Dark: the German Netflix series that's like an amalgamation of Twin Peaks, Back to the Future, and X-Files (SPOILERS!)

the episode summaries at https://dark-netflix.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Wiki are pretty good.

Ledge, I don't think that's wildly implausible at all - it has definitely occurred to me a few times. For one thing, Bartosz is the only one we haven't seen as an older version, despite being rescued along with Magnus and Franziska. My question would be why would Magnus and Franziska follow Bartosz in Sic Mundus, when they don't trust him? How would he fool them? (Aside from the trick of everybody in the show not being able to recognise anyone else if they're a different age.)

he'd also have to get a great deal wiser as he gets older as he's not the sharpest tool in the box right now.

but we see adam "seeing"/remembering martha and bartosz is the only other guy with a close connection to her, except for magnus and ulrich who are already accounted for.

Is Adam really that wise, or do people just think he is?

Adam being Bartosz would also track with his pronouncement about "some pain you never get over" or whatever it was he said, but referring to Jonas getting it on with Martha rather than anything else.

As I say, it's definitely crossed my mind more than once, but I'm withholding judgement as of yet. There are many convincing arguments for it actually being Jonas after all. We've also got a whole new batshit thing to bounce around in with the introduction of parallel worlds now, so who knows where the writers are going with this?

Parallel worlds are the only way out of it I think, otherwise the whole narrative comes falling down. I wonder if that's been the intention since the start.

Please tell me they have an extensive recap available at the top of season three?

They don't but YouTube does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnczoVbNsH4

Oh, very good. Thanks.

who says this show has no sense of humour? torben's two eyes one arm reveal was a lol for sure.

Only a couple of episodes in so far but the unknown trio (or whatever they're called) feel very Twin Peaks/Lynchian

oh man i somehow forgot all the episodes are released at once. i was sort of looking forward to eking this out week by week.

some nice symmetries between s3e1 and s1e1 - s1 ulrich climbs out of hannah's bedroom window, s3 franziska climbs of out magnus's (the same room). ulrich uses the same excuse about the queue at the bakers to katharina (s1) and hannah (s3). franziska gives a talk about black holes in s1, bartosz in s3.

it looks like everything is left-right reversed in the other world - jonas's (old) house, the school, the church - but not the nielsen's (old) house?

Yeah, I'm not a fan of bingeing shows but will probably try and watch this as quickly as possible because spoilers

Trying to keep this mostly spoiler-free

I got quite lost this season and should have watched a more extensive recap (the two minute recap NF provided was less than useless), but switching between worlds AND time periods was tough to follow, even with the visual cue. I often had to pause and think about what had last happened. My other problem was most things felt insignificant compared to Jonas and Martha's stories, but some of the gaps were interesting to see filled in. Still, nice finish to the show. I don't know if the story is 100% consistent (I'll leave that to people smarter than I) but I'm still a bit in awe that real people plotted this story out

Rewatching the first two seasons was a massive help for me and meant I could also appreciate all the (plenty of) callbacks this season.

There were obviously a few plot holes but generally it was tightly plotted and I can't wait to see the new character maps people come up with for this season

just finished season 2 this week after stalling out after episode 2 of it last year and am now p stoked for season 3.

don't know if it's just me but S2 really laid bare just how irredeemably awful hannah is.

Well, that final song choice was a stinker, and I say that as someone who has very much enjoyed the 'sad song / slow montage' element of each episode.

I'm glad it managed to stay enjoyable all the way through, definitely not a perfect piece of TV but good. They fucking played me with Wöller's eye, though.

My other problem was most things felt insignificant compared to Jonas and Martha's stories

I got frustrated quite a few times over the series that it was so focused on these two as the central issue, when other people were equally caught up in/responsible for/messed up by the knot. I think in the end the show managed to address that, though? They're important, but their duality is not ultimately the most meaningful thing.

Was that the Peter Gabriel tune? I'd not heard it before and thought it was much better than the original.

I guess spoilers for music here, so look away if you're bothered by that - it was the 'What a Wonderful World' choice. So corny.

Oh yeah, that was bad

We are four episodes into season three and I am not feeling this anymore at all. Too much Jonas and Martha, too much standing around and spouting cod-meaningful platitudes about time.

I also should've watched a better recap. I could maybe even use a previously-on-Dark recap before each episode. Sometimes it takes me a while scene to remember who everyone in a scene is and how they got there.

Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe these German sitcoms are just not what I want in these times.

Takes me a whole scene, not a while scene.

I'm six episodes in and I'm on tenterhooks for what happens next but I agree there's too much time travel bullshit in this one, it was better when it was equal parts unhappy family trauma and time travel bullshit. Too much double crossing as well. He lied to you! No she lied to you when she said he lied to you! etc etc.

I think it gets better in the second half as the final pieces get filled in. Episode 7 in particular was one of my favorites of the series

That is good to hear.

4 episodes in and i p much agree with trishyb. i do find the scarlip3 genuinely terrifying tho, especially the littlest one.

