Look, What Happened in the Night Finale?

Martha and Magnus in Dark's third season. But can you tell which universe they're in?

Martha and Magnus in Dark'due south third flavor. Only can you tell which universe they're in? Photo: Netflix

With a evidence equally complicated every bit Netflix's Nighttime, y'all'd recollect it'd be impossible to wrap up every story line — only Dark has a character who gives nativity to her own female parent, so doing the impossible is pretty much its affair. The 2nd flavor of the German-language series left off with a character from some other universe showing upwardly to save time-traveling teenager Jonas Kahnwald, just moments before the apocalypse. With the third and final season premiering over the weekend, Dark had eight episodes to conclude its trippy sci-fi saga — that, yes, at present included not just multiple timelines to track, but multiple universes — in a satisfying manner. And holy hell, did series creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese pull the whole thing off. Even through all the twisty revelations near who is related to whom, which parents impale their kids, which kids kill their parents, and more than one timeline existing within each universe, flavor three provided a conclusive ending that made sense. Merely likewise, just typing that sentence made my brain melt a little, and then who knows? Let's untangle what befalls our Winden residents in the Dark serial finale.

We spend a lot of time in Alternate Martha'due south universe, where Winden looks very much like the rural German town we've come up to know over previous seasons. It turns out that this alt-Winden is almost exactly similar our Winden: Things may happen in dissimilar ways or at unlike times, but the same consequence occurs. For example, Ulrich once over again follows Helge through time, assertive he is wrapped up in his son Mads's disappearance, but this time Ulrich travels to 1986 and attacks Helge as an adult, not a immature boy, and leaves his heart disfigured instead of his ear. Also, in this alternate universe, Ulrich has left Katharina to exist with Hannah, but he's notwithstanding off having an affair — this time it's with Charlotte Doppler.

The biggest difference in alt-Winden is a huge one: Mikkel never traveled dorsum in time, therefore his son Jonas/Adam doesn't be in this universe. However, that doesn't mean someone isn't moving chess pieces around in the battle with time. Where our Winden has Adam, alt-Winden has a mysterious effigy named Eve … who turns out to exist alt-Martha! The 2 worlds are bound together in a knot that perpetuates the countless cycles we've seen play out. Only while Adam wants to destroy the knot and terminate all of the suffering and tragedy, Eve wants to preserve the knot.

To answer that, we have to talk about the moment that Adam and Eve believe is the origin point of the knot, a.k.a. the specific event that kicked off the time loops. After alt-Martha saves Jonas from the apocalypse, she ends up having sex with him and getting pregnant. As a child from both universes, their son grows up to become the root of Winden's extremely knotty family tree: As a young man, he hooks up with Agnes Nielsen, who then gives birth to Tronte in both worlds. (Tronte so grows up to get Ulrich'south begetter, which ways that Jonas and alt-Martha's child is as well their ancestor. He is Jonas's great-great-grandfather and Martha's great-gramps.) After lifetimes spent investigating the loops, Adam and Eve determine that their son, this bridge between two worlds, must be the origin bespeak of the knot.

Adam wants to terminate his son from ever being born, thus destroying the knot and ending the cycles of tragedy. Martha, however, wants to protect her son, which means she believes she must preserve the knot and the countless cycles at all cost. Adam and Eve are constantly trying to outmaneuver one some other to go what they want. In one reality, Adam kills meaning Martha. In some other, their child is born and we run across him creeping around as a child, an adult, and an old human being doing Eve'south bidding, murdering and/or manipulating people to preserve the knot.

No kidding. Just in case Dark didn't requite us plenty things to keep track of, the third flavor too reveals that there is a loophole within the knot: When the apocalypse occurs (which happens days apart in the two universes), fourth dimension stands still for a fraction of a 2d. Inside that moment, a person can create alternate, simultaneous timelines within a single universe. In what feels like a predetermined loop doomed to repeat itself for eternity, this is the small moment when you tin can change things.

Here's the bargain: Adam has no idea about this loophole, merely Martha does, and she'south been using it to her advantage. She creates two timelines inside her universe, one in which she sends her younger cocky to save Jonas from the apocalypse and bring him back to her universe (a.k.a. what we saw in the season-two finale), as well as a timeline in which she sends Bartosz to cease Martha from saving Jonas. In that second timeline, Jonas rides out the apocalypse in the bunker under his house and never learns nigh the alternate universe; this is why Adult Jonas is so surprised when he meets alt-Martha in the 1880s. Eve needs both versions of her younger cocky to carry out her mission to preserve the knot and keep her son alive.

