‘Dark’ on Netflix Series Finale Recap: In the Light

The solution was simple, as solving a trick knot often is.

Befitting the Triquetra symbol found on the cover of the time traveler’s guidebook passed from character to character, there is a third world in addition to the ones Adam and Eva come from. On that world—the origin world—clockmaker H.G. Tannhaus is the first person to open the spacetime passage beneath Winden, in an attempt to travel back in time and rescue his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter from a fatal car accident. This experiment resulted in the creation of the other two worlds, grown like cancer from the original.

It took the elderly Claudia Tiedemann decades to figure this out, and to discover that the only way to travel to that original world and save the family—thus eliminating Tannhaus’s need to create time travel in the first place—is to act at the very moment of the apocalypse, when time stood still for a fraction of a second.

So Jonas—fresh from seeing his beloved Martha get murdered before his eyes—snatches the alternate version of Martha—fresh from watching her older self murder the world-traveling Jonas, whom she’d come to love in just one day—from her appointed course of action, just as Adam whisked him away from his own.

Together they travel to the origin world and wait for Tannhaus to open the passage for the very first time. They find themselves in a corridor of endless light, where they see each other as children, children capable of seeing through the walls of reality and looking right back at them.

They emerge from the light together into a road on a rainy night. They divert Tannhaus’s son, who’s leaving Winden after a nasty fight with his father, from crossing the bridge where the fatal accident was to take place. The Tannhauses reunite. Jonas, Martha, the adult Jonas, the adult Martha, Adam, Eva, and Claudia all slowly fade from existence.

We end things at a dinner party, where the characters who aren’t born from the once-unending knot—Katharina, Hannah, Regina, Peter, Bernadette, and Wöller, whose wounded eye cheekily never gets explained—toast to a world without their hometown in it. The lights flicker, and Hannah recalls a dream in which the world ended, a fate she thought fitting and freeing. But she seems glad to be alive, in the end. She has a baby on the way, you see, and she thinks Jonas is a beautiful name.

One of the best science fiction shows ever made, and one of the finest dramas of the Peak TV era, Dark ended thoughtfully, emotionally, beautifully, brilliantly. With regards to the relationship that drove so much of it, the young love between Jonas and Martha, Dark found a way to have its cake and eat it too. It’s true that the pair were the most important people in the saga of Winden and its apocalyptic time loops, both as prime movers and as the behind-the-scenes masterminds Adam and Eva. But by the time the credits roll, the true nature of their importance is revealed to be them knowing when to gracefully exit the stage. It’s Tannhaus, an eccentric minor character, and his family, whom we don’t even meet until the back half of the show’s very last episode, whose relationship is the font from which the worlds we’ve been visiting were created; Jonas and Martha ultimately exist simply to reunite them, and then fade away.

It may seem like a bait-and-switch. You may not care about the Tannhauses the way you do about the Nielsens and Kahnwalds and Tiedemanns and Dopplers. You may not have gotten all the AnSwErS, from the origin of Wöller’s missing eye (or missing arm, depending on the world in question) or who raised Jonas and alt-Martha’s child to become a murdering trifecta of bastards—or how alt-Martha survived long enough to bring that child to term and give birth to him in the first place. (That said, you do get some AnSwErS, from the origin of the time loop to how the alternate version of Helge Doppler lost his eye, courtesy of Ulrich Nielsen.)

What you do get from this episode, titled “Paradise,” is Dark telling you what Dark has always been about. It’s about family. It’s about love. It’s about fighting and reuniting, the ties that bind and the crises that sever those binds and the herculean human effort required to tie them back together again. Dark was one of the most complicated narratives the medium has ever seen—it makes Lost look like a Dick Wolf police procedural; I’m trying and failing to come up with a point of comparison that isn’t Twin Peaks Season Three, that’s the level on which we’re operating here. But it never lost sight of its fundamental truth: the idea that love matters, that love is what makes life worth caring about. All the gorgeous sci-fi imagery and ferocious soap operatics serve that central point. Once you realize this, you’re not in the dark anymore.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Dark Season 3 Episode 8 ("The Paradise") on Netflix