7 is indeed something of a tour de force.

I finished watching it. Sure, the ending was satisfying, but I thought the whole third season was a snooze.

Also, I wish edgy programmes would stop signalling their edginess by showing people hanging themselves. It is extremely upsetting to watch.

That third season wasn't a snore. it was a freegin' chore. Talk about sucking all the momentum out of a story through terrible pacing. So disappointing.

After finishing it last night I dreamt about being in a bunker and hiding from some evil germans.

I give it two thumbs up, yes it went a bit up its own bum in the third season but there was enough sturm und drang to keep me invested and the ending was immensely satisfying.

I agree that the third season was a bummer, I was expecting more multiverse shenanigans and not just the same hammering of "you can't escape fate" theme of the previous two seasons, even if it was ultimately subverted.

One small thing that really bugged me, in the first episode of this season, when Martha and the other kids are in the woods at night, she hears a creepy voice calling her name, and for a second sees a scary woman all covered in some black goo, who then disappears. I kept expecting for the show to explain what the fuck that was about, but it never did. I even rewatched the scene with freeze frame, but because of the black goo it's impossible to tell if the woman is supposed to be a version of Martha or one of the other time-travellers. Seems like a weird detail to leave unexplained in a story that otherwise tied all its threads?

it's her mum i think, an echo of s1e1 where jonas sees his dad in the same way. i only discovered this reading online.

I guess it could be her mom, yeah, but that still doesn't explain why she saw her? Jonas had a creepy vision of his dad because he had just killed himself, but nothing like that happens to the alternate world Katharina.

idk, because martha and jonas are connected, man ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the more i think back on this show the more impressive i think it is. multiple characters across three generations and timelines all brilliantly cast, with a labyrinthine plot & family tree that stands up to scrutiny and is resolved with no significant loose ends.

what i liked most about the third season were some of the more minor emotional developments, e.g. bartosz's family and the fact that he and magnus and franziska never (iirc) make it back (... to the future!); and also the small differences/echoes between the worlds/timelines, e.g. when we see peter as a priest talking to an untransitioned benni in eva's timeline.

also the incidental music was fantastic - i was a ben frost fan anyway but I've been listening to & loving his three soundtrack albums. the episode ending songs were sometimes a bit ott but they worked.

Oh and I also liked how it hid away some plot explanations like easter eggs - e.g. who was Regina's father? In Adam and Eva's timeline it was Tronte Nielsen but when Tronte is a kid we see the origin/unnamed/weirdo trio say he gave Tronte his name, implying he's Tronte's father (and Tronte is his own great-great-great grandfather) But then Regina wouldn't exist in the original world, being a product of the time fracture - so in the final scene in the original world we a picture of Claudia, Regina, and Bernd Doppler. (Which makes the fairly creepy scene with an adult Bernd telling a young Claudia that if she wants something she should take it even more creepy.)

In Adam and Eva's timeline it was Tronte Nielsen but when Tronte is a kid we see the origin/unnamed/weirdo trio say he gave Tronte his name, implying he's Tronte's father (and Tronte is his own great-great-great grandfather) But then Regina wouldn't exist in the original world, being a product of the time fracture - so in the final scene in the original world we a picture of Claudia, Regina, and Bernd Doppler. (Which makes the fairly creepy scene with an adult Bernd telling a young Claudia that if she wants something she should take it even more creepy.)

That’s what the previous post was saying. Regina was not a product of time travel.

Regina would be a time travel anomaly if Tronte were her Dad, and the family tree on the floor in Eva's room says he is - but yes it has to be Bernd in all three universes. The theory is that Claudia covered up her parentage and pretended it was Tronte, I'm not sure how much of that is spelled out in the show and how much is fanfic.

One thing I think the writers didn't really properly explain is, how exactly Tannhaus's invention of the time travel in the original universe create the two splinter universes? The way I understood it is that him turning his time machine on in the bunker created the "time tunnel" in the Winden caves, which in turn lead to all the time loops seen in Jonas's/Adams's universe. And in that universe he gets Charlotte as an adopted daughter, which quenches his obsession of trying to save his son's family, so he doesn't invent a time machine there. But I don't understand how Eva's world was ever created? It's said that it happens in the splinter moment when alternate universe Martha travels to save Jonas from the apocalypse, but if Eva's world didn't already exist before, there would be no alternate Martha to create that splinter moment. So even if the time loop is closed now, in the original iteration something else must've happened to create Eva's world, before the loop of cause and effect became closed.

