Notice how this is phrased, at least in English- Jonas and Martha aren’t saving lives. They’re taking away the reason Tannhaus invents time travel and they’re stopping the creation of Jonas’ and Martha’s worlds.

Taking away all of Claudia’s rivals.

We’re shown a 4th version of Tannhaus preparing to start the time machine.

4 attempts to invent time travel=4 worlds?

Part of my 4 worlds theory comes from the triquetra. It has 3 fins and a center space- when it’s used as a Venn diagram, the center is the part that shows what all 3 outer parts have in common. Is the origin world one of the fins or the center world? Or a world that shouldn’t be part of this diagram at all? Did Claudia force it into the mix in order to make it the new Prime world, so she could give it to Regina?

There is a case to be made that Franziska was a chosen one in S1, then she was marginalized and eventually even her voice was taken away, which would make her the 4th chosen one. Martha, Franziska and Bartosz have each taken their turn with red as their color. I don’t think Jonas has worn true red, though he’s associated with burgundy, his painting and with fire. That would make him, with his OG yellow coat, the true Prime, center world.

But the show never went anywhere with the hints about Franziska, such as the bird necklace (equivalent to the St Christopher medal/birds are the equivalent of souls), the box buried under the bridge and her fake death, so never mind. It’s all just Chekov’s blue balls.

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Meanwhile, back at the bunker, sweet old Tannhaus is about to destroy his good world and create two evil worlds, because he’s just too attached to his loved ones. His Will is out of control.

Jonas: “This is the moment the passage was first opened in any world. Tannhaus wanted to travel back to a world in which the death of his family never happened… Anytime now, a bridge will come, connecting all 3 worlds.”

He explains that they need to travel to Tannhaus’ world, back to the moment when his suffering began. As they sit side by side in the passage and wait, he asks her what the Jonas in her world was like. They both cry a little, but she doesn’t tell him that he was supposed to be the Jonas in her world.

Tannhaus turns on the machine again.

Back to to the bunker. Little time sparkles stream through the bunker. This has happened before, during major Time events. The bottom of the time machine sends out a time laser which cuts into the rock below, creating the passage.

Lights flicker in Eva’s lair. Adam and Eva are excited and hug.

The time sparkles flow in 3 separate streams- the past, present and future? Everything whites out for a second, as Time saturates the passage. When Jonas opens his eyes, he is in the Time bridge- there is nothing around him but the time stream. (I thought for a second it was the Speed Force and he was now The Flash.) He calls for Martha, then looks for her. Martha is doing the same.

One end of the time bridge opens up for each of them. At first, it’s blank space. Then, Jonas sees Toddler Martha’s closet gradually materialize. She sees him in the back of her closet, as if he’s somewhere deep in Narnia. Katharina, who is pregnant with Mikkel, asks what Martha is doing. Martha says she sees a sad boy.

Martha sees Toddler Jonas watching her in his basement closet. Adult Mikkel/Michael asks what Jonas is doing. Jonas tells him he sees a girl in the back of the closet. Jonas is wearing a yellow raincoat. Katharina is in red. Both Marthas are in black.

Once the closet doors are shut, Martha and Jonas back up through the time bridge until they find each other. It’s a three way, Y shaped bridge, like the passage. Instead of waiting for the connection to the third world to open up, Jonas takes out the time sphere and sets coordinates. He and Martha walk toward the third arm, disintegrating as they go.

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It’s 1971 in Tannhaus’ clock shop. His son, Marek, is complaining that he always brings up the same things and never listens. “No wonder Mom couldn’t take it anymore.”

Tannhaus says, in a bewildered voice, that he thought Marek would want the store, if not now, then eventually.

Marek: “Your endless lecturing… Big Bang, Big Crunch. Have you ever asked Sonja if she’s interested? In all these years, have you ever asked if I’m interested? Or what I want?”

Tannhaus: “It’s raining outside.”

It’s raining, it’s all HG’s fault, too much science, bad relationships, what are you saying?

Very efficient. That was the entire series dismissed in about a minute.

Wait- Baby Charlotte is wrapped in a red and black blanket. The shop walls are teal. There’s a yellow clock. Here comes the secrets, oceans, and unknown child.

Marek: “You told me the world outside is full of secrets and that what we know is a drop in an unending ocean. At least you were right about that. You may know everything about black holes and Einstein Rosen bridges, but about me- you know absolutely nothing about me.”

Marek walks out. HG tells Sonja he thought they’d stay longer. Sonja assures HG that his son will cool off.

This scene gives you everything you need to know about the mysteries of Dark. Time took a two minute argument in the clock shop and repeated it ad nauseam for 26 episodes. My work here is done.

Okay, I’ll let the angels do the work of the white devil first.

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Marek and Sonja drive away in the rain, toward the bus stop. Sonja tells him he was too hard on his dad. He complains that she has no idea what it was like to grow up with a father who was only interested in big ideas and never really saw him. Sonja reminds him that he can’t choose his family. Marek says he chose her. Sonja says she chose him, too, and they kiss. While Marek is driving the car and Sonja is holding the baby. In the pouring rain.

Jonas and Martha materialize in the middle of the road, next to the bus stop, just as Marek and Sonja reach the intersection. Marek and Sonja are still kissing. He swerves and barely misses Jonas and Martha. He stops the car and gets out to yell at them for standing in the middle of the road.

They stand stiffly and don’t respond immediately, as if they aren’t fully in this world yet. Then Jonas tells Marek that the bridge is closed because of an accident. Marek starts to walk away. Jonas says, “What we know is a drop. What we don’t know is an ocean.” Marek pauses. Martha tells him that his father loves him and would do anything for him.

Marek goes back and asks what they said. At the same time, Sonja gets out and asks what’s going on. They all look at each other, then Marek tells Sonja that the bridge is closed. She hurries him back to the car, since Baby Charlotte is crying and wet. Once they’re back inside, Marek tells her she was right- they should wait to leave until the next day.

Martha and Jonas watch them drive away.

HG is surprised to see them back at the shop. Sonja tells him that Marek thinks he saw a pair of angels. Marek tells her not to mock him. He says he suddenly had this… feeling. HG hugs him and says he’s glad they came back. Marek takes their bags upstairs. Sonja lets HG hold the baby while she follows Marek.

It stops raining. Jonas and Martha are still in the street. Martha wonders if it worked, since they’re still there. Jonas tells her he saw her, as a child, when they were in the light. He thought she could see him too. Martha remembers seeing him in her closet.

Martha: “That was you? It wasn’t a dream.“

Jonas tells her no, it wasn’t.

She wonders if any part of them will be left behind or if they’re just dreams who never really existed. He doesn’t know.

Now that they’ve completed the connections between the worlds by acknowledging their own connections, they begin to slowly dissolve into gold glitter. Jonas steps closer to Martha and says, “You and I are perfect for each other. Never believe anything else.” They hold hands.

The camera reveals that there is no nuclear power plant on this world.

Gosh, what a coincidence. How convenient for Claudia.

One last montage. Versions of Jonas and Martha on all three worlds slowly dissolve while What a Wonderful World by Soap & Skin plays. Once they’ve killed the parasites who saved their lives, everyone else will finally get to live happily ever after without those ugly knots dragging them down.

Adam and Eva hold hands and face the paintings. They don’t have to fight Claudia’s war anymore. Unscarred Stranger Jonas sits on his bed, holding the St Christopher medal. He won’t become Adam this time. Stranger Martha and her chalk family tree disappear from the bunker. The knot is erased. Aging Claudia and her version of the knot on the Prime world also dissolve. On the origin world, the last remnants of Jonas and Martha float into the air. Fade to darkness.

Not light.

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What Just Happened? The Timestream as the Light

That looked to me like a soft reboot, or non-violent cycle change, instead of a hard reboot or violent cycle change, like we usually see, since it didn’t appear that any actual worlds were destroyed and only a few people were involved. They very pointedly showed that all three worlds remained behind- only certain people were removed, including Claudia, who didn’t think she was part of the knot.

Relationships which were connected to the events of the series were erased, regardless of whether Claudia had decided the people involved were genetically part of the knot. But that doesn’t mean the people were erased forever, because by Claudia’s own reasoning, many of the people on her board weren’t part of the knot and shouldn’t have been erased if that was the case.

This suggests to me that the natural order of things was being restored and/or a larger cycle was ending so that a new one could begin, similar to the end of a decade instead of a year. And that the characters’ overall existences are not necessarily tied to the existence of the knot. Instead, they are oversouls who travel within this larger cluster and will continue to be reborn together in various configurations.

But what do I know?

The space bridge that appears is an Einstein Rosen bridge, or wormhole, as discussed by Tannhaus and Jonas in season 1 and mentioned again by Marek. Tannhaus mentioned that Einstein Rosen bridges go in 3 directions through space-time, which this one does.

In one of his TV segments, Tannhaus noted that scientists didn’t know how to get a human through a wormhole. Claudia figured it out. You saturate the humans in the timestream, bind them to their own timelines/worlds and human connections, and bind them to each other’s worlds, so they are immortal chosen ones on their worlds- connect them to True Love and Light.

I’ve previously discussed chosen ones and the various soul connections between characters over time. In the season 2 episode where Martha and Jonas have sex for the first time, Katharina and Mikkel are lying in bed together in the next room, while Ulrich and Hannah have sex downstairs. I suggested then that we were being shown the true soulmate bonds. It appears they are also a soulmate cluster, with Ulrich and Hannah on the periphery.

Though Hannah isn’t on the bridge, she gets the last visual and last word of the season- she is still the all-mother goddess of this universe and her son won’t be denied his place in it. Zeus/Ulrich is represented by the lightning and thunder storm. Just what does he want Torben to continue hiding from the others?

Katharina, Mikkel, Jonas, Martha and the Unknown are all present in the Time bridge. (Martha is pregnant with the Unknown.) Katharina and Unknown are each only represented once, so they are the next closest bonds to Jonas and Martha, which is comforting in the case of the Unknown, given the way those relationships appear in the material world. All 5 characters sacrifice their lives for others. Katharina dies for Ulrich and Mikkel. Like his parents, the Unknown dies a savior’s death, destroying himself and the worlds to save them.

I expected the bridge to go to 3 worlds and that there would be a 3rd person on the bridge with Martha and Jonas. I’m surprised that it’s Mikkel, but now that he’s there, it makes complete sense for it to be him. He’s close family to both Martha and Jonas and has a close, loving bond to both. He died so that Jonas could live on the Prime world and Martha and Jonas conspired to keep him alive on the Alt world.

