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

[john]

43 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

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.

That was good stuff, I liked it. The problem, I imagine, for the Dark creators is that,

Spoiler

apart from their interpretation of the power of human love being less subtle than yours, it also erases all the mirror symbology - Martha’s journey mirroring Jonas, her world literally mirroring it. That’s why there was three seasons, really there should have been more for the amount of story they wanted to tell. Your version works from a writing perspective but Dark was created by a writer and a filmmaker so presumably all of the stuff visually on screen was as important as the writing.

 

[SpaceChampion]

4 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

@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.

I don't think reference to a third reality invalidates my interpretation at all.  That third reality does not exist until the final time through the loop.  It's not really a third reality at all.  It's all one reality, but the final time went differently more than others preceding.   Claudia said she always adjusts things every loop, that doesn't create infinite different realities.

Your hang up about duplicates just doesn't matter to anything.  If Martha was duplicated and one died, instead of being transported, that doesn't change anything about the nature of looping.

And there was no "power of love" doing anything but having characters Claudia, Martha and Jonas understanding psychologically how to motivate Tannhaus to not ever build the time machine  -- the one thing they could all agree on!  There was only one way, so they did that.  All perfectly logically.

[DaveSumm]

4 hours ago, john said:

That was good stuff, I liked it. The problem, I imagine, for the Dark creators is that,

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apart from their interpretation of the power of human love being less subtle than yours, it also erases all the mirror symbology - Martha’s journey mirroring Jonas, her world literally mirroring it. That’s why there was three seasons, really there should have been more for the amount of story they wanted to tell. Your version works from a writing perspective but Dark was created by a writer and a filmmaker so presumably all of the stuff visually on screen was as important as the writing.

 

Thanks for reading it. To be honest, I didn’t want to go too far in to it but the nature of ‘loops’ would mean that all the most important moments would have to happen the furthest in the past, to make sure everything that branches off from it was truly a fresh loop. So huge chunks of Dark wouldn’t have worked at all and you’d basically be rewriting the whole thing.

You could just get away with keeping the mirrored stuff for Martha’s world, there’d be an argument that it doesn’t make any less sense than it does in another reality (and nobody ever comments that everything is reversed), but I know what you mean. It wouldn’t make sense that the third loop was one way or the other in my version.

@SpaceChampion To be honest I’m not sure what you’re referring to with that? Did you misquote?

[john]

5 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

And there was no "power of love" doing anything but having characters Claudia, Martha and Jonas understanding psychologically how to motivate Tannhaus to not ever build the time machine  -- the one thing they could all agree on!  There was only one way, so they did that.  All perfectly logically.

Sure there was. How about Martha sleeping with Jonas because she felt she “knew” him somehow. Or the corridor of light in non-space that lets you look back at your loved one as a child? Or origin Hannah looking fondly at non-existing Jonas’ yellow jacket at the very end?

That’s not including the less supernatural variants of it. Like Martha immediately feeling enduring affection for her incredibly creepy child.

I didn’t say it was illogical though. Since the whole world(s) is resonating out from Tannhaus’ machine it does seem possible that love could pass through time and space as well. I just think it’s slightly lame storytelling.

EDIT - maybe I should clarify that I don’t hate love as a story element. I liked the idea of this couple that shouldn’t exist being perfect for each other. And people endlessly choosing their children over everything. But I don’t like love as an explanation for something that shouldn’t be possible.

[karaddin]

The corridor of light is as much as explanation of their connection as it is a result of it. Their child selves seeing them in a way they don't consciously remember is the reason they feel recognition and deja vu.

And the tannhaus machine isn't a working time machine, it's completely different to the ones in the loop and I don't think time travel is even possible in the prime world. What it does do is break reality creating the loop worlds. My speculation was that the things bolted on are meant to be magnetic bottles and he's doing something with antimatter.

That's the delicious irony that I'm really enjoying from it - the he thought he was inventing a time machine to save his kid, he was very very wrong but it ended up working for completely wrong reasons. Or I guess you could decide that it did exactly what it was meant to do, that his machine involved a artificial super intelligence that manufactured the sadistic time loop to spur the unfortunates trapped inside a reality where time travel is possible to use it to save his kid.

The only possible evidence for the second interpretation is that the loops are so overly complex with the layers of bootstrap paradoxes that randomly springing into existence in that way doesn't make much sense to us. I guess it could be the stability thing DaveSumm talked about though, an infinite array of alternate realities sprung into being but these were the only ones that formed stable loops and loops are what that reality sustained.

