Hey guys, Pete here. Today I'm going to do a Dark season 2
ending explain video for you. If you're looking for answers to Dark's big
mysteries, I regret to tell you that you'll have to
wait until season 3 is released to get that type of clarity.
But, after nearly a year of thinking about the season 2 finale
it feels like the right time to break down what happened and where things were
left to set up the ending of one of my favorite tv shows.
I've already put together a recap of the second season. If it's been a while since
you watched season two I recommend watching that
as well to remember everything that happened. Because i've already done that
I can just focus on the ending of season two in this video. In case this
is the only Dark season 2 video you're going to watch
before season three comes out, I will recount the big revelations that we got
in the second season. The first was that Noah isn't the big
bad in the story. He follows a man named adam who is the
leader of a group called Sic Mundus. we learn that Adam is actually Jonas, the
oldest version of him that we've met. This means that there are two major
factions in the story led by Adam and Claudia. This is all fairly complicated
considering that alliances change throughout time. Adam and Sic Mundus's
goal appears to be to destroy the world, but
he tells people he's in a war with god which is
time. Claudia wants to stop Adam. She sells that as wanting to save the world
and there's a component of changing small details of things
which will lead to a different outcome. Another big revelation was that
Elisabeth and Noah are Charlotte's parents. This means that
Charlotte is both the daughter and the mother of Elisabeth which makes for a
paradoxical family tree. As far as time travel is concerned there
were no major changes in how things work. based on what's
observable Dark appears to be occurring in a deterministic system where nothing
can be changed despite what some of the characters say or try to do.
Tannhaus does introduce the idea of a bootstrap paradox.
Very simply this explains how something can cause its own existence by being
sent back in time. it exists in a cause and effect loop
with no point of creation. he uses his book as an example which he wrote after
reading a copy that Claudia gave him from the future. it
would take a whole separate video to explain the observable rules for time
travel in Dark so i'm not going to get into it here, but i will revisit it at
the end because one of the biggest revelations
comes in the final moments of the ending when we learn that there's at least one
alternate world or reality. So, what happened at the ending of Dark
season 2? The final episode opened in 2053 where the older Elisabeth is
preparing for the day of the apocalypse. she looks at photos of her daughter and
mother Charlotte from when she was a baby.
Elisabeth is the leader of the survivors in the contaminated restricted zone
around the nuclear power plant. they are followers of a prophecy related to Sic
Mundus and are waiting for the passage to
reopen on this day. in 2020 stranger Jonas grabs the gun
Boris Niewald brought with him to Winden from the box that Hannah kept it
in. he also looks at the spot on the floor
where his younger self will see Martha die
later. the gun he's grabbing is the same gun that will be used to kill her so
this is a really nice touch that shows he has experienced her death
before. he echoes this to her when he goes to her house saying, "I saw
you die once. I won't let that happen again." when she
won't come along with him he uses the same gun to force her into the bunker.
he's trying to keep her safe from the apocalypse. at this point he should know
that she's not going to stay there but he still has to try,
Katharina arrives at the Kahnwald house with the time machine
and finds Michael's map of the caves and the hand lamp. she runs into stranger
Jonas when he returns who now believes he can't change the
fact that he'll become Adam, but believes he might be able to stop him.
at the caves young Jonas is with middle Claudia not long after she watched her
father Egon die. in their conversations we see how he is
under the influence of older Claudia and how that drives his decisions.
it's interesting that he's guided by this idea of trying to change small
things that will produce a different outcome all the way up until the time he
closes the portal in the season one finale. Jonas activates the machine in
the tunnel and that reopens the passage. the other characters around then then
all notice that something is happening. Katharina asks stranger Jonas what it is
and he explains that the passage in the caves is being reopened.
she sees this as an opportunity to try to find Mikkel and leaves the house with
Michael's map to try to travel through the passage.
she leaves the time machine that she was carrying there.
