If you watch a show like Dark, you've made a deal with the creators of the show - you'll do your best to follow, and they promise that it will all make sense in the end. I haven't finished the series, but the third and final season takes the difficulty slider and kicks it up to 11.
One of the oddest things about Time Travel narratives is the notion of cycles. Instinctively, we want to put things in a certain order. If we see an older and a younger version of a character (as we do frequently in Dark, often interacting with one another) there are certain instincts that are hard to fight:
I'm going to just use character names here, which means it's spoiler time.
For the first two seasons, the ostensibly primary protagonist of the series is Jonas Kahnwald, who discovers that his father, Michael, is actually the same person as Mikkel, the little brother of his love interest, Martha. Mikkel goes missing in the first episode in what appears to be a series of child abductions/murders that echo a similar incident involving Mikkel's uncle Mads 33 years earlier. In fact, a body is discovered of a boy with his eyes burned away, eventually revealed to be a perfectly-preserved Mads.
In fact, Mikkel has been sent back in time to 1986, where he winds up adopted by Ines Kahnwald, a nurse, and he winds up growing up alongside his parents and his future wife, Hannah, who is Jonas' mother.
But that's not the real kicker.
Over the course of the first season, there's a mysterious figure who looks to be around 50, always wearing a thick rain jacket and with a big backpack as if he's always on the move, cryptically hinting at the odd goings-on. He's referred to in the credits as The Stranger, but we eventually discover that this character is actually a future Jonas - 33 years older.
We also eventually learn that Noah, the monstrous priest who is abducting children and submitting them to horrific deaths as he attempts to construct a time machine, is actually working for a more powerful villain named Adam.
When Jonas eventually confronts Adam, he discovers that Adam is, in fact, also Jonas, but 33 years on from the Stranger version of him.
It's chilling, of course, but also difficult to wrap your head around. Given how obviously villainous Adam appears (it doesn't help his case that his face is basically one giant scar) Jonas can't imagine how he would become him eventually, especially given that he has an example of himself a full 33 years on still fighting against Adam's plots.
I'm very curious to re-watch the series after I finish it, to see if I really understand what's going on. My sense on this first watch-through is that, more or less until the last moments of the second season, the entire timeline is consistent. It's loopy and filled with bootstrap paradoxes, but nothing contradicts itself.
Under such a system, there's an instinct that we might have that one needs to mentally counter: when seeing Jonas confronting either of his older incarnations, it's easy to imagine them as a sort of elder/junior pair of separate individuals. We see Adam espousing his philosophy and Jonas disagreeing with it, and we instinctively think of Adam's previous crimes as occurring in the past, and Jonas' actions as existing in the future. But this is actually the reverse. Jonas is the "older" version of Adam, not the other way around - a prior incarnation that operated from an older worldview.
There's an instinctive hope that we have that Jonas is capable of changing things. We see this is a parallel with generational conflicts - Jonas is younger, so we see him as the youthful generation, moving past the sins of the past, represented by Adam. But that's an illusion - Jonas' actions are set, while Adam's remain unknown. That doesn't somehow make Adam a good guy, but it does mean that our preconceptions about youth and age confuse our instincts when analyzing what's going on.
There's an instinct to think of these cycles - Jonas to Stranger to Adam - as an endlessly repeating cycle. But it's not - it's not even a cycle. It's a single path that we are simply jumping around on. Adam might remember his conversation with Jonas as if it happened twice, with him on each side once, but the truth is that that conversation only occurs a single time - it's only that Jonas/Adam's perspective on it is warped by time travel. So there's no chance of changing that event "the next time" in the same way that I'm never going to be able to have my "next" 21st Birthday (barring reincarnation, of course, but that would just be counting 21 from a different starting point.) Jonas will experience that conversation again, but it won't be the "next version of it" - it will just be the same conversation that he's returning to.
But.
In season 3, things get more complicated.
There is, as it turns out, an entirely separate universe that exists next to the one we're familiar with. It's easiest to think of these universes as the Adam Universe and the Eve Universe. Jonas never came to exist in the Eve universe, and thus there's no native Adam to it. Likewise, because Martha was killed by Adam in the Adam universe, there's no older Martha there to become Eve (I don't know that we have that officially as a name, but it's strongly implied.)
That, on its own, is enough to make things super complicated, as we need to re-learn the nature of peoples' relationships in this other universe. It turns out that here, there's no Sic Mundus group, but there seems to be an equivalent in Erit Lux ("Let there be Light," I think) run by Eva/Martha.
But beyond that, we even start to see changes within a timeline. There's only one Jonas, it would seem, who goes from Jonas to Stranger to Adam, but when a younger version of Eve-Martha shows up in 1888, having whisked Jonas away to her universe, the Stranger doesn't remember that happening - which suggests that we've actually split Jonas off into his own timeline, which then throws out everything I said about cycles because now there can be different versions of those events.
On one hand, this could be a good thing, as it might allow for some semblance of a happy ending (though I half-believe that a happy ending would, given how everyone is related, wind up wiping out most of the characters we know in the series in order for the world to be saved) and if Jonas' fate can be changed, perhaps that can be true of the world as well.
But it also means that we need to throw out Dark's meticulous timeline consistency. Dark's writers have removed the safety restraints from this roller coaster, and so we just need to trust them to use G-forces to keep us in our seats.
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