Like Charlotte in season 2, in season 1 Jonas was sure that the repeating time loops were about him and Mikkel. Maybe they were, before Claudia tampered with them. The fact that Fetus and Adult Mikkel are at the end of 2 arms of the bridge suggests that the 3rd arm should connect to his world, since Toddler and Young Adult Martha and Jonas are shown. Jonas and Martha make Ariadne’s thread type connections with each other’s worlds. It makes sense for them to also be connecting to the Mikkel of 3 worlds.

The bridge opened up for them when they were in the passage and the connections to each other’s worlds opened up by themselves. Logically, the connection at the end of the 3rd arm should have also opened up on its own, given a little more time, and shown them Mikkel. Maybe their alternates would also have been there, at a time when all 3 looked in a closet together. Then they would have completed the connections between the 3 worlds and a portal would have opened to Mikkel’s world.

Instead, Claudia’s machinations were all so that she could hijack this 3rd connection away from the world it naturally connected to. Claudia set up a stable wormhole, then switched the connection to the new, cancer-free world, probably when they use the sphere instead of the portal at the end of the 3rd arm to exit the bridge.

It might have taken the energy of both the bridge and the sphere to get both travelers to the origin world and secure the time energy connection in the way Claudia wanted, since the origin world isn’t similar enough to Jonas & Martha’s worlds to be nearby in the timestream/multiverse. Which is part of why I doubt it’s really the origin world in the way Claudia described. I think that’s a story Claudia made up to sell this mission to Martha and Jonas and the creation of the passage is more like a divergence point with many potential outcomes. By 2020 or 2053, the timelines would have diverged even further from each other and created more branches/timelines.

Once they’re on the 3rd world, Jonas and Martha make emotional connections with Marek, Sonja and Baby Charlotte. When Tannhaus holds Charlotte and then Jonas and Martha acknowledge the new connections, the process is complete.

We know Claudia is a form of the Devil or an opposition goddess, even though she’s seized control. The Unknown wrote the Bible, is the son and willingly sacrificed himself. He’s on the Time bridge in spirit, if you will, as an embryo, and the characters see him as the father of the knot on two worlds. He’s set up as the father/son God to oppose Claudia’s devil/dark mother, but he remains in the background.

In order to write the triquetra diary, which is what Claudia originally followed, the Unknown had to have a form of his own omniscience, observing the entire cycle, every cycle. We are shown that he makes changes and it’s not always clear who he’s working for. Claudia eventually moves beyond him and it’s implied that she visits many other worlds, but her worldview is determined by what she learns from him and she still needs to return home and use the Unknown to enact her final plans.

But, in the end, he remains a mystery. We have no idea what the Prime world was like in the beginning, before time travelers tried to fix it.

Dark is influenced by German Expressionism, an abstract early 20th century style in art and especially film making that leaned toward pessimism and turmoil as themes, using light and shadow, visual distortions and hyperrealism, especially in the expression of emotion. The horror genre has been particularly influenced by German Expressionist films.

But I believe the key to understanding the series as a whole lies in the 1930 German film The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings. The film made Dietrich a star and was the first of many collaborations between her and the director, the most to date between any actress-star and a single director. It was the beginning of the end of Emil Jannings’ career as a star. He eventually died in a Nazi concentration camp, in a chilling case of life imitating art.

Critics debate whether the film is a true example of German Expressionism. It appears to be so on the surface, telling the Faustian story of a middle class professor who becomes so caught up in his desire for a cabaret singer that he walks out on normal life in order to marry her and join her troupe of traveling entertainers. She’s a femme fatale who can’t be satisfied by one man. Eventually, the protagonist is reduced to working as a clown and living as a public cuckold. When the cabaret troupe returns to his hometown, he visits his old classroom and dies from intensity of the living he’s done.

In this masterful review, Mike Prokosch shows that there is a symbolic layer of Romanticism underlying the film’s pessimistic surface. Though he dies, the protagonist is ultimately better for having pursued his dream, loved and lost, and followed the light in his own way, than he would have been had he allowed himself to continue as a tool of the bureaucratic machine:

“Janning’s pursuit of light, though it leads him into humiliation and death greatens his soul. Sternberg’s emphasis on light-attraction over darkness’ terror, on personal triumph in the middle of degradation, are Romantic themes whose Christian roots are fundamentally opposed to German Expressionism.”

This is what we ultimately find at the end of Dark. Everything the characters do, no matter how dark, they do in pursuit of the Light, the greater good as they see it, to save their loved ones and their own souls from eternal torment or a violent world. In the end, Jonas refers back to the Time bridge, which is made up of the timestream and flows like water, as the Light. He’s able to return to the beginning, when he understood that Love and connection to Light are all that’s necessary.

Along with a little patience.

Claudia doesn’t win. She temporarily hijacks a connection which still exists. I guess she just wanted to see the Promised Land of a world where Regina doesn’t get cancer? You will never convince me that Claudia is able to destroy every world in the multiverse where Regina doesn’t live to 100.

What would be the point, if Claudia understands the true nature of the universe? (I don’t think she does- I think that might be the point. She’s so caught up in her own ambition that she doesn’t understand the nature of the cosmic consciousness, reincarnation of the soul rather than the persona or the world outside Plato’s Cave. She figures out some of the the mechanics, but nothing more.)

Regina is always going to die eventually, then be reborn. Which is why I think Claudia’s underlying goal was to steal credit for inventing time travel, then enjoy the control and accolades that brings her, with the side benefit of watching Regina live a longer life, removing Claudia’s guilt for being a neglectful mother who kept Regina’s father from her.

I have a feeling the Unknown reset a few things of his own, but we’ll never know. Except for that dream Grandma Hannah has…

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The lights come back up on a stormy night in the origin world. A group of friends is having dinner at Hannah’s house, which is now Regina’s house. Regina has a photo of herself with her parents, Claudia and Bernd, on a side table. They look like a close, happy family. Regina is a teenager in the photo.

Katharina, Peter, Benni, Torben and Hannah toast to Regina. Benni thanks Regina for the invitation. Everyone looks great. Hannah is pregnant. Torben (whose name means “the thunder god’s bear”) has scarring under his eye, but otherwise he seems intact. The others ask him to explain what happened to his eye. He starts to say, “Last summer…” But his voice is drowned out by thunder and the lights go out.

Hannah is spooked by the thunder. She stares at the yellow raincoat by the stairs and says she had deja vu. All of this is just like a dream she had last night- the storm, the lights, the darkness… “Then the world had ended. It was dark and never became light again. It felt good for everything to end and to be free of everything. No wants, no needs. Unending darkness. No yesterday. No today. No tomorrow. Nothing.”

Benni tells her she should see someone about it. Hannah tells Benni it’s just the pregnancy hormones.

Regina asks what they would wish for, if they only had one wish at the end of the world. Katharina says she’d wish for a world without Winden. They all drink to that. The lights come back on.

Katharina asks what they’re going to name the baby. Hannah says she’s always liked the name Jonas.

Sounds like Jonas is happy where he is. He finally found the exit.

Or did he? There are blue butterflies on the lampshade next to the yellow raincoat, symbols of resurrection since ancient times. Maybe Jonas has left yellow and green behind, ascending into blue.

Now it’s Bartosz’s turn with the Yellow Raincoat of Fate. (Regina and Aleksander will find each other in every timeline, come what may. Never believe anything else.)

Or maybe the raincoat and butterflies are meant for Regina. She has 3 red candles/Ariadne’s red threads behind her head and she asks for her friends’ wishes. Is she Fate on this world?

1986 Ulrich first wished for a world without Winden in season 1, episode 3, while sitting in the Bus Stop of Fate with Hannah, 5 months after the power plant accident, the day after Mikkel came back from the future.

Have a video of Marlene Dietrich singing Falling in Love Again from the film The Blue Angel, instead of the recently overused and tonally out of place Wonderful World. And then a mini playlist for the heck of it.

In my mind, Adam and Eva slow dance and sing Falling in Love Again to each other as they dissolve. And then somehow we transition to Lorde’s version of Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Claudia’s theme song.

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Commentary

Images courtesy of Netflix.

Dark Season 3 Episode 8: The Paradise Recap- Michael dies again, Jonas startles awake again. Claudia explains it all, then convinces Jonas and Martha to take a star bridge into space. The End. #DarkNetflix The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. Michael dies again, Jonas startles awake again.

#Dark #dystopia #Lisa Vicari #Louis Hofmann #metacrone #Mystery #netflix #recaps #review #science fiction #scifi horror #The Paradise

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metawitches · 4 years

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In episode 6, we discover that Young Jonas is Schrödinger’s cat. Martha goes to live in a cage, like Hansel waiting for the fairy-tale witch to eat him/her. We finally learn the contents of Martha’s letter to Stranger Jonas, but of course the letter leaves him bitter, because that is Jonas’ relationship to letters from the dead. We relive the apocalypse in the Prime world, because we just can’t get enough, and live through Martha’s apocalypse for the first time.

Recap

Meanwhile, in the Prime world, we jump back to the end of S2, where Young Jonas kneels over Dead Prime Martha’s body and promises he’ll make this right, somehow, somewhere, sometime. But right now, a nuclear apocalypse is coming, so he’s going to abandon her body to its fate and run downstairs to hide in his mom’s basement.

What, that’s not how you remember the end of season 2 going? Go check the footage. I’ll wait.

Actually, I won’t. Times to travel, recaps to write, who cares what we all thought happened way back in season 2. It’s a new day and a new Jonas. You accepted a new Martha, didn’t you? Well, the Jonas you’ve watched for 2.5 seasons just died for reals over in Martha’s world.

But wait! I think I hear angels singing!

A new Jonas pops back into the same moment, as theoretically the same Jonas, but also one who never went to Martha’s world and doesn’t have those memories, because in this universe, if you do a mash-up with oversouls, a cosmic consciousness, multiverse theory and the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, that’s what you get. It’s convoluted, but, their universe, their rules. The show will explain Jonas’ reappearance eventually.

For now, Stranger Jonas just had a nightmare in 1888 that was remarkably similar to what happened to the other Jonas in the Alt world.

Or If You’d Like a Little More Explanation Now…

Minor Spoilers Ahead

Remember how in episode 4 Prime Adult Claudia thought Jonas was dead? That’s because he really did leave their world and hasn’t been seen in 3 months. She understandably assumed he’d died. As external viewers, we know he went to Martha’s world instead.

