Dark season 2 ending: What happened?
Note: contains major spoilers for Dark.
There are two types of TV show on this earth: Netflix's Dark, and everything else.
The German sci-fi thriller, with its myriad twists and turns – how can someone's daughter also be their mother? Anyone? Help! – is a mind-bending specialist. It takes the traditional beginning, middle and end story structure and tears it apart, limb by limb, to build something brilliant and entirely unpredictable, a law unto itself.
But if you thought season one was a wild ride (we've got a recap here, just in case you need a refresher), the second chapter went to places even we weren't prepared for, once again leaving us with more questions than answers.
Yes, we still feel like our minds have gone 12 rounds with Stephen Hawking, but the ending did solve *some* big conundrums.
What is Adam's plan, and how does Jonas transition into him?
There was a heartbreaking moment at the end of Dark season two when Martha, the love of Jonas's life, was shot right in front of him, bleeding out on the floor as the light faded from her eyes. But the most startling element of her death was the fact that technically, it was Jonas who killed her.
While young Jonas looked on helplessly and his middle-aged self was elsewhere with young Magnus, Franziska and Bartosz, it was old Jonas, otherwise known as Adam, who murdered her.
We discover in season two that Jonas will eventually become Adam, a time traveller who has set up camp in 1921 and has access to a device which uses the God Particle. That allows him to journey anywhere in time, and not simply 33 years into the past or 33 years into the future (the solar and lunar cycles supposedly align every 33 years), limits that the other time-travelling devices impose on their operators.
Adam shot Martha because it's the pain of that loss which will spur Jonas on to do what needs to be done, however cruel. Adam tells his younger self that he will carry that pain with him for the rest of his life. It will emotionally harden him, and then one day Jonas will finally be able to let the memory of Martha go and focus on bringing about the end of the world in order to construct a new one.
"What is created today will begin the end," Adam told Jonas. "The dark matter must be created so that I can lead it to its destiny in the future. And I am the trigger for... what will make you what I am today."
Dark is about the battle between shadow and light.
Adam and the Sic Mundus, short for "Sic Mundus Creatus Est" – "Thus, the world is created" – represent the dark.
Young Jonas and middle-aged Jonas (the stranger), and Claudia Tiedemann (the white devil) are their adversaries and are trying to put a stop to the apocalyptic time loop which kickstarted the third cycle.
But will that cycle play out fully, or will Jonas and co manage to stop it? If Adam's plan is successful and linear time ceases to exist, what will the world look like?
Yup, alternate realities exist
Just when it looked like we had lost Martha after she was shot and killed, someone with her face (albeit with different hair) appeared from one alternate reality, and hinted at numerous others with the phrase "what world". So not only do we have time travel to contend with, there are also numerous different universes.
Where are the duo going, and how many other different worlds are there? Why did Martha show up at that particular moment and not before? Does anyone else know, and is this the key to stopping Adam and Sic Mundus?
Plus, if there are multiple other alternate realities, does that mean we'll get to meet a host of same but different characters, each with their own alternate reality hopping devices?
How the apocalypse actually happened
It was the stabilising and opening of the wormholes across all of the timelines by Adam's followers which ultimately caused the Winden nuclear plant to meltdown and begin the third and final cycle.
There was an accident at the plant in 1986 and the radioactive waste was barrelled up and hidden in the caves before being removed via a lorry. But those containers were eventually returned back to the plant and covered in concrete. When they are broken open right at the end under the orders of the Winden police, a black material rises out of it which causes one of the wormholes.
Through that particular time window, Charlotte and old Elisabeth, who is both her daughter and her mother, came face to face and proceeded to touch hands, just as the apocalypse tore through the town. Was Charlotte pulled through to 2053, as young Jonas was sucked through a different wormhole earlier?
Also in the show's finale, the passage between the different timelines (the Sic Mundus door), which is located in the caves and was previously blocked by Jonas, reopens and is discovered by Katharina.
By crawling through, she will surely survive the apocalypse and travel to a different time. But where is she going? We know that her son Mikkel is still trapped in 1986. If she heads there, picks him up, and the pair return home together, how will that affect the chain of events?
With the final chapter not expected on our screens until next summer, you've got more than enough time to shore up those theories, before the thriller swiftly dismantles them one by one.
If we've learned anything from Dark, it's to expect the unexpected.
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