Warning: SPOILERS for Dark season 3.
Dark season 3's ending perfectly wraps up the series with an emotional sendoff and the dissolution of two worlds. Dark is a show about time travel and time paradoxes, but at its core, it’s a very human story about a large cast of characters, their relationships, families, and the tragic mistakes they make to help their loved ones. The first season started with the disappearance of a young boy named Mikkel in the small German town of Winden. The mystery of his whereabouts is the catalyst for young Jonas to discover a way to time travel. Eventually, he learns Mikkel is, in fact, his father and the young kid who disappeared went back in time and grew up in the 1980s. Although Jonas wants to help him, he knows if he takes Mikkel back to the future, Jonas will cease to exist. This is one of many paradoxes the show introduces, but a crucial one to understand Dark’s main storyline.
However, Jonas is just one element of a larger time loop that has, in a way, trapped Dark’s large cast of characters into a never-ending cycle, dooming them to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. As Jonas learns more about the cycle, he also discovers his future self has been time traveling for years, wanting to bring about the apocalypse. At the end of Dark season 2, old Jonas (or Adam) succeeds in his goal and an accident involving dark matter and the nuclear plant of Winden destroys the town and the rest of the world. But before Jonas is engulfed by the destruction, a young Martha appears and takes him to a different reality. This Martha is not the same young woman he was in love with for most of the show – the original one died in his arms after Adam killed her. Nevertheless, Jonas trusts her and they travel together to a parallel world at the start of season 3. Like Jonas in the first two seasons, Martha has gone through her own journey to discover time travel.
Since in this universe Jonas never existed, because Mikkel never disappeared, some characters are living different lives, but the apocalypse is still approaching. Jonas and Martha attempt to stop it from happening again, but they realize that they are in the middle of a battle between their future selves: Adam and Eva. Adam wants to break the final cycle, while Eva wants to continue it. As long as they exist, over the years their paths will diverge and they will continue manipulating the timeline to make sure certain events happen or are prevented. Each action feeds into the other, and they are forever connected no matter what they try to do. As the show puts it, their beginning is their end and vice-versa.
In Dark's timeline, "the origin" is the moment in time that would lead to the invention of time travel. Although Adam at first believes the origin of the cycle is his and Martha’s son (who remain unnamed throughout season 3), Claudia discovers the truth. It wasn't the fact that Jonas and Martha - born of two worlds that didn't originally exist - had a son together, born of out time, but instead that they were connected to an event that preceded the creations of their worlds.
In the original world - the Third World in Dark - H.G. Tannhaus loses his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter in a car accident. Grieving deeply, he decides to invent time travel so he can prevent their deaths. This is the moment when Jonas’ and Martha’s worlds are created - through an accident, as Tannhaus' experiment had dire consequences - and the knot is tangled. When Claudia tells this to Adam, and he in turn informs his younger self, Jonas and Martha travel outside their loop using quantum entanglement and stop the accident. Without the trauma of losing his family, Tannhaus doesn’t develop time travel and thus their two worlds are never created. In this new world - the original world - the Nielsen family tree has never existed and the events of the previous seasons didn’t happen. Thus, Jonas, Martha, and everyone connected to them don't exist.
In Dark season 1, Jonas learns his father is actually Martha’s young brother, Mikkel. In 2019, Mikkel time travels to 1986 and remains stuck there for the rest of his life. As an adult he marries Hannah, and they have Jonas. That meant Jonas was Martha’s nephew and, although they were very much in love, their relationship was a time paradox. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg for the families of Winden. In the end, they are all connected through paradoxes, as characters’ existence depends on the existence of their parents and vice-versa.
Martha is a Nielsen. She’s the daughter of Ulrich, who is the son of Troten. Troten’s father, however, is Martha’s son with Jonas. This child was conceived when the original Jonas slept with the Martha from the second world. In both worlds, he was then sent back in time to the 1940s where he met and married Agnes, who gives birth to Troten. This means the entire Nielsen family tree is one huge paradox. It can only exist as long as Jonas and Martha time travel, while they can only exist if their grandfather (and son) goes back in time as well.
Meanwhile, other families also are connected to Martha and Jonas. For example, Jonas and Claudia shared a half-sister: Silja. This is because Hannah time traveled and slept with Egon Tiedemann, Claudia’s father. Martha is also Charlotte Doppler’s cousin because of Silja and Noah, a man who would eventually marry Elisabeth (Charlotte’s mother and daughter). Noah is also Claudia’s great-grandson because he’s the son of Bartosz Tiedemann (who is the son of Regina, Claudia’s daughter). Basically, almost everyone in Dark was related to someone, if not by blood, by marriage. This happened because many characters traveled in time and ended up creating a domino effect that intertwined the Doppler, Tiedemann, and Nielsen family trees... beginning with Jonas and Martha, who are Adam and Eva.
Though they loved each other deeply at one point, Adam and Eva have two conflicting objectives. The first wants to destroy what the show calls “the knot” and end the cycle, while the latter is fighting to preserve events exactly as they always happened. The knot is what connects the two worlds and, in Adam and Eva’s mind, it is also what ensures the endless continuation of the time loop. Furthermore, they both believe the knot is the Unknown Child. This man, who is never named in the show, is the son of the original Jonas and the Martha from the second world. This means he is a being of two worlds and also the father of Tronte Nielsen. He’s both the beginning and the end of the Nielsen family tree.