At the moment that he died in Martha’s world, he popped back into being in the Prime world at the moment he left and it became as if he’d always been there. He doesn’t remember any other outcome and thinks he’s been living alone and working on the God particle alone for 3 months- which is now true.

But his trip to Martha’s world wasn’t erased. Both outcomes are now true. This is now a multiple timeline universe- a multiverse. Dark is layering the timelines strangely, but that’s what they’re doing.

They are also calling multiple timelines or dimensions “worlds”, which helps add to the confusion. The show isn’t explaining the many worlds theory well, since they want to stick to the pretense that there are 3 worlds locked in a trinity cycle, but they also want multiple timelines to spawn when different decisions are made, which is how new worlds are created in the many worlds theory.

By all rights, the Dark world should have new worlds popping up every time they go through the cycles and changes are made to the timeline or characters make major decisions that could go either way, such as when Jonas decided whether to go to the power plant or back to Eva’s lair.

Logically, there may (should) actually be at least two versions of Martha’s world/timeline out there now, one where Jonas went with her at the end of S2 and one where he didn’t, but we’re only going to follow the one where he went with her, because we need to keep up the pretense of a symbolic number of linked worlds, okay? Just go with it.

Also, I guess Claudia just didn’t bother to look for Jonas, the date who brought her to the apocalypse, during the 3 months she thought he was dead. That would be in character for her. She also didn’t bother to try to save her son-in-law, grandson or Tronte. Not even a quick phone call asking them to meet Regina in the bunker.

At the moment when Jonas either went with Alt Martha or ran to Hannah’s basement, time split into two streams, with two versions of Jonas going in two different directions. Because Claudia now lives outside of normal time, she sees more of reality than he does in this moment and realizes the truth. Of course she doesn’t tell him what happened. This is another moment where she lies to him by omission.

Why did a second version of Jonas appear in the Prime world while the original died in the Alt world, rather than the original reviving in the Alt world ? They are amending the rule that says characters can’t die before their time to include a stipulation that if the death isn’t in the character’s original world, they will come back to life in their origin world rather than where they died. I assume their soul is bound to their original world, but we only see this rule applied once, possibly twice, so it’s hard to know.

(The Marthas just sort of come and go so quickly around here and the scenes are so out of order but all look alike and it all ends up not mattering anyway, so why bother sorting it out? I’m not sure the writers and showrunners even know- to some extent, they’re just throwing cool ideas at the camera, answering a few questions, then dropping in a twist ending and hoping we’ll forget most of what came before 3.5, like the characters do.)

In episode 7, Tannhaus will explain this exception and the multiverse it forms using the classic Schrödinger’s cat experiment. Maybe Jonas is simply the cat bouncing back to the box he began in. In recent years, scientists have put photons (particles of light) into a state of quantum entanglement and observed that they were also in a state of superposition, the layering of potential states of being/actions/outcomes before one is chosen, akin to the cat in the box that’s both alive and dead.

There’s only one cat in Schrödinger’s one box, but the universe is comprised of an infinite number of boxes, bound together, creating the gears or threads or house of cards of the universe(s). The rule for individual characters in the Dark universe has always been that the Jonas who’s always existed comes back to life by whatever means necessary. Jonas is always Jonas.

Other than very specific circumstances, that will continue to be the rule and that rule will, in fact, be stated straight out. But the many worlds/timelines aspect will also continue to be included and expanded. Personally, I find the Schrödinger’s cat example to be a clunky, confusing way to approach an explanation of many worlds theory, but since this is Dark, that’s probably the point.

Also, It might be helpful to look at these last 4 episodes as a separate mini season, with their own separate themes, rules, personality changes and influences. This experience changes Jonas and Martha in much the same way that a cycle change produces personality changes. Since these are their worlds, people close to them also feel the change.

Okay, Maybe It’s A Lot More Explanation…

I really should have talked about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave about 20 episodes ago. Socrates uses this analogy to describe the process of becoming aware of the true nature of reality.

This summary is from a Psychology Today article:

Human beings spend all their lives in an underground cave with its mouth open towards the light. They have their legs and necks shackled so that they can only see in front of them, towards the back of the cave. Behind the prisoners, a fire is blazing, and between them and the fire there is a low wall behind which men carry diverse statues above their heads, such that the fire casts the shadows of the statues onto the back of the cave. Because the shadows all the prisoners ever see, they suppose that the shadows are the objects themselves.

If a prisoner is unshackled and turned towards the light, his eyes suffer sharp pains, but in time they grow accustomed to the light and he begins to discern the statues. He is then dragged out of the cave, where the light is so bright that he is only able to look, first at the shadows, and then at the reflections, of the actual objects. At last, he is able to gaze upon the objects themselves, of which the statues were but pale imitations. In time, he looks up at the sun, and understands that the sun is the cause of everything that he sees around him, of light, and sight, and the objects of sight.

The purpose of education is to drag the prisoner as far out of the cave as possible; not merely to instil knowledge into his soul, but to turn his whole soul towards the sun, which is the Form of the Good.

Only a few are capable of leaving the cave and fewer still are capable of achieving each level of education/enlightenment. The end result was meant to be highly educated philosopher-kings who would reluctantly return to the cave to rule ignorant common folk who are incapable of making decisions for themselves. This analogy is usually related to philosophy and politics, but religious and scientific beliefs are other obvious uses.

While it’s generally understood that Plato and his narrator, Socrates, tell this story to explain why education and a classist society are necessary, the deeper metaphor explains the nature of reality and the levels of growth the human soul goes through before full understanding is reached and the soul is ready to experience the full light of God.

The allegory explains human life as a theatre of the mind, in which the oversoul is an an observer of the physical body as it goes through a mundane life on the lowest plane of existence, our lives on Earth. In this life, we are blinded to the realities of the universe by our dependence on experiencing life through the dull senses of our physical bodies and processing those experiences with our organic brains, instead of having full access to our souls.

Once we awaken to the truth of reality and gain access to the deeper abilities of our souls, we go through several more levels of waking up and becoming able to tolerate more light, since it takes time and practice to adjust to the strength and brightness of the truth.

And sometimes, to the harshness of it. Generally, this metaphor cares little for individual human lives or attachments or even the Earth itself, since all will be reborn. There are Eastern variations that teach sacredness and respect, though.

These basic ideas have been played with by artists, philosophers, scientists, religions, etc. for millennia. Schopenhauer wrote about the self as the subject and the rest of the world as objects which exist because the Will of the subject has dreamed them into being. “The world that we perceive can be understood as a “presentation” of objects in the theatre of our own mind.”

He thought that the Will/desires of the subject create the shadow puppet show of mundane life. Suppression of the Will/desires could allow one to move past those desires toward the truth. Giving in to the Will provides momentary pleasure, but ultimately creates a painful, out of control addiction to this temporary rush that must continue to be fed.

We’ve watched Dark play with the notion of the shadows in the cave vs the light of knowledge and love. We’ve seen the characters struggle with their desires until they become undeniable, destructive addictions, but also with their attempts to suppress their desires until they’re driven to suicide from the deprivation. Some of them have known since season 1 that they are in a false, theatrical world and they’ve tried to grow beyond it or escape it.

Adam and Eva have both used the system of naivety, innocence and death to explain waking up to the truth, which they call the light, in Eva’s case, or the dark, in Adam’s case. They’ve both created apocalypses to blast their way out of the metaphorical cave, which they call “the origin”, and they’ve tried the light of true but forbidden love in attempts to simply turn away from the shadow puppets. But the shackles of this mundane plane of existence are complicated and Claudia continuously ties the knots of their bindings tighter.

They’ve both been guided by Claudia, the white devil, every step of the way, because she has work for them to do, so she needs them bound to their worlds by these knots.

Ariadne’s thread will only lead you out of the labyrinth if the string is set up to take you where you want to go.

What if the labyrinth is actually a maze, with more exits and entrances than you realized, and Ariadne has been misleading you all along for her own purposes? Or you’re actually Odysseus, stuck on the island with Ariadne’s aunt Circe for 1 enchanted year that turns out to be hundreds of cycles, with a cord tied to your ankle that will only allow you to walk in circles?

Also see: Russian Doll, The Truman Show, Palm Springs, Reprisal (the whole season plays with self awareness, escape and return, but episode 8 actually goes to a shadow puppet show, then has successive characters become more aware of the truth of their situation)

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When his dream ends, Stranger Jonas startles awake. He’s been sleeping in Alt Martha’s bed, because he both loves and hates her and because there’s only one bed in 1888. He picks up the letter from Martha that Young Noah brought him at the end of S2. Martha reads it aloud, so we know some version of her wrote it, probably the one who’s now in a cage:

“Dear Jonas: You promised to make everything right again. I want you to know that you will do that. You must never lose hope that there is a way out of this maze. A way to save me and yourself. But we have to make sacrifices, do unimaginable things, to untie the knot at the end. Each fate in this knot is tied to the next. A thread, blood red, that connects all our actions. In light and in shadow. But the apocalypse must take place. You must let me die, so I can live. We have to let some things go so they can find their way back to us. You and I are perfect for each other. Never believe anything else.”

Jonas burns the letter.

It’s the ultimate manipulation of his emotions. I’m willing to bet that Adam still has it memorized and believes it, deep down, even if he dictated it to Martha. After all, there is a set of objects, including two letters and a light, that trail around after him throughout his life. Why not Martha as well?

Jonas has had to find a way to live through everything, since he can’t die, and he hasn’t had the luxury of giving up and sinking into peaceful madness, the way Prime Ulrich has. The cycle requires continuous action from Jonas, so he needs something to get him out of bed in the morning besides startling awake and sniffing the milk, especially once the cows are vaporized.

Dark Emo Alt Martha would have heard Jonas promise to make things right. Maybe she heard Prime Martha tell Jonas they’re perfect for each other. Or maybe Adam betrayed everyone again.

There are currently so many Alt Marthas that I’m honestly not trying too hard to keep close track of their movements. (Are they spawning them in the lake like the maid and butler in Watchmen?) Now that we know a Chosen One can die and it doesn’t matter because a new body will pop up somewhere like it’s Easter Sunday, it’s gone beyond the pathos of Jonas wishing he could die and into farce for me.

