Dark Season 3 Explained: Endings Are Hard
Star-crossed lovers from Dark Season 3. Image courtesy of Netflix.
The only way to speak of Dark without spoiling anything is to call it a German language sci-fi show about time travel. To say anything further would be to spoil this wildly ambitious and complex mind-bending series, which debuted its third and final season on Netflix this week. So please be warned: the rest of this post will contain spoilers, and believe me you do not want this show spoiled.
Seasons 1 and 2 of Dark were pretty much near perfect. It starts as a grounded little mystery about a missing kid and a suicide set in the self-contained world of a small, idyllic German town. Then the time travel element is introduced, and slowly the narrative and the mythology of the show’s world - which at first seemed rather simple - begin to ripple out from the center and fold in on themselves. Each new twist and turn is a shocking delight - such as finding out that a character gave birth to her own mother. It reminded me of the amazing fifth episode of The Haunting of Hill House - when I finally realized where the narrative had been carrying me it was a pure rush of joy, and the reason we watch television and cinema.
The show’s too cool for school aesthetic perfectly complements the narrative, and as we begin to reach further forward and backward in time everything fits together with superb confidence and precision. That was, for me, one of the truly impressive feats the show pulled off in Seasons 1 and 2 - it is extremely complex, but there is a consistent internal logic and a very clear, almost inexorable sense of purpose which carries the viewer along toward the inevitable. I loved the end of episode montages scored to mind-trip ballads, and as Dan Deacon’s “When I Was Done Dying” hit at the end of Season One, I had completely given myself over to this show and trusted that it knew where it was going and knew exactly what it wanted to be.
But the open question was always whether creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, having created this masterfully complex narrative organism, could land the ship in a manner fitting what came before. Perversely (and also fitting for Dark) extremely successful series are often haunted by the success of their past selves. Once you reveal in Season 2, for instance, that Charlotte gave birth to her own mother you’ve already used one of your most potent reveals, one that it then becomes very difficult to top. This was one of the things that ultimately hamstrung Game of Thrones - the show was always trying to top the shocking twist of Ned’s execution, with diminishing returns over time.
I was afraid Dark Season 3 would fall victim to this same issue - and in some ways it does. In order to make Season 3 even more complex than what came before (which was already mind-bogglingly complex) the show continues to develop multiple parallel temporal narratives, while also adding an alternate reality to the mix. So now not only do you have characters stranded or pulling string in multiple time periods, but now some of them are from a different reality. And here is where I started to struggle with Dark Season 3.
The first two seasons required really active viewing to follow, but everything made sense. It followed an internal logic that was consistent. New developments did not up-end our understanding of what came before. But when Dark introduces its alternate reality, which I will call World B for simplicity’s sake, the internal logic doesn’t quite track like it did before. The show claims that World B is different from World A in some minor ways - Ulrich has left his wife for Hannah - but that ultimately no one can outrun their fate and therefore life always reverts to the mean and people become who they were always destine to be, even if the exact path taken to get there might be slightly different from world to world. I actually like that idea, and it plays into the show’s main thematic tension between free will and determinism. Except that in World B, Jonas was never born.
The reason Jonas doesn’t exist in World B seems to be purely a matter of narrative convenience - Adam kills Martha in World A, and Martha kills Jonas in World B as Eva and Adam wage their game of cosmic chess across space and time. But in doing so they have violated the show’s own internal logic in a way that I cannot reconcile (maybe someone else understands it better than me).
How can World A and World B be echoes of one another which, while slightly different, share the same DNA and ultimately end up in the same place if in one of those worlds Jonas was never born? The show is making the claim that history may not repeat but it does rhyme. But how can it rhyme if one of the main characters is entirely missing? They never even attempt to explain why, in World B, Mikkel does not travel back to 1986 (I think, and I am not joking, it might be because the plot had to be re-written on the fly since the actor playing Mikkel went through puberty at lightning speed in between when they shot Season 2 and Season 3).
It is possible if I re-watch the whole series and take detailed notes I can figure this out, but on its face the addition of an alternate reality, on top of the already impossibly complex multiple time period structure, just went slightly too far for me. If you can ignore this plot hole and just let the show wash over you, it’s still very good. But it’s no longer the transcendent experience it was in Seasons 1 and 2, where the show simply felt like it was an act of God itself - the cracks in such an impossibly complex structure have now started to show, and that’s what I was worried about. And now let’s talk about the ending.
Since the beginning, Dark has dealt with the paradox of time travel by basically saying no matter what you do, you cannot change your fate. It raised very complex questions about determinism and free will - are people really free, or are we all set on a predestined path that we unknowingly follow over and over for all of eternity? Thomas Aquinas was onto this line of thinking back in the 13th century, musing about the First Mover who was the Cause of All Things and put all subsequent events throughout time and space into motion. Aquinas believed this First Mover was God. Science calls it the Big Bang - but who or what put the Big Bang into motion? Anyway, Dark dives into this heady philosophical stuff using its fantastic narrative complexity to probe the question of whether there is a First Mover or whether the universe and life is more like a perpetual motion machine that simply loops back on itself for all eternity with small variations, and whether we actually have any control over the direction of events or they are already on a predetermined path.
Adam is searching for the First Mover so he can destroy the loop; Eva is trying to preserve the loop for all eternity. And the show very cleverly in the first two seasons keeps suggesting that the more you try to change the course of time and history, the more you simply enable it. In other words, the show strongly takes the side of determinism, and it makes a joke of free will. Every character seems to think they are making their own choices, but in fact everything they do causes the very events they are trying to prevent. The way the show’s narrative structure unfolds in this methodical and inevitable way helps underline that aspect in a terrifically effective way. And the big thematic question for Season 3 was whether the show would continue to turn free will into destiny’s chump or not.
It would have been really interesting if Dark took a strong stance one way or the other. But it doesn’t. It cheats. It says actually yes everything is predetermined and you are bound to follow the path set for you by fate - except for a few nanoseconds during this one particular moment when time stands still and you do have free will, but only for the briefest of moments. And in that moment, and only that moment, do you genuinely have any choice and power over the world. The show ends with Jonas and Martha using their one moment of free will to travel back to yet another alternate dimension and erase their own existences - along with a Targaryen-level incestuous family tree spanning space and time. By making this noble - and admittedly gushingly romantic - sacrifice they destroy both World A and World B and set things right in the universe.
They also cause themselves, Ulrich, Mikkel, Charlotte and her daughter/mother, Noah, Tronte and a bunch of other people to wink out of existence. They basically Donnie Darko the whole thing. I would have preferred the show take a strong stance one way or the other - like when Martha and Jonas go back to 1971 to un-create themselves, that they actually accidentally become the First Movers in the chain of causality that creates World A and World B. But that’s not the direction the show went, choosing instead to say free will is an illusion until the plot needs you to have a moment of real choice and you choose the most dramatic and romantic route possible. Which I’ll admit, grudgingly, I still fucking loved even if it’s not what I would have done because this show is awesome.
So in the end, Dark Season 3 was good and I enjoyed it, but it was not quite the transcendent experience that the first two seasons were. And that’s OK. If there is one thing Dark has taught us it is that endings are hard, especially when they are also beginnings.
