Dark Season 3 picks up where season 2 left off, with Marta-from-another-world (Lisa Vicari) imploring a shattered Jonas (Louis Hofmann) to come with her before the apocalypse wipes him out. From there, it goes into a god-awful mess, illustrating that time travel isn’t the solution that everyone hopes it will be, and undoing it requires the ultimate sacrifice. The journey in season 3 is more muddled and bleak than the first two seasons (and that’s saying something!), but it does lead to a rightful and emotional conclusion.
The Predestination Paradox
The premise of season 3 is that time travel is an infinite circle of hell paved with good intentions. In the world of Dark, several characters travel through time, all with the intention of changing events to have a positive outcome. For example, Jonas promises a shot-dead-by-Adam Martha in season 2 that he will go back in time and make sure she stays alive next time around. But if you have a bunch of people all manipulating time to meet their needs, it’s almost like there was no time travel at all, because the same miserable outcomes will keep occurring. To demonstrate this point, the creators added a second, alternative world so that Jonas and Marta, Adam (Dietrich Hollindarbäumer) and Claudia (Lisa Kreuzer), Helge (Hermann Beyer) and Ulrich (Oliver Masucci), could continue working at cross purposes until someone finally figures out how to untie this Gordian knot.
Questions are Answered
This sounds bleak, and it is. Yet, I still enjoyed some gasp-inducing moments in Dark season 3, such as what Winden will look like in 66 years, and I remained attached to Jonas and Marta’s star-crossed love story. These poor 17-year-old kids just want to be normal teenagers. Why that can’t happen is one question that is answered (and it’s not just because they are aunt and nephew). Other things we learn are how Jonas turned into the cliché-spouting, possibly evil Adam and why he looks the way he does, who Noah (Mark Waschke) really is, how Elisabeth (Sandra Borgmann) became so battle hardened, and whether or not Claudia has the solution to the “knot”. One mystery that is never solved, however, is what happened to Wöller’s (Leopold Hornung) eye, which is the one dose of humor we get in the entire series.
Dark Season 3 Verdict
Despite my irritation with the introduction of the second world, and the addition of some extraneous plot lines and characters, (what was the point of Silja??) by the end of Dark season 3, I was crying into my salad, literally. And it’s the ending that gets a gold star. They may have taken us WAY out of the way to get there, but how the creators wrap up the series is perfect. My advice is to stick with it and you will be rewarded, unlike the people of Winden.
Note: If you love the music in Dark, you can see the track list here.
Looking for more of the best in foreign TV? Don’t miss our other great reviews HERE!