Is Martha in a cage so Adam knows where she’ll reappear after he eats her? Dark hasn’t done cannibalism yet. Isn’t it time? A constantly reappearing Chosen One like Martha or Jonas could be the best thing that ever happened to cannibals in an apocalypse. What better way to express their enduring love than by spending an entire cycle keeping each other in cages and ritually eating each other with their followers like it’s Christmas dinner?

While Martha reads the letter, we’re also shown Yellow Raincoat Martha sitting over Really Most Sincerely Dead Jonas’ body, which is artfully situated on the family tree. His head is touching Noah’s square. BFFs forever, even though this Jonas will never get to experience that frenemyship. Martha’s bloody hands clutch the medal that’s supposed to protect travelers.

Is the St Christopher Medal Cursed?

Spending time attached to Helene’s body maybe lessened the St Christopher medal’s power to protect and increased its ability to attract violence. That woman was a bad witch, but who knows what kind of influences were in her past. Or maybe the cursed medal turned her into a bad witch instead of a passive victim.

It did enter the story through Claudia’s daddy, before it became a Nielsen totem. Then it became connected to a chain of death- Claudia killed Egon, who gave the medal to Hannah. Hannah gave the medal to Helene, who killed Katharina. As a teenager Katherina tied Regina to a tree, which may have lead to her exposure to radiation and have eventually given Claudia’s daughter cancer, leading to her early death.

Jonas and Martha found the medal where Katharina dropped it. A different Martha kills one Jonas. Thanks to Claudia, the day after he finds the medal, Jonas is accidentally responsible for his father’s death and then for child Mikkel’s disappearance a few months later. This ultimately leads Katharina’s accomplice, Ulrich, to travel to the 1950s. He spends the rest of his life incarcerated in a psych ward.

Jonas eventually kills the Martha he’s with when he finds the medal, and well, fate will eventually close the loop with Hannah. She keeps her baby (Silja) instead of having an abortion, so Fate needs her alive for a few years.

I think Egon cursed Claudia as he died. Did Claudia curse the Nielsens for their role in Regina’s life and death? In this sense, the red that’s associated with women and fate, and with the Nielsen women this season in particular, could signify Original Sin- blood red that can bring life or death, guilt or love.

Red can be seen as a tipping point between black and white in this sense. Life is the tipping point between the light of Heaven and the shadow of Death/the Underworld. We can make moral choices while alive, but can’t change those choices after death.

Dark is about regret and attempts to change choices. While Regina was tied to the tree all night, Claudia was with Tronte. She was working as the director of the power plant. She blames herself for being an inattentive parent and for working in an industry which exposed her daughter to harmful radiation. But she also blames the family and town who put her daughter at risk and the culture of abusive behavior which led to such harsh bullying of Regina. Is she trying to punish all of Winden, but some more than others?

The 3 Marthas of Fate are in their God particle room. Someone just traveled, but we aren’t shown who or where. Current best guess is that this scene is shifted from later in the episode, when Eva sends her minions out into the world.

It could be that the scenes which are inserted early throughout the series and appear to be awkward foreshadowing are actually glimpses of other timelines/worlds which are very close to the Prime world. When Jonas convinced Martha to help him erase himself from the timeline, Martha’s world became distinct enough for us to notice it as a separate world. At some point Claudia visited it and the travelers created a connection to it. In addition to the Prime world and Martha’s world, we may have been seeing 1 or 2 other worlds all along, which are still too close to distinguish other than in brief glimpses. Based on Martha’s world, we know that the other worlds can be very similar, but slightly out of sync.

In the Prime world, Young Silja herds Young Alt Martha into the cage Elisabeth kept Jonas in. Silja freed Jonas, who we now know is her brother, but she holds a gun on Martha, who is her cross-world great great grandchild and aunt and who’s pregnant. When Martha doesn’t cooperate quickly enough, Silja roughly shoves her in.

Adam stares at the God particle and at a pristine copy of Martha’s letter.

Over to the Alt world again. It’s the day of the apocalypse.

Yellow Raincoat Martha appears from the mist like the ghost she’s becoming. She slowly walks into her house, then notices her hands are still bloody. Just as Claudia and Helene and Lady Macbeth attempted before her, she tries to wash off death in the kitchen sink. Like them, she can’t remove the stain it’s left on her soul. She realizes that Jonas’ blood is everywhere and peels off her outer layers of clothing. When she hears Magnus coming, she throws the bloody clothing into the trash, including the yellow raincoat.

Symbolically good and virtuous no more, she’s left whichever of the first 2 stages she was supposed to be in. I’ll miss that splash of yellow.

Magnus asks where she was. He says that Katharina cried all night.

It was a tough night for all the Katharinas.

Then he notices the state she’s in and gives her a hug. When he asks what’s wrong, Martha says that Bartosz was right when he told them in the woods that the end of the world was coming. She tries to explain about the barrels and the accident Aleksander is trying to cover up, and that she’s discovered the barrels are going to somehow cause an accident today, which will create an apocalypse.

Magnus tells her she’s crazy and to stop worrying their mom, then walks out on her. She takes out the medal.

Stranger Martha and Dark Emo Martha stand in the Erit Lux lair. The Adam and Eva paintings are scorched and the furniture is covered with drop clothes. Young Martha has a slash across her eye. Stranger Martha consoles the younger Martha. Dark Young Emo Martha holds the St Christopher medal.

Stranger Martha tells her that Jonas had to die because they are black widows and that’s how they break up with guys who are wrong for them in two worlds. Stranger Martha understands that it’s hard, every time you murder an ex, but you get used to it. He’s a busy little murderer too, after all.

Stranger Martha: “He had to die. You two are wrong, in his world and in ours. I know what you’re feeling, but you’ll learn to let him go. Everything will run its course, just as fate determined, for our world and his.”

As with Stranger Jonas, Stranger Martha is a mystic. But where Stranger Jonas helps characters clarify their intentions and see their path forward, Stranger Martha is an oracle who shows us when the characters intentions are set and their paths have gelled such that a particular future is now certain.

In a sense, Stranger Jonas helps travelers with the beginning of the labyrinth, when they might turn around or stop, then Stranger Martha senses when they’ve reached the center and there’s only one way out. (The Stranger on the 3rd world would maybe be a psychopomp who helps face The End with all of its demons. Like Doc Brown or Mad Eye Moody. Adult Bartosz on both worlds will be associated with death and movement.) That last scene is a glimpse of the future that is now destined to happen on Martha’s world and the Prime world and maybe has happened on other worlds.

Back to Cage Martha in the Prime world, who’s fighting the good fight by trying to break the cage. I would say this is a waste of energy, but I once had a puppy bend the metal and break out of a cage in order to get to me, so you never know who might turn out to have super powers. The puppy was uninjured, lived another 16 years and was the best dog I ever had. Never left my side.

Love and devotion are the most powerful forces on Earth when properly applied, other than maybe water, which is also exceptionally versatile and patient.

Adam walks in holding the Time Sphere, so Martha stops fighting the cage and yells at him instead. He lied to her, her older self lied to her and she’s generally been used badly by the universe for everyone else’s purposes. Plus, she’s in a cage. It’s kind of demeaning.

Adam stares at her and the Time Snitch for dramatic effect (I think Father Noah taught him how to do that), then makes his speech: “Sic Mundus. Old Tannhaus. He firmly believed he was creating a paradise where we’d all be free of destiny and free of our pain. A world outside your world and my world. But I have finally realized what this Paradise is. Eternal darkness in which nothing exists. But for that, both apocalypses are needed. In my world and yours.”

He dramatically exits.

Hey, his round glow light is over in the corner. Told you the light follows him around. If only he’d let it back in.

Back to the Alt world. 6 hours until the apocalypse.

Aleksander is at home and on the phone, arguing with Jürgen Obendorf about the barrels. When he gets off, he tells Bartosz that he has to go into work, even though he’d promised to stay home with Bartosz for the day. Bartosz is disappointed, but understands.

Before he goes, Aleksander decides to confess to Bartosz that someone is blackmailing him. He shows Bartosz the newspaper article about the bank robbery and unsolved murder he was involved in 33 years ago, just before he came to Winden. He says that his real name is Boris and that the death was an accident. Aleksander expresses regret for the whole thing and begs Bartosz to believe him.

Bartosz asks if Regina knew the truth about Aleksander. Aleksander says that Regina was everything to him, but he never told her the truth. He apologizes again, then steps toward Bartosz. His son backs away, rejecting Aleksander, who is devastated. Bartosz is all he had left to live for.

This is Alt Aleksander instead of Prime Aleksander, so the stories may be different, but Prime Regina certainly had some sense of the truth. Prime Regina treated Aleksander’s very serious gunshot wound, since he refused to go to the hospital. She certainly knew he was involved in a crime, even if she didn’t know the specifics. When Clausen arrested him in S2, she was frantic to get him out of jail and make the charges go away.

I think Regina understood who Aleksander really was, which included recognizing his flaws, and he was her savior and protector. He had a gun when they met and used it to save her from her dangerous bullies. Alt Aleksander may have glossed over the truth of their relationship with Bartosz to protect Alt Regina’s image with her son. That would be very much in character for him. Whatever his mistakes, he was devoted to her.

Next up, pregnant Alt Hannah is in her dark purple goddess robe and feeling her power. Alt Charlotte shows up at her door asking to see Ulrich, who is in the shower. Charlotte, who is in her mysterious cross-world blue, asks to wait. Hannah pretends to chat for a moment, then warns Charlotte away from her man. Hera is not letting some strumpet from who knows where take Zeus from her.

Ulrich senses that there are too many women in the house and comes running. Charlotte tells him she wants to show him some information about the boy in the bunker. Hannah suggests that Charlotte bring Peter over sometime soon and they all go out on a double date before the baby is born!! She hugs Charlotte and kisses Ulrich before trotting off to the shower.

As soon as Hannah’s out of sight, Zeus whisper yells at Charlotte not to ever show up there again without calling first.

He must have learned how Ulrich and Katharina’s lives turned out in the Prime World.

Charlotte doesn’t take this threat seriously at all. She explains that she has very important information, that just couldn’t wait, regarding the 33 year old disappearance and death of Mads and her intense need to put Old Helge in jail. She’s discovered that the penny Helge carries with him and the penny she found in the bunker are the same penny. “It’s as if the penny traveled through time.”