[john]

5 hours ago, karaddin said:

The corridor of light is as much as explanation of their connection as it is a result of it. Their child selves seeing them in a way they don't consciously remember is the reason they feel recognition and deja vu.

That’s true. Although recognition is a weird thing to base a love on, the show doesn’t really give us much else to work with. I’ve never told my wife that being together is like a glitch in the matrix, but what the hell it seems to work for Martha and Jonas.

5 hours ago, karaddin said:

And the tannhaus machine isn't a working time machine, it's completely different to the ones in the loop and I don't think time travel is even possible in the prime world. What it does do is break reality creating the loop worlds. My speculation was that the things bolted on are meant to be magnetic bottles and he's doing something with antimatter.

That's the delicious irony that I'm really enjoying from it - the he thought he was inventing a time machine to save his kid, he was very very wrong but it ended up working for completely wrong reasons. Or I guess you could decide that it did exactly what it was meant to do, that his machine involved a artificial super intelligence that manufactured the sadistic time loop to spur the unfortunates trapped inside a reality where time travel is possible to use it to save his kid.

Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s a whole new train of thought dumped on you in the last episode. I was actually thinking, while I was watching, about a Rick and Morty episode where they have an entire civilisation inside their car battery just to power the car. I don’t think you can go too far down that road though without stripping the characters of any agency at all, which I doubt is what the writers intended.

They do of course time travel within the origin world, using the technology from what is essentially a fake reality. But I don’t know if they can just go to any time, or if the machine is just allowing you to go where you need to, guided by Tannhaus’ intentions. Imagine Martha and Jonas just running away, having a life together in the origin world. Fuck all those (other) fake people.

[karaddin]

They could only live until 86 if they tried that lol. 

I wasn't picturing it as creating them without agency so much as torturing them until they do what you want. Which is awfully dark.

[john]

It is kinda dark but from the perspective of the machine it’s just a function of fulfilling its purpose. Like in a light switch maybe all the electrons are screaming.  

Actually, thinking about it (and going back to the idea of it being a valid reality with real people in), maybe Jonas and Martha are supposed to represent the cynic’s idea of love - repetition bringing positive reinforcement. Whereas true love is represented by Claudia who is actually able to change in order to be what her daughter needed.

[Gertrude]

22 hours ago, karaddin said:

The corridor of light is as much as explanation of their connection as it is a result of it. Their child selves seeing them in a way they don't consciously remember is the reason they feel recognition and deja vu.

That's how I saw it at first too, but then I realized that this is supposed to be a new event, maybe? Everything after Jonas poofing Marta away from old Magnus and Franziska is not a part of the loop, right?

Meh, I've only watched it once and already the details are slipping a bit.

[karaddin]

3 hours ago, Gertrude said:

That's how I saw it at first too, but then I realized that this is supposed to be a new event, maybe? Everything after Jonas poofing Marta away from old Magnus and Franziska is not a part of the loop, right?

Meh, I've only watched it once and already the details are slipping a bit.

Martha remembers seeing Jonas like that though and the implication is that Jonas does likewise. I took it as yet another case of thinking they did something differently but the loop didn't actually change

[john]

The new loop, or new straight line as it turned out, would’ve started at the point when Adam talked to Jonas. You can only change things at the point of the apocalypse.

The corridor of light, I figured, would exist outside of time and space, so every possible version of J and M would’ve remembered seeing the other through a magical cupboard.

[Heartofice]

Can we at least agree that the corridor of light was not a good addition to the story? It might be the only moment in the whole show I actively disliked.

[Gertrude]

OK, having it exist outside of time and space makes sense. I understand why they did it, but I also agree it wasn't my favorite scene.

[DaveSumm]

5 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Can we at least agree that the corridor of light was not a good addition to the story? It might be the only moment in the whole show I actively disliked.

I didn’t care for it, but its function was to provide some explanation as to why Jonas and Martha had to fix this and no-one else could. Anyone else would’ve been lost in the tunnel, but they were anchored by the basement/wardrobe visions which showed then the third way.

I’m not for a second saying that makes any sense, just that that was why it was there.

[john]

Which Claudia couldn’t know, of course. The show doesn’t give us much reason to accept that it had to be Jonas and Martha, except for the pleasing symmetry of it, you messed it up so you fix it.

[Toth]

So... I finally managed to finish the season and... damn, I am quite disappointed by the finale...

