For the Seasons 1-2 article, go here.
SPOILERS August 14, 2020 – If you understand the show in macro, the details fall into place. The show is essentially about life trauma and how to deal with it. The life trauma at the start of everything happens when H.G. Tannhaus’s son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter are killed in a car crash. Deeply grieved, Tannhaus then builds a time machine to bring back his family. This takes place in what can be called Origin World.
But Tannhaus’s time machine doesn’t work as planned. It destroys his world, Origin World, and creates two new worlds in its place: Adam World and Eva World. These two new worlds are forced to exist in an infinite loop, each world having its own suffering and apocalypse. And the two worlds are essentially at war with one another. In the end, however, Claudia Tiedemann figures out a way to end the loop by adjusting something in Origin World.
So the first thing to understand in macro about Dark is that there are three different worlds, or four if you consider Origin World with Claudia’s fix as a new world…
If things weren’t complicated enough, Season 3 also introduces multiple timelines.
Claudia discovered a loophole. During the apocalypse, there is a brief moment when time stands still. During this nanosecond, alternate timelines can be created.
Adam didn’t know about this loophole, but Eva did. Eva used it to make another timeline. In one timeline, Eva sends alt-Martha (Eva World Martha) to save Jonas from his world’s apocalypse, and bring him to Eva World. This is what we see at the very end of Season 2.
To create the second timeline (and second alt-Martha), Eva sends Bartosz to stop alt-Martha from retrieving Jonas from Adam World. As a result, a new timeline is created where Jonas goes to the bunker under his house during the apocalypse, and never learns about Eva World. This is why older Jonas, The Stranger, is so surprised to see Martha in Adam World in 1888 at the Tannhaus factory. The last time he saw her, in his timeline, she had been shot dead by Adam.
This means there can be multiple versions of people. There are at least two alt-Marthas and at least two Jonases. Claudia probably made a second version of herself as well, which is why we see her character even after Noah has killed her.
The next macro thing to understand in Dark is the war that’s taking place among Adam, Eva, and Claudia. Adam World and Eva World are stuck together in a never-ending loop, in which the cycle of suffering perpetually repeats itself. The war is over what to do regarding the time loop.
ADAM In Adam World, Adam runs the society known as Sic Mundus. When Adam tries to preserve things as they are, it’s only because he wants to insure his own existence as Adam (Old Jonas). Adam views himself as the necessary architect for his ultimate goal: the destruction of his world and Eva World. He has come to believe that paradise is non-existence, darkness, nothingness. Both worlds must cease to be.
So Adam seeks to find the origin of the two worlds and destroy it. Eventually he concludes that his own son with alt-Martha – the Unnamed Man who always travels in threes and has a cleft lip – is the origin of the two worlds. Adam thinks this because the Unnamed Man, uniquely, is the product of both worlds. Therefore he must be “the knot” holding their two worlds together in perpetual suffering. If Adam can remove his son, the two worlds can cease. So Adam eventually kills one of the pregnant alt-Marthas (he doesn’t know there are two of them). But nothing happens, and Adam is confused.
EVA In Eva World, Eva also thinks that her son, the Unnamed Man, is the origin of the time loop. But, unlike Adam, she wants her son to exist no matter what. So Eva and her society, Erit Lux, work to keep the loop going by any means possible. Preserve the knot. So the Unnamed Man goes about killing people at Eva’s behest, to make sure he will exist. Preserving the knot also means they want time travel to be possible, so Erit Lux does things to guarantee that the nuclear power plant explosion happens in 1986.
It turns out that both Adam and Eva are wrong about the origin of their worlds. The cause/origin is not their son.
CLAUDIA Like Adam and Eva, Claudia, too, has been making sure that things continue to happen as they always have. Similar to Adam, she does this to insure her own existence as Old Claudia, because she believes she’s the one who can actually fix things. She turns out to be right.
In Seasons 1 and 2, Claudia is Adam’s opponent because she wants to fix Adam World by removing its suffering. Younger versions of Jonas are on board with this. But Old Jonas (Adam) isn’t, because he doesn’t think his world is fixable; he wants to do away with it altogether. In Season 3, Claudia is also at odds with Eva, because Eva wants to keep the two worlds as they are, including their suffering; because all she cares about is making sure that her son, the Unnamed Man, lives.
So it becomes apparent to Claudia that neither Adam nor Eva will help her with her ultimate goal: preserving the life of her daughter, Regina. So Claudia looks for a solution of her own and eventually finds it. Unlike Adam and Eva, she comes to believe that the origin of the two worlds didn’t come from the two worlds. The origin must have come from outside the two worlds. There must be a third world, an origin world that created the two worlds.