Ulrich takes the pennies and rushes to the police station to confront Old Helge, leaving Charlotte standing alone in the house he just warned her not to visit. Charlotte is the girl who always walks alone in the woods, so I’m not sure anyone can save her from herself, but Ulrich’s scatterbrained attempts to protect people are also frustrating.

Ex Yellow Raincoat Martha sits alone in her room. She’s sad, so it’s time for a life change via haircut and makeover. Cut to Alt Katharina asleep on the couch, with New and Improved Young Alt Martha sitting on the end, staring at her, looking like the monster in an Asian horror film.

You have to watch the video, then make a copy and pass it on, okay kids? Then Scary Alt Martha won’t kill you.

Lol. I guess she did make a copy of Jonas, then pass him on. Yet he still kills her every time. Maybe the formula only works on female demons.

Katharina wakes up and notices that Martha changed her hair. Martha asks if she believes in fate. Plucky Katharina believes in free will, so she’s no help to Martha right now. She tells Martha that she’s there for her anyway and “it gets better”. Martha appreciates her mother’s attempt to help, so she gives her a big hug, but it’s unlikely that Martha can “just say no” to the apocalypse. Or Eva and Claudia.

She tells Katharina she has something she has to do, then leaves.

Back to the Prime world, September 2020.

Adult Claudia looks at the map of Winden and decides to go find the spot in the power plant where the proto God particle should be. The map tells her to follow the geiger counter radiation signal to the God particle, just as Jonas’ map in S1 told him to follow the signal in the caves to the passage.

She enters the room with a radiation suit on, flashlight in hand. Jonas has already started work on the God particle, which is currently in the form of a cosmic egg, the shape proto universes take according to both science and myth. This one might be a stray bubble universe.

While overall, the room is utterly destroyed, scientific equipment is set up and running in one corner. The proto God particle/cosmic egg is a small glowing ball in its usual corner, giving off a radioactive signal, as promised.

As Claudia draws closer to it, we can hear that it has a heartbeat. It has red streaks inside, like a nebula, that flow and pulse. Its light and radiation also pulse. All of the proto God particle’s pulses get faster as Claudia tries to touch it.

It’s scared of her. It probably senses her avarice toward it. We’ve never seen her look at anything the way she looks at the cosmic egg.

Jonas yells at her to stop. Claudia is surprised that the other Claudia was right and he’s alive.

As I have argued before, he is the practical scientist, while her strengths are in theory and management. And manipulation.

Over to the Alt world, November 2019.

Eva and Stranger Martha supervise Shooter Emo Martha as she writes a replacement copy of the letter from Martha to Stranger Jonas that Jonas burned after his nightmare. Shooter Martha asks why Jonas is still alive in the Prime world, when she just killed him. Eva draws an infinity sign and explains that the connection to the other world is a bit like a railroad switch. The Jonas train has a couple of choices for the direction he takes at the moment of the apocalypse, which acts like a switch in the tracks at the center point of the figure 8/infinity sign.

Eva: “There’s a switch point at the junction in the loop of time. The moment that allows things to run in one direction or the other. You bring him to our world or you don’t. A line that meets itself again in a loop. Two possible paths, along the outer edge of the line or the inner edge of the line. And yet it is the same line. Two overlapping realities. On one of these paths, he dies. On the other, he doesn’t. Both possibilities recur in the loop, repeating endlessly. One triggers the other. Quantum entanglement. Adam has tried to sever this entanglement for 33 years so that the thing growing inside you will never be born. But it’s impossible. Our worlds can never be disconnected. Every step Jonas takes is guided by us. He cannot escape his fate.”

Who knows if Eva is correct that she’s controlling Jonas’ every move? She’s got a lot competition. Adam wants to destroy everything, Noah wants to destroy him (and Claudia), Eva wants to maintain the cycle by erasing most of it and Claudia wants to save Regina by any means necessary (and maybe get revenge for her death). The Unknown wants to be left alone, which might equal self determination or might equal annihilation. That all boils down to mostly destructive energy.

Back to Jonas and Claudia in the Prime world, 2020.

She asks about the cosmic egg. He tells her it’s what was left after the catastrophe. She names it the God particle, then asks about the electronic equipment he’s set up. He explains that he’s seen the God particle working as a portal in the future (when he came through the rift after touching Helge’s hand). Since the passage was destroyed, again, the only way to travel back to the past is to get the God particle portal working, again. If he can do that, he can go back and save everyone- Martha, Mikkel, etc.

Has he forgotten that he can’t save Mikkel? Were his other memories affected as well when he popped back into the Prime world after he died in the Alt world?

Then he pauses and asks how Claudia knew to look for him there. The last time they saw each other was when they split up at the mouth of the cave at the end of S2, a few hours before the apocalypse. They split up while they went to find their loved ones to bring them back to the bunker. Claudia made it to the bunker with Regina, but Jonas got caught up at Hannah’s house with Martha and Adam.

Claudia gets nervous for a second, then brings up the time travel device, which we’re now calling the apparatus. He gets excited. If the apparatus works, they could use that to go back in time and save everyone in some unspecified way that Jonas is unrealistically obsessed with.

Alas, it’s broken, burned out by the time overload of the catastrophe, just like all of the other time travel methods except the sphere. Claudia suggests that maybe everything has to break before it can be fixed, in order to change the cycle next time. They changed the cycle last time by bringing the Cesium 137 into the passage, which changed the variables in the equation. Maybe next time they’ll get it right!

I’m not going to try to make sense of that paragraph, since it’s mostly her feeding him BS to stall and distract him.

Jonas isn’t in the mood for a solution that requires him to live through an endless number of painful cycles before things have a chance of getting better. However, buried inside Claudia’s suggestion is the truth that creation is born out of destruction. She just doesn’t explain it in a way that allows him to understand or draw hope from it, given how raw his pain is.

And even when he does meet a Martha who lives, as Stranger Jonas in 1888, she’s already been corrupted into betraying him in multiple ways, as he is eventually corrupted into betraying her. Jonas and Martha’s souls are bound in a never ending cycle of love, creation and destruction.

Young Jonas also tells Claudia that since her older self must have known what would happen to Martha and she never said anything to him, he has no reason to trust her now. Claudia replies that she knows what the Cesium 137 is and she can help him get the God particle portal working so that he can save Martha.

Claudia successfully distracts Jonas from the question of why she came to the power plant, when it should be a barren, radioactive deathzone. That’s why it’s about to be walled off, as the soldiers told Peter earlier in the season. Remember how 2050s Elisabeth was killing anyone who entered the restricted zone?

Claudia doesn’t tell Jonas that she knew to come to the power plant because she has the triquetra diary, which probably answers all of his questions. We know she shows it to him at some point, but not until she’s got him hooked and removed certain pages.

Back to the Alt world. 3 hours until the apocalypse.

Ex Yellow Raincoat Martha goes to Bartosz’s house and tells him all about the barrels at the power plant and the upcoming apocalypse. She asks him to help her stop it.

Ulrich goes to the morgue to take another look at the body found in the bunker. The morgue attendant says that the boy died just before the body was found. Ulrich asks if the body could have died at an earlier time, then been preserved, confusing the morgue attendant. He notices a scar on the boy’s chin just like the one Mads had.

Ulrich goes to Helge’s cell to question him about Mads. He’s still not convinced that the body is that of his brother. He asks Helge how the boy in the bunker can be identical to Mads.

Helge: “She said I had to do it… Send him to the future… To fill the gaps.”

So Adult Helge wasn’t working with Noah in the Alt world. But who was he taking orders from? Claudia or maybe Stranger Martha?

Ulrich takes the matching pennies out of his pocket and asks Helge about them. They trigger a memory in Helge. He says he has to stop “him”. Ulrich asks who Helge has to stop. “You.”

Ulrich doesn’t understand the answer. He decides to let Helge go, then follow him to see what kind of scenario plays out.

Martha confesses the whole strange story of her and Jonas to Bartosz. He’s having a weird day with confessions. Bartosz didn’t know Jonas in this reality and it was an alternate Martha who killed him anyway, so he doesn’t reject Martha the way he did with Aleksander. Martha convinces Bartosz that she’s seen the future and it’s bad. He tries to call Aleksander to stop him from starting the apocalypse.

Aleksander doesn’t answer the phone, maybe because he thinks Bartosz is angry with him. Maybe because it’s convenient to the plot. He calls Charlotte instead, and tells her to meet him at the power plant so that he can show her something.

The Unknown Child and Old Man go through Eva’s God particle. Once they’re gone, Adult Unknown pulls out the Golden Time Snitch.

Over in the Prime world, 2053, Silja forces Alt Martha back out of the cage. Martha has one last date with Adam/Jonas, but first Silja needs her clothes. While she undresses, Martha asks why Silja follows Adam’s orders.

Silja: “We chosen few must fill the gaps so that you find your way here and so can Adam. And we finally reach salvation.”

By gaps, Silja and Helge mean the holes left in the continuity of the cycle where bootstrap paradoxes have been created. Sometimes entire characters are missing, sometimes events have been so disrupted that there’s no way for predetermined events to occur naturally anymore. So the most devoted Sic Mundus followers, along with the Unknown, help events along to make sure that the outcomes that need to happen still happen somehow.

Adam has been in the future with Agnes, Silja, Charlotte, Elizabeth, Franziska, Magnus and Alt Martha. Over the course of 3 days, he’s sending them out to their final assignments. Agnes went to pick up Tronte from the group home so they could move in with Doris and Egon back in S2. We’ve also seen Charlotte and Elizabeth leave, but haven’t yet been shown where they went.

Now Adam sends Magnus and Franziska out. This is the first time we’ve seen them leave the safety of whatever encampment Sic Mundus has been using at any given time. They are almost always together, in the inner sanctum, often close to the God particle or Adam. When Adam tells them it’s time to go and that they know what to do, they clasp hands tightly, as devoted to each other as ever.

Over on the Alt world, it’s 1 hour until the apocalypse and Young Alt Franziska and Magnus are sitting on the shore of the lake overlooking the power plant, wondering if what Martha told Magnus is true. They agree that if they’re dying today, they will die together. Then they make out. Franziska is in red and black plaid.

They’re all about going down in a blaze of glory. They even mentioned the bunker, but neither considers going there.

Don’t they teach duck and cover in schools anymore?

