Having bowled my way through the second season, I'm now on Dark's final season, and boy have things changed.
This is a very twisty, very complex show, and so I really think you'll be best off if you watch it yourself before reading spoileriffic content. I'm one episode into the third season, and the show has just jumped exponentially in complexity.
Let's go over it past the spoiler cut, shall we?
Dark is a show about time travel. Early on, rules are established - for instance, one can travel in time only by passing through a specific passage in a cave. The travel takes you to one of three time periods that are connected, 33 years apart. Essentially, you can only jump back 33 or 66 years, and each timeframe continues to move forward at its normal rate.
Further along, however, we start to bend that rule. We see other eras - not just 2019, 1986, and 1953, but also 1921 and 2052, the latter of which is a horrible post-apocalypse (while I haven't heard anything about weird explosions in Germany, 2020 being a sort of apocalyptic year seems sort of accurate.)
The thing is, the cave-journey is eventually revealed to be just one method of time travel. There is a device constructed by H. G. Tannhaus, the clockmaker, working from a blueprint recreation of that very device, but also there is a series of devices constructed by the sinister Sic Mundus cabal.
Still, one of the hard rules of the series for the first two seasons is that there is a single, consistent timeline. The consequences of any journey to the past are already part of the fabric of reality, which allows for crazy things like (and again, serious spoilers here) Charlotte and Elisabeth being each others' mothers.
While it's a fairly ensemble-heavy show, if there is a central character it's Jonas Kahnwald, who discovers in season one that his father Michael is actually the brother of his love interest, Martha, the young Mikkel, who gets stuck back in 1986 at the end of the first episode. But while this reveal is quite mind-blowing, the much thornier reveals are about Jonas' future selves. First, there is "the Stranger," a 40-something (I guess he'd have to be either late 40s or about 50) guy who looks a lot like the main character in Death Stranding. We discover that this is, in fact, an older Jonas.
And yet that's not even where it ends - the most apparently villainous character in the series, "Adam," for whom the initial "big bad" Noah works, reveals himself to be a version of Jonas even farther along the future, disfigured by horrible scars all over his face and head.
The notion that our young hero's antagonist is actually his future self is already a pretty tough thing to wrap your head around. Actually, this happens to remind me of a villain from the MMORPG World of Warcraft - the "Infinite" Dragon Murozond, who is actually a future version of the benevolent Nozdormu, whose bronze dragons are tasked with safeguarding time.
It would seem that any attempt to outmaneuver one's future self would be futile, and while young Jonas and Stranger Jonas both seem resolved not to turn out like Adam, wouldn't that have to be their fate? Aren't we inevitably watching not the hero's journey, but the birth of a villain?
There are two "factions" who seem to be at play in the series, one led by Adam, the other by Claudia, the brilliant head of the nuclear plant in 1986, but this is seriously complicated by the fact that it's Jonas who teaches Claudia about time travel, and to an extent, vice versa. It's also not exactly clear which of them wants to change the past and which wants to maintain the timeline. Claudia is motivated primarily by keeping her daughter Regina alive, while Jonas wants to save Martha from her apparent death in the apocalyptic event that takes place in 2020.
Season two ends with a lot of questions about these factions. For instance, Magnus and Franziska, Martha and Mikkel's brother and Elisabeth's sister, respectively, appear to become part of Adam's organization when they're much older (though back in the 1920s.) It also seems that Hannah, Jonas' mother, leaves 2019 behind and starts life anew in the 1950s. We also know that Agnes, Martha's great grandmother, is Noah's sister, but we still don't know what Noah's actual name is. And there's still a major mystery of who Aleksander Tiedemann (Claudia's son in law) really is, and why he was bleeding and carrying a gun when he first met Regina.
If the show were to keep going as it has been, we might have expected to get some grand reveals about that stuff - and perhaps we still will - but instead, we've gotten a massive monkey wrench thrown in:
An alternate timeline.
Just as the apocalyptic disaster is about to strike, Martha, running from the bunker that will keep Regina, 80s-era Claudia, Peter (Charlotte's husband) and Elisabeth safe, goes to see Jonas at his house, only for Adam (remember, actually far-future Jonas) to arrive and shoot Martha, claiming that Jonas needs to start getting over her for him to do what he has to do.
But as Adam leaves him, another Martha shows up - different hair, different attitude, and she takes out what seems to be the most advanced time-machine introduced so far (but clearly related to the Tannhaus machine) to take him not just to a different time and place, but a different world entirely, before leaving him to meet her for the first time.
What we discover in the first episode of season 3 is that Jonas has arrived in a timeline in which he does not exist. Mikkel, on this version of November 4th, 2019, never got taken to the cave and never went back, and as such, Michael Kahnwald never existed, and thus neither did Jonas.
The fallout of this is complex - perhaps because she did not have her own husband, Hannah must have engaged in her affair with Ulrich earlier, and thus she's now married to him and pregnant with his child, while Martha, Magnus, and Mikkel live, of all places, in the Kahnwald home (Hannah was only a Kahnwald by marriage.)
So when Jonas shows up at his high school, none of his friend recognize him - even Martha, because this is a version of her before the one that took him from his timeline. Indeed, she's now dating some new guy named Killian - the brother of the drug dealer who goes missing early in the first season - who doesn't seem to exist in the original timeline. Jonas sees his own very pregnant mother in the halls of the school, and she of course doesn't recognize him.
In this final season, this is a massive wrinkle in what the show has taught us to expect from it. It does suggest that it could, in the end, allow for some sort of victory - preventing the apocalyptic future, and maybe even saving these characters we care about - but it also really raises some difficult questions.
To my mind, the most crucial question is whether the Stranger or Adam had their own journey into this alternate timeline. Has this event broken the cycle, or is this, just like everything else, just another element of it?
The most obvious hook for a new mystery here is the existence of a new individual we see in three iterations. A young boy, an adult man, and an old man, all with the identical lip scar, are first seen torching Adam's underground (I think, right?) lounge, and then we see them in the 1980s killing Bernd Doppler with a garrotte.
Who this person is is a big mystery, of course.
Interestingly, in our alternate timeline, we see Martha playing a more proactive role, which is kind of nice for someone who was sort of an in-the-dark motivator for Jonas' story for most of the series. She seems to be undergoing her own journey, though we've only just scratched the surface.
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