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

[red snow]

ah, it makes sense why there's no ulrich now. I missed that. These links are quite good at clearing up the various family trees and how it makes more sense out of those present in the final scene. 

[Iskaral Pust]

I’ve watched only 2eps of S3 and I’m really struggling to care enough to keep watching.  I can’t decide if it’s me or the show or both.  Perhaps the wait for S3 was too long because I care less now and I have a harder time remembering all of the threads and connections. But I also think the narrative propulsion and character arcs have dropped badly and are just in limbo as the completeness of the loops is revealed. 

[Heartofice]

Just now, Iskaral Pust said:

I’ve watched only 2eps of S3 and I’m really struggling to care enough to keep watching.  I can’t decide if it’s me or the show or both.  Perhaps the wait for S3 was too long because I care less now and I have a harder time remembering all of the threads and connections. But I also think the narrative propulsion and character arcs have dropped badly and are just in limbo as the completeness of the loops is revealed. 

Unfortunately I think the problem is with the show 

[DaveSumm]

4 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I’ve watched only 2eps of S3 and I’m really struggling to care enough to keep watching.  I can’t decide if it’s me or the show or both.  Perhaps the wait for S3 was too long because I care less now and I have a harder time remembering all of the threads and connections. But I also think the narrative propulsion and character arcs have dropped badly and are just in limbo as the completeness of the loops is revealed. 

Yea I felt the same at times, it reminds me a little of the end of Revenge of the Sith, we know where everyone ends up so it gets boring just getting closer and closer to completing that circle. I also think it was an error to follow the alt-people as it does in the early episodes, it essentially mirrors the original world and it’s not that interesting seeing it play out.

I’d maybe consider getting to the end of 5, the season sets its stall out mostly by then (and fully in episode 6 I’d say). If you’re still not into it there’s nothing that would change your mind afterwards.

[red snow]

16 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I’ve watched only 2eps of S3 and I’m really struggling to care enough to keep watching.  I can’t decide if it’s me or the show or both.  Perhaps the wait for S3 was too long because I care less now and I have a harder time remembering all of the threads and connections. But I also think the narrative propulsion and character arcs have dropped badly and are just in limbo as the completeness of the loops is revealed. 

Alternative worlds means the first two seasons of everything being deterministic goes out the window. That and it's a bit like the season of lost that is largely a what if meaning it's harder to care. It's a different show in many ways.

I also get the impression the show wasn't planned from the start (not the final season anyhow) as it seems odd to me to introduce a major antagonist previously unseen in the final season. Given it's a show about time travel it seems forced/contrived to not see these antagonists in s1-s2.

Some of these changes may have been out of their hands eg the actor playing Noah had a lead role in 8 days and i think there were scheduling conflicts. Otherwise why bother setting him up as a major player in S1 and most of season 2.

Despite that I'd still recommend you finish the show but at your own pace. If you decide not to it's probably fine as well as the show is unlikely to end the way you thought due to additional worlds. And you are correct in that there isn't really any closure for a lot of characters.

The show was best for me when characters were forced to make hard choices due to their knowledge of the timeline eg mikkel and Ulrich.

[Toth]

Anyone else still finds it absolutely hilarious that after all this ominous talk of "Adam paid the price for all his time travels", it turned out that Adam barely did any time travel himself and only looks like he does because he sucks as an engineer? He reminds me of when I forced a Sims character with 0 mechanics skill to fix the broken TV...

[red snow]

On 7/24/2020 at 6:57 PM, Toth said:

Anyone else still finds it absolutely hilarious that after all this ominous talk of "Adam paid the price for all his time travels", it turned out that Adam barely did any time travel himself and only looks like he does because he sucks as an engineer? He reminds me of when I forced a Sims character with 0 mechanics skill to fix the broken TV...

Not just that but how comes Claudia, Noah etc (who do as much/more time-travelling) isn't looking like a Sontaran or potato? He paid the price for being a bit health and safety inept

[Toth]

On 7/26/2020 at 2:48 PM, red snow said:

Not just that but how comes Claudia, Noah etc (who do as much/more time-travelling) isn't looking like a Sontaran or potato? He paid the price for being a bit health and safety inept

Not to mention that Eva and Tannhaus managed to build time machines without toasting themselves.