I liked Dark. I like the careful plotting of the loop and even in season 3 I found the whole alternating events involving one Jonas to die while other becomes Adam and one Martha to die while the other becomes Eva quite satisfying to play out. There was a glimpse upon the past strengths of Dark when Jonas recognized Martha's scar and questioned his actions, only for that to be part of the loop again. The suffocating stranglehold of determinism that dominated the show was visible there, but episode by episode passed and I ended up wondering when they could finally find that one thread with which to unravel the whole mess... and then the last 30 minutes of the last episode rushed it down with absolutely ludicrous pace and introducing a mechanic of the cave that felt very much like a Deus ex Machina. I like that there has been an origin world because I have been wondering about how that came to be ever since the Charlotte/Elizabeth reveal because the loop shouldn't have been sustainable without one, but the origin world should be so far up the line of neverending loops and overwritten by all the time travel shenanigans that it really shouldn't be possible to reach it straight away. I expected more a Steins;Gate approach of the protagonists undoing their timeline one change at a time. And like others have said, that stupid corridor Narnia scene was just silly and didn't give us any purpose.

Which brings me to one of my next gripes: Introducing concepts for no reason whatsoever. The universe intervening to prevent Jonas from killing himself was peak ridiculous. I feel like it was only there to prevent Jonas from doing the obvious solution of preventing Adam to be in the next loop, but it feels so arbitrary and gives time an agency that it really shouldn't have. Determinism was the enemy so far, but determinism is a concept that needs the ability to make choices, it only says that under the exact same circumstances we will always make the same. Giving time the arbitrary ability to bend physics to cut down choices hurts the narrative so much. They borrowed the wrong aspect of Steins;Gate... And then the final scenes in the final episodes introducing the idea that the loop characters run on Back to the Future logic, fading away when preventing their births. What the fuck? Are you shitting me? In a series that makes so much use of characters from previous loop iterations sticking around to influence their younger selves? I groaned so much about that part. For all intents and purposes, Jonas and Martha should have been stranded in the original world and the epilogue should have been their adult selves looking after the remaining cast in the fixed Winden. Would that be so difficult?

And that's just the mechanical side of things, where I have been annoyed, but overall still pretty entertained. The main realization that broke the season for me came when one of the Claudias sided with Eva and I was just "Wasn't her goal to prevent the death of her father? How does she even consider that?!?". From there on I became painfully aware that the vast majority of things happened not because characters had a reason to do them (as deterministic events would have), but rather because they have to happen, causality be damned. Most egregious part being Martha becoming Eva... out of love for Jonas? The disheveled vagrant she knew for three days and was terrified of him for the majority of it until she suddenly wasn't anymore and had sex with him? They did a faint attempt to say that there had been character development in between Martha and Eva and Jonas and Adam, crammed in as a clip show in the first before last episode, but it felt more like them suddenly having changed their motivations off-screen. And then there is their allies... the show established quite well why Noah joined with Adam, but why are Franziska and Magnus fine with what he is doing? Why does Bartosz seem to recognize his future wife when he's one that should know the least about time travel? Why the hell does anyone possibly side with Eva? I felt more and more that the constant cryptic non-answers given by characters are just a poor attempt to evade the question why characters do anything. And... I haven't rewatched the first seasons so my memory might be a little fuzzy, but I don't think it was anywhere near this bad in the past.

I still like Dark. I like the plotting, I like the ideas it has and I like that it doesn't treat its audience like idiots, instead relying heavily on giving visual cues to explain how things are connected. But I think in the third season they wanted too much and forgot the characters somewhere along the way.

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, Toth said:

For all intents and purposes, Jonas and Martha should have been stranded in the original world and the epilogue should have been their adult selves looking after the remaining cast in the fixed Winden. Would that be so difficult?

I floated this on reddit and it went down like a lead balloon, I thought the same thing; there’s no logic at all introduced in the show that dictates they needed to disappear. If anything, it makes more sense that they don’t as that side steps that awkward grandfather-paradox feature, that they can exist for just long enough to fix the problem and then disappear. I wouldn’t have minded at all if Stranger and mid-Martha had been at that dinner table scene. OK, it’s his aunt ... but I feel like the show already made its bed with that, they’re our protagonists, are we rooting for them or not?