As the leader of Sic Mundus, Adam sends various agents across the timeline to attempt to manipulate events so he can kill a pregnant Martha in both worlds. He is the one who sends Noah, Helge, Agnes, Silja, Franziska, Magnus, Elisabeth, and Charlotte to different times and places so they can guarantee things would happen according to Adam’s wishes. Under his orders, Noah experiments with children to fix a time travel machine, Elisabeth and Charlotte go to the future to kidnap the baby Charlotte, and Franziska and Magnus lure Martha to Adam. Once he killed original Martha, he captures the Martha from the second world and uses the God particle to kill her and their unborn son. However, his actions are always countered by Eva.
Eva is the leader of Erit Lux. Her organization opposes Adam, whom they consider a shadow to their light. Like him, she sends agents across the timelines in order to maintain the knot and preserve her son’s existence. She uses Claudia, Bartosz, Noah, Egon, and the Unknown to keep the loop going forever. One key part of her plan is feeding Adam information by having the Unknown write the Sic Mundus notebook Adam uses to fight her. During Dark season 3, the Unknown travels to many points in time to force certain events to happen, such as the construction of the nuclear plant in Winden. Another vital part of her plan is to make sure Jonas and her younger self sleep together, so she will get pregnant.
Only a person outside the knot, disconnected from Jonas and Martha’s tangled family tree, could truly see a path to break the cycle - and that person was Claudia. Daughter of Egon and Doris Tiedemann, she wasn’t a Nielsen and was driven by the desire to save her daughter, Regina. After years of studying the loop, she finally discovers the true beginning of the cycle and passes that knowledge to Jonas. It turns out the origin and the knot were not the Unknown Child, but the invention of time travel by H.G. Tannhaus in the original world.
However, the only point in time when traveling between worlds is possible is during the apocalypse. The event caused by the nuclear plant’s accident creates a quantum entanglement phenomenon that leads to the overlapping of multiple realities. For a fraction of a second, time stops, and the chain of cause and effect that trapped the characters finally breaks. This is how Eva’s agents can jump between worlds. But it’s also the moment when Jonas and Martha can travel not only across time, but worlds as well.
Despite loving each other, Jonas and Martha are determined to end the misery that is their existence as well as the existence of their families. They follow Claudia’s and Adam’s instructions, return to the Winden caves, and end up in a tunnel of light. While the tunnel itself is not explained in the show, it might be a place outside time and space, perhaps the physical manifestation of a fourth dimension. Eventually, they are transported to the middle of a road in the original world.
There, they are almost run over by Tannhaus’ son. Wanting to see if they were okay, he steps out of the car to meet them. They warn him not go to the bridge that will lead to his death. After they repeat a phrase also used by his father, he accepts their advice and drives back to Tannhaus’ house, preventing the car accident from ever happening. Because they succeed in erasing Tannhaus’ grief and motivation to construct a time machine, Martha and Jonas slowly disappear. Their existence was tied to the invention of time travel, something that will not happen in the third world.
Once Martha and Jonas untie the knot and stop the invention of time travel, anyone that existed because of them was wiped out. Without time travel or the Unknown Child, the entire Nielsen family ceases to exist. This means only those outside that tree are alive in the third world. The Tiedemanns and Dopplers were mostly untouched. Doris and Egon still had Claudia, who then had Regina. Greta had Helge, who is the father of Peter. This time, however, Peter is not married to Charlotte because she no longer exists. Instead, he’s with Woller’s sister, Benni. Hannah and Katharina are also alive and well, and still friends since Ulrich wasn’t there to drive a wedge between them. Hannah is now married to Woller, and expecting a baby.
That’s why the last scene of Dark has Katharina, Hannah, Benni, Woller, Regina, and Peter dining together. They are alive because their parents and grandparents existed in the original world without the interference of Adam or Eva.
Dark is a show about mysteries. The audience and the characters spent most of it trying to make sense of what is happening and why. This is especially true for Jonas, who is purposefully manipulated and kept in the dark by Adam, Eva, and Claudia. Knowledge is the key to end the cycle. It’s the tool Claudia uses to understand the origin and the knot. She knows Jonas has to stay in the dark so she can lead him to the eventual end of the cycle. Claudia references the show's title when discussing the timeline's mysteries and how she needed to withhold answers from him.
Another meaning to the title might be related to Hannah’s words in Dark season 3's ending. She says she had a dream about lights flickering, a loud bang, and then suddenly everything was dark. The world had ended in darkness, but she had a feeling this was a good thing. This is a reference to how the two worlds ceased to exist. Dark, in this context, is the end of desire, of wanting. In a way, this suggests Jonas and Martha, as well everyone in the loop, find a sort of peace as they disappeared into the darkness.
In the last scene of Dark season 3's ending, a sense of déjà vu comes over Hannah as the lights flicker and she stares at a yellow raincoat. Déjà vu in the show points to events repeating over and over again, and Martha and Jonas refer to the feeling as “a glitch in the Matrix.” In the Matrix trilogy, déjà vu was a moment when something had changed in the code of the simulation, an event that could not be predicted by the characters but would happen anyway. This suggests that even in the third world, certain things will happen again as determined by the system (in this case, reality). As she stares at the coat, Hannah informs the group she’s naming her child Jonas. Even after being wiped out of existence, some part of Jonas’ and Martha’s worlds still linger on.
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