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

[SpaceChampion]

2 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

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This is a better explanation than the show gave us, but it’s not backed up by anything in the show and I really don’t think is what they had in mind. These duplicated characters immediately start interacting with other people, it doesn’t wait an entire loop. And Martha is killed by Adam, the reason it doesn’t work is because the other Martha still exists.

I’m open to keeping your version in mind during a rewatch, but it would involve some Westworld Season 1 level trickery, where scenes are actually from completely different loops and people are accidentally travelling to different loops constantly. I don’t see how we can conclude there aren’t duplicates when the characters all think there are and talk to them.

Actually, I think just the whole origin-fathers-two-Tronte’s kills off your idea anyway. If one loop Martha dies, how does it all repeat again?

 

 

Spoiler

I disagree.  It's backed up by everything the show gave us.  They said so with the infinity loop image.   Not once did they say there are duplicates.  There is less reason to believe there are duplicates because then the worlds would diverge rapidly and spin out of control, instead repeating the same story pretty much the same except the alternating existence of Jonas.

Yes, I think it is possible every single incident of time travel might have been to a different loop, though I'm not saying it is.  If things are happening the same each loop, and there are say 40 incidents of time travel in the story from start to finish, then Jonas-1 could be jumping to loop-2 through loop-40, and he'd never know the difference.  But he doesn't exist in the even number loops.  Martha-2 would not be restricted to just the odd-numbered loops,.  Martha-40 is probably jumping forward to loop-1.

Alternatively, the cave and the Apparatus can only jump within a loop, but Claudia's sphere can jump through to the next loop or back to previous.  It isn't really two worlds, but different loops.

The origin-father can take the sphere and go to two loops to impregnate Agnes in both.  Why wouldn't he?  He wasn't trapped in one timeline.
 

 

[Heartofice]

Spoiler

I must have missed it, but who made the orbs that travel between worlds? And how?

 

[DaveSumm]

44 minutes ago, karaddin said:

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The two worlds essentially being sequential with each other isn't called out by the show, but the Mobius strip is explicitly referred so I definitely think there's an intent for something along those lines. 

I think it's only actions taken in the fleeting+infinite moment of stopped time that result in duplicates? We don't actually definitively see Martha duplicated do we?

We see multiple versions of young Martha!2 but they're from different points along her subjective timeline, and if Adam's attempt to kill her fails then there's no need for there to be a duplicate - that's the Martha that grows up and becomes Eva.

For convenience I'm going to call her YM2, her subjective timeline goes

1) Jonas shows up in her classroom, weird shit happens that night, she starts to believe him

2) Jonas takes YM2 through the cave to the future and they see MM who convinces them to get cesium from the barrels to "change" things

3) They hook up

4) They break into the plant, YM2 scratches under her right eye making Jonas realise they are temporally close to the Martha that saves him, he assumes they did get the cesium last loop so decides not to and they go see OM2 which is exactly what happened last loop

5) YM2+ kills Jonas leaving YM2 promising to make it right

6) YM2 spends the next day trying to stop the apocalypse, convinces Bartosz to help but OMag1 and OFran1 stop them on the way to the plant and convince her to go save Jonas

7) She saves Jonas

8) She confronts OM2 who cuts her face across her left eye, tells her she's pregnant with Jonas's kid, creepy kid hugs her into submission and she's convinced to go along with it

9) YM2 is now at the point of being YM2+ from point 5) and kills Jonas

10) YM2 travels back to 1888 in world 1 and gives StrangerJonas the sphere of cesium that's necessary to get his machine working. This starts immediately after killing Jonas, she's in the same clothes and the eye wound is fresh. It's also implied later that she visits 2053 Adam before going to the past

11) YM2 travels forward to 2053 in world 1 and hangs with Sic Mundus there for a bit, before. 

12) She's put in a cage by them and

13) Adam tries to kill her and her baby with the god particle. This is the last we see of Young Martha 2, MM2 is either a duplicate or her later along her timeline

The order we see these events in is quite different though, 7 is right at the start, then 1 takes several episodes. 10 is in ep2, 11 in ep3, back to 2&3 in episode 4, 4&5 in episode 5, 6&7 in ep6,  12,13 & part of 8 in ep7, then the rest of 8 along with 9 at the start of ep8. So we see much of the last portion of timeline quite early in the season that gives the impression of there being more Martha's than there may be. 