after they opened the passage Jonas tells middle Claudia he's going to find
his mother and Martha and for her to go find Regina and take
her to the bunker Peter and Elisabeth Doppler go to the
bunker as well and when they open the door Martha escapes
in 1921 Noah confronts and tries to kill Adam. Adam says they can't escape their
fates and says that it's not Noah's fate to
kill him on that day. when Noah presents the missing pages
from the notebook he says you're not waging war against god you're
waging it against humankind. Adam isn't worried because he believes
it's not his fate to die and watches as the gun jams on Noah
making it impossible for him to kill him. Adam's belief is that this knot, this
world we've been introduced to with Jonas at its center, can only be
undone by destroying it completely. this seems to support noah's belief that
Adam is waging war against humanity Noah won't be around to see how it plays
out though because Agnes enters the room and kills him.
unlike her brother she is able to use the gun and shoots him with Adam's
approval. older Noah's story ends there and we see
his younger self arrive in 2020 in the next shot.
he arrives at the Kahnwald house with the letter for stranger Jonas and he says
it's from Martha based on what we've seen this can't be from the original Martha so
we're left to wonder if Adam wrote it or if it was written by alt-Martha who we'll
meet later. he looks emotional and seems shocked by
what he reads and takes off with the time machine
after Noah tells him that he has to save Magnus, Bartosz, and Franziska. we don't
know what the letter says but the mention of saving Agnes and Noah later
is interesting thinking of what Jonas cares about we
could speculate that Magnus and Franziska need to be saved in order to
produce a child that would be important for the rest of the family trees
if that child was Agnes then the Martha he fell in love with wouldn't exist
unless she's born since she's the farthest point back on the Nielsen line
that we know of none of that is confirmed and i didn't
like this theory at all when i first heard it but there is some sense to it
and it would explain what was inside that letter that made him change his
mind about trying to kill Adam in the lead-up to the event at the power
plant Katharina enters the caves older Elisabeth enters the dead zone in
2053 to activate the god particle machine
there Adam gets ready and then travels to 2020 and then later we see his
machine being activated again charlotte arrives at the
power plant just as Clausen is discovering the barrels
and young jonas arrives at his house just before Martha arrives
they have a heartfelt reunion and kiss passionately until they're interrupted
by adam's arrival adam then kills martha telling jonas he
will carry that pain with him for the rest of his life until he's ready to let
go of her her death is necessary to jonas's
transformation into adam and adam needs the apocalypse to happen so that he can
use the dark matter to destroy the knot and
it does happen and i described it in greater detail in
my season 2 recap the quick explanation is that Clausen
opening the barrels leads to a portal opening up connecting
2020 to 2053. elisabeth and charlotte see
each other through it and they touch hands just before
Winden is destroyed reflecting on the ending one of the things i find most
fascinating is the convergence of all three jonas's at the same place in the
finale and what their motivations are at
different points in the same life remember jonas just spent a year with
the older claudia where he essentially joined her side
with the intention of changing things what they did during that year is still
a mystery but he tells middle claudia that their goal is to make it so none of
this happens he had already turned away from adam
after his first trip to 1921 because of the deception over the
suicide and i feel pretty confident in saying that watching martha die at adam's
hand probably didn't change things just a few
months earlier during the season 1 timeline
stranger jonas tried to close the portal with the machine
hoping that changes he made might have made a difference
it didn't work and in the process he came to the realization that he couldn't
change anything he changed his focus to killing adam
rather than trying to alter what's already happened
when he receives the letter he realizes that he has to save
magnus bartosz and franziska and that leads him to travel to the past where he
will inevitably become adam by killing martha adam ensures that
his younger self is on the path to become the stranger and then eventually
him the apocalypse happening sets up the
rest of his plan the final thing that happens in the
season is that young jonas is saved by an alternate version of martha
who basically tells him she's from a different world she has a completely
different look than the marta we know and has what looks like a much advanced
time machine that presumably also allows her to travel between
worlds she whisks jonas away at the last second
and we literally don't know anything else about how she fits into the story
as i mentioned in myonas's journey through time video where i mapped out
his path through seasons one and two the big questions are the periods of
time when he transitions from one version to the next we have to imagine
that some of the time between young jonas and the stranger occurs in
that old world what that alt world is how it works and
how it influences the bending that we know
are currently a mystery so what does it all mean well based on what we've seen
to this point it seems like we're looking at a
deterministic system where everything that happens already happened