I think it’s worth noting that Magnus pulled Katharina off of Regina back in S1 when they got into the fight at the high school after Martha’s play. While Magnus, Helge (Claudia’s childhood friend) and the Dopplers who are descendants of Helge don’t live easy lives, they also aren’t tortured and murdered as much as the younger Nielsens are. Peter and Helge die sacrificial deaths to rescue children. Franziska and Magnus, in particular, are kept safe and alive up until the last minute on both worlds, which suggests their deaths might have something to do with the time science/magic that’s accomplished with this apocalypse.

Ex Yellow Raincoat Martha and Bartosz perform a high speed bike ride toward the power plant in a last ditch attempt to save the world. Bartosz has his red and black plaid scarf on, which means he’s important but also maybe a little guilty of something.

It’s very Stranger Things. Or ET.

Ulrich follows Helge to the caves. Before he goes in, he leaves a phone message for Charlotte telling her that the boy in the bunker is Mads.

Alt Bartosz and Martha turn down the forest road. Prime Magnus and Franziska step out to stop them. Magnus makes Martha guess who he is. Why are brothers always like this?

Magnus and Franziska explain that Eva and Stranger Martha lied to her. They want the apocalypse to happen. But Young Martha can change everything if she trusts Jonas and chooses his world.

This Martha didn’t know that Jonas popped back to life in his world, so this is a compelling plan. Franziska says that Jonas can tell her what the origin is. But first, she has to save him from the apocalypse in his world and bring him to her world.

Magnus pulls out the time sphere and says that Martha can’t stop the apocalypse that’s about to happen, but if she helps them now, she’ll be able to stop the next one.

That sounds so familiar. Plus, this is the next one, so obviously the apocalypses haven’t been stopped.

Time for Some Time Theory

My guess is that something about bringing Alt Martha and Prime Jonas together for the end of both worlds syncs up their apocalypses energetically, even though they are chronologically out of sync. (His happens in June, while hers happens in November.)

Killing Prime Martha unbinds Jonas’ soul from hers, but if Alt Martha is right there, his soul will immediately become re-entangled (on a quantum level- it’s hard to distinguish quantum physics from religion at times) with the next version of Martha that it finds. Since they are each the Chosen One of their worlds, binding their souls binds the two worlds together.

That’s the actual connection between the two worlds. The Unknown stabilizes the connection, but he’s not the origin. And once the connection is made, it’s as if it’s always been there, affecting events in the past, present and future. This is how there could be references made to Martha’s world in S2, and probably characters from that world- at some point, the connection became a certainty, and so it also became a reality, even though it technically hadn’t happened yet.

Martha and Jonas and the Prime and Alt worlds are anchored to each other through the genetic knot, sex, a child, violence and loops Jonas and Martha made through time on and between both planets. By eliminating their alternates on each other’s worlds, the binding is made strong.

They are somehow each tied to their God particle in a way that makes them and the binding immortal. That’s probably why they both need to die on both worlds, then come back, as part of the process- it binds them to their world, the other world and the God particle. New Jonas has the same soul as Old Jonas, but he’s a still a slightly different Jonas, with slightly different memories- he was changed by the experience. He’s a phoenix or the next iteration of Dr Who. The same but different.

Like all strong magic or science, time magic/science has redundancies built in and isn’t easily broken.

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While Franziska, Magnus and Martha talk, Bartosz is in the background asking questions that no one answers. Martha decides to go with them and asks Bartosz to come with her. Franziska says that he’s on Team Eva, so they need to leave him behind to be saved by his own people. Within a moment, Bartosz is left alone with his bike, watching a puff of glitter fade.

Bartosz hasn’t been obvious about working for Eva, but he has subtly guided characters in the right direction a few times and he was quick to believe Martha’s outlandish story.

Team Eva has assembled in the Erit Lux lair for their pre apocalypse pep talk. Let’s meet the players.

Eva: “It’s time. Adam has moved each of his pawns into position. It’s time that we do the same. This knot has given us all life and we are its keepers in both worlds.”

She puts her hand on Emo Martha’s pregnant belly: “He’ll never be able to untie this knot. In all these years, he’s never understood how everything is connected. How it all ends and begins. Not only in our world, but also in his. We are destiny.”

Go, team, go.

She moves on to Stranger Martha: “We raise the walls of this labyrinth. Each of us shapes the paths and extends their hand.”

She is the oracle. The letter that Martha just rewrote will help guide Jonas’ path and give him the strength to keep going.

To Adult Bartosz, who should look familiar from his fatal encounter with young Noah early in S2: “Bartosz, you must save yourself to save our lives.”

Young Bartosz is stranded on the forest road. He needs a lift and new instructions.

To Adult Claudia: “Claudia, you must guide yourself to be our eyes in Adam’s world.”

Her task is to meet her Prime self for the first time.

To Old Egon: “Egon, you must create your past to preserve the family tree.”

He needs to help Alt Hannah get back to his younger self, so that Silja can be born. That doesn’t happen on its own without Stranger Jonas there to tell Hannah about time travel and give her the apparatus.

Egon is filling in the gap left by the absence of Jonas, another sign that he used to be part of this world.

To Adult Noah: “Noah, you bring love…”

To Young Noah: “To make everything new.”

The Noahs will take care of Elisabeth, who is now named as the representative of love and renewal in this world, giving her the status of Persephone and turning Noah into Hades, god of the underworld. I guess without a Jonas, he’s the only one left to take on the role. They are going to the bunker.

“Every darkness is followed by light. With every death comes a life.”

Destruction leads to creation.

She turns on the God particle.

Back in the Prime world, Adam is preparing for the next apocalypse by playing Dr Frankenstein. He’s riffing on The Bride of Frankenstein this time, with Martha tied to scaffolding under the God particle. She’s wearing The White Slip of Doom and that super unlucky St Christopher medal, which should probably be taken back to Mordor already. Jonas has always had a flair for setting a dramatic scene, you have to give him that.

Jonas remains in his S3 coat- was the budget that small, or did something extra terrible terrible happen to his body on the way to turning this God particle white? No, don’t tell me, I’m already traumatized by what he’s done to himself.

Martha’s asking the usual victim questions like why would he and how could he and such. He doesn’t answer until she asks where everyone else went. Then he tells her that they’re all off fulfilling their destinies, sustaining the cycle so that the two of them can exist in this moment. Martha asks what he’s saying. She wasn’t paying close attention when he spoke of the prophecy earlier.

He makes a very grand speech about how he’s about to kill her and the baby inside her because the baby is the Big Bad Spooky Origin. He’s decided, or Claudia implied at some point, that the baby needs to be killed by the energy of both worlds, so he’s built a suped up God particle machine which will focus the energy of the apocalypses on both worlds onto her.

“Your son only exists because the matter exists. And now he will die through the matter and all of us with him. None of this will exist anymore. Both worlds will extinguish one another. Absolute annihilation.”

Martha: “You’ve gone insane.”

Yup.

Adam tells her there’s no hope, salvation or paradise. “We are wrong, you and I. In your world and in mine.” He yanks off the medal and goes to the control booth.

Lol. They are wrong together, but he’s keeping the wedding token in the divorce this time.

Okay, let’s go through this reasoning again, since Jonas can’t get it through his head. Nothing he said had anything to do with creating or destroying worlds in Dark’s system. Well, obviously an apocalypse can do that on the level of destroying the matter the planets are made from, but he’s not talking about that, even though he mentioned matter, too.

He thinks that an abortion is the key to ending the eternal recurrence of two worlds which are bound together. He said himself that he was destroying the matter the child is made from, not the quantum energy. So instead of being destroyed, Martha will pop back up on her world, or maybe some other world, since the God particle is involved.

Adam still might not know that he’s creating cross world transportation using the God particle specifically, but he should know enough to realize that that energy is indestructible and immortal. It doesn’t die, it just goes somewhere else. This is a basic law of physics.

I suspect he’s confusing the loss of the Cesium 137 from the apparatus when they traveled from 2019 to 1888 during the last apocalypse with death and assuming he can kill Martha, the Unknown and the God particle together. My guess is that the black goo is equivalent to the God particle’s life force or blood, but it has a greater ability to live independently than blood cells do.

The dark matter is also probably able to escape its captivity under certain conditions. The apparitions that Jonas and Martha see may be the God particle trying to speak through quantum entanglement. Claudia said in her notes that it can live simultaneously as all 3 states of matter. That’s likely not the only thing it does all at once, since it’s a universe in a cloud. Maybe it can hijack the spirits of dead people to use as avatars on occasion.

Martha screams his name. Jonas/Adam turns on the machine. The lightning starts.

Eva, who really does have a lot in common with Claudia, starts talking about the end and the beginning. She says that connections need to be closed in both worlds. No loose ends.

The Unknown stand in front of the bus stop and look at the shelter. The Adult is the Prime world and the Old Man and Child are in the Alt world. Quite a few significant conversations have happened in the shelter that they could be thinking of. The most significant to them might be when Agnes brought Tronte to town and stopped at this spot to ask directions from Ulrich in 1953. Or maybe when Teen Hannah and her dad stopped in 1986 to offer a ride to Young Jonas so he could get out of the radioactive rain.

Possibly when Ulrich and Hannah, Zeus and Hera, wished for a world without Winden in 1986 in S1Ep1. Maybe they unknowingly created everything. MAYBE THAT’S THE ORIGIN.

The Unknown continue walking to the power plant.

Eva keeps talking about everything being connected and light and shadow. As Alt Young Elizabeth walks down the forest road in a bright red jacket, she meets Alt Adult Noah, in much the same way she met Prime Adult Noah for the first time while she was wearing Franziska’s bright red lipstick. He holds out his hand to her, then takes her to the bunker and Young Noah. They are the only ones in the bunker. Adult Noah leaves.

Old Egon stands at the mouth of the cave and looks confused. He’s coming from 1986 to 2019, so he’ll need to get his bearings.

Hannah sits at her kitchen table and handles Aleksander’s gun. When the radiation from the reactor starts, she begins to miscarry. Old Egon comes to get her. His job will be to take her through the passage to a safe time period where she can get medical treatment. Then Hannah needs to have an affair with Adult Egon in the 1950s and get pregnant with Silja.

Alt Claudia introduces herself to Prime Claudia.

Adult Bartosz uses the sphere to jump in near Teen Bartosz, who’s just been left behind by Martha on the forest road.

Stranger Martha goes to 1888 and sneaks into the factory where Stranger Jonas is at work on his God Particle. She goes to his bedroom and leaves the new copy of the letter and the For Charlotte pocket watch on the table.

