Dark and What Paradise Might Be

I've always found it interesting that there's a huge distinction in the assumptions of Eastern versus Western religions regarding our fate after death. And before I get into this: huge caveat to anything I say is that I'm just some white dude who I guarantee you does not understand all the nuances of religions like Buddhism or Hinduism (and this argument is really more on the Buddhist side of things, again, something can't claim any expertise in.) But if you look at Western religious traditions, even dating back to Ancient Egypt (which is not strictly-speaking Western, but was a culture that had enough influence on Western thought that it's worth mentioning,) there is an underlying existential angst. Death is the great evil to be feared. And death, it's assumed, takes the form of some kind of endless darkness - an extinction or annihilation of the consciousness, of memories, of everything that made us what we are.

In Ancient Egyptian religion, the journey to the underworld saw your soul being evaluated, and only those who were unburdened by sin and evil were allowed to persist. The others are fed to a chthonic crocodile, with no life to go on beyond this one. In Christianity, salvation is the defeat of death - Jesus is supposed to grand us eternal life, and while the interpretation of the alternative has often been another sort of eternity, but one of suffering and pain in hell, you could also interpret Jesus' gift to humanity being simply the ability to persist, never perishing entirely, allowed to live on forever.

And so it's funny that, for all the parallels between Christianity and Buddhism, it seems like there's an opposite goal. In Eastern religion, or perhaps more specifically Indian ones (again, I'm ignorant here, and just writing this as a ramp up to talk about a German TV show) the baseline assumption that is made is that we all are reincarnated when we die - that our consciousness and soul is placed in another body, ignorant of our past lives, but still judged and punished accordingly. Buddhism identifies the cycle of reincarnation as a wheel of endless suffering - that all of existence is suffering. Therefore, the goal, it would seem, is to no longer exist, which Buddhism (if, again, my interpretation is correct) seeks to achieve through Enlightenment.

(Now, I'm pretty sure that there are very different interpretations of Nirvana - perhaps not so much an existential extinction as much as a transcendence of individualist identity and ego, which I have to say sounds infinitely better to me.)

One of the things about time travel narratives is that it can mimic both the idea of endless cycles and also existential annihilation. Indeed, while one might fear that death brings with it an existential erasure, at the very least we believe that our past existence is not undone (though from a solipsitic perspective, if you cannot exist to remember your past, does it even exist?)

Let's talk Dark.

In the end, things are set right. They're set right in a way, however, that annihilates most of the characters we've come to care for in this densely twisted narrative in the small town of Winden.

As we discover, there is, in fact, an origin to all the complex twists of Winden - a starting point in a close loop. Because as we should have probably guessed from all the 3 symbolism throughout the series, there's a third universe. But unlike the mirrored Adam and Eve universes, this other one - the Prime universe - is the genuine, correct one (with maybe a little asterisk that I'll get to.)

H. G. Tannhaus, the mostly secondary character who was Charlotte's adoptive grandfather after she was dropped off by, it turns out, her older self and her daughter/mother, in fact turns out to be the genesis of it all. In 1986, Tannhaus' son got in a somewhat mild argument with him and then drove off with his wife and baby and they got in a car accident and the whole family died, except for H. G., who was left alone in his shop.

An amateur but brilliant and well-read physicist, Tannhaus spent the next couple decades trying to build a time machine, hoping that he could save his family by altering their fate. But what he actually accomplished was to create two new universes, splitting the timeline, and generating these two parallel apocalypses.

In a lot of ways, the tension between which is better - eternal existence or escape from eternal existence - is the fundamental difference in philosophy between Adam and Eve. Adam sees this whole cycle as nothing but pain, and would rather see the whole universe go. But Eve does not wish to allow it all to end. And both have done horrible things in their conflict with one another.

Ultimately, Adam gets his way, but rather than winking out all of existence in a fit of spite and nihilism, what redeems him is that he does this in order to save another world - sacrificing his messed up and convoluted world in order to allow the original one to go on mostly as it was supposed to, and with no trigger for an apocalypse.

It's Claudia who reveals to Adam how this can be done - the loophole that Eve has been using in each cycle to change things, which is that while the catastrophe occurs at the nuclear plant, causality breaks down, and this allows for the nudging of events to occur differently. Adam uses this loophole to find Jonas and effectively beat Martha to the punch (though I think it's notable that any of the Marthas that became Eve didn't actually take Jonas to her timeline, and all the Jonases who became Adam were never taken by her, which I think is the "double cycle" that they talk about, though this is perhaps the most confusing aspect of the narrative.)

Adam, whom Jonas believes to be the same Adam who just shot his universe's Martha, nevertheless convinces his younger self to come with him, creating a third course of events. He explains what Jonas has to do, giving him the universe-hopping time machine ball and telling him to go grab Martha before Magnus and Fraziska can get her.

Together, Jonas and Martha - younger versions who will never grow up to be Adam and Eve - travel through the tunnels to the Prime Universe, shortly before Tannhaus' family is killed. They appear on the street, in the pouring rain, and the younger Tannhaus swerves to miss them (there was a moment I was terrified that their appearance was what caused the crash in the first place, which would have been kind of a bootstrap paradox).

However, instead, the car swerves around and comes to a safe spot. Jonas tells the exasperated and adrenaline-fueled couple that the bridge (from which they plunge to their deaths) is closed, and the Tannhaus family is spooked enough that they decide to head back to H.G.'s house for the night.