If Adam was successful at killing her, then I don't think we know which traveling event results in her duplicate. But it's implied that the older Martha's remember all she goes through so I don't think he did.

 

Spoiler

Thanks for writing that all out, I truly want this to be true. It’s a better explanation. I’m just convinced that something in the show must contradict this as I was sure this was what was going on while I was watching. But I can’t prove it right now as I’ve only seen it once, I will keep a close eye on a rewatch though. 
 

So, following this theory, there isn’t two worlds at all, there’s just two alternating loops. Except there’s four? Is that what Eva was getting at, that the Möbius strip has a kink in it and so it goes inside right, outside left, outside right, inside left? IR being Jonas In Basement loop, OL being Martha Saves Jonas loop, OR being Jonas Is Saved loop, and IL being Martha Doesn’t Save Jonas loop.

Surely one loop must lead to the other, so something about Jonas’s loop must produce Martha’s? What events lead to that, why isn’t Mikkel taken back to 1986? 
 

EDIT to add, I still think it’s big leap that Martha survived having a double apocalypse dropped on her, and they definitely didn’t hint at her doing anything other than dying. 

 

[DaveSumm]

22 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

 

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I disagree.  It's backed up by everything the show gave us.  They said so with the infinity loop image.   Not once did they say there are duplicates.  There is less reason to believe there are duplicates because then the worlds would diverge rapidly and spin out of control, instead repeating the same story pretty much the same except the alternating existence of Jonas.

Yes, I think it is possible every single incident of time travel might have been to a different loop, though I'm not saying it is.  If things are happening the same each loop, and there are say 40 incidents of time travel in the story from start to finish, then Jonas-1 could be jumping to loop-2 through loop-40, and he'd never know the difference.  But he doesn't exist in the even number loops.  Martha-2 would not be restricted to just the odd-numbered loops,.  Martha-40 is probably jumping forward to loop-1.

Alternatively, the cave and the Apparatus can only jump within a loop, but Claudia's sphere can jump through to the next loop or back to previous.  It isn't really two worlds, but different loops.

The origin-father can take the sphere and go to two loops to impregnate Agnes in both.  Why wouldn't he?  He wasn't trapped in one timeline.
 

 

Spoiler

See my response to karradin mainly. But I’ll add, this is a awful lot of ‘even numbered loop jumping’ that has to happen. EVERYONE in the first two seasons who time travels, Ulrich, Helge, Noah, Mikkel, Jonas, ALL of them skip odd numbered loops? The caves have this odd numbered skipping ability built in, and so do the devices? And the chair?

 

[DaveSumm]

Also can we get Season 3 Spoilers added to the title? These hidden bars are killing me, need to be able to quote properly.

[SpaceChampion]

13 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

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See my response to karradin mainly. But I’ll add, this is a awful lot of ‘even numbered loop jumping’ that has to happen. EVERYONE in the first two seasons who time travels, Ulrich, Helge, Noah, Mikkel, Jonas, ALL of them skip odd numbered loops? The caves have this odd numbered skipping ability built in, and so do the devices? And the chair?

 

Spoiler

That's an extreme case.  Didn't say that's what happened.  I said all the devices except the sphere stays within one loop.

 

[karaddin]

Yeah I think the cave is much more limited than other options

Spoiler

The cave is restricted to +/-33 [x n] years. The apparatus seemed able to jump any amount within the same "world", only the sphere allows jumping between them.

I'm not sure on the two worlds being serial, I think it makes more sense to think of them as the other side of the strip at the same time - like the upside down in stranger things - but our brains aren't very good at grasping the concept. 

But i think that is all meant to be a side show anyway, that conception of the way things are is wrong, it's not a binary it's the triple thing. The whole Mobius strip twist trick still works over that shape to make them all part of the same long side.