[Corvinus85]

1 hour ago, Toth said:

Not to mention that Eva and Tannhaus managed to build time machines without toasting themselves.

I think in Eva's case she built hers in the future. While resources were scarce, there was still knowledge and some advanced technology to be found. Adam/Jonas started building his in 1888, and had to deal with creating his own electrical grid probably. 

Tannhaus was a physicist. While he clearly didn't anticipate the end result of his machine, he knew what he was doing overall. 

[karaddin]

There's also no evidence that Tannhaus built anything that functioned as a time machine, alternatively it just broke space time completely and created the broken loop realities. If he destroyed his entire reality then he didn't avoid toasting himself

[red snow]

5 hours ago, karaddin said:

There's also no evidence that Tannhaus built anything that functioned as a time machine, alternatively it just broke space time completely and created the broken loop realities. If he destroyed his entire reality then he didn't avoid toasting himself

I think that's sort of the case. We never see him travel through time. He just makes it possible somehow. He more likely created a reality machine where the universe had to figure out a way to give him the reality he wanted. No idea of that's harder to make than an actual time machine or not. 

Either way he didn't travel through time and my take was that it was the act of time travel that took its toll not the machine/energy

[karaddin]

4 hours ago, red snow said:

I think that's sort of the case. We never see him travel through time. He just makes it possible somehow. He more likely created a reality machine where the universe had to figure out a way to give him the reality he wanted. No idea of that's harder to make than an actual time machine or not. 

Either way he didn't travel through time and my take was that it was the act of time travel that took its toll not the machine/energy

Yup that's exactly my take too. It makes more sense to me in a simulation kind of context but it amounts to the same thing. He broke the universe until to make it give him what it wanted, to avoid being broken.

[Annara Snow]

On 7/11/2020 at 8:58 AM, 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?

 Yes. That's a terrible idea. How can they exist in the origin world when their fathers don't? They were never born in it. And it would have been a total cop-out. "Oh look, we just pulled a happy ending for Jonas and Martha out of our behinds, also erasing the themes of sacrifice and tragedy, "every decision for something is a decision against something else". Nope, they have their cake and eat it, while a bunch of other people we cared about from their existence: no more Mikkel/Michael, Ulrich, Magnus, Franzisca, Charlotte, Elisabeth, Tronte, Noah/Hanno,  Agnes, bye bye but who cares as long as the two leads get their incredibly unlikely HEA?

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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?

 

No, her goal was to prevent the death of her daughter

.

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Why the hell does anyone possibly side with Eva?.

Because they didn't want to stop existing?! That's the most obvious motivation ever.

[Annara Snow]

On 7/2/2020 at 11:47 AM, john said:

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.

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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.

 

What makes you think Silja was fathered by two different men?
 

You don't really think Ulrich was her father in the Alt-world? I thought Hannah was obviously having a miscarriage. And old Egon was told by Eva to save her and bring her to the past so he can preserve his past - i.e. to father a child with her as a young man.

[Annara Snow]

On 6/29/2020 at 6:05 AM, Corvinus85 said:

Finished it. Well done, but I'm not sure I buy what happened at the end, will have to think about it more.

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They pretty much had a grandfather paradox. Jonas and Martha stopped the tragedy that leads to Tannhaus creating two new worlds, then they wink out of existence. But if they wink out of existence...

I wonder what Katharina's name was at the end. Her mother clearly was inspired to name her thus by Hannah, but if the original world never happened, her mother may have given her a different name. Anyway, Katharina's death at the hands of her own mother, and her becoming the legend of the woman in the lake + the medallion ending up on the shore was one of the most tragic moments of the series for me. 

I will have to investigate the convoluted family tree to determine who exists and who doesn't. Curious that Bartosz doesn't. My guess is that is has to do with the fact that his descendants don't exist, and thus Regina doesn't find herself bullied in the woods by Ulrich and Katharina, where she meets Aleksander/Boris.

By the way this show doesn't have any genuine laughter until that last scene at the dinner table. 

 

 

On 6/29/2020 at 7:30 AM, SpaceChampion said:

 

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I read Katerina's origin world name is Phyllis, but I don't know if the person who said that was joking or not.

