An obscure Netflix series called Dark just released its final season a few weeks ago. This German science fiction show explores a small town called Winden where people can time travel. The story follows a young man named Jonas as he unravels mysteries, uncovers long-hidden secrets, and tries to save those he loves.
Throughout its three seasons, the characters find themselves stuck in certain loops where they cause the very things they’re attempting to prevent, parents and their children cross one another in different timelines, and the world always ends.
Major spoilers to follow! If you haven’t seen the show, please go watch it now and come back when you’ve finished.
As Jonas discovers more about Winden and its complex relationships, he realizes that the chemical that makes time travel possible–called the god particle–will eventually cause the apocalypse that kills almost everyone he knows and loves. While trying to prevent this, he meets the older version of himself who now calls himself Adam. Adam wants not only to end time travel, but to erase everything from existence.
For much of the show, we see Adam as the antagonist. We root for the characters as they fight for life and especially for Jonas as he tries to save the girl who he’s in love with, Martha. Because of time travel, she also happens to be his aunt, so they can never be together, but he still hopes to save her life. We want so badly for Jonas to succeed. But in the end, we see Adam was right along, though not quite in the way he thought.
After struggling through many hardships, Jonas comes to believe that maybe if he never existed, he could save everyone from pain. In the first episode of season three, we even see a parallel world where Jonas doesn’t exist at all. Yet, this world is destined to a similar path that ends the same way when the god particle causes the apocalypse.
This mirror world is inextricably tied into Jonas’ and some travelers go back and forth between them. In this world, an older Martha fighting to preserve the loop that entangles everyone, and she calls herself Eve. The viewer discovers that Adam and Eve have been fighting with one another for all eternity to continue the loop or end it.
Jonas then finds out that his world and Eve’s world were created in the original world, when the physicist HG Tannhaus invented a time machine to save his son from dying. Jonas and Martha decide to travel to the origin world and save Tannhaus’ son. As a result, their two worlds will never exist, and they can save dozens of people from the painful time loop they’re trapped in. They choose to erase themselves from existence instead of living in pain forever.
During a certain heartbreaking scene on their journey to undo their worlds, Martha asks Jonas, “Do you think anything of us will remain? Or is that what we are? A dream? And we never really existed?”
Jonas just says, “I don’t know.”
As they start to dissolve into nonexistence, they hold hands and face oblivion together.
We’re all just walking each other home.
Ram Dass
Even though Martha and Jonas’s quest to understand what’s happening to them and their ultimate choice to undo their timelines are struggles we could never imagine, we also face the same questions. They’re the questions we all have about death, about generations passing us, about humanity eventually going extinct.
We don’t have to undo ourselves, no, but in a million years, in a thousand years, we’ll be gone. Our memories die with us, and the memories of us die with others. Even a mere hundred years after my death, everyone who had memories of me will most likely be gone, too.
We wonder if anything of us will remain, but we just don’t know.
Maybe something will happen to our souls when our bodies die. Maybe we’ll go to another plane of existence, or we’ll come back in another form. But we don’t know.
After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, JK Rowling
What we do know is this, here, now, the present, this moment. This is all there is, all we are guaranteed.
The characters of Dark couldn’t live in the present. With the paradox of time travel controlling their lives, they face heartbreaking situations with unsolvable problems. Some characters have to do things they know will cause their younger selves immense pain. One character travels back in time to find his son, only to be torn away from him and put into a mental institution. One woman kills the older version of her daughter without knowing who it is.
When Jonas and Martha undo the two worlds affected by time travel, they return to the natural order of things. Humans are meant to be in one place: the present.
Albert Einstein said that the distinction between past, present, and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion. If we just look at it a different way, the past and the future can fall away so we’re only left with the present. With only this moment to guide us, we can live more fully. And when the time comes, we can accept death and wherever it leads us.