Totally agree with your other points though. Couldn’t stand the hanging scene, or the Noah gun scene the previous season. The plot remains exactly the same if you just leave them out, have Agnes shoot Noah before he can draw the weapon or something. I feel like making an entirely deterministic show was just too difficult for them, and in order to portray a continually looping scenario, they had to introduce all three of the major players as people who are obsessed with maintaining the loop, and Eva is the only one of them who they bother to provide a reason for. “The loop can’t be changed, that’s why I’ve employed the majority of the cast to work tirelessly to maintain it.”

[Toth]

10 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

If anything, it makes more sense that they don’t as that side steps that awkward grandfather-paradox feature, that they can exist for just long enough to fix the problem and then disappear. I wouldn’t have minded at all if Stranger and mid-Martha had been at that dinner table scene.

Exactly! They went out of their way to create a paradox that wasn't necessary at all! The loop happened, their past happened, they are the result of that and they went into the very first timeline before the creation of all the others to create a timeline where the world isn't ending. Done! I totally agree that them being part of the dinner scene, enjoying their happy ending, would have been much more logical and even satisfying an ending! Heck, you could even surmise that Adam and Eva making up in the knowledge that there now is a timeline with a future gives them a happy ending (as irritated as I was about Adam becoming a good guy again after realizing that he didn't change shit with his atrocities).

[aceluby]

Binged this for the first time over the last 3 weeks or so and really loved it.  Time travel done right.  I also really liked the way it ended.

Spoiler

The entire show was about how this is done in 3's.  The three timelines from the cave.  The three 'origins'.  Three Nielsen kids who had major parts to play.  The three who went back to the 20's to create the cave and original time machine.  There are threes literally everywhere in this story.  Once they introduced the second world without Jonas, I knew almost right away that there had to be a third world.  There was also the infinity sign / mobius strip for the origin that didn't really fit with the triangle infinity sign that was all over the place in the first two seasons.  Something was wrong there as soon as that was revealed.  To have the final episode bring it all in with a third world and everyone going off of incomplete information was exactly what the show had been doing the entire time.  I thought it was just masterful story telling that really banged you over the head with all the visual cues, but were also very easy to miss since you focus so much on the mystery and figuring out where everyone fits.  Just loved it.

 

[red snow]

Finally finished season 3. It was the only one I didn't binge through in the space of a few days. Part of the reason was there was so much going on every episode I needed some time to digest. I can see why they wanted three seasons but I think they had too much to cram into the final season. They established an alternate timeline and characters as well as creating a new antagonist with an entire history behind her. Then there were multiples of characters meaning there were at least 5 Jonas', 5 Marthas and god knows how many Claudias. 

The knot became so complex it became easier for me to see the show in retrospect as being a collection of loops and that what I saw wasn't necessarily all from the final loop.

There were also some anticlimaxes most notably in the martha/Jonas child. They made it out as if he'd be something truly momentous but besides the really cool visual of being a trinity timeline assassin that's all he seemed to be - some lackey.

I'm also not sure whether the final fix makes sense unless I hang onto the notion that at the moment of the apocalypse they had a narrow window to fix everything (which is what I think were all the points where Claudia was able to nudge things so an earlier stein's gate comment probably holds too as each apocalypse Claudia made a change).  Otherwise all that nonsense with Jonas not being able to die made no sense (eg he could have died if someone had shot younger him at the moment of the apocalyose).

In all honesty, I thought the show was really going to live up to its namesake and that it was Jonas and Martha who actually caused the accident setting everything off in the first place. A miserable ending but in many ways I think it would have sat better with me.

I also think I've missed something somewhere because I'm not getting why Martha wouldn't exist after the fix. Why isn't Ulrich around in the final scene? I'd have thought his relationship would have happened as it was? Jonas not existing is easy at least. 

I think I need to do some checking though as the family trees were maybe more grandfather parodoxed than I realised. I'm guessing the 1880s children turned out to have ancestors that couldn't have existed without the time travel.

I still enjoyed the show a lot and i liked how several characters were the focus at different points Jonas, Martha (season 3), Claudia, her dad and Ulrich (season 1) all had their own stories. It was just a bit hard when some characters essentially disappeared eg Ulrich and most notably Noah. I personally preferred the show when it was a fixed loop with everything having to play out as it always had as that gave everything a real sense of tragedy and that was the case up until the last 5 minutes of season 2.

Despite those grumbles the conclusion was still far better than many shows I've enjoyed and invested in eg Lost and BSG.

It'll be interesting to see what the writer/director team does next. I'm guessing they are in demand after the international success of this show and the director  has a lot of flair.