As to Martha surviving or not it could have just moved her in time like it does with people that walk into it when it's a sphere. I guess her being duplicated after killing Jonas is possible as both versions would remember all that. Perhaps it's the jump to the other world for more than a short moment that results in a Schrodinger's clone.

 

[briantw]

26 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Yeah I think the cave is much more limited than other options

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The cave is restricted to +/-33 [x n] years. The apparatus seemed able to jump any amount within the same "world", only the sphere allows jumping between them.

I'm not sure on the two worlds being serial, I think it makes more sense to think of them as the other side of the strip at the same time - like the upside down in stranger things - but our brains aren't very good at grasping the concept. 

But i think that is all meant to be a side show anyway, that conception of the way things are is wrong, it's not a binary it's the triple thing. The whole Mobius strip twist trick still works over that shape to make them all part of the same long side.

As to Martha surviving or not it could have just moved her in time like it does with people that walk into it when it's a sphere. I guess her being duplicated after killing Jonas is possible as both versions would remember all that. Perhaps it's the jump to the other world for more than a short moment that results in a Schrodinger's clone.

 

Spoiler

The cave is absolutely more limited compared to the other options.  It only links three separate timelines: the original 1986 and 33 years forward and backward from the 1986 time when the wormhole was created.  

I'm assuming by the apparatus that you mean the device that Tannhaus fixed for the Stranger.  If so, that is also only capable of sending someone either 33 years forward or backward in time, but unlike the cave I don't think it was limited in how far you could conceivably go back.  So if you used it in the 1953 timeline, I assume you could still go back 33 more years, although I don't recall if this ever actually happened on the show.

The apparatus was obviously capable of malfunctioning when used during an apocalyptic event, though, which is what happened to the Stranger and young Jonas' friends, and how they ended up in the late 19th century.

The only device that I remember being capable of actually intentionally breaking the 33 year cycle was the one that Adam built in the Sic Mundus lair that he used to send Jonas back to the day his father hanged himself.  Although it's certainly possible that Eve had a similar device, although again I don't know if this ever actually is shown in the series.  She does obviously have the capability to move between worlds.

 

[DaveSumm]

Spoiler

OK, should have checked the official website sooner. Glad I’m not going mad. Yes, Martha is killed and, due to quantum entanglement, there’s a second Martha who is also pregnant with the unknown.

It’s Bartosz catching up to her that’s the difference, when he doesn’t she rescues Jonas and works for Adam, and is then killed. When he does, he says Adam’s lying and she works for Eve, and kills Jonas and has the baby.

So I revert to my previous position that this all a bit bollocks and doesn’t make much sense.

As for the cave, it links 53, 86 and 19. Whichever year you enter it, the other two are your options.

[john]

I’ll give my impressions of the show later but first, I’m finding you guys’ arguments harder to follow than I did the actual episodes, but here is my take anyway.

Spoiler

There’s three versions of alternate Martha and original Jonas. Jonas that becomes the Stranger then Adam, Young Jonas that’s quickly killed and ultimate Jonas that saves the day. Plus Martha that rescues Jonas, Martha interrupted by Bartosz before rescuing Jonas and ultimate Martha that saves the day.

There could’ve been other versions of Eva or Claudia as well since they both know the secret of making changes at the moment of the apocalypse. Didn’t seem like they did though. I wondered about Claudia but I think the older version that shows up in the final episode was just from before she gets killed by Noah.

So anyway, that means Adam did kill Martha in his time ball. She was the same Martha that Magnus and Franziska took from the bike ride with Bartosz, visited Sic Mundus in 1888, was in a cage (that was a pretty stupid scene) etc. Even if there had only been one pregnant Martha around would killing her have done anything given the origin point wasn’t to do with the freaky triple kid?

 

[DaveSumm]

6 hours ago, john said:

I’ll give my impressions of the show later but first, I’m finding you guys’ arguments harder to follow than I did the actual episodes, but here is my take anyway.

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There’s three versions of alternate Martha and original Jonas. Jonas that becomes the Stranger then Adam, Young Jonas that’s quickly killed and ultimate Jonas that saves the day. Plus Martha that rescues Jonas, Martha interrupted by Bartosz before rescuing Jonas and ultimate Martha that saves the day.

