Dark
“The Paradise”, Season 3 Episode 8
Requested By
Dan200 and jakkdl on our Discord server
What do I know about this series going into it?
Only that it was made by the same creators as the previously-requested 1899. Prior to the request, I had never heard of it.
Recap
A house in a rural area. Inside, a man licks an envelope closed, then hangs himself. It’s a dream, or possibly a memory, as someone else wakes up.1
Elsewhere, a monstrously scarred man is talking to an old witch. He doesn’t understand how she can be alive, when he ordered her killed. She says she’s there to end his “endless loop”. He doesn’t believe her; he claims he already did.
But the witch says he’s wrong. She says that his world and “Eva’s” world should never have existed. The “origin” isn’t in either world, she says. He suddenly understands: “The triquetra. There is a third world.”
The witch says “Tannhaus” made a mistake in that third world. He tried to bring somebody back from the dead, but his machine destroyed the world and split it into two. You can only stop the “knot” by preventing the invention of spacetime travel in the first place.
The opening credits involve mirrors that turn hands and lips and other body parts into strange creatures and freaky patterns. The letters D and R in Dark are reversed.2
Back to the Scarred Man and the Witch. I can see a bit more of their surroundings: a partially collapsed building. The Witch explains that she worked to ensure that the time loop stayed exactly the same up until this moment, to ensure that he tried and failed to destroy the “origin”, and only now can she intervene to break the loop once and for all.
Elsewhere, a white-haired old woman tells a dark-haired young woman that everybody has to die. The young woman’s unborn son is the origin, she says, and gave life to everybody in both worlds. While she explains this, three men approach: young, middle-aged, and old. I think they’re meant to be the same person at different ages. The young woman is Eva, and she will do anything to save her son. If Eva wants “Jonas” (her son, I think?) to live, says the old woman, she must do the same thing that was done in every previous iteration of the loop.
The old woman hands Eva a gun and has her lie in wait to shoot somebody, who she overhears talking about the apocalypse. That somebody turns out to be another version of herself; she approaches her other self with the gun, apologizes, then turns and shoots somebody else.
Okay, so far I’m extremely lost. The only thing I have so far is that the “knot” and the “origin” are two words for the same thing. I think.
Back to Scarred Man and the Witch. She explains that she eventually figured out that only her dead daughter Regina (whose grave we see in a flashback) was not part of the knot. Regina is fated to die in both worlds, so her only chance of survival is if the Witch restores the origin world.
The Witch talks more about how she maintained the original sequence of events, during which we see flashbacks of two fights happening in parallel. I think, but am not sure, that these fights are between the same two people but in different universes; if I understand correctly, in both cases the combatant named “Helge” (I think) dies, his head bashed in by his opponent, but on one world Helge is a boy and on the other he is an adult.
The Witch explains that even though things might not happen exactly the same way in both worlds, Helge was destined to be bashed to death with a rock by this opponent and have his body dragged away. On one world, however, the murderer gets an immediate comeuppance: the Witch and a one-eyed old man discover him, and the old man kills him.
The Witch continues to explain to Scarred Man that there is a loophole, a fraction of a moment during the apocalypse, during which you can change fate and break the time loop. Eva used it to send her younger self in a different direction, and the Witch used it to be here today to talk to Scarred Man. She explains that now Scarred Man needs to use it, to send “Jonas and Martha” in a different direction, because they’re to blame for the time loop.
Cut to a nuclear power plant. Lightning strikes and a black bubble appears in midair above the plant; the bubble rapidly expands, I assume to swallow the world and cause the apocalypse. In a cabin somewhere, Jonas is crying over a dead body when suddenly Scarred Man appears. Jonas demands to know why Scarred Man is here, what more could he want from him if Martha’s dead? Scarred Man activates a device that teleports them both away. Jonas reacts in seemingly self-contradictory fashion: both “how did you do that” and “what time have we transported to”.
Turns out Scarred Man is a future version of Jonas himself. He explains to Jonas that they have teleported to the other world, on the day the apocalypse hits that other world, and Jonas needs to save the other Martha. For one moment, time will stand still and Jonas will need to use that moment to get to Martha before Magnus and Francisca3 do.
Irrelevantly, the one-eyed old man is wandering through the woods chanting “tick, tock” to himself.
Two copies of the witch are talking about how if this all goes right, Regina will live. For some reason they refer to Scarred Man as Adam, not Jonas. Adam and Eva, really?
Meanwhile, Eva is riding on the back of someone else’s bicycle. Jonas is running through the woods. Both are heading for the nuclear power plant.
Eva and her companion run into two other people in the woods. One of them is about to pull out a gun, so I’m guessing these are Magnus and Francisca. Jonas sees them from afar, activates the timer on the teleportation device that Scarred Man gave him, runs towards Eva, and tackles her at exactly the right moment to teleport them both.
I’m very confused. He’s supposed to save Martha, but this is the character referred to as Eva earlier. Are Eva and Martha the same person, then, just as Jonas and Adam are? That makes the “Adam and Eva” thing a lot less cliched and problematic, if those are just aliases that Martha and Jonas took when they grew older.