and nothing can be changed despite what the characters have said
we haven't seen any evidence to contradict this if that's the case you
could think of time as a line where all the events are laid out from beginning
to end since time travel exists characters can
visit different points on the line and experience them out of order but
everything is mapped out and happens only once for example martha
nielsen was shot and killed jonas happens to be there at two different
points in his life but there is only one event his older self
shoots her and his younger self watches her die it only happens once even though
he sees it from his perspective twice where things get confusing is that
characters throw around this idea of cycles the term cycles and that isn't
clearly defined what makes the most sense to me is that
a cycle would be one person experiencing an event from their
perspective at different points in time since the final cycle is supposed to
start on june 27 2020 the apocalypse is probably the
event when adam arrives to kill martha this
would be the third point in his life that he's experienced this
from his perspective that could be what he's talking about when he says the
start of the third cycle i'm not married to this idea but it's
hard to come up with something else that doesn't violate this closed structure
where the characters don't have free will
my hope is that they define what adam is talking about early on in season three
and will get a clear understanding of how alt marta wound up saving jonas from
the apocalypse the first time he experienced it
Tannhaus's hypothesis in his book a journey through time
is time is not linear past present and future are intertwined and
influence one another we also have the trinity knot notebook the triquetra
notebook with everything that happens leading up to the apocalypse already
written down several characters have seen the
notebook and followed what was written inside it and its existence
indicates someone knew everything that would happen we don't know who wrote it
or where it came from and that's just one of the mysteries we got bouncing
around there's a lot of mystery and a lot of
unanswered questions going into the final season
there are some things we do know though we know who lived and who died and where
some of the characters are at who died in season two well the man at
the cave who is most likely the older Bartosz
he was killed by younger noah and adam sent him to do it
noah died when he was shot by a sister agnes under the church
we also saw the graveyard by the church in 2053
there were a lot of wooden crosses marking graves they all looked the same
and were all likely victims of the apocalypse
we saw markers for Woller and aleksander tiedemann and others just in case you
didn't think this giant black ball slash explosion thing would kill
everyone in the city Woller was at the power plant and
aleksander was in the police station the church itself
is destroyed and that probably means adam's god
particle twin machine is gone as well although there's no way to tell since
jonas wouldn't have known about it when he first traveled to 2052
we're not really sure if claudia knew about it younger noah would have known
about it but we don't know if he would have told any of the other survivors
older claudia was killed by noah and of course marta prime was killed
and all these characters are dead but because of time travel
it's certainly possible that they will pop up in season three
the survivors and where they are hannah traveled to
1954 and she's still there when the apocalypse happens as far as we know
we've yet to see an older version of hannah but do know that she left ulrich
where he was and we've seen the older version of him
she also told aegon that she was looking for a fresh start which
sounds like she may stay in that time period older magnus and
presumably older franziska are still in 1921. the best guess is
that adam would have returned to the church and traveled back to join them
there after he killed martha everyone in the
bunker is still alive middle claudia regina peter young
elisabeth and young noah of course those two will form a
relationship that will later produce charlotte claudia has a time machine
with her and she will be researching the god particle we know that from the tapes
and the stuff that she left behind in 2053
we don't know what's up with peter or regina at this point
regina still has cancer stranger yonas and magnus franziska and Bartosz travel
somewhere that will eventually lead them back before 1921.
the stranger will become adam build the church in the god particle twin time
machine and form sic mundus katharina entered
the passage traveling to either 1954-1987
we'll have to wait and see where she exits since jonas
and young helga both survived when they touched through the portal at the end of
season one there's reason to believe that elisabeth
and charlotte will survive as well it's a different situation to be sure
though since the area where charlotte is currently is in the process of being
destroyed i don't think we could say where they'll end up based on what
happened the last time when jonas and helga touched each other
one person traveled 66 years and the other traveled 33
and that's what we know and what can be explained i'm going to leave it there
if you have questions leave them in the comments i'll try to answer what i can
it looks like they're going to be announcing season 3 any day now
so be sure that you subscribe to my channel because i'll be doing more
videos leading up to season 3. please like this video if you enjoyed it
and tell me what you think in the comments
thanks for watching i'll talk to you soon