Dark: Netflix's Time-Bending German Mystery Series {Spoilers from page 5}

[red snow]

8 hours ago, Heartofice said:

That the writers have limited themselves to 3 seasons makes me suspect it will all be ok. With Lost you got the sense it was being made up on the fly, and they never expected to get that far. With Dark it feels like a story that someone has been thinking about in great detail for a very long time, with each strand tightly plotted. 

Thats what I'm hoping anyway.

That's definitely my hope as well - I think we'd have seen cracks already if they didn't have the timelines all mapped out before starting. Hopefully we'll get siome timeline map once it's complete.

The creators have joked/said 10% of show will never be explained eg what happened to that guy's eye.

What happened to 2019 "Michael's" mum (the nurse)? I kept thinking someone would have asked her about events particularly Mikkel's mum once she knew the score.

I also dread to think what Hannah will be doing in 1953 or whereever she decides to start a new life - she's pretty nuts given she just completely abandoned Jonas in the middle of everything just so she could screw with Ulrich.

How may time machines are there? I know there's only one but there seems to be at least 3 of it running around/in the possession of various people

[DaveSumm]

4 hours ago, red snow said:

How may time machines are there? I know there's only one but there seems to be at least 3 of it running around/in the possession of various people

I think it’s confirmed that there’s one, but we see it at various points in the machines life.

[red snow]

7 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I think it’s confirmed that there’s one, but we see it at various points in the machines life.

I like how the machine doesn't infinitely age as season one made a point of having them create the "new" one from the "old" one. Although until we see a time-machine being destroyed (did they destroy the old one after making the "new" one) there's potentially an infinite number of time-machines or at least an extra one per cycle. Sort of.

It makes Charlotte and Katharina even more mind-numbing. Although at least I've now realised that Noah didn't really sleep with his grand-daughter as I initially thought (although he sort of did). I think the clincher there is whether he knew of her paradox and his role in it. He did mention doing things that were awful just because Adam said he had to do so for the timeline to be maintained. I wonder if Katharina's deafness is partly due to her partial cloning of herself.

That gun not working still really bugs me. What did Adam know he had to be alive to do that made his death impossible? Killing Martha seems to be the only one I can think of that he'd remember he had yet to do.

[dbunting]

Finished this today. I struggled with the first two episodes, too many time lines and people intertwined to remember from S1. After ep 3-4 my mind was back on track and it was so much better.

So, I am your mother, and your daughter? She birthed her mother who in turn birthed her.  And I am your lover, and your nephew since my dad is your missing brother, who btw I took to the past? Game of Thrones is childs play compared to this next level incest!

 So was the gun thing, when he was trying to kill Adam, was that the shows way of saying you can't change fate, or was the gun rigged before Jonah ever got it?

The whole cop at the nuclear power plant thing was a bit of nonsense though and it really took away from the show. I mean, to think that they would just go wherever they wanted and break open a concrete floor in a nuclear facility was silly. Not to mention that they just happened to have the equipment on hand to do it.

I am glad to hear it's limited to 3 seasons, sometimes these get dragged out too far.

[karaddin]

 

On 7/7/2019 at 7:57 AM, red snow said:

Maybe the world we've seen is a bubble stuck in a loop while other timelines exist normally?

Yeah my current theory on it all is that attempting to create a bootstrap paradox "breaks" time and you wind up with a pocket universe that is just iterating through loops of the paradoxical events while the regular universe continues on as normal. I'd say in this case that the first paradox was bringing the book back to the watch maker guy but its up in the air as to what might have actually been the first paradox. Once you're inside the loop causality is fucked and it seems to be getting more and more circular.

I'm starting to conceptualise the flow of time within the pocket universe as having subjective time and a separate meta time. Subjective time is the progression of calendar years as we see it and time travel occurs within this layer, the progression of meta time however is absolute still which is what causes there to be separate iterations of the loop. In S1 and S2 we have seen some of the events that take place in 1 progression through a loop and we've seen the end point of the loop which is the triggering of the apocalypse (which would happen at the same meta time in 1921,1954, 1987, 2020 and 2053). The small changes they talk about making result in small alterations to the next loop as they change the starting conditions for the next loop.

I find it hard to explain in words and a picture would probably do better, but if you imagine the Sic Mundus logo (the 3 pronged spirally thing) but maybe with 5 or 6 spokes rather than 3) and then lay a bunch of them horizontally in a row with the last spoke connecting to the first spoke of the next one instead of connecting to the first one. A single line running through the middle of each of these figures is the progression of meta time.

