What DARK Is Really About

Dark is a series that captivated audiences with its mystery. Each episode revealed another puzzle piece, and we couldn't wait to see how it all fit together. And unlike other mystery box shows that only answer questions with more questions, you got the feeling Dark's creators meticulously planned things out, so the answers wouldn't disappoint.

And as many YouTubers can attest, it's easy to spend hours diving into Dark's mystery to solve things, to show how the timelines work, and how everything fits together. But behind all that, behind the convoluted timelines, parallel realities, and bootstrap paradoxes, there is meaning. Dark's complicated story wasn't just there to be a puzzle; it was used to explore some complex themes. In this video, we're going to dive into that side of the show. We're going to look at the series as a whole, how it ended, and offer an interpretation of what it all means.

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The characters of Dark were trapped in a repeating cycle of death, destruction, and misery. In an endless quest to stop it, Jonas traveled throughout time, only to learn that his actions were perpetuating that cycle. He grows up to become Adam and manipulates his younger self to ensure the same actions are repeated again and again and again, etc. According to Claudia, this occurred an infinite number of times.

The central question of the series is: Can we alter the timeline, or are our actions and outcomes predetermined? Which ties to a broader question: Do we have free will, or do we live in a deterministic reality? In a podcast interview, co-creator Baran bo Odar said one of their goals in making the show was to portray a singular feeling throughout the series. They wanted to take the question of free will versus determinism and add a feeling to it, to make it personal. And I think they succeeded. We watch characters make choices and try to achieve goals, but any hope is constantly undercut by the dark aesthetic and haunting score. You can feel the struggle of will vs. fate.

Skipping to the end of the series, Dark seems to settle the debate in favor of free will. Ultimately, Jonas and Martha did successfully alter the timeline and overcome fate. They prevented H.G. Tannhaus's family from dying. As a result, he never pursued time travel and never spawned Jonas and Martha's unnatural worlds. The cycle where these characters make the same choices over and over is broken when they finally make a new choice. But if this cycle occurred an infinite number of times, what actually changed in the final cycle to enable this new choice?

I think the answer to that question gets at the core of what Dark is really about. More than just a straightforward "yes, humans can overcome fate," and to understand what changed, first, we have to understand what perpetuated the cycle to begin with.

Season 3, episode 7, "Between the Time," includes a lot of voiceover from H.G. Tannhaus, which lays out many of Dark's themes and clarifies the driving force of the cycles. Over images of Tannhaus working on the time machine, he says, "Man is able to pursue any goal, no matter how unattainable it may seem. Over the course of an entire lifetime, no resistance, no obstacle is great enough to stop the human will in its tracks." He adds, "All the paths we take in our lives, every choice we make, is guided by our deepest desires. It's pointless to fight this sense of want. It determines every one of our actions, no matter how difficult and unimaginable they seem."

Put another way, human desire drives human will, which is powerful beyond imagination. It is powerful enough to bend space-time, and it is powerful enough to bend morality. So one can murder their own mother, steal an infant from parents, or destroy the one you love. Every good story includes a desire or goal; a character wanting or needing something and having to overcome obstacles to get it is the basic building block of storytelling. But this is especially true in Dark. Characters are almost entirely defined by their desires. We only spend a little time with them at the start of the series before their lives are interrupted and become solely defined by the pursuit of a goal.

Jonas, who eventually becomes Adam, wants to untie the knot and end the torturous cycle. Martha, or Eva from the other world, wants to preserve the knot and the life of her son. Claudia wants to save her daughter, Regina. Each of these characters spend a lifetime dedicated to their desires, and as Tannhaus promised, they are driven by them to do terrible things. Jonas kills Martha twice in the cycle we see, but usually a third time in previous cycles. Martha kills Jonas. Claudia kills her father, her other self, and has her daughter euthanized.

I focused on these three characters because they are the main players manipulating events and their younger selves to perpetuate the cycle. But you can pick other characters too and see how their lives are also driven and destroyed by a singular desire. Ulrich, in his endless pursuit to find Mikkel, ends up disfiguring a child before growing old and alone in an institution. Katharina, in her pursuit to find Mikkel and Ulrich, ends up murdered by her own mother. Noah, initially driven by religious belief, is engulfed by the need to find his daughter, and this search leads to his sister killing him.

With each cycle, these characters repeat their actions, perpetuating the knot. Their choices are consistent and predictable because their desires remain the same. As long as Adam wants to end the knot, Eva wants to perpetuate it, and Claudia wants to save her daughter, human will ensures that events proceed just as they did in prior cycles.

In season one, Jonas's middle-aged self tells him, "We are not free in what we do because we're not free in what we want." Tannhaus echoes this sentiment in his season 3 narration, saying, "You can choose as you want, but your wants are chosen for you." Tannhaus and Jonas warn that we can make choices and exert our will, but they will always be guided by desires, and we do not choose our desires. The characters of Dark are trapped in a cycle not because of determinism, but because of want. Each of them are infected by desire, and human will ensures they pursue whatever course might deliver on it, even if that involves doing terrible things.

Circling back to the question we asked a couple of minutes ago: What is the engine that drives the cycle? The answer is desire. As Jonas says to Martha in the final episode, "You and I, we're the reason that all of this happens time and time again because you can't let go of what you want, and I can't let go of what I want."