With this change, robbing Tannhaus of his motivation to begin his catastrophic experiment, Jonas and Martha are afforded a last few moments to stand in the rain, and be with each other. And then, as time sort of adjusts for this new continuity, they begin to dissipate, turning into gold-and-black dust (not unlike when the universe-hopping machine is used, but much slower.) Simultaneously (if that's even a concept that makes sense) we see this happening with Adam and Eve, after Adam has gone to her universe and explained that he's ended the cycle, and with Stranger Jonas in the 1880s, and also with Claudia - though a version of her will survive, this one goes away.

As the series' short epilogue, we see a party at Hannah's house. And things look happier. Regina is there, but cancer-free (I'll confess I don't know if they directly link the cancer to all the time travel, but I suppose it's implied that that's the case). Peter and Benni seem to be there as a couple (and it seems Benni just looks better-off, though that's purely based on appearances). Katharina is there as well, and without Ulrich, there doesn't seem to be any source of conflict between her and Hannah. Hannah is pregnant with Jurgen Woller's baby. When there's a blackout - maybe some result of the little incursion from these canceled timelines, or maybe innocuous - Hannah mentions that she had some strange dream, one in which everything she was and knew came to an end, and despite how terrifying that sounded, she says that it was peaceful and gentle.

So, with that, most of the cast has been erased from the timeline, but the world is saved, and the original timeline, with all the people that might result (including the Tannhaus family) are thus allowed to exist, which I think is the redemptive aspect of this story that keeps it from being 100% depressing.

We obviously like Martha and Jonas, but the fact that they exist in the first place is a symptom of this damaged reality. Winden has been a place filled with pain and suffering, and ultimately most of that has come from their older selves. Allowing them to escape the cycle as their younger, innocent versions, is a sort of redemption.

The last episode is called Paradise, which has been Adam's goal. While that concept as originally conceived by one of Tannhaus' ancestors was a more terrestrial one - a world in which time travel was used to go back and fix any problems that occurred, orchestrating a perfect existence not unlike a writer going back and editing multiple drafts of a story - Adam comes to believe that it would be better not to exist at all. But Eve, I think not unreasonably (though her methods are unreasonable) cannot abide that annihilation, believing there to be more value to the existence of the world.

So in a way, this ending splits the difference, saving one reality (that seems better) at the expense of two others.

Let's get into opinions.

Overall, I do think the third season suffers a bit from "we need to finish this story" issues. The first two seasons build up a great deal of mystery, and in any such show, the solutions to those mysteries are never going to match what you feel they could have been. Personally, I feel like the introduction of the Eve universe was a desperate attempt to find some way to close off the story, despite the fact that it ultimately just leads to a bigger loop. If I watch the show again, I'll look for hints of its existence in earlier seasons, but I suspect there won't be any.

I'm also a little bummed that we never got any explanation for the "people drenched in that Cesium isotope stuff" especially given that this version of Martha is one of the images in the opening titles of the final season. What seemed like it would be a massive clue to how things ultimately get resolved turned out to, it seems, just be some cool imagery that didn't really have a bearing on the plot.

Nevertheless, the show gets a B+/A- from me for its time travel logic, which is vastly better than most. I think the last season and the finale have a few sort of extraneously sentimental moments (I didn't quite understand the need for the "them as kids seeing one another through closets" moment, which also raises the possibility that this isn't actually a change to the timeline) but as sad as the ending is, I think it's an appropriate conclusion.

It's interesting to me that the show generally doesn't touch much on the historical events of its various eras - we certainly get different attitudes, like how gender roles have evolved over time - but there's no mention of, for example, the fact that between the 1920s era and the 1950s era, Germany went through a, shall we say, fucked up period, you know, with Nazis.

I don't know a ton about the demographics of Germany today, but the lack of people of color in the series does strike me as a missing opportunity. Now granted, given that nearly all the characters are members of one giant fucked up family tree, it makes some sense that they'd be a bit lacking in ethnic diversity. But it strikes me that if you were to make this in America, you'd be a damn fool if you didn't include any non-white people in the story (especially given the fact that many people in the US who think of themselves as white do have some black ancestry, and many people who are considered black have some white ancestry - remember, folks, race is a social construct! One that unfortunately has created horrific inequalities that shouldn't be ignored, but still something that's ultimately artificial.)

The ultimate fates of the people in the Adam and Eve universes is sort of left up to your imagination. Hannah tells the gathered party that she plans to name her as-yet-unborn son Jonas - though I leave it to you whether that means that Jonas will be allowed to live on in a better world, born like 17 years later, or if Hannah just likes the name Jonas and would name her first son that regardless of who he was.

If you have the Christian or similar view on the best afterlife, I'd think that God could easily pluck souls from cancelled timelines and take them to heaven. And if you have a more Buddhist conception, perhaps they've achieved nirvana.

Despite how neatly the ending seems to close off the story, there is one funny element: the whole thing ends in a grandfather paradox. Only because of these two denizens of the cancelled timeline come to the Prime Universe is the cancelled timeline cancelled. Though Jonas and Martha exist in the universe only for a few minutes, they still get woven into the tapestry of time, which suggests that on a multidimensional, eternal level, the fact of their existence is still there.

Still, it appears the universe is all right with this discrepancy, if only because it allows the show to come to an end (I seriously doubt there will be a season four announced at any point.)

Whatever flaws in the logic can, of course, be excused by the fact that the writers are mere mortals and not time-gods. And again, compared to most of these narratives, this is one of if not the tightest time travel narrative I've seen (ok, Twelve Monkeys - the movie, I haven't seen the show - might be the absolutely flawless one).