[DaveSumm]

3 hours ago, karaddin said:

I'm starting to conceptualise the flow of time within the pocket universe as having subjective time and a separate meta time. Subjective time is the progression of calendar years as we see it and time travel occurs within this layer, the progression of meta time however is absolute still which is what causes there to be separate iterations of the loop. In S1 and S2 we have seen some of the events that take place in 1 progression through a loop and we've seen the end point of the loop which is the triggering of the apocalypse (which would happen at the same meta time in 1921,1954, 1987, 2020 and 2053). The small changes they talk about making result in small alterations to the next loop as they change the starting conditions for the next loop.

That’s awesome, I’ve been thinking the same thing that you need two dimensions of time to properly discuss this stuff. One dimension of the regular time (53/86/19) and one to make sense of the idea of ‘subsequent’ loops/cycles. To be subsequent, it has to come after, but it obviously isn’t chronologically ‘after’.

I’m rewatching the first season, at first I thought they’d just stopped bothering with the lights flickering / birds dying effects of the cave. But in episode 3 Hannah and Ulrich sit at the bus stop in 86 and say “maybe it’s the apocalypse”. It’s possible that Clausen causes the apocalypse by opening the barrel, but it’s repercussions are felt in the ‘immediate’ meta-afterwards if you will, i.e, at the beginning of the cycle in each time frame. So in linear time, that day at the bus stop is in November 86, but in meta-time, it’s the day after the apocalypse. The birds are seen with with white specks on them which was seen at Chernobyl, but I’m not sure if that’s implying this apocalypse or possibly the effects of actual Chernobyl travelling through from 86. 

[karaddin]

2 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

That’s awesome, I’ve been thinking the same thing that you need two dimensions of time to properly discuss this stuff. One dimension of the regular time (53/86/19) and one to make sense of the idea of ‘subsequent’ loops/cycles. To be subsequent, it has to come after, but it obviously isn’t chronologically ‘after’.

I’m rewatching the first season, at first I thought they’d just stopped bothering with the lights flickering / birds dying effects of the cave. But in episode 3 Hannah and Ulrich sit at the bus stop in 86 and say “maybe it’s the apocalypse”. It’s possible that Clausen causes the apocalypse by opening the barrel, but it’s repercussions are felt in the ‘immediate’ meta-afterwards if you will, i.e, at the beginning of the cycle in each time frame. So in linear time, that day at the bus stop is in November 86, but in meta-time, it’s the day after the apocalypse. The birds are seen with with white specks on them which was seen at Chernobyl, but I’m not sure if that’s implying this apocalypse or possibly the effects of actual Chernobyl travelling through from 86. 

Yeah its a really weird way of viewing time that you've got to wrap your head around in order to try follow it. The part I'm still not adequately conceptualizing is the periods outside the main 3x33 periods, that is the post apocalypse future and the period Sic Mundus appear to spend their prime years in, and whether they're still bounded as part of the meta timeline. 

Trying to even picture it in my own verbal diagram I'm struggling, it winds up like MC Escher art that requires impossible geometries. You need to be able to run your finger along the subjective time line starting in 1953 and running all the way through to 2020 and it should all connect up without any gaps, but at the same time 1953, 1986 and 2019 all need to be at the same point along the meta timeline and still proceed along it as you travel along each spoke of the subjective timeline. You can't "time travel" artificially in meta time but you're kinda permanently travelling through it as it warps around keeping the 33 year periods in sync. I feel like I had a better idea of this in my head a few days ago but didn't get it down >_>

[john]

What a good show.  It almost defies speculative discussion because it’s so intricately plotted you either know things or you don’t yet.

The Charlotte/Elisabeth thing is a mindfuck.  The other paradoxes are all logical, cause and effect, just in a loop with no beginning.  But how can a DNA dump not be created at some point?

The other world Martha is interesting but clearly these “other worlds” are all part of the plan too.  Adam must have known it was going to happen or he surely wouldn’t have left his younger self to be disintegrated by a dark matter explosion.

[briantw]

On 7/7/2019 at 5:21 AM, Heartofice said:

That the writers have limited themselves to 3 seasons makes me suspect it will all be ok. With Lost you got the sense it was being made up on the fly, and they never expected to get that far. With Dark it feels like a story that someone has been thinking about in great detail for a very long time, with each strand tightly plotted. 

Thats what I'm hoping anyway.

Yeah, the issue with Lost was definitely that they were making it up as they went along, and eventually they'd asked so many compelling questions that they could never hope to answer them all.  Dark, on the other hand, presumably already had the ending in mind when the show began production, as they went in expecting three seasons.  They've also been good about answering a lot of questions even as they ask new ones, something Lost really struggled with.