Anyway, I don't know if any caught this, but Bern Doppler groomed Claudia from a young age, and he was Regina's father.  You see a photo of all of them together in the end.

 

Yes, it seems that Boris/Aleksander didn't stay in Winden in this reality, because he didn't meet Regina that day in the woods, because she was not being bullied.

The ending was really bittersweet - and not just the fact that so many of the people we knew and cared about don't exist anymore (well, maybe not for all of the, but certainly for most - I'm really bummed that people like Mikkel, Charlotte, Franzisca, Elisabeth, Noah, Magnus, Bartosz and obviously Jonas and Martha don't exist in this Origin world). There's also the fact that the Origin World is happier than the two worlds created by time travel (which is not saying much, those two were really tragic) - but not really a "paradise": those who exist in the Origin World may not have suffered a horribly tragic fate as they did in the two time-loop worlds, but it's not like their lives are perfect.

Don't exist:

Jonas (time loop fate: either to be killed by a version of the love of his life, or to live a horribly tragic life and end up a bitter, nihilistic disfigured husk of a man who murders his mother, the love of his life - twice, and, in one version, his unborn child)

Martha (time loop fate: murdered by the love of her life, in both worlds, and murders him at one point)

Mikkel/Michael (time loop fate: either a tragic life and suicide, or dies in the apocalypse as a child)

Ulrich (time loop fate: either a long, tragic life, losing everything and stuck in a mental institution for decades and never escapes, or killed by Helge)

Mads (gets abducted and killed as a child in both worlds)

Tronte (I'm not sure what happened to him, someone help me here - he clearly didn't die in the Prime world. But I guess he knew he'd be erased from existence and still helped Claudia.)

Magnus (I guess he didn't die in the Prime world; Alt Magnus died in the apocalypse with Franzisca)

Franzisca (same as Magnus)

Charlotte (didn't die in either worlds)

Elisabeth (same)

Noah/Hanno (his whole life turned out to be a failure, killed by his own sister at Adam's orders; I'm a little confused on what happened to Alt Noah)

Agnes (no idea)

Silja (dies in childbirth)

Bartosz (murdered by his own son at Adam's orders)

Unknown (he was alive until the world blinked out of existence)

Exist:

Hannah 

Katharina (probably with a different name) (definitely not Phyllis LMAO since that's not a German name)

Regina

Peter

Torben Woller

Benni/Bernadette

Claudia

Bernd Doppler (apparently they got married in this reality)

presumably also:

Egon and Doris Tiedemann

Helge Doppler

Greta Doppler (long dead, presumably)

Jana 

Ines Kahnwald, her father Daniel Dahnwald (long dead)

Helena Albers and Hermann Albers, the farmer, whoever he was to her other than the father of her child

Sebastian Kruger (Hannah's dad)

Boris/Aleksander (but who knows where he is and what happened to him)

Clausen (ditto)

Erik Obendorff and the rest of the Obendorffs

Yasin (the deaf boy who was kidnapped)

Jasmin (Claudia's secretary)

the female cop (can't remember her name)

Gretchen the dog

Obviously, these were all or almost all better off as, in the prime world, most of them died in horrible ways (Katharina - killed by her own mother, or died in the apocalypse, Hannah - murdered by her own son, Egon - killed by his own daughter and realized he had already witnessed her death, Regina - was dying of cancer and in pain when strangled by her mother's old friend/lover at her mother's request, or died of cancer early/possibly killed herself, we don't know, Helge - killed himself in the attempt to... kill himself (his younger self), Erik and Yasin - abducted and killed as children, most of the others - died in the apocalypse)...

But:

- Helge still had an abusive mother, who resented him because he was a product of rape (sidenote: I've seen people dispute that, I thought what Greta said was very clear, they didn't need to spell it out)

- Katharina (or whatever her name is) still had an abusive mother, who resented her because she was a product of possibly incest, definitely abuse (We need to connect the dots on this one, but Hermann Albers, the farmer, is credited as her father. But Helena was already Helena Albers when she was a really young teenager who went to have an abortion, some 18 years earlier. So either she was a really young child bride and was never happy about her marriage, or he was a male relative who repeatedly got her pregnant)

- Egon and Doris may not have divorced, as she never met Agnes and he never met Hannah, but their marriage was hardly happy. They probably just continued being in a lukewarm marriage without much love or sex, or maybe split anyway.