Jonas and Eva reappear on a street outside the power plant. Eva says this can’t be: Jonas is dead. He’s equally shocked: You look like her.
She demands to know what time they’ve teleported to and where they are. Jonas explains that it’s June 21, 1986, the day both worlds were created when Tannhaus destroyed the original world. They have to stop Tannhaus from creating the two worlds, Jonas says, though I’m not sure how they can do that if they’re not in Tannhaus’s world and the teleportation device can’t get you there.
Meanwhile Adam sets fire to a Middle Ages-style4 painting of Adam and Eve. He goes to another room with floating blue electric goo, and pulls a lever there to stabilize it and make it into a black sphere like the one we saw swallow the world earlier.
Jonas leads Eva to a cave; it’s one we’ve seen multiple people enter and emerge from in various flashbacks. She wants to know the plan, so Jonas explains that they’re going to prevent someone’s death by getting to them before they die. He goes over what we already knew: that the two of them are the reason for the time loop, and they need to undo the existence of both worlds.5 Eva is initially horrified at the idea, but it takes about two seconds for her to change her mind.
At this point I’m starting to suspect that if everyone else has been a Martha/Eva, the Witch is a future Eva as well.
Adam enters a room to find an old woman that I’ve seen before, but I’ve forgotten who she is. He pulls out a gun, and she waits to be shot. “You’re going to kill me today,” she says. “Martha will find me, just as I once found myself” – so she’s an older Martha/Eva, and possibly a younger Witch– “and this is what turns her away from you.” But in this iteration, Adam doesn’t shoot.
Eva won’t accept that. She grasps the gun in Adam’s hand and pulls the trigger herself. But he reveals that he’s removed the bullets. She can’t understand how this is possible: this isn’t how fate was supposed to go! You were supposed to kill me! “You will die,” he says. “I will die, and everything that has grown from us,” now that the Witch has convinced him to change his mind.
He gives the same explanation to Old Martha that he learned from her older Witch self: that Tannhaus’s son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter died in a car accident, and he tried to go back in time to save them, etc., etc. Meanwhile, in the cave, Jonas and Martha climb through a narrow tunnel and reach a plaque that reads SIC MUNDUS CREATUS EST. And Young Jonas tells Young Martha the story too.
But one thing is new. Jonas’s plan isn’t to stop Tannhaus from building his faulty time machine, as I had assumed. It’s to prevent the moment that Tannhaus’s pain even began – to succeed where Tannhaus failed, to prevent the accident from ever happening.
On the origin world, Tannhaus activates his machine. Sparkling lights start to float through Jonas and Martha’s cave tunnel. Elsewhere, Old Martha and Adam embrace, expecting oblivion.
Jonas wakes up. He’s in a spatial corridor made of sparking lights. He calls out to Martha, who is nowhere to be seen – because she is in her own star corridor.
The end of Jonas’s star corridor opens up, and he sees a Young Martha as though from the back of her bedroom closet. She sees him too, but her mother just sees the back of the closet.
The inverse happens in Martha’s star corridor: it opens up and she and a young Jonas can see each other, where Young Jonas’s father sees only the basement wall. Adult Martha and Adult Jonas each back away from this vision, until their corridors intersect and they bump into each other.
They find that at the point where their corridors connect there is a third corridor, which clearly leads to the third world. They walk down the corridor towards it and Jonas activates the teleportation sphere.
A young Tannhaus is arguing with his son. I’m not clear on exactly what the argument is about – he wants him to take over his clockmaker’s shop when he retires, I think, but it also has to do with Tannhaus’s obsession with astrophysics. The son leaves in a huff, and drives into the stormy night with his wife and daughter. They kiss while he’s driving, which is incredibly stupid of him – and just then, Martha and Jonas teleport into existence in the middle of the road. The car swerves.
For a moment I was 100% certain that this is all part of the stable time loop too, and that Martha and Jonas themselves caused the accident they’re trying to prevent.
But no, the car is okay, just on the side of the road. The son gets out and yells at Martha and Jonas for standing in the road, but for some reason they’re less interested in explaining themselves than in making cryptic statements.
Somehow, one thing they say (about knowledge being a drop and the universe being an ocean) happens to be one of Tannhaus’s favorite quotes, which brings Tannhaus’s son - named Marek - up short. But Marek’s wife is creeped out…
…and pulls him back to the car, where they do a U-turn and drive back to his father. The wife tells Tannhaus that Marek thinks they were a pair of angels sent to warn him.
Back to Martha and Jonas. The rain has conveniently stopped. “Do you think it worked?” Martha asks. I assume it did, but why haven’t they vanished yet? Were they spared from the unraveling because they’re not currently inside the worlds that are being unraveled?
