I just finished watching the three-season Netflix series “Dark.” It’s a kind of sci-fi time-travel thriller. It was a German-language series set and shot in Germany.
There were several things that were never answered or resolved. Or maybe I just missed something. I found the plot very complex with tons of characters and I have trouble tracking those kinds of stories.
Dead children were found with burned-out eyes and exploded eardrums. How did they die and how did they get these injuries?
Peter Doppler was thought to be seeing a transgender prostitute, but there was some sort of reveal that he was only…I don’t know, helping her with money or something but not having sex with her? Never quite understood the back story on that.
What was going on in the windowless room where young boys would be strapped into a chair?
Who was the guy who showed up in the last season as himself at three different ages, and what was his motivation for his actions?
Any other discussion besides answers to these is also welcome.
I enjoyed the series but felt it had its flaws. It was trying to be hard sci-fi but the science was all mumbo jumbo except for a very short segment on quantum superposition that seemed like comic relief. I would rather that they had just left the underlying explanation as a mysterious effect that nobody understood.
The kids were being used to open the time portal in the windowless room with the chair. I’m not really sure how. They died in the process.
I believe the transgender prostitute was Peter’s sister. He was helping her financially.
I was absolutely in love with the first two seasons of the show but as soon as they got into the alternate universe stuff I had to bail. We never finished. Me, a lover of romance, was like, “This love story is encroaching too much on the plot.” It felt suddenly like YA post-apoc fiction. Then when Marta got pregnant that was the last straw. I’ve never gone so fast from loving a show to losing all interest.
I stuck it out because I felt so invested. But when they reached three alternate universes I felt like the writers were saying, “How the hell do we get out of this?” I think if you saw the ending you would be happy that you bailed. It was kind of an Interstellar ending. It did resolve everything but it got hokey and also love-story melodramatic.
More questions:
How did Adam get so scarred? Looks like burns but we never see what happened.
When did he start calling himself Adam?
Did the apocalypse devastate the entire world? All we ever see is Winden.
Why did Hannah go back in time to see Ulrich in the mental institution, only to abandon him?
I thought it could have been better if they had fewer characters and showed more characters’ timelines in detail jumping around in time. It was very difficult to synthesize any continuity from what we are seeing. For example, showing how Mikkel grew up as Michael and met Hannah.
I believe it was explained that frequent time-jumping could eventually lead to physical damage that accumulated with frequency of time jumps, and old Adam’s scarring was a result of his time-jumping frequent flyer status.
ETA: this dark wiki might help. It helped me put the pieces together when I had lost the thread after I began watching season 3:
The dead kids were failed attempts at time travel in the “electric chair.”
The apocalypse did affect the entire world, but in a newscast, it mentioned that the effect was centered on Winden and was worst there.
Hannah ditched Ulrich because he wouldn’t leave his wife for her.
My question is, what was the deal with Jonas and Marta “sensing” each other at the end? Were they in different universes that were temporarily connected via their actions? Maybe the three universes created by the initial accident took people from alternate realities who would otherwise never have coexisted and threw them together. That’s why they were “abominations” and why the town felt “wrong” to some people.
The writers had a nice Ex Machina for getting rid of loose ends by simply causing the alternate realities to end. But it felt like a cheat to just show the 1880’s folks dissolve with no resolution. Katherinas murder by her younger mother had no consequences, etc…