- Bernd Doppler still groomed Claudia - and it's clearly not a love for the ages, even if, in this reality, they got married, because there was no Tronte for her to fall in love with with, which made her not want to disclose Regina's parentage or marry Bernd

- Going by their toast to "A world without Winden", they aren't too happy with their hometown in this reality, either.

Erik and Yasin are obviously better off, Peter and Bernadette being together is the one clearly happy ending. Torben Woller got what he wanted, finally - his crush on Hannah has been hinted at in both worlds. And I guess Hannah, who was always 'looking for love in all the wrong places', seems to have found happiness... but it' probably not the greatest love ever on her side - as she never noticed him in the world(s) where Ulrich and Mikkel/Michael existed.

And then of course - Hannah's memories of the other worlds create some interesting possibilities and could be interpreted in different ways.

 

One thing I wish the show did was expand more on some of the stories. We've never even seen how Agnes and Unknown met and became Tronte's parents. Or what happened to Doris. I'd like to have known more about Agnes, Silja, to see more of Noah and Elisabeth's, Hannah and Michael', Bartosz and Silja's relationships. Why did Magnus and Franzisca decide to join Adam's side? There's a lot more, this is a show that offers so many possibilities for speculation and filling in the blanks. I'll be sure to check canon-compliant fanfiction, which I'm sure there will be a lot of!

[DaveSumm]

2 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

Yes. That's a terrible idea. How can they exist in the origin world when their fathers don't? They were never born in it.

But that’s exactly what happened, you can just substitute ‘lived happily ever after‘ for ‘were able to fix things at all’. They existed just long enough to stop the car accident, despite the fact that the accident was on rails to not happen as soon as they arrived. This is the grandfather paradox that the show has avoided so carefully until now. And seeing as they broke it, it makes no more or less sense for them to continue existing.

Back to the Future II had the same problem, in that Old Biff shouldn’t have been able to return the DeLorean to the correct timeline. So they handwaved this idea that the changes themselves have a ‘speed’ that Old Biff essentially outran, so he rides in front of a wave of changes and gets to 2015 before the changes. There’s a really bad deleted scene where he’s been shot in the stomach and then fades away after returning the car. It’s why he looks in such pain in the film when he gets out, the idea was that one of the changes that caught up to him was that Lorraine eventually shoots him in the ‘rich Biff’ reality. 

[Annara Snow]

2 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

But that’s exactly what happened, you can just substitute ‘lived happily ever after‘ for ‘were able to fix things at all’. They existed just long enough to stop the car accident, despite the fact that the accident was on rails to not happen as soon as they arrived. This is the grandfather paradox that the show has avoided so carefully until now. And seeing as they broke it, it makes no more or less sense for them to continue existing.

Back to the Future II had the same problem, in that Old Biff shouldn’t have been able to return the DeLorean to the correct timeline. So they handwaved this idea that the changes themselves have a ‘speed’ that Old Biff essentially outran, so he rides in front of a wave of changes and gets to 2015 before the changes. There’s a really bad deleted scene where he’s been shot in the stomach and then fades away after returning the car. It’s why he looks in such pain in the film when he gets out, the idea was that one of the changes that caught up to him was that Lorraine eventually shoots him in the ‘rich Biff’ reality. 

You didn't at all address my main point that it goes completely against the themes of sacrifice and tragedy and "every choice for something is a choice against something else" and would be a cheap cop-out to give the two leads a HEA.

[Toth]

On 8/2/2020 at 3:03 PM, Annara Snow said:

 Yes. That's a terrible idea. How can they exist in the origin world when their fathers don't? They were never born in it.

It's not their world though. They have lived their lives up to then, why would they just randomly pop out of existance after doing a thing that changes a different timeline? People don't work on Mr. Meeseeks logic, disappearing after doing their job!