In each world, the Unknown use the keys they took from Bernd to enter the nuclear power plant’s volume control room and open valves to set off a reaction and meltdown, filling in the gap, since this time there aren’t multiple time travel devices in multiple periods to set off the chain reaction, the way there were at the end of S2.

At the same time, Aleksander brings Charlotte to the plant to show her the barrels in order to stop Hannah from blackmailing him. I’m not sure if he intends to kill Charlotte, commit murder-suicide or turn himself in for the cover up. They put on red hazmat suits, in contrast to the Prime world’s yellow suits, then enter the room alone. Aleksander opens a barrel as the radiation level rises and Adam’s God particle is at full strength in the Prime world. Another God particle quickly rises out of the barrel in the Alt world.

The two God particles are in the same place in two different, but connected, worlds. On one world, Martha is pregnant with the child of two worlds. On the other world, Charlotte, who comes from a mysterious background, is in the room. Her alternate self has already gone through a time rift in the previous cycle.

I’ve wondered for a while if there was a round robin performed with the infant Charlottes from 3 worlds. It could be that it’s necessary to have Charlotte in the room at this point for that reason. Remember, she is also in the room in the Prime world 2020, even though we aren’t being shown that right now. She will be sent forward to 2053, where Adam is currently torturing Alt Martha in September and Elisabeth is waiting for her in June. Presumably Alt Charlotte will be sent forward as well. Since Alt Elisabeth is in the Alt bunker, she should be in the Alt future to touch Charlotte’s hand and then receive her in the future.

Where will Alt Martha and the Unknown fetus be sent? To the 3rd world? And is each Charlotte sent forward in the world she lives in or is she sent forward and to her birth world, if I’m right about the baby swap theory?

Alt Ulrich follows the red thread to the passage.

This is a tunnel, with defined edges and an open center. It stands to reason that it’s a time tunnel, that will take Martha somewhere, unless the God particle has finally developed an appetite for humans.

Adam’s God particle spins faster and faster and opens up a portal over Martha’s head. The God particle turns into a tube of light and shadow, like a worm hole, and slides down over Martha. She screams, since she’s getting zapped by lightning and who knows what else. Adam closes his eyes and waits for the end of time.

The Unknowns are all bathed in bright red flashing warning lights. They calmly wait for the end of the world.

Alt Magnus and Franziska watch with alarm as a black hole dome forms over the power plant and then a shockwave emanates outward toward them. They’re engulfed by it before they can react.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It.

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Commentary

You’ve made it to the center of the Dark S3 labyrinth. Congratulations. Now you have 2 episodes to fight your way back out. The pacing is a little off this season. Or maybe this was the end of the labyrinth and we’re on our own from now on.

I love the forest road scene and all of its ridiculous iterations. The fact that it will eventually end in at least 4 different multi person poofs of golden glitter, each of which should spawn their own timeline, just makes it even better. We’ve seen the first two- Bartosz and Martha become a team, but Magnus and Franziska finally realize their potential as cult members and lie their butts off to convince Martha to come to the Prime world.

Then after Martha, Franziska and Magnus leave, Stranger Bartosz leaps in to save his younger self from the apocalypse and bring him into the light. Or has Teen Bartosz been Eva’s acolyte all season and just leading Martha on? I want a sequel series that takes place in the sunlit glass house that Bartosz lives in. It can be called Light. He and his action hero other selves can go around saving the worlds that Jonas screws up, with their superdog sidekick Gretchen always at their side.

The Bartoszes will always do what Gretchen thinks is best, because that dog deserves a break and is clearly full of light. Martha will be the damsel in distress who needs rescuing on every single world. Jonas will always be Stranger Jonas, who does an excellent mustache twirling villain opposite Bartosz. I’ll cast the roles for the rest of Bartosz’s family later, but I feel Noah and Elizabeth have earned large roles for needlessly spending decades in the post apocalypse world and giving up their infant daughter. Plus, have you seen Elisabeth in action? She literally takes no prisoners.

In order to get Martha to go with them on the forest road, Magnus and Franziska use some circular logic on her that makes no sense at all. What matters is their lead point- Jonas is alive in their world, but he’s about to die unless she saves him.

Except, in reality, Jonas will save himself, unless she brings him to her world like they want, where she’ll kill him again. Why does Adam want Martha to bring Jonas to the Alt world and murder him when there’s been no previous evidence that he even understands that happened, beyond the fact that she’s somehow pregnant? Um, I guess so he can get her pregnant with the Origin again, so he can get mad about the Origin again, so he can kill it and her again?

(This also shows that Jonas understands that the time stream splits, producing two versions of him and two of her at various points- he already knows it’s not an aberration for that to happen, just a thing time does sometimes. But at this point we are dealing with mental illness, cults and systemic abuse on many levels without the show acknowledging much of it. Apparently everyone is happy just to follow orders, except for Prime Noah, who is dead because he woke up too much and went against Claudia and Jonas. As many a savior can tell you, enlightenment is a dangerous game. Which is why shows and films like this back away from their original point in the last episode.)

Instead of all of this craziness, Jonas could just try breaking the cycle by accepting the existence of his kid and his ex, then patent some of his minor inventions, send Alt Martha child support payments and move on with his life. She moved onto to her own planet and set up her own cult business. What more does he want from her?

And the Unknown is far from the worst kid in the Nielsen family. At least he has a job and takes care of his mother. He never became a murderous time hobo bent on revenge like Noah, Jonas and Ulrich. He came back home to his mama after all of his vengeful time murdering. He takes after Bartosz’s side of the family that way. Maybe Alt Bartosz was a father figure for him.

Or Jonas could just let Old Franziska and Magnus live out their last days in the time period of their choice and leave Martha to the apocalypse. That’s where it becomes clear that Claudia is actually pulling the strings because the energy produced by the apocalypses, etc is useful to her. Jonas isn’t vindictive on his own, except toward himself.

Jonas and Bartosz have matching glass boxes to live in. Or maybe they’re glass cages where both are trapped with their families. Bartosz’s box is in the sunlight, but Jonas’ builds his in the light of the God particle.

How adorable is it that Prime Bartosz and Hanno have matching father-son Emerald Tablet tattoos- Bartosz on his chest and Hanno on his back? Maybe not so adorable when Jonas orders Hanno to kill his father because he’s become a liability, right around the time that adult Noah comes home to the 1920s. Jonas didn’t want those 2 ganging up on him and wanted the guilt Hanno/Noah felt about murdering his father to cloud his mind. Plus, getting a little revenge on Claudia by having her grandson killed might have finally been too much to resist.

Hanno is guilty about his father. Noah is guilty about Charlotte. At least he has a period of love and happiness with Elisabeth in between. He’s a character that’s caught in the middle of Jonas and Claudia’s war, choosing his own side in the end, but used as a pawn by both of them until the end. He’s also the only one who seriously questions Claudia’s honesty, and brings those questions to Jonas, which makes him a liability to her. But he’s also Claudia’s great grandson. He’s a one person knot.

After 33 years of planning how he would save Martha when the cycle change came around again, at the end of season 2 Stranger Jonas politely gave up on her and walked away, based on a letter delivered by a frenemy. It didn’t occur to him that handwriting is easily forged, especially when you’ve had 33 years to practice. Or that the last time he saw Hanno/Noah, he had a huge grudge against Jonas. It doesn’t really matter that the letter was written by another Martha. If she wasn’t there, Adam would have had one of the other women forge the letter. Either he or Claudia probably did, in earlier cycles before the two worlds connected.

Hey, the S1 reliance on phones for communication is back. I really wanted to see a call between worlds. Maybe Tannhaus will invent a device in the sequel series.

On Eva’s world, at least so far, Noah didn’t kill Bartosz, Claudia didn’t kill Egon and Katharina hasn’t lost Mikkel. Hannah and Adult Egon may have a chance to stay together and raise Silja for longer. On the other hand, some of the people who survived the apocalypse on Jonas’ world will die on Eva’s world, like Magnus and Franziska.

The Death and Rebirth of the Light

Do we know when Adam’s birthday is? I’m certain he’s a Gemini. Nobody does mood swings like a Gemini. Or impatience, when in a bad mood (and patience when in a good mood, obviously). (Disclaimer: I am a Gemini.)

June 21st, the day Michael Kahnwald kills himself, is the Summer Solstice, day of the death of the light/Sun King. Lots of significance for Jonas, if you think about it- the death of his father, the death of the Light, the death of the Sun God. The death of hope, since it’s the time when Claudia convinced him that Michael/Mikkel couldn’t be saved.

But it’s also the growing season and early harvest season, which is part of why gods start to die then- they are harvested as the fruit of the earth to feed their people, which is, in the end, a leader’s responsibility, whether they’re a monarch or a deity, and in the long run they will give their life to it, one way or another. Ritual pseudo cannibalism still exists, even in Christianity, for a reason. And pregnant black widows eat their mates as a birthright.

Did you notice Adam mentioned that Old Tannhaus and Sic Mundus knew there are 3 worlds in the system and they were working toward connecting with the 3rd world, which they believed would be Paradise? Jonas, however, has decided that it won’t actually be much different from the world they’re in, so he’s opting for annihilation still/again. His double annihilation will not so coincidentally raise a ton of power that someone, probably Claudia, will surely find a use for. The overall annihilation also threatens Eva’s child, keeping her busy so that she pays attention to Adam’s machinations instead of Claudia’s.

This is why Eva and Adam’s war doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to keep them focused on each other and sometimes doing what Claudia needs them to do, even though they don’t understand the real reason why they’re doing it. She keeps them in continuous motion and in emotional turmoil so that they don’t stop to think their actions through. She doesn’t want them to reach a clear state of mind where they could cooperate with each other and sort through her actions in order to realize what she’s doing.

Noah, Charlotte’s father, is the only one, besides the Unknown, who suspects her, so she turns him against Jonas and goads Adam into killing him before he figures out her plan.

As I have said before, Jonas is being driven mad on purpose. A mad scientist with a penchant for darkness will create the energy you need for some of your larger time travel projects, if you can goad him into what you want at the right time and place. And Jonas is so predictable. Claudia and Eva can easily keep him preoccupied with this and that so he doesn’t ever figure out what they’re really up to. Claudia uses the same trick on Eva.

Tannhaus’ beliefs may have been based on a Gnostic or Hermetic myth or on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante progresses through several levels of an Inferno based on the worst of humanity, then several levels of Purgatory based on both Love and the Seven Deadly Sins and then through several levels of Paradise, which are based on Cardinal and Theological Virtues assigned to celestial bodies. When Dante has made it through the levels of Paradise, he’s ready to ascend into the light of God along with his true love.