There could’ve been other versions of Eva or Claudia as well since they both know the secret of making changes at the moment of the apocalypse. Didn’t seem like they did though. I wondered about Claudia but I think the older version that shows up in the final episode was just from before she gets killed by Noah.

So anyway, that means Adam did kill Martha in his time ball. She was the same Martha that Magnus and Franziska took from the bike ride with Bartosz, visited Sic Mundus in 1888, was in a cage (that was a pretty stupid scene) etc. Even if there had only been one pregnant Martha around would killing her have done anything given the origin point wasn’t to do with the freaky triple kid?

 

Spoiler

I wouldn’t worry about that conversation, I was confused for a while. This is all correct right up to the last sentence, even though there turned out to be a separate reason for these universes existing, the trio were still the father of both worlds Tronte.

So I guess if Adam had of killed the only Martha (which I suppose would require the entanglement trick), the family tree wouldn’t happen the same way, but these universe would still exist and origin Tannhaus’s family would still die. How exactly entanglement would interact with this ‘time won’t let you die’ crap is anyone’s guess.

 

[karaddin]

So I saw this post from reddit that I think has me completely satisfied with the explanation of

Spoiler

the very end - ie why the action of saving Tannhaus's family broke the knot even though it would appear that this action could be integrated as part of the loop and still requires Jonas and Martha to do it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarK/comments/hj6zer/spoilers_your_handydandy_guide_to_the_most_common/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

The answer is something that was explicitly brought up this season - its the Observer effect. Both the knot and the "real" timeline exist in superposition alongside each other, until the Observer (whether that's meant to be the audience or Jonas and Martha) observe the family turning around at which point that becomes the concrete reality and the knot is destroyed.

Because the universe of the knot is fucked up in terms of its rules of physics and time, the loop plays out an infinite number of times even though you can argue that the first run through the loop leads to them taking these actions anyway. Its kinda neat that Tannhaus created a device that was meant to enable time travel, but instead it broke reality and created two hellish time loops and individuals within the loop suffered so much that they used the different rules of time/physics in their Universe to fix the thing he wanted to prevent so he never created the device. So even though his device didn't work in the wa we'd traditionally think of time travel, it did have the desired outcome. It's almost more like it created a pocket universe with simulated people to solve the problem for him, and then shut down the simulation once it was achieved.

I am OK with this as an outcome precisely because Season 2 made it clear that the rules of reality were too different to our world for the knot to actually be fixed by logic based in our rules of reality, its clearly a completely different beast.

 

[DaveSumm]

5 minutes ago, karaddin said:

So I saw this post from reddit that I think has me completely satisfied with the explanation of

  Hide contents

the very end - ie why the action of saving Tannhaus's family broke the knot even though it would appear that this action could be integrated as part of the loop and still requires Jonas and Martha to do it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarK/comments/hj6zer/spoilers_your_handydandy_guide_to_the_most_common/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

The answer is something that was explicitly brought up this season - its the Observer effect. Both the knot and the "real" timeline exist in superposition alongside each other, until the Observer (whether that's meant to be the audience or Jonas and Martha) observe the family turning around at which point that becomes the concrete reality and the knot is destroyed.

Because the universe of the knot is fucked up in terms of its rules of physics and time, the loop plays out an infinite number of times even though you can argue that the first run through the loop leads to them taking these actions anyway. Its kinda neat that Tannhaus created a device that was meant to enable time travel, but instead it broke reality and created two hellish time loops and individuals within the loop suffered so much that they used the different rules of time/physics in their Universe to fix the thing he wanted to prevent so he never created the device. So even though his device didn't work in the wa we'd traditionally think of time travel, it did have the desired outcome. It's almost more like it created a pocket universe with simulated people to solve the problem for him, and then shut down the simulation once it was achieved.

I am OK with this as an outcome precisely because Season 2 made it clear that the rules of reality were too different to our world for the knot to actually be fixed by logic based in our rules of reality, its clearly a completely different beast.