Similarly, I don't Jonas's and Martha's unnamed kid ("the Origin") can be father of Tronte, even though it was implied he might be. Because again, the first iteration of the time loop in Jonas's universe couldn't happen without the existence of Ulrich and Mikkel, and if Tronte was fathered by the Origin, they wouldn't exist in the first iteration. The only way the loop makes sense to me is if the first iteration goes something like this:
Agnes and Tronte come to Winden, but because Sic Mundus doesn't yet exist, their reason for coming there is something else, and Tronte's mysterious father is someone else than the Origin.
->
Tronte marries Jana and they have Ulrich and Mads, just like in the later loops.
->
Mads doesn't go missing, so Ulrich's motivation for becoming a cop is something else in this first loop.
->
Ulrich marries Katharina, and they have Magnus, Martha, and Mikkel.
->
Tannhauser turns on his machine and creates the time tunnel in 1986.
->
Mikkel gets lost in the time tunnel in 2019. The reason for this is something different than in the later loops, but it's not hard to imagine a 11 year old kid wandering into a mysterious cave just because he's interested in it.
->
Mikkel travels back in 1986, grows up, marries Hannah, fathers Jonas.
->
The locked loop settles in.

But if this how it went, then Ulrich and Mikkel must exist in the original universe. It's not hard to come up with an explanation why Ulrich isn't the final scene though: he's an adulterer in both splinter universes, so probably he's that in the original universe too, and Katharina has already divorced him. But unlike in the splinter universes, Hannah and Katharina are friends (this could be a butterfly effect of Mikkel not traveling in time), so Hannah has invited her and not him to their little gathering.

Regina would be a time travel anomaly if Tronte were her Dad, and the family tree on the floor in Eva's room says he is - but yes it has to be Bernd in all three universes. The theory is that Claudia covered up her parentage and pretended it was Tronte, I'm not sure how much of that is spelled out in the show and how much is fanfic.

Btw, I found all those revelations of "X is Y's time travelling parent" in season 3 to be kinda gratuitous and pointlessly confusing. The plot twists in season 1 and 2 about who Jonas's father and Charlotte's mother really are were cool and unexpected, and they did serve the purpose of explaining the motivations of various characters. But the same doesn't really apply to season 3; for example, was there any reason why Noah's and Agnes's mother had be Hannah's time traveling kid who's also the young woman Jonas met in 2053? Would the plot have been any different if Bartosz had simply married some regular early 20th century woman and had Noah and Agnes with her? Feels like they just wanted repeat the previous season's twists even though there was no need to do so.

One small thing that really bugged me, in the first episode of this season, when Martha and the other kids are in the woods at night, she hears a creepy voice calling her name, and for a second sees a scary woman all covered in some black goo, who then disappears. I kept expecting for the show to explain what the fuck that was about, but it never did. I even rewatched the scene with freeze frame, but because of the black goo it's impossible to tell if the woman is supposed to be a version of Martha or one of the other time-travellers. Seems like a weird detail to leave unexplained in a story that otherwise tied all its threads?

https://i.insider.com/5efcd61af0f41938f67c8d55?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp

So I guess this means the other Martha is having a vision of her alternate self? But what it all means and why she's covered in black liquid (the God Particle?), I have no idea...

what it means is that they wanted a scary and mysterious image to pull people in in s1e1 and they chose to mirror it, along with lots of other things, in s3e1 because it would be cool. i am fine with this.

i thought that adam and eva's world were created fully formed, time loops and all, by tannhaus in 1986, in an inexplicable act of creation ex nihilo. i'm also fine with this.

If it was Doctor Who I'd be perfectly fine with that explanation, but this was a show that spent 3 seasons meticulously showing and explaining how each event was the result of a preceding event, so I found it odd that this crucial bit of the backstory was only explained in the broadest of strokes.

it's true doctor who fans will lap up any old shot

Another small detail that was never explained: in one scene in season 3 we see the middle-aged Jonas read the letter that the alternate universe Martha gave to him, which he then burns with a candle. But then immediately after that, there's a scene where Adam is reading the same letter. At first I thought that scene was hinting at there being more than two alternate universes: one where Jonas burned the letter and one where he didn't. But later on we find out that's not possible, time can only split at the moment of the apocalypse, and there's only one universe with the middle-aged Jonas and Adam in it. So what was the point of that scene then?

I mean, I guess it's possible Adam went back in time, stole the letter from Jonas, then returned it later to him so he could burn it. But what would be the point that, since Adam already knows what's in the letter?

This happens to a variety of objects in the show - the book, the device, the letter/suicide note from Michael - it's the paradox that once you start moving about in time you duplicate the item. I can't remember what happens specifically with Martha's letter, but at some point Michael's letter also gets destroyed but still exists.

Yeah, I got that, that's why I was wondering whether Adam acquired the letter via time travel... But with all the other objects that were "duplicated" via time travel, it was shown how that duplication came to be, and I don't think anything like that was shown with Martha's letter? And the scene of Jonas burning it was directly juxtaposed with Adam reading it, so clearly the show makers wanted to draw our attention to its paradoxical existence.

this show though... only partway through s2 but it's already top 5 best shows ever

Season 3 was a step too far for me in terms of complexity. I devoted so much attention to fruitlessly trying figure out what was going on that I began to lose sense of the character's motivations and the stakes. I definitely appreciate its ambition, but it was drifting into abstraction.

Conversely, the actual resolution seemed a little straightforward compared to what had gone before.