SPOILER ALERT: This is an ending or beginning explained article (Because the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end) for Dark Season 3. So, it’s obviously going to have major spoilers. Please watch the show and then read it. And if you don’t care about spoilers, go right ahead while wearing your yellow raincoat because it’s going to rain theories.
For some Netflix users, it must’ve been a day or a few hours since they’ve watched the third and final season of the critically acclaimed show, Dark. But since I am a time-traveler (Or have access to early screeners), it has been almost a week since I have watched it and I cannot stop thinking about it. Because, honestly speaking, it was a lot to take in and as far as final seasons go, Baran Bo Odar, Jantje Friese, and the rest of the cast and crew of the show did a banging job of concluding it in a hugely satisfying way. However, the question still remains, what did it all mean? We followed Jonas and the residents of Winden from 2017 to 2020 through timelines and dimensions. So, what does it signify?
Now, I am no expert in any branch of science, which is something Dark deals with heavily with its use of black holes, gravity, quantum entanglement, and do not have a hotline to the Odar, Friese, or anybody who has been involved in the making of the show. So, like any other fan, I scoured the internet for explainers, which there are plenty of and will only multiply exponentially by the time I finish this sentence. And I came to the conclusion that there are two ways to dissect the ending of the final season. There’s a standard way, which involves a beat-by-beat walkthrough of the narrative. There’s a galaxy-brain way, which involves getting into the show’s metaphor and messaging. I like the second one but let’s deal with the first method.
This is a final spoiler alert. Iske baad bhi bola ki “spoiler warning kyu nahi diya”, then I’m going to throw you into a black hole and send you back to the ’20s. If you want the spoiler-free review of Dark Season 3, then here it is: Dark Season 3 Review - An Ambitious Attempt To Analyse Humanity's Urge For Self-Preservation
During the tail-end of Dark Season 2, we learned that the show doesn’t just have time travel, but inter-dimensional travel as well. What’s that? Well, there’s a mirror Winden existing alongside the Winden where things are a little different but similar (Shown excellently by cinematographer Nik Summerer by literally flipping the image during the mirror Winden scenes). Just like Adam (The ultimate form of Jonas) is the overlord of Winden, Eva (The ultimate form of Martha from the mirror Winden) is the keeper of mirror Winden. And these two worlds are in a knot and can only exist if Adam continues to try to destroy the connection by killing a version of young mirror Martha, bearing the child of young Jonas, and Eva continues to preserve the connection by pushing young Jonas and young mirror Martha to conceive the child. However, there’s a loophole that can bring this sick cycle of self-preservation to an end.
Soon after young Jonas is killed in Mirror Winden by a version of young Martha, we see him come back to the plot as if nothing has happened. That’s when we learn that just like Schrödinger's cat, there exist two overlapping paths in a singular reality: one is where mirror Martha comes to rescue young Jonas and one where she doesn’t and young Jonas has to hide in a bunker underneath his house to save himself from the apocalypse. In this reality, both Adam and Eva’s plans fail as young Jonas is sent on his way to take mirror Martha into the Origin Winden and stop the cause of the creation of time and space travel. What’s the Origin Winden now? It’s the original dimension where H.G. Tannhaus’s (The original Tannhaus) efforts to bring back his son and daughter-in-law who had tragically died in a car crash had led to the creation of the Winden we’ve been seeing all this time, the mirror Winden, and all the characters with fu*ked up family trees.
So, in another cycle of the alternative reality of Winden, after Adam, Jonas, old mirror Martha, young mirror Martha, and Claudia come to the conclusion that they need to stop existing, we get a really touching climactic scene between Jonas and Martha. They talk about how their destinies and that they’re perfect for each other before turning into stardust. We cut to the Origin version of the Kahnwald household where Hannah, who’s married to Woller and is pregnant, Katharina, Regina, Peter, and Bernadette are having dinner. The light flickers, as usual, Hannah has a déjà vu after spotting a yellow raincoat, and she explains a dream where she saw the destruction of Winden. As the light comes back on she says that she has thought of a name for her unborn child: Jonas. And that could either mean some semblance of time travel still exists (Because déjà vu’s are not to be taken lightly) or that Winden is completely free of it and a Jonas will be born who’ll be able to live a life devoid of trauma.