 

Spoiler

I can definitely see the appeal of the theory, it solves a few problems. But I think it’s reaching a little bit that this is what the show intended; the Schrodinger’s Cat stuff comes right after the duplication, and is intended as an explanation for that. Two cats, two Jonas’s. It’s never mentioned as an explanation by anyone for what’s actually happening with the origin world. And I’m surprised to see so many people comfortable with the idea of us as the observer, the idea that it can only work because it’s a TV show.

The role of the observer is quite misunderstood with all this, the idea that being conscious holds some special place in the universe and gives you a magic wave function collapsing superpower is incredibly widespread, but ultimately wrong. It’s more to do with the transition from micro to macro, superposition doesn’t survive that journey regardless of who knows about it. But I could certainly forgive them that, as I say, it’s very widespread.

 

[Heartofice]

Even if the ‘observer effect’ was one of the answers and did solve a lot of problems, it doesn’t help with problems with it narratively.

While it is nice that there are resources online to help with understanding the show, we really shouldn’t need to be digging that deep into them, days after finishing the show, to actually understand what happened. That’s not good storytelling unfortunately.

[john]

@DaveSumm, 

Spoiler

Yeah, by the rules they establish the time ball should engulf her and not kill her (in the scenario that there’s no other pregnant Martha) which is a little harder to take than a gun not firing. The only other explanation is that Bartosz is fated to save the other Martha but I don’t think that’s right because that was a change at the point of apocalypse, outside of the knot. (Another question is how much f*cking leeway is there with that? You appear to be able to make changes any time vaguely around the apocalypse).

@karaddin,

Spoiler

Thanks for posting that. We were indeed saying to each other while watching “well, they’ll just travel home the next day and die then.”

I don’t really buy it either though.  I just figured in the origin timeline there’s no knot and you can make as many changes as you please. Given that part of the premise relies on love echoing across realities I don’t think we need to rely on the observer effect for an explanation.

 

[DaveSumm]

15 minutes ago, john said:

@DaveSumm, 

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Yeah, by the rules they establish the time ball should engulf her and not kill her (in the scenario that there’s no other pregnant Martha) which is a little harder to take than a gun not firing. The only other explanation is that Bartosz is fated to save the other Martha but I don’t think that’s right because that was a change at the point of apocalypse, outside of the knot. (Another question is how much f*cking leeway is there with that? You appear to be able to make changes any time vaguely around the apocalypse).

Spoiler

This is the fatal flaw with the finale, they invented a plot device to escape determinism and didn’t even remotely attempt to explain how it worked. There’s a special moment = something something = duplicate. That’s it.

 

[john]

Right, so here’s my thoughts on the series. I did like the finale, despite it being based on an incredibly trite premise, I still found it affecting. But generally I was disappointed, the whole season felt more like a detailed appendix attached to a great first season and a pretty good second season.

Spoiler

Basically, the show has three elements to it. The first element is about the complexities of human behaviour, the futility of trying to change, how we’re doomed by the past. Shown through the lens of time travel, that’s the first season and it was excellent.

Then you have a story about a couple who become the progenitors of their family line which is interesting in so much as it’s an original idea. But then they rely on the power of love theme far too much here, which is one of the most overused themes in all of fiction.

Then it ultimately resolves into a sciency man inventing a time machine because his family died which is just ... I mean, I wrote that story when I was six. Then apart from Back to the Future they also have the Interstellar thing of looking at each other in the past through a corridor of light. I could almost think it was an ironic commentary on time travel fiction but this is not really a show that deals in irony. Come on man, you wrote one of the great time travel shows ever and it ends up like this.

More specifically, it felt like all the story points we got with our original protagonists were wasted here in favour of moving people about so they’d be in the right places to back up what we’ve already seen. Peter’s story in particular seemed utterly pointless, Hannah’s only slightly less so. Katharina’s was too abrupt, Elisabeth covered a whole lifetime of pain and trauma in a few scenes, original Ulrich hardly appeared and original Charlotte didn’t even get to speak I don’t think.