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And it would have been a total cop-out. "Oh look, we just pulled a happy ending for Jonas and Martha out of our behinds, also erasing the themes of sacrifice and tragedy, "every decision for something is a decision against something else". Nope, they have their cake and eat it, while a bunch of other people we cared about from their existence: no more Mikkel/Michael, Ulrich, Magnus, Franzisca, Charlotte, Elisabeth, Tronte, Noah/Hanno,  Agnes, bye bye but who cares as long as the two leads get their incredibly unlikely HEA?

What are you talking about? The loop worlds were a dead end. If Jonas and Martha ended up stranded, it would imply that these worlds would still exist somewhere, they just cut off the branch at the stem and made the origin world go another way. The 'tragedy', if you really need one, would be them being cut off from the world they knew, but at least getting to witness one where nobody fucked up quite so badly. Not sure what you are going on about Happy Ever After there anyway. Wasn't that the point of the dinner scene? That those who made it are now happy? But in any case, you are missing that my entire argument was never about the theme they were going, it was about the logic of this outcome. A show so meticulous about its plotting and such a heavy theme of determinism shouldn't at the very end have the universe itself randomly decide which characters have to live and which characters have to disappear.

But hey, I won't argue with people who refuse to consider that writers could have done other decisions. They didn't had to end the show the way they did and I certainly won't consider a 30 minute rush-job after hours of continuing the loop plotting as if the show still had two seasons left as a flawless master piece. It absolutely wasn't.

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Because they didn't want to stop existing?! That's the most obvious motivation ever.

That was Eva's motivation, sure, and they did and absolutely horrenduous job establishing this. Just as Adam was railroaded onto his path with barely a handwave that he suddenly had his motivations, not really why he developed them. But all these people? They had known faces, they had no lines, so we can only guess why they did what they did. And your idea that they are just like Eva would imply that all of them would be totally fine with Earth turning into a lifeless desert and everyone will have a miserable death on the off-chance that changing the past would cause the universe to just turn them into a puff of smoke. Which is a decisision the writers did, not one the universe necessarily have to run with. And I have the suspicion the writers only did so because they assumed their audience would feel more comfortable with what they know from Back to the Future, not for any thematic reason.

[red snow]

22 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

 

Yes, it seems that Boris/Aleksander didn't stay in Winden in this reality, because he didn't meet Regina that day in the woods, because she was not being bullied.

The ending was really bittersweet - and not just the fact that so many of the people we knew and cared about don't exist anymore (well, maybe not for all of the, but certainly for most - I'm really bummed that people like Mikkel, Charlotte, Franzisca, Elisabeth, Noah, Magnus, Bartosz and obviously Jonas and Martha don't exist in this Origin world). There's also the fact that the Origin World is happier than the two worlds created by time travel (which is not saying much, those two were really tragic) - but not really a "paradise": those who exist in the Origin World may not have suffered a horribly tragic fate as they did in the two time-loop worlds, but it's not like their lives are perfect.

Don't exist:

Jonas (time loop fate: either to be killed by a version of the love of his life, or to live a horribly tragic life and end up a bitter, nihilistic disfigured husk of a man who murders his mother, the love of his life - twice, and, in one version, his unborn child)

Martha (time loop fate: murdered by the love of her life, in both worlds, and murders him at one point)

Mikkel/Michael (time loop fate: either a tragic life and suicide, or dies in the apocalypse as a child)

Ulrich (time loop fate: either a long, tragic life, losing everything and stuck in a mental institution for decades and never escapes, or killed by Helge)

Mads (gets abducted and killed as a child in both worlds)

Tronte (I'm not sure what happened to him, someone help me here - he clearly didn't die in the Prime world. But I guess he knew he'd be erased from existence and still helped Claudia.)

Magnus (I guess he didn't die in the Prime world; Alt Magnus died in the apocalypse with Franzisca)

Franzisca (same as Magnus)

Charlotte (didn't die in either worlds)

Elisabeth (same)

Noah/Hanno (his whole life turned out to be a failure, killed by his own sister at Adam's orders; I'm a little confused on what happened to Alt Noah)

Agnes (no idea)

Silja (dies in childbirth)

Bartosz (murdered by his own son at Adam's orders)

Unknown (he was alive until the world blinked out of existence)

Exist:

Hannah 

Katharina (probably with a different name) (definitely not Phyllis LMAO since that's not a German name)