They describe what they saw in the star corridors. Each one remembers when they were children and saw the other in the back of their closets. So it’s clear that their visions as children led Martha and Jonas to grow up seeking each other out, but they didn’t know about the other worlds. So Young Jonas of World A saw Adult Martha of World B, but got together with Martha of World A (who died). And Young Martha of World B saw Adult Jonas of World A, but got together with Jonas of World B (who died). And now they’re finally together with the actual versions of each other that they had been seeking all along.6
Anyway, causality having politely waited for them to get it all straightened out before interrupting, their bodies began to fade and vanish into sparkles of light. And elsewhere, the same happens to Adam, to Old Martha, to middle-aged Martha, to the Witch, and to some random bearded guy I don’t recognize (who seems to take his disintegration completely in stride).7
We fade in on a family around a dinner table, clinking glasses in a toast to Regina. One man is asked about his wounded eye (I’m guessing he grows up to be the old guy without the eye), but he barely starts the story when the power goes out.
One of the women, Hannah, freaks out at the power outage. She tells the others how she dreamt last night that this happened and the world ended, and that was a good thing because there were no more worries or cares, just oblivion.
Anyway, Hannah is pregnant and wants to name her baby Jonas.
Another woman recommends they toast to a “world without Winden”, who I think is her ex-husband. The power goes back on, and they say they guess Winden isn’t leaving after all and they’re happy it’s back. So maybe Winden is the nuclear power plant? And on that underwhelming note, the episode ends.
Unresolved questions
Will time travel ever be reinvented? Will somebody one day screw up the same way Tannhaus did and destroy the world all over again?
Does Regina actually survive in the original world? The Witch assumes that despite everyone having the same fate in the first two worlds, their fate in the third world can be different. But as far as I can tell this is just a hope. What if individuals’ fates in each of the two worlds is linked precisely because that fate originated in the third world?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 8/10. An imaginative and complex plot that hints at layers and layers of backstory that I missed.
It was genuinely fun to slowly puzzle out, over the course of the episode, the fact that more and more characters were all actually the same two people at different stages of their lives8 – something that all the other viewers already knew coming in. It was like the writers created a separate mystery especially for me.
The fakeout with the car crash was excellent, and I’m genuinely curious as to whether that was intended. Does every viewer gasp and think, “Oh no, they caused the very car crash they were trying to prevent”? Or did previous episodes show the crash, such that I’m the only viewer who was fooled?
Writing: 3/10. Harsh, I know. But while most of the writing was above average, there was just way too much repetition of the same explanation. Yes, I understand that the characters all created each other in a tangled predestination paradox. I understand that Martha and Jonas need to go to the third world to prevent the other two worlds from ever being created. If I understood that the first time it was explained, how much more frustrating must the repetition have surely been for the regular viewer? The episode could easily have been twenty or thirty minutes shorter.
Production: 9/10. Top-quality special effects. Excellent casting, hair, makeup, and editing decisions that help sell the belief that I’m seeing the same two people at four or five different stages of their lives. The only criticism I have is with the color grading, with many scenes in shades of drab blue-and-gray. It felt as though the VFX artists kept stealing the colorist’s parking spot, so he or she spitefully undid all of their work in post-production.
Characterization: 8/10. Although there were ultimately only two characters of consequence, they have a very complex relationship that sucked me in and made me want to explore it further. I want to learn how they became each other and meddled in each other’s lives at different ages thanks to time travel.
Accessibility: 3/10. As I said above, one specific part of the plot was very clear, having been explained over and over until it was coming out of my ears.
But all the other aspects of the plot were completely inaccessible. I am left with many, many questions that were probably much clearer if you saw the rest of the series: the importance of Regina; why and how Martha and Jonas became visible to each other’s younger selves but not their parents; why and how they remembered seeing each other as their younger selves if the same deviation from the timeline that made those apparitions possible also erased their worlds from existence; how the Witch broke free of the predestination paradox; who all those people were around the dinner table at the end; what the caves and the murders were all about; what caused the apocalypse and why it couldn’t be prevented without undoing the creation of the two worlds; and so on.
Heck, it was only upon rereading my notes that I remembered that the episode began with somebody’s (possibly imaginary) suicide, a plot point that was clearly very important but which was not revisited. So there was a lot going on that went over my head.
Closure: 10/10. How much more closure can you get than undoing the existence of the main characters and even the entire worlds they lived in?
Do I want to watch the series now?
My only concern is with the repetitive script. Hopefully it was just an aberration, where they wanted to make damn sure that everybody understood the ending. If, God forbid, the entire series was like that, it can grow very tiring very quickly (have you ever watched Inuyasha?).
But I definitely want to give this series a shot! It seems like a fascinating world, and I want to see how this predestination paradox was put together from the beginning.
When the episode title comes up, it’s given as “Paradise”, where Netflix calls it “The Paradise”.
Possibly spelled wrong – I only had an instant to see the name in the subtitles.
I don’t know anything about art history.
Given that this will undo his own existence, I’m not clear on why he’s so cavalier about this, or how Adam convinced him to go along with it so easily.
But that doesn’t make sense. In the original timeline – that of the stable time loop – they died in the apocalypses, and never entered the star corridors. So how do their childhood memories of the original timeline include this moment?
Curiously, only the characters themselves and any man-made objects they created disintegrate – but not the world around them, or man-made objects created by other people.
A plot point also present in Heinlein’s All You Zombies, the only story he ever wrote that didn’t make me want to hurl the book across the room in annoyance.