After season two aired, the co-creators sat down for an interview with Vulture. When asked if the characters have a shot at ending the cycle, Jantje Friese responded, "They think they know how this works, but they don't. They are still human. They will never be able to overcome their inner longings, their ego. They would need to completely crash their ego structure to get a grasp of it."

In the season three finale, this is exactly what Jonas and Martha did. They chose to let go of their desires and wipe themselves from existence. I don't think a person can more completely crash their ego than by erasing themselves and their entire reality. And as Friese pointed out, this required them to overcome their nature as humans. We all have inner longings that guide our actions, and to let go of them, we would have to let go of ourselves entirely, as Jonas and Martha did.

But something was gained by their actions. The origin world was restored, meaning 2020 and 2021 pass without an apocalypse, and all the characters who were not born of Jonas and Martha's impossible family tree get to exist in a reality not necessarily doomed to tragedy. With the exception of Torben's eye in the origin world, either through a quantum aftermath or spiritual vision, Hannah vaguely recalls the other worlds. She tells her friends at the dinner table that she dreamt of a world that ended, and the weird thing is, she adds, "It felt really good for everything to be over, like suddenly being free of everything. No wants, no needs, unending darkness, no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow, nothing."

Through Hannah, Dark tells us that Jonas and Martha made the right choice because, although the feeling is weird to Hannah, it is ultimately a good feeling that the world ended. Jonas and Martha could never be happy trapped in their cycle, but they knew Tannhaus might in the origin world. The same is true of Hannah, Torben, Regina, Bernadette, and the countless others spared by the apocalypse. They might be happy if given the opportunity to exist outside Jonas and Martha's doomed realities. And Dark tells us that potential for happiness is worth sacrificing for, even if it is someone else's happiness and not your own. It's a concept that only makes sense if, as Jonas and Martha did, you let go of your own ego and desires.

If I were to sum up Dark in a sentence, I would call it a cautionary tale about how we can trap ourselves in cycles of bad behavior by succumbing to desire. On Dark, this was portrayed as literal cycles through time loops, and to drive the point home, they gave us an entire second world only to show that even if things are different, characters' desires drive them to similar outcomes.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Dark's co-creators both agreed the ending is a happy one. Friese, in particular, pointed out that it resonates on a personal level with viewers because we all sometimes ask ourselves the same questions: "How does it feel to be almost in a prison because you can't get out of yourself? How can I get over always reacting in the same patterns to certain situations? How do I free myself from my reactions to certain impulses?" Letting all that go, for me, feels very satisfying.

In my initial review of the finale, I said that I have mixed feelings about the ending, and that has not changed. But I can now be a little more specific. It's funny because in that same interview, Odar and Friese both agreed it was a happy ending but offered slightly different perspectives. You already heard what Friese had to say, but here is a quote from Odar commenting on Jonas and Martha: "They have to realize that yes, we suffer and we have pain and desires, but we too are not so important that we must exist so someone else can't be happy. For me, it's a very happy ending realizing it's not just about you all of the time. You can actually do something good by not being there so someone else can be lucky and happy."

Between these two perspectives, I find that Friese's is the one that most resonates with me, but Odar's is where I find myself clashing with the show's philosophy. I think there's a kernel of truth in the idea that you may find yourself unintentionally in the way of someone else's happiness. But Dark constructed a science experiment where characters, by their very existence, prevent all human happiness. Exaggerating a story to bring a theme into clarity is totally valid, but in this case, I think Dark goes so far as to lose its parallel with reality. It tells us to consider the idea of one's own existence as a hamper on someone else's. Personally, I find that to be an unhealthy philosophy.

In my opinion, the kernel of truth that may be a little lost in the ending is that one may be a hamper on someone else's happiness due to a pattern of behavior, not due to one's fundamental existence. On the other hand, considering Friese's view, I certainly agree that our desires are powerful enough to drive our behavior and define us entirely. And Dark offers a very interesting insight, which is that we don't select our desires, or at least we don't feel like we do. For example, a desire to discuss film and television prompted me to create this YouTube channel, but I can't tell you why I have that desire to begin with. And maybe I can deconstruct it to figure out what draws me to it, but ultimately, it doesn't feel like I chose the desire. And over the last few years, it has driven much of my behavior.

There is a lot more we can say about Dark, but ultimately, I think the question of free will versus determinism is the driving force of Friese and Odar's story, and they ultimately answer with the nuance that we may have will, but that comes with a responsibility to introspect and understand what drives our will. Is it a desire that traps us in a pattern of destructive behavior? Does it drive us to hurt ourselves, or perhaps hurt someone else, maybe even the ones we love most? These questions can be well, dark, but the ending is ultimately a hopeful one. It says that we can let go of the desires that drive us. It says that if you are trapped, you can still find Ariadne's red thread to lead you out of the labyrinth.

Anyway, thank you for listening to me ramble, and please let me know your thoughts on Dark in the comments. What I presented in this video is my interpretation of the series, but that certainly doesn't mean it's definitive. The show is dense, complicated, and offers so much opportunity for differing opinions, so I would love to hear some of yours and continue discussing this amazing series. And if you enjoyed this video, please like, subscribe, and hit the bell icon so you can see more just like it. With that, thank you for watching, and see you on the next one. Take.