Plus Silja and Agnes were barely treated as characters despite having far more important moments in their lives than most of the others. That’s putting aside the ridiculousness of identical Silja being fathered by two different men. Seems like there’s magical biology acting across the timelines as well as the power of love.

But the scene that annoyed me the most, again to do with that fucking power of love, was the defining sex scene, young Martha with a mental kid, dressed like a homeless guy, who showed up one day ago and shattered her world. Yeah of course she wants to fuck him because, despite all evidence to the contrary, when he showed up in her class she just felt like she knew him, y’know?

One other thing, even more specific, why does it turn out there’s a power plant in the origin world? I mean I know it’s needed for the time machine but I’d have liked to know something about it’s development in the real world. In the knot worlds the terrible triplets had to arrange for that but presumably it would have happened without any intervention since it does in the origin world.

 

[DaveSumm]

29 minutes ago, john said:

 

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One other thing, even more specific, why does it turn out there’s a power plant in the origin world? I mean I know it’s needed for the time machine but I’d have liked to know something about it’s development in the real world. In the knot worlds the terrible triplets had to arrange for that but presumably it would have happened without any intervention since it does in the origin world.

 

Spoiler

There isn’t. You can’t see it above the trees by the bus stop as you normally can. For the reasons you state, it was arranged to be built in the other world.

 

[john]

56 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

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There isn’t. You can’t see it above the trees by the bus stop as you normally can. For the reasons you state, it was arranged to be built in the other world.

 

Spoiler

Ok, thanks. Not sure why I thought there was a power plant. That makes a lot more sense from a story perspective but also begs the question how the fuck did Tannhaus build a reality distortion machine from a few pipes bolted together without any dark matter or atomic materials to help.

It also suggests that there is no time travel and that the alternate worlds are more like fantasy worlds created by the machine within which you can time travel using handywavy science, albeit which spills over into the origin world at the end.

 

[DaveSumm]

@SpaceChampion 

I really, really wanted your interpretation to be true because it was so close to a theory I had that as far as I know has never been done with time travel fiction. I spent Seasons 1 and 2 contorting things to desperately hope that it might come true in Season 3. But it never did. Indulge me if you will, in my personal 'How Dark Should Have Worked':

EDIT: OK, that ended up waaaaay longer than I'd intended. Much respect if you can bother getting to the end, and thanks so much if you do. Needed to get it out of my system.

Spoiler

 

"Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable." This general law is almost too obvious to seem particularly profound, but I believe it is. It underpins the workings of the entire universe. The chemical compounds we find abundant are stable ones. The planetary orbits we observe in the solar system are stable ones, which may seem beautifully orchestrated to our eyes, but of course there are countless millions of objects that didn't quite get captured by the sun, floating through the galaxy. It's these countless failures that put the planets into perspective, they no longer seem lucky, but inevitable. They were stable, so they survived. And so too with evolution; our very existence is only possible because of the billions of failed organisms who couldn't see well enough, couldn't run fast enough, couldn't think fast enough. We survived because we are stable, and ultimately all the universe does is sieve out the unstable and leaves the stable.

Dark portrays a universe where everything seems to be inevitable, where time runs in a never ending loop and our characters are doomed to repeat the same events over and over. It is a stable loop. But what if this apparent stability was only an inevitable outcome like planets, chemicals, life? What if this loop only appears fixed because, in its wake, it has left an effectively infinite amount of failures? Every possible iteration of every possible event has happened, has been played out. This experiment has been running so long, that the universe has simply done what it always does; filters out the unstable, selects for stability. The loop we're left with has all the hallmarks of an unchangeable, deterministic universe. But it isn't. It's being suspended in place by the only constant left: human desire. Mothers always love their daughters, Fathers their sons, people always seek revenge, become jealous, love, grieve.

This already provides us with a lot more freedom to work with. We can have all the fun we want, seeing people go back and fulfil destinies they were trying to avoid. Ulrich can try and save his son, but ultimately drive Helge into Noah's arms and lead him to kidnap the children all over again. We can go crazy with apparent 'bootstrap' paradoxes (provided they have believable origins, given enough loops). But our characters still have free will, they can still try and change things and not be bound by 'time'; guns don't jam, and 'time' doesn't actively involve itself in events to course correct. There is no fate, there is no pre-agreed destination that must be arrived at. 