There may be a cynical reason for Claudia’s out of character drive to save Regina- she can take her time travel ambitions further if she allows herself the humanity of feeling deep love for one person and letting that motivate her toward the light. Travel and enlightenment are easier with a partner.

While Adam speaks of Sic Mundus and their intention to create Paradise, we’re shown the golden sphere. Gold symbolizes the highest form of good. Old Tannhaus’ Paradise and intentions were pure. Jonas’ face is surrounded by darkness when he speaks of his own intentions. When he says that both apocalypses are needed, the light ball is shown next to them. The double apocalypse won’t create annihilation. It will create more light.

It will also create the ability to travel further in time. Claudia insists on repeating the cycles over and over, into infinity, because repeatedly sending radiation and time energy through the passage is building up its power. It took me several times through these last four episodes of the season to get what she means in this conversation with herself, but that’s what she’s saying.

What makes Jonas and Martha’s (and Bartosz’s) worlds unique is the combination of a nuclear power plant on top of the cave where time travel experiments were done. The build up and layering of the residue from each use of the passage increases the power of the passage. This is why timing is everything with Claudia. She’s waiting for the moment when the passage is finally powerful enough to do what she needs it to do to save Regina. She needs all of the different kinds of energy created by everything she talks everyone into doing, in order to direct the passage where she wants it to go.

From the first meeting between the Claudias, S3Ep5:

Alt Claudia: “Jonas opened the passage in 2020. The older Jonas has closed it in 2019, as well. After it had been opened for the first time in summer 1986. In all three moments, they left behind traces of Cesium residue, a component of the black matter.”

Prime Claudia: “Radioactive half-lives.”

Alt Claudia: “In each cycle, in all three moments, this Cesium is carried through the tunnel and back before it’s completely decayed. It exponentially expands endlessly.”

Prime Claudia: “So that’s how the passage was created.”

Alt Claudia: “And that’s how it must continue to exist for eternity. Everything has to happen again. Jonas bringing the matter into the passage. The opening of one of the drums in the plant triggering the apocalypse. Everything in this loop repeats itself. Life and death.”

Baby Universes and Exhausted Deities

Many cultures around the world describe a cosmic egg, also known as a world egg or ylem, as part of their creation stories. In mythology, it’s associated with Chronos and other time gods. It’s also associated with Dionysus, Zeus, snakes, oracles and the third eye. The ylem is one name for the super condensed gravitational singularity that existed right after the Big Bang.

The cosmic egg is also a symbol of fertility, birth, life, and femaleness, with a woman’s pregnant uterus being the most obvious inspiration for the symbol after a bird’s egg. The ancients showed people hatching from eggs- an 8 or 9 month pregnant belly is literally a big flesh egg with a person inside. If you are the one inside, it is your universe. If you are the mother, it’s also your universe. You are the goddess in charge of creation.

For each world, Dark gives us a version of pregnant goddess Hannah, Queen of Heaven. Hera is goddess of marriage and childbirth and hates men who mistreat their wives. She has a fierce personality, because she is a protector goddess. She has a universe to protect. The male gods find this threatening at times.

Cosmic eggs typically have universes and or deities or both inside. This one certainly seems sentient (meaning it has a cosmic consciousness or Oneness), which means the characters are essentially creating sentient universes or deities with every apocalypse, then torturing and enslaving them. That basically follows Adams mythology from season 2, when he told us that Time is a god who he’s trying to destroy. Apparently he’s trying to create and destroy multiple universal time gods.

Where does this fit with the rest of the show’s mythology? Raising energy, as one does with an apocalypse, creates and destroys. The cosmic egg was created. The real question is why did it stay in the power plant?

This could be an alien. It could be another world/dimension that was supposed to form, but was captured and is now stunted. Ask the cat in the box. I will say that when Jonas zapped the Cesium 137, it looked like it was alive to me as well, with those little tentacles, which suggests that this stuff is immortal in every form. It just understandably goes dormant at times. Claudia said that it maintains homeostasis/energetic equilibrium on its own. Torturing and enslaving it might not be the best idea in the long run. Maybe that’s why Jonas’ world has turned into He11.

Also, like I said- there are typically deities and universes inside cosmic eggs, Jonas referred to Time as a deity and Claudia referred to its homeostasis, which means by every description we’ve heard or seen, its self-sustaining and unkillable. I imagine that applies to universes/dimensions/worlds when they’re allowed to expand to their full potential as well, but what do I know? I don’t make the rules, I just observe the quantum entanglement.

Remember Jonas’ round glow light, though? Doesn’t it look like a little cosmic egg that follows him around like a devoted puppy that just won’t give up on his tattered soul? I wonder if these embryonic universes are eternally entangled with their chosen one at birth, essentially turning the chosen one, or maybe a chosen few at the center of a knot, into deities.

Meanwhile, as Adam, Jonas is trying to blow two worlds up, sending them straight back to the cosmic egg stage. How many of his worlds do you suppose he’s succeeded with, and are those now following him around like little puppies who desperately want him back? Is Jonas actually a constellation? Probably he and Martha together are the constellation of Gemini, since he’s blowing up her world at the same time and their souls are bound.

Bartosz is probably glad that Grandma leaves his world out of this fiasco.

Now Let’s Take A Quick look at Motivations

Claudia was completely mesmerised by that egg. I don’t think we’ve ever seen her look at something with pure greed in her eyes the way she looked at that embryo.

And then Jonas distracted her from it, because it’s his, made from his apocalypse. As with all things his, Jonas is going to be possessive about it and love it, but also treat it badly and try to kill it. Claudia is going to spend quite a bit of time standing enigmatically in the background, “leading” him when he gets frustrated. That look we just saw in her eye, combined with the way she walked out on her entire life when Benrd Doppler gave her the original data on the God particle, says something about how important time science is to her.

Claudia is as torn in two as Jonas. The science involved with the God particle is everything to her. But so is saving Regina from an early death. Alt Claudia had Alt Tronte murder Prime Regina in order to motivate this Claudia to pursue the science to some end that would allow Regina to live. The fact that she needed to change the timeline means that pursuing the science alone doesn’t fulfill the goal of saving Regina or bring Claudia fulfillment on its own, even in the Alt world, where Alt Claudia could also save Tronte and have him with her if she wants.

It shows that the Claudias have each independently decided that the most important goal is to save their daughter. They are working toward that goal, rather than following the exact path that the cycles have followed before. Prime Claudia may even be looking at the cosmic egg with greed because it’s the key to saving Regina in the long run. She’s been in contact with her older self all along, who knows as much or more than Alt Claudia does about time science and the future.

Jonas is perpetually torn between his overwhelming love for Prime Martha and his need to do what’s right, which leads him to draw close to her, then reject her, over and over. He plays out the same pattern in his other relationships, until he gets to the point of compulsively severing family ties between Sic Mundus members and ordering murders between family members.

Even though he supposedly doesn’t remember dying, the coldness within him starts here, in 2020. This is when he internally becomes the Stranger. Something in his soul remembers that Alt Martha murdered him and that she’s pregnant. Combined with the way he’s forced to hurt Mikkel/Michael, he mentally breaks even further. It mostly leads to coldness and contemplation during this period of his life, because he’s working on the God particle, but he’s not completely alone. He has Noah’s friendship.

The coldness turns murderous in the 1800s, after he’s unable to save Prime Martha and he’s betrayed again and again at the end of season 2 and beginning of season 3. He becomes Adam inside when Gustav is murdered, Alt Martha leaves with the sphere and Bartosz continues to blame him for everything. Magnus and Franziska were never his close friends and they remain passive assistants now that he’s 33 years older than them. He loses all hope for himself.

I’m not convinced that Jonas came up with the huge, intricate Nielsen knot on his own, but it’s possible. It’s also possible that it’s a vestige of an earlier plan whose origin is now impossible to trace.

Or the knot could be a natural phenomenon, a series of mutations caused by Winden’s constant exposure to radiation and time energy. Time energy could act like any other pollutant on a small town, causing changes in the natural reproductive cycles of the residents. There are people missing from the timeline, like HG Tannhaus’ father, and people who are time shifted, then die young, like Michael and Katharina, who may have originally played larger roles.

Meanwhile, Alt Martha is torn between her love for Jonas and her love for her child. She also seems to hate both of them, so her motivations are especially confusing. They both have love-hate relationships with her as well. There’s no happy outcome possible for Alt Martha once she shoots Jonas, so she’s mostly going through the motions and trying to convince herself she’s doing the right thing or that it doesn’t matter. Alt Martha’s contradictory actions seem to be more dictated by Claudia than by her own motivations. But she’s so immersed in the cycles that she never raises her head out of the shadows far enough to understand what’s been done to her.

The Unknown sees right through Eva, which is why he hates her (and loves her). He knows that he’s an afterthought for both parents, since, despite the motivations Claudia plants in them, neither Martha nor Jonas are all that attached to their worlds, just to each other. They’d leave him behind in a heartbeat if they could walk away from the worlds they’re shackled to and just be themselves somewhere.

(Characters say Alt Martha is doing everything for her son, but she’s not. She’s doing much of it to continue her contact with Jonas. She rarely even looks at the Unknown and didn’t even bother to name him. Martha’s devotion to him is one Claudia’s biggest lies. Martha would have gotten rid of him, since he’s the product of incest and so much pain.)

Unlike Adam and Eva, Claudia maintains her identity as she ages. She doesn’t hide behind another name and she doesn’t create a secret society. She becomes more purely herself, and she owns that identity. And she doesn’t feel the need to justify or advertise who she is to the others. She becomes more and more reliant on only herself, trusting no one, not even her younger or alternate selves, with her secrets.

Images courtesy of Netflix.

Dark Season 3 Episode 6: Light and Shadow Recap- Jonas becomes Schrodinger's cat. One Martha has to live in a cage. The other turns to Bartosz. A cosmic egg appears. It's a whole new world. #DarkNetflix In episode 6, we discover that Young Jonas is Schrödinger's cat. Martha goes to live in a cage, like Hansel waiting for the fairy-tale witch to eat him/her.

#Dark #dystopia #Light and Shadow #Lisa Vicari #Louis Hofmann #metacrone #Mystery #Paul Lux #recaps #review #science fiction

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