[dooog]

It's a good show though I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as S1. It all just felt so futile and, well, dark.  I didn't find myself binging it the way i did last season.

Spoiler

Multi dimensions is going to make this even more of a headfuck going forward. Old lady Claudia did mention that timelines where Jonas takes his own life when he's young never work out well, but I didn't think the show would actually incorporate other dimensions into the main universe

Anyway I have about a million questions. For one

Spoiler

Everything keeps repeating itself over and over. Why then does middle aged Jonas (still scarred by Martha's death)  not stay with her in the bunker, since he knows full well she will die via gunshot by his older self in the kitchen.  She's what matters most to him and he knows how it plays out.

 

[karaddin]

I think it does work

Spoiler

Younger Jonas has no knowledge that Middle Jonas tried to save her by taking her to the bunker - he meets up with her, they have the conversation and old him kills her. So Middle Jonas thinks he's already changed it by taking her there.

He's also at the tipping point of what turns him into Noah and I think that's influencing his decision making

 

[red snow]

4 hours ago, karaddin said:

I think it does work

  Hide contents

Younger Jonas has no knowledge that Middle Jonas tried to save her by taking her to the bunker - he meets up with her, they have the conversation and old him kills her. So Middle Jonas thinks he's already changed it by taking her there.

He's also at the tipping point of what turns him into Noah and I think that's influencing his decision making

 

That works for me.

I think charlotte and Elisabeth works in a weird biology way. Again a diagram would explain this more clearly (don't think we can inbed pictures here?). You inherit half your DNA from your mother and half off your father. The caveat here is that you have to assume no recombination has occurred in the germlines - a process where essentially the child receives a mixture of grandparents DNA rather than from just one. So charlotte has half her chromosomes from Elisabeth and half from Noah. Charlotte gives birth to Elisabeth who inherits the exact same half of chromosomes that older Elisabeth gave to charlotte (nothing from noah). The other half of Elisabeth's DNA is from her father Peter. Note that none of Peter's DNA gets passed on, via Elisabeth, to Charlotte. So on a genetic level it isn't incest. Charlotte shares no DNA with Peter despite him being her granda/husband.

The implications from this is that time is controlled on a molecular level because the chances of only receiving one grandparent's set of chromosomes is infinitely small. I suspect we are seeing a force like that witnessed when Noah fails to kill Adam at play. Elisabeth and charlotte's genetics have to have that combination because otherwise it wouldn't work and therefore the impossible has to happen over and over again.

One implication that has occurred to me through all of this is that Peter may have somehow known about Elizabeth/Charlotte. I know he's been seeing the van prostitute but what if Peter and Elisabeth's relationship also broke down because he found out his wife was his granddaughter? That could explain his refusing to sleep with her anymore while still loving her.

[dbunting]

21 hours ago, red snow said:

That works for me.

I think charlotte and Elisabeth works in a weird biology way. Again a diagram would explain this more clearly (don't think we can inbed pictures here?). You inherit half your DNA from your mother and half off your father. The caveat here is that you have to assume no recombination has occurred in the germlines - a process where essentially the child receives a mixture of grandparents DNA rather than from just one. So charlotte has half her chromosomes from Elisabeth and half from Noah. Charlotte gives birth to Elisabeth who inherits the exact same half of chromosomes that older Elisabeth gave to charlotte (nothing from noah). The other half of Elisabeth's DNA is from her father Peter. Note that none of Peter's DNA gets passed on, via Elisabeth, to Charlotte. So on a genetic level it isn't incest. Charlotte shares no DNA with Peter despite him being her granda/husband.

The implications from this is that time is controlled on a molecular level because the chances of only receiving one grandparent's set of chromosomes is infinitely small. I suspect we are seeing a force like that witnessed when Noah fails to kill Adam at play. Elisabeth and charlotte's genetics have to have that combination because otherwise it wouldn't work and therefore the impossible has to happen over and over again.

One implication that has occurred to me through all of this is that Peter may have somehow known about Elizabeth/Charlotte. I know he's been seeing the van prostitute but what if Peter and Elisabeth's relationship also broke down because he found out his wife was his granddaughter? That could explain his refusing to sleep with her anymore while still loving her.

I had completely forgotten about him in that whole mix. I was so stuck on her being her own grandmother(?) that I missed it. So he is married to his grand daughter and his daughter is her mother....? wtf.