In Season 1, Jonas tries to bring Mikkel back to 2019, but The Stranger stops him. He reasons that if he does, he'll never exist. By the rules I'm proposing, he's absolutely right. But by Dark rules, it would have been impossible to do so anyway. Something would interfere, something would correct the timeline to make sure that Jonas existed, as he already exists. In Season 2, Jonas comes to believe that his life isn't worth all the suffering that everyone's enduring, and he travels to 2019 to try and stop Michael committing suicide, knowing that it would lead to the younger Mikkel never travelling back, and effectively ending Jonas's existence. This turns out to be a failure, and he only alerts Michael to the fact that he needs to commit suicide to save his son. And so he does so. But only a few episodes later, we're introduced to a world where this exact outcome is true, a world where Jonas never existed. I'm proposing that we cut out the middle man and just have Jonas be successful at this attempt, altering the timeline and creating what we think is progress; a change to the loop that everyone thought was unchangeable, a world without Jonas.

This would be where I would start Season 2, after Jonas successfully creates a new loop at the end of Season 1. Our Jonas from the original loop can still easily be present, as there's no mystical fading away with these new rules. Jonas simply travels backwards in time from this new reality (just like Back To The Future II, Doc and Marty can't travel to anywhere where Biff isn't rich) and sees that no Mikkel arrives in 1986, and all the Winden population will grow older none the wiser and life will eventually lead to exactly what we see in the real Season 3, where Hannah is married to Ulrich and Mikkel is still living with Katharina, Magnus and Martha. It's a huge plus to me that these characters aren't just random doppelgangers, they are the same characters. 

Jonas would then quickly realise that his absence causes all manner of other problems, and that life is overall worse for everyone. Time travel is still very much a thing. In fact, it seems like the main players are even more powerful now for some reason, still working to make life miserable for everyone. He aims to undo what he did and reinstate himself by taking Mikkel to 1986. Suddenly, Eva's tracing of the infinity symbol makes perfect sense as this appears to be exactly what is occurring; all along, the loop was actually a pair of loops, two-ing and fro-ing between them. The universe has selected for a binary loop, first Jonas exists, then he doesn't, then he does, then he doesn't, and on an on for eternity.

Fictional Season 3: Jonas succeeds, and finds himself back in what he thinks is the original loop. But now he understands that the real enemy is all this time travel that keeps making people miserable, and he sets about destroying it. He does exactly what The Stranger does in Season 1 and destroys the cave portal, he burns down Adam's lair, he works to make sure that the nuclear plant incident never happens. Every avenue of time travel that he's aware of is destroyed, and he has no reason to think that he hasn't broken free, that after today the loop can't ever repeat. Along the way, he accidentally causes a chain of events that leads to Tannhaus's family crashing their car and killing all involved. Tannhaus then does exactly what we see him do in the origin universe, he's distraught that his family are gone and works tirelessly to bring them back by creating a way to go back and stop the accident. Jonas has missed this crucial detail. Tannhaus builds his bunker machine, which ends up creating the cave wormhole as it had done all along, and he ends up creating...

...the first loop. The loop is, always has been, and maybe always will be, a triquetra, looping in a pattern of three endlessly - Jonas, Martha, Tannhaus, Jonas, Martha, Tannhaus. Seasons 1, 2, 3. The end truly is the beginning, and the beginning the end. Having destroyed all previous knowledge about time travel, the main players are limited to what we see in the real Season 1: the chair, the cave. The chair experiments really are necessary, as they have no better information, and they want to build a more powerful machine. They will succeed, and they'll carry this information into the second loop, making the main players even more powerful. 

You then have the freedom to end this however you like, based on the rules you've established. It goes on forever, or it ends, or Jonas manages to sneak one teeny tiny difference back into the first loop that leave a glimpse of a possibility that one day, he could win. All three loops are real, all contain our characters that we know from all three seasons. No quantum entanglement, no time standing still. Just three loops, three seasons.