But there is 1 other graphic symbol who learns about the importance of alternate realities …

Claudia wins the gold star for not bad fourth dimension travel. Working alongside the alternative version of herself from the other universe, she assists Eve in her fight against Adam. At some indicate, an older version of herself tells Claudia that if everything they're doing works, their girl Regina will live. But later, Claudia learns that Regina dies in both worlds no matter what she does, which leads her to conclude that a third universe must exist.

Claudia eventually figures out that she'southward right: The ii universes of Adam and Eve were never supposed to be in the outset place, and there's an origin universe where all of this started. In the origin universe, H.Yard. Tannhaus loses his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter in a automobile blow in the 1970s. He builds a machine to save his family and bring them dorsum to life. When he uses this machine in 1986, though, he ends upwards simultaneously destroying his universe and creating the two universes nosotros've been hanging out in. As One-time Claudia eventually tells Adam, Tannhaus using this machine is the bodily origin signal of the knot: The only manner to cease all the pain and suffering of the time loops is to stop Tannhaus from e'er wanting or needing to make his machine. His son must live, people! And the only people who can save him are Jonas and alt-Martha.

Moments before the apocalypse, Adam arrives in the universe where Jonas is grieving over a dead Martha and gives him the information he needs to cease the madness: If he and alt-Martha travel to the origin universe and salve Tannhaus'due south family, the knot will never exist. So, this version of Jonas travels to the timeline where Bartosz stops alt-Martha from saving Jonas, and then turns on his time-auto orb and whisks her away before Magnus and Franziska recruit her to join Team Adam. Delight keep in mind that these versions of Jonas and alt-Martha take never met, notwithstanding they feel intensely continued because fate and destiny and dear.

Here's the programme: Jonas and Martha must wait in the tunnels on the day that Tannhaus creates time travel in the origin universe. At that verbal moment, they're able to travel into the origin universe by manner of a time bridge (it is very pretty merely also wild!). Once there, they travel to the dark of the machine accident and cease Tannhaus'southward son and daughter-in-law from driving off to their deaths. With his family alive, Tannhaus no longer has a reason to build his machine. And thus, the other universes are never created. The programme works! You lot know how they know it works? The two other universes and anybody involved in the knot outset fading abroad. Jonas and Martha hold easily as they turn into light that flickers out of being. Dang, this is emotional.

Dark's final scene shows us what present-day Winden looks similar in the origin universe. Most of the characters we've come to care about were tied upwards in that time knot — Jonas, Noah, Charlotte, Elisabeth, Franziska, all the Nielsens — and therefore don't exist anymore, only the characters who existed outside of that knot are seemingly gratis from the tragedy they were doomed to echo over and over. During a celebratory dinner at Regina'due south house, we see that Regina had a much happier babyhood with her mother, Claudia, and her father … Bernd Doppler! Hannah, who in this universe doesn't travel to the early 1900s to be murdered by her own son, is happily significant with Wöller's infant! (Wöller begins to tell the story of his center injury — it'due south healing up nicely in the origin universe, by the mode — merely for the tale to be interrupted past a blackout. Peter and Benni are finally together, and Katharina is at the dinner party, too. Honestly, if some version of Katharina didn't get a happy catastrophe, information technology would've been Likewise MUCH.

After the power goes out at the dinner party, Hannah gets a glimpse of a yellow raincoat that triggers some major déjà vu. She gets very existential most a dream she had about darkness (like fading from existence, perhaps?), and even in this origin universe, our remaining characters tin't aid merely toast to a earth without Winden. And so, when asked what she'south thinking of naming her baby, Hannah replies, "I always idea Jonas was a proficient proper noun."

This catastrophe is patently up for interpretation: Is this but part of some other cycle? Is Winden doomed no matter what universe it exists in? Or is this simply a hopeful conclusion that suggests that no matter what, some version of Jonas will be and perchance, just maybe, this Jonas will live a life complimentary of time travel, tragedy, and needing copious amounts of string to keep rail of his family tree?

Wait, So What Happened in the Dark Finale?