After 3 seasons, Dark ends on Netflix with an apotheosis final. But what to understand from the last episode and the final scene? Watch out, spoilers.
Watch out, spoilers. The following paragraphs contain spoilers on Dark and its outcome. If you don’t want to know anything, don’t read the following.
Between past, present and future, time travel in Dark will have given fans a lot of headaches. Especially since the end of season 2 of the German series had introduced an additional difficulty of understanding: a parallel world with another Martha who appears to Jonas so that he can repair the time flaws and that everything goes back to normal. Except that as he searches, Jonas is made to believe that the two parallel worlds are in conflict, one being governed by Adam, an older version of Jonas, and the other by Eva, a version Martha’s older one.
Adam wants to destroy everything and break the knot, the fault created between the two worlds, while Eva wants to perpetuate the parallel worlds and the cycles by reproducing all the actions of the past, present and future and therefore maintaining the knot which links the two parallel worlds. Like the mantra Thus the world was created (“Thus was created the world”, in Latin), season 3 of Dark is oriented towards a metaphor of the creation of humanity with Adam and Eve, as parents of the fairly consistent family tree of the inhabitants of Winden, all connected to each other. According to Adam and Eva, the knot or fault that intertwined the two parallel worlds is the love between the Jonah of the first world and the Martha of the second world, introduced at the end of season 2. From their union was born a son , available in three versions, a little boy, a young man and an old man, who helps Eva to accomplish his purpose.
A wonderful story of time
Except that the reality is quite different. There are not two but three worlds that exist: an original and two parallel worlds that were created by HG Tannhaus, the inventor of the time machine. In the last episode of season 3 of Dark, we understand that the German series is above all the story of a man willing to do anything to save the life of his family. Dark’s story begins on November 8, 1971 when HG Tannhaus is having a rainy evening with his son Marek. The latter leaves by car with his partner Sonja and their daughter Charlotte. They will have a road accident while crossing a bridge. Full of remorse, HG Tannhaus then creates a time machine to save his son but his desperate attempt will create a time flaw from June 21, 1986, date of the first opening of the passage, which generates two parallel worlds.
Netflix
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In these two worlds where time travel is possible, the life of the inhabitants is disturbed in particular with the disappearance of Mikkel, become Michael, the father of Jonas. Meetings and journeys through the ages then create an incredible family tree in which all the protagonists are linked, as indicated by the fresco on the ground in Eva’s lair. But neither she nor Adam are aware that they are only simple creations and not creators as they thought they were. It is thanks to Claudia, who discovered the truth after multiple attempts, that things will be able to get back to normal. She prevents Adam from killing Eva as in every cycle and explains the situation to her. He then takes care to warn the young Jonah who will take Martha from the second world with him and prevent the accident to Marek and his family.
Jonas and Martha then take refuge in the cave, assist in the creation of the passage in 1986 and take a space-time corridor in which they see each other again as children. They then went in 1971 to the known crossroads of Winden and blocked Marek and Sonja shortly before the accident. Jonas manages to make Marek understand that he should not hit the road with a reply: “What we know is a drop of water, what we don’t know is the ocean”, which echoes the phrase repeated by his father HG Tannhaus, always with his head in the stars: “The world is full of secrets, what we know is a drop in the ocean”. The accident being prevented and their mission accomplished, Jonas and Martha disintegrate little by little and disappear in nature, just like the protagonists of the two parallel worlds.
Screen capture / Netflix
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What to understand from the final scene?
The final episode ends with a meal in very stormy weather which seems to be held on June 27, 2020 with the inhabitants of Winden who really existed without time travel, namely Regina Tiedemann, Hannah Krüger and Torben Wöller, Katharina Albers, Peter Doppler and his transgender partner Benni. But when they all celebrate Regina for an unknown reason and Torben wants to tell them about her accident to the eye, a power failure occurs. Hannah panics and evokes a feeling of deja vu when she sees a yellow raincoat (like Jonas’). She says that she dreamed of an apocalypse and that she experienced it as a liberation: “No yesterday, no today, no tomorrow”. They drink to a world without Winden and the current returns. We then understand that Hannah is pregnant with Torben and when asked which first name she chose, she declares that “Jonah is a pretty first name”.
Since Jonas and Martha have reorganized in space time, Ulrich, Aleksander and Charlotte do not exist, as do their ancestors and their descendants. If the apocalypse did not take place, time travel and events in the two parallel worlds seem to have left some traces since we see a yellow raincoat, that Hannah wants to call her child Jonah, that the we see Egon and Claudia in the photo frame with Regina and that Torben has a trace in the eye as Helge, Peter’s father had. These somewhat disturbing clues suggest that there may be unexplained events and that time travel may be possible. After all, if Jonas and Martha prevented the car accident of the son of HG Tannhaus and therefore the creation of parallel worlds, nothing indicates that the watchmaker did not try to create his time machine anyway . This open ending does not answer all the questions asked in Dark and gives free rein to the imagination of the spectators.
Dark’s trailer:
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