[red snow]

2 hours ago, dbunting said:

I had completely forgotten about him in that whole mix. I was so stuck on her being her own grandmother(?) that I missed it. So he is married to his grand daughter and his daughter is her mother....? wtf.

Yeah, it's messed up. It's a good thing he's a psychiatrist so that he can try and parse all of that. For some odd reason i had been thinking Noah was the incestuous one but other than helping Elisabeth create her own mum he's in the clear.

I suspect the final season might introduce even more of these bizarre family connections. Given there are at least 3 people from 2019 living in 1920(?) There could be several of the core families with intermingled time genetics going on.

[john]

How is Noah in the clear? He had sex with his granddaughter, same as Peter, nobody is in the clear.

But yes, I don’t think incest matters much in this scenario, it’s probably going to turn out that everyone in these three families is descended from their descendants.

[red snow]

12 minutes ago, john said:

How is Noah in the clear? He had sex with his granddaughter, same as Peter, nobody is in the clear.

But yes, I don’t think incest matters much in this scenario, it’s probably going to turn out that everyone in these three families is descended from their descendants.

Ha, true! Peter and Noah are like mirror images in that sense. Worse, Noah might have known this going into the relationship.

[DaveSumm]

3 hours ago, red snow said:

I suspect the final season might introduce even more of these bizarre family connections. Given there are at least 3 people from 2019 living in 1920(?) There could be several of the core families with intermingled time genetics going on.

I follow the Dark subreddit, and it’s mostly “could x be y’s parent/child?”. I’m actually hoping they dial it back for the third season, although I doubt I’ll get my wish. I love Dark, but I don’t find it all that clever to just gradually reveal crazy time travel lineages. This is why I didn’t care for Predestination, it’s really obvious from the outset that it’s gonna contain twists, the only question is how far they’ll go with it. 

It’s also why I don’t think Dark will hold up all that well on multiple rewatches. Second rewatch? Sure. (Check out the scene where Elisabeth kisses her mother goodbye at school in the first season, they knew about that part 100%.) But so many scenes are only good for what revelations there are about the plot, I can’t think of any scenes that are great simply because the acting and writing is great. Not that they’re bad, but does Dark have a root beer from DS9 conversation? A ‘fuck fuck fuck’ scene like the Wire?

Once we’ve seen the third season and we know everything, and we’ve rewatched to check out all the clues, I don’t think there’s much there that will keep me coming back.

[red snow]

1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

I follow the Dark subreddit, and it’s mostly “could x be y’s parent/child?”. I’m actually hoping they dial it back for the third season, although I doubt I’ll get my wish. I love Dark, but I don’t find it all that clever to just gradually reveal crazy time travel lineages. This is why I didn’t care for Predestination, it’s really obvious from the outset that it’s gonna contain twists, the only question is how far they’ll go with it. 

It’s also why I don’t think Dark will hold up all that well on multiple rewatches. Second rewatch? Sure. (Check out the scene where Elisabeth kisses her mother goodbye at school in the first season, they knew about that part 100%.) But so many scenes are only good for what revelations there are about the plot, I can’t think of any scenes that are great simply because the acting and writing is great. Not that they’re bad, but does Dark have a root beer from DS9 conversation? A ‘fuck fuck fuck’ scene like the Wire?

Once we’ve seen the third season and we know everything, and we’ve rewatched to check out all the clues, I don’t think there’s much there that will keep me coming back.

Predestination went a little too far but I guess it was memorable for going as far as it did.

I don't know, there's been some fairly powerful scenes I think eg when Ulrich beat the kid with a stone knowing it was an act of evil, yet thinking it was the only way to save his own son. The scenes in season 2 with the 1930s cop touched me. I suspect the opening scene of season 1 will be more powerful now that we know he had to kill himself. It's maybe not "the wire" but I wouldn't say it was devoid of emotion and powerful scenes outside the twists and turns.

[dooog]

Must say I really liked how Egon went from bumbling drunk incompetent in S1 to such a decent, sympathetic and quite possibly the most normal grounded character of S2. He's one of the few characters to behave openly and with dignity. It's not his fault his supposed incompetency (and intuitive mistrust of Ulrich) highlighted in S1 was all down to time traveling and alternate universe shit.   But with that being said, being such an empathetic character I found his arc in S2 incredibly depressing as we know beforehand that all of his honest efforts will be utterly futile.

 

 

Rewatched S1 last month and this song is a gem

 

 

 

[red snow]

I've been listening to the official score and the featured songs on Spotify quite a lot. It's funny how many musicians i follow/like have turned up in the show, I've been a fan of apparat (title music) for over 15 years. Maybe there's some correlation with music taste and story content.