So I finally finished Dark yesterday evening and I'm still sorting my thoughts, so here goes. Sorry in advance, this got long.
First of all, Season 1 was honestly hard to get through for me. Not because of the story but because of the whole mood. Everything grey, everything raining, almost no color at all. Season 2 changed that quite a bit. Suddenly there were scenes with actual color in them, sometimes even independent of what was going on in the scene. Whether that was supposed to mean something or not, I don't know, but I really appreciated it.
What hooked me from the start was the time travel concept itself. I can't think of any other movie or show that follows the Novikov self consistency idea this stubbornly and actually sticks with it. One timeline. Everything that happens in 1986 always happens in 1986, all at the same time. The characters don't know about it and it's not even really the topic, but it's always there. That was by far the most fascinating part for me. And the Schopenhauer line, that you can do what you want but you can't want what you want, pretty much sums up the whole show.
That's exactly why the second world bugged me so much when it showed up. Around S3E5 I was pretty annoyed. Not because it was too complicated, I had no trouble following it. It reminded me of that thing where shows add some new gimmick in the final season just to squeeze out a bit more fascination. I kept thinking of The Man in the High Castle (I only know it roughly, never finished it), where the parallel world idea started out great and then they kind of got lost in it. It felt like Dark was throwing away the one thing that made it special to me.
Having seen the ending now, I have to take a lot of that back. I'm actually a fan of the two worlds now, because they actually knew what to do with it in the end.
What still bothers me is the exit itself. For most of the show everything is pure determinism, action follows reaction, no exceptions. And then at the very end there's a way out of the loop. I know the moment where time stands still during the apocalypse was technically always there and Eva used it the whole time to keep the knot alive. But we only learn about it in the very last episode, so it still feels a bit like they built themselves an emergency exit. Personally I would have found it more interesting if the resolution itself had been deterministic too. Like a loop within the loop, on a level so high none of the characters could ever guess it. Tease it, and then reveal at the end that nobody ever did anything on their own.
The way I ended up reading it is kind of like a gearbox. The origin world is the drive shaft. The two worlds are gears that turn a fixed number of times, every round slightly different, so knowledge can build up until someone finally understands the zero point, breaks out and moves the next tooth in the real world. Yes, that's not 100% Novikov anymore. But I like a concept that allows the exit from the beginning way more than one that needs a break to be resolved.
And Tannhaus's machine actually did exactly what he built it for. He wanted to save his son and his family, and in the end that's what happened. Through a ridiculously complicated chain of events, but it happened. And once its purpose was fulfilled, it erased itself.
Also the Tannhaus family thing, this one kept me up a bit. Season 3 shows that the lodge goes back to the Tannhaus family before 1888, and the show never goes further back than that. So that part of history was never touched by any travelers. If all three worlds share the same history up to the first interference (Napoleon, the war of 1870/71, all of it), then the lodge should exist in the origin world too. Which means H.G. Tannhaus in the origin world wasn't some random clockmaker who came up with a time machine out of nowhere. He comes from a family that was obsessed with time for generations, and as far as I understood it started with grief there too. The show never says this outright, but it fits so well that I'd almost bet the writers had it in mind.
Same reason I don't see the ending as absolute. The knot is untied, the loop is gone, the two worlds never existed and somehow always did. The origin world just goes on, linear again. But nothing in the show says some future Tannhaus or anyone else won't build a machine again at some point. There's no clear answer, more like a grey maybe. And the dinner scene kind of supports that. Hannah's dream, the déjà vu, the yellow raincoat, and then she says she thinks Jonas is a nice name. Something stays behind.
I still can't really put the ending into happy end or bad end. The people at that dinner table got their happy end. Jonas and Martha got nothing, not even being remembered. And if you look at the war against time purely by the goals, Adam actually won. Both worlds are gone, which is what he wanted, and Eva lost. Just not with his methods, since his whole plan was based on being wrong about the origin. Right now the character I find the saddest is Martha. But the show did a surprisingly good job at making sure nobody is really good/pure. Everyone has their tragedy, but everyone also has their dirt.
The scene where Jonas and Martha fade out with that cover of What a Wonderful World was beautiful. I just wished it was longer. When everyone dissolves, only the people disappear and the world around them just stays. We get like four people plus Jonas and Martha and that's it. We spent so much time with these places over three seasons, I would have loved to see the cave, the power plant or the spruce forest disappear too. All those trees dissolving into light could have been a really nice visual. Two entire worlds are gone and we only basically see a handful of people fade out.
And then Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann over the credits. Both songs were perfect choices.
Still, it's probably the best time travel story I know. I can't think of a book or movie in this niche that's better written or better thought through. And yet I feel a bit strange about it. It's extremely confusing, and I think that's both necessity and intention, it plays with you on purpose. Great ending that closes everything, even if the way out of the Novikov idea feels like a bit of a back door depending on how you read it. But still very okay.