Now, that’s the simple explanation. Yes, my friend, that’s what ‘simple’ looks like in Dark. But what does the existence of the Windens, its destruction, Adam and Eve, Jonas and Martha, all mean on a thematic level? Because although fans of the show love to obsess over the familial connection, that’s not the point that Baran bo Odar has been trying to make… I guess. I have watched Season 1 three times now and I am pretty sure that he was talking about the cyclical nature of our characteristics and how we pass it on from one generation to another. I have watched Season 2 three times as well and there Adam spelled it out it is a war against God, which is Time itself here, due to the merciless way it puts humans into this cycle. And after watching Season 3 twice, I think it is about linking our urge for self-preservation to an invisible entity like Time and why we should stop doing that to reclaim free will. This basically means that it is about rejecting all forms of religion, becoming atheists, and accepting responsibility for our actions.
See Tannhaus is technically God, in a physical form, here because it’s his ‘mistake’ that leads to the creation of the Windens and the people in it. If you see very closely, there’s no concept of religion in here. We assume it’s Christianity because people are buried and there’s a church where Noah operates from, and the setting is similar to the reality we live in. But it’s later revealed that the Christianity we see here is a concept introduced by Adam via a Bible handed over to Noah. And it feels like a way to dissuade the general public from discovering who or what the real God is because even he doesn’t know who or what the real God is. He understands the mechanics of what God has created but he never gets to the essence of why it’s happening. Hence, in an attempt to simply exist, he becomes a Biblical gatekeeper of what he thinks God is i.e. Time, and continues on his journey of self-preservation. The same goes for Eva. However, that is a very reductive way of seeing things because that’s how gatekeepers of any high-concept subject are.
God isn’t just Time or Tannhaus here. It’s an amalgamation of the characters’ inability to let go of their past which thereby makes them relive a cycle and gives them only the illusion of free will. They think that they are making real choices but their choices are already predetermined due to their inability to move on. It’s a knot with no beginning and no end. The illusion of free will is something that we see theists talk about as well because according to them everything is written by God, something they’ve never seen and is a reductive way of looking at the scientific way our world works. And since it absolves them of anything they do and allows them to be in control of everything because they’re “connected with a higher power”, they do everything to preserve their idea of God, much like Adam and Eva are doing in Dark. They want Winden to keep repeating their mistakes by taking away their free will because it gives them absolute power and allows them to play God. But it is sickening and comes in the way of evolution, which IMO isn’t productive in Dark or our world. And that’s what I think the makers of Dark are requesting us to stray away from.
If we see Adam, Eva, Jonas, and Martha (Or any of the characters who are deleted from existence) as characters, the message might be that if one feels like offshoots of the blueprint of society i.e. a glitch in the matrix, then they should stop existing, which is problematic in many ways. However, if you see them as the physical representation of religion itself i.e. the real glitch in the matrix, it makes more sense. Their myopic view of the world, although they keep saying that they know about the larger picture, divides families into factions, worlds into realities, and causes the f*cking apocalypse. It is only after they accept that what they know is a drop and what they do not know is an ocean, which is something that atheists keep saying all the time because they are trying to understand the world instead of claiming to know everything, harmony comes back to Winden (cinematographer Nik shows it visually by injecting so much colour), time and space travel i.e. Dark’s God is abolished, and its residents are free to choose their own adventures and basically have a happy ending or beginning. Because living a happy, moral life free of prejudices and regressive rules is always better than being in the cycle of identifying with a religion and following the regulations set by its gatekeepers.
This is just my theory. I’ve no way to know if that’s something Odar, Friese, or anyone associated with Dark had in mind unless they speak about it in the future. That said, as an atheist myself, I think it is an explanation I am satisfied with. Because Dark is a cerebral show and just taking it on face-value takes you down the road of who is whose father and who is whose aunt. And that, in my opinion, is just a narrow-minded way of deconstructing a piece of art that has been carefully pieced together by people. So, the best thing we can do is to reciprocate that love by analysing it as deeply as the creators have while making it. I’ll obviously revisit the show in the future and, trust me, this is not going to be the end of my theories on the themes of Dark even though the show has closed its curtains. It’s only the beginning.
Cover artwork by Pramit Chatterjee/Mashable India