Regina

Peter

Torben Woller

Benni/Bernadette

Claudia

Bernd Doppler (apparently they got married in this reality)

presumably also:

Egon and Doris Tiedemann

Helge Doppler

Greta Doppler (long dead, presumably)

Jana 

Ines Kahnwald, her father Daniel Dahnwald (long dead)

Helena Albers and Hermann Albers, the farmer, whoever he was to her other than the father of her child

Sebastian Kruger (Hannah's dad)

Boris/Aleksander (but who knows where he is and what happened to him)

Clausen (ditto)

Erik Obendorff and the rest of the Obendorffs

Yasin (the deaf boy who was kidnapped)

Jasmin (Claudia's secretary)

the female cop (can't remember her name)

Gretchen the dog

Obviously, these were all or almost all better off as, in the prime world, most of them died in horrible ways (Katharina - killed by her own mother, or died in the apocalypse, Hannah - murdered by her own son, Egon - killed by his own daughter and realized he had already witnessed her death, Regina - was dying of cancer and in pain when strangled by her mother's old friend/lover at her mother's request, or died of cancer early/possibly killed herself, we don't know, Helge - killed himself in the attempt to... kill himself (his younger self), Erik and Yasin - abducted and killed as children, most of the others - died in the apocalypse)...

But:

- Helge still had an abusive mother, who resented him because he was a product of rape (sidenote: I've seen people dispute that, I thought what Greta said was very clear, they didn't need to spell it out)

- Katharina (or whatever her name is) still had an abusive mother, who resented her because she was a product of possibly incest, definitely abuse (We need to connect the dots on this one, but Hermann Albers, the farmer, is credited as her father. But Helena was already Helena Albers when she was a really young teenager who went to have an abortion, some 18 years earlier. So either she was a really young child bride and was never happy about her marriage, or he was a male relative who repeatedly got her pregnant)

- Egon and Doris may not have divorced, as she never met Agnes and he never met Hannah, but their marriage was hardly happy. They probably just continued being in a lukewarm marriage without much love or sex, or maybe split anyway.

- Bernd Doppler still groomed Claudia - and it's clearly not a love for the ages, even if, in this reality, they got married, because there was no Tronte for her to fall in love with with, which made her not want to disclose Regina's parentage or marry Bernd

- Going by their toast to "A world without Winden", they aren't too happy with their hometown in this reality, either.

Erik and Yasin are obviously better off, Peter and Bernadette being together is the one clearly happy ending. Torben Woller got what he wanted, finally - his crush on Hannah has been hinted at in both worlds. And I guess Hannah, who was always 'looking for love in all the wrong places', seems to have found happiness... but it' probably not the greatest love ever on her side - as she never noticed him in the world(s) where Ulrich and Mikkel/Michael existed.

And then of course - Hannah's memories of the other worlds create some interesting possibilities and could be interpreted in different ways.

 

One thing I wish the show did was expand more on some of the stories. We've never even seen how Agnes and Unknown met and became Tronte's parents. Or what happened to Doris. I'd like to have known more about Agnes, Silja, to see more of Noah and Elisabeth's, Hannah and Michael', Bartosz and Silja's relationships. Why did Magnus and Franzisca decide to join Adam's side? There's a lot more, this is a show that offers so many possibilities for speculation and filling in the blanks. I'll be sure to check canon-compliant fanfiction, which I'm sure there will be a lot of!

That's a pretty depressing yet accurate summary. 

I guess the show was never suggesting the prime world was perfect it was just one that wasn't stuck in an endless loop of misery and apocalypse. I was never sure how apocalyptic the "apocalypse" really was as the fact people survived afterwards suggests it wasn't that final. I also wondered if it was more a "chernobyl" incident in that it left Germany/a chunk of europe a wasteland rather than actually destroy the whole world.

I maybe wasn't 100% happy with the end but I'd have disliked it more if it was "happily ever after".

One interesting thing about the list of people who'd never exist is that their existence was pretty shitty. I mean if getting to spend the rest of your life with your auntie is a happy ending the outlook is pretty grim.

[karaddin]

@Annara Snow I'd missed that Peter and Bernadette were together at the end, that's something nice to take away for me lol. Thanks.