The show is unclear how Claudia knows all that she knows. In any case, she comes to believe that the H.G. Tannhaus in Origin World created a time machine that backfired, which created the two entangled worlds. She also believes the loophole (the brief moment during the apocalypse when time stands still) is how the Origin World can be reached. Eventually she tells Adam about all of this.
Then Adam recruits Jonas and alt-Martha to travel to Origin World
during the apocalypse’s moment of quantum entanglement.
They go to Origin World, and prevent Tannhaus’s family from crashing their car. Thus Tannhaus never builds his faulty time machine in the first place. But then Adam World and Eva World cease to exist.
So it turns out that Claudia, like Adam and Eva, was wrong. She initially wanted to preserve her world. But she later realized, after much trial and error, that Adam and Eva Worlds needed to end. Only in Origin World could her daughter survive.
• At the very end of the finale, the people at the dinner table in Origin World are not related to Adam and Eva. All who were related to Adam and Eva existed only in Adam World and Eva World, worlds that now do not exist.
• There are notable differences between Adam World and Eva World, such as Helge having a scarred eye rather than a scarred ear. Things are often flipped. When alt-Martha is in Eva World, she has a cut on a particular cheek; when she goes to Adam World, the cut switches to the other cheek.
• Mystery solved: It was Adult Bartosz who Teen Noah killed back in 1921. Yes, Teen Noah killed his own father, because Bartosz was no longer agreeing with Adam.
• Mystery solved: Who is Bronte Nielsen’s father? The Unnamed Man hooked up with Agnes Nielsen. So he is the father of Bronte and all the Nielsens.
• Mystery solved: Who are the parents of Hanno/Noah and Agnes? Bartosz and Silja (the girl from the future with the facial scar) are the parents of Hanno/Noah and Agnes.
• Mystery solved: Who are Silja’s parents? Silja is the illegitimate daughter of Egon Tiedemann and Hannah Kahnwald when Hannah traveled back to 1954 (in Adam World) after stealing the time-travel device. Thus Silja is half-sister to both Jonas and Claudia.
• Mystery solved: Who is Regina’s father? Even though Claudia had an affair with Bronte Nielsen, Bernd Doppler is revealed as Regina’s father. That’s how Regina was able to exist in Origin World; she wasn’t related to Adam or Eva.
• Why is Adam’s face so mangled? When Hannah goes back to 1911 with Child Silja, Bartosz tells her that, “Traveling has taken its toll on him [Jonas].” This implies that time travel caused his disfigurement. However, a more likely reason is his reckless experimentation around radioactive materials, which we see evidence of in Season 3.
• It was very touching in Season 2 when Old Ulrich (who’d gone back in time as Adult Ulrich) was reunited with his son, Young Mikkel. In Season 3, it was equally touching when Old Ulrich was reunited with his wife, Adult Katharina, at the psychiatric hospital when she traveled back in time.
• In the finale, at the dinner table, Hannah is espousing the same viewpoint as Adam, that nothingness is ideal. This probably isn’t meant to be the “moral” of the story. Rather, it’s to show that Origin World isn’t exactly flawless either. It’s a better world than Adam’s or Eva’s in that it’s not caught in a time loop; but it’s still an imperfect world.
As I initially stated, I think the show is about life trauma and how to deal with it. Ultimately, the show seems to be saying that the only way to have a world free of pain is if bad things never happen (Tannhaus’s family never dies in the car crash). But that would require a world where no one is related to Adam and Eva.
The show also seems to be criticizing the viewpoints of Adam and Eva. Adam is a nihilist who thinks suffering can never be eradicated, who views non-existence as paradise. Eva is a fatalist who believes everything is fixed, who has become accepting of suffering. Claudia is not okay with suffering, endures in the hope of its removal, and believes the solution must come from a source outside her world(s).
At the same time, the show lets Adam and Eva finally do something nice for a change. They finally get humbled, and finally admit they’re wrong. And, after being self-serving for so many years, and creating so much pain and suffering for others, all while arrogantly assuming they were right in all that they were doing, they were finally willing (as both Adam and Eva, and as Teen Jonas and alt-Martha) to sacrifice themselves for someone else’s happiness.
Bibliography:
Fandom Dark Wiki
Dark Timeline: The Netflix Show Explained
Wait, What Happened in the Dark Finale?
Netflix's Dark Finally Revealed the Origin of the Time Loops, and My Head Is Still Spinning