(Eerie music)
- (Michael) What’s up, Wisecrack, Michael here.
Time travel in movies has a weird history, to say the least.
Whether it’s a DeLorean juiced up to 1.21 gigawatts , a germ-filled hot tub, or Keanu
Reeves:
- (Keanue) Whoa!
- (Michael) it’s basically always a certifiable mind trip.
And yet we keep returning to these stories because they tickle our brains with one very
compelling question: Do we have any free will to change the future, or are the awful things
that happen to us inevitable?
Enter: Dark.
This German Netflix series centers around a small forest town whose residents time travel
across centuries trying to change a tragic chain of events.
Their ultimate goal?
Avoid an oft-discussed “apocalypse”
(Characters saying Apocalypse in German)
The question of whether or not they CAN do anything about their impending doom is the
core of the show’s mystery.
And make no mistake, this show will have you up at 3AM, 100 comments deep on a Reddit thread
about Dark’s incestuous family tree.
But more on that later.
The really important question it poses is this: Do we have the power to prevent our
own suffering?
And is it even worth trying to?
Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition on The Philosophy of Dark.
And, as always, spoilers ahead.
- (Michael) And now, a quick recap.
Dark tells the story of Winden, a rural town facing a series of tragic but seemingly normal
events.
This all quickly spirals into time travel, accidental incest, and interdimensional disaster.
So first, a guy kills himself.
Then, a boy goes missing.
And THEN, the son of the guy who killed himself, Jonas, starts looking for the missing boy
via a literal wormhole to the past.
There, he learns that the missing boy has been living in 1986 and will grow up to become
his Dad.
Oh, and meanwhile a whole lot of other folks are also secretly messing with time travel,
too.
Eventually, the people of Winden - from as far back as 1888 to as far forward as 2053
- discover that they are trapped in a perpetual, unchangeable time loop that always ends in
a horrible apocalypse.
Oh yeah, and Jonas finds out that his crush, Martha, is, in fact, his aunt.
Yikes.
So, let’s take this one season at a time.
All our characters are using time travel to try to fix or change the future.
But do they even have that power??
Or are they cursed to stay trapped in this rainy suburban hell of a time loop.
Midway through the season, Jonas and the people of Winden discover the wormhole beneath their
town and attempt to “correct” or “change” the central event - the young boy’s disappearance.
At first, Jonas thinks he has “free will” and - that his choices will determine his
fate, and the fate of the missing boy.
But a mysterious stranger tells him that taking the boy back to 2019 would result in the end
of Jonas’ own existence, because this kid is his FATHER, and needs to grow up in the
past in order to, you know, father Jonas.
Examples like this are numerous - and the results are always the same.
Every time someone tries to change the past, they’re actually just doing something that
by necessity has already happened.
And as the characters’ attempts to change the past are continuously thwarted, they slowly
realize that they don’t have free will.
Rather, they seem to be trapped in an endless cycle that’s outside their control.
We can understand this endless cycle with a little help from Arthur Schopenhauer, who,
side note: was a horrible hang.
According to Schopenhauer, the world is driven by an animating force called “Will.”
This Will, rather than our own individual choice, is what drives our actions.
Will compels us to eat, breathe, sleep and importantly, to try to avoid suffering.
It’s like Will is the shitty, underpaid busdriver, and we’re all passengers, stuck
in the back of the bus, unable to get off.
In Dark, characters like Jonas struggle to accept this reality as they continue to believe
that they are, in fact, the driver of their own bus, able to change history with their
own will.
In fact, one character’s determination to change the future makes him behave so erratically
that he gets put in a mental institution - in the PAST.
It can be hard or even impossible to accept that we don’t REALLY have control over anything
we do.
After all, we experience life as a series of actions and the consequences of those actions.
So even as teen Jonas realizes that all of his choices have been predetermined, the mysterious
stranger, who is actually Adult Jonas from the future, keeps trying to change the fabric
of reality by destroying the Winden wormhole completely.
Only problem?
Even THIS event has already happened, and we learn that Adult Jonas’s attempt to close
the wormhole is what actually creates it in the first place.
‘Cause your stoner friend from college, Ganja Greg, was RIGHT - time IS an illusion.
The characters keep messing up their lives because they can’t accept that time is NOT
a one-way street of sequential events.
Rather, the things they do in the present can actually affect the past.
They, like we, experience time as linear, and tend to assume that’s the reality.
In fact, time, according to Dark and also, ya know, Einstein, is happening all at once,
everywhere and every time.
Of course, the people of Dark might have realized their fate sooner if they could have read
the first season’s opening quote by Einstein himself: "The distinction between the past,
present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
By season two, our characters start to learn that, not only are they unable to change the
past, but they are ALSO completely unable to stop TRYING to.
Why?
You guessed it: the force of will, and in this case, the will to stop their own suffering.
Everyone in Winden is dealing with emotional wounds: Jonas can’t get over his father’s
suicide, his mother feels rejected by the men she loves, various people are hurt by
their spouse’s infidelities, and many people die tragically.
One character, Claudia, experiments with time travel, hoping to save her daughter, who gets
cancer in the future, as well as her father, who is murdered in the past.
And Jonas, far in the future, tries to save Martha, his aunt slash lover, and everyone
else he loves from the end of the world.
If constantly trying to stop bad things from happening without succeeding sounds awful,
that’s because it is.
In fact, the very will that makes us take action to avoid suffering simultaneously drives
us to further suffering.
According to Schopenhauer, the world of daily life actually just “is suffering” and
trying to prevent that suffering just makes us more miserable.
Like we said, not a fun hang.
By this point, the people of Winden may have realized that they’re not in control of
anything.
But they’re also not sure who is.
That’s when the show suggests that there might be some kind of higher being pulling
all the strings.
It introduces Adam, a God-like dude in a church-like room who seems very bossy.
So is Adam God?
Hell no!
He’s just an older and uglier version of Jonas!
In a literalization of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, young Jonas’ innocent desire to save his
town from suffering leads him to grow into Adam, an ugly thing responsible for much of
his town’s suffering.
We see this again at the climax of season two, as both Young Jonas and Adult Jonas are
trying to stop the death of Martha.
Young Jonas thinks she dies during the Apocalypse, but Adult Jonas knows she dies by gunshot.
In a sick irony, Adult Jonas forces her into a bunker with the very gun that ... Old Jonas
(aka Adam) will one day use to murder Martha.
Is your brain okay right now?
Mine’s not.
But anyway.
Jonas’s desire to save Martha ends up being the very thing that sets all the pieces in
place to get her killed, by his own hand.
The creators of Dark seem to agree about the inevitability of certain human behaviors.
According to the show’s writer, Jante [JAN - T] Freise: "It always comes down to some
kind of programming they had before them that you cannot choose because you cannot let go
of the stuff that happened before you.
Your past is always pushing you into the direction you're going, while at the same time the future
is pulling you."
But there’s still one more season of the show!
Is there any hope to be had for our time traveling incest babies?
There is, if they can learn to, like your laconic teenage brother, just give less of
a shit.
We’ll let the show explain.
Season three roots its conflict in the tension between two “mirror” worlds, one light
and one dark, which are both fighting for control of time travel.
Naturally, everyone believes that they are on the good side, even as they do very bad
things, like repeatedly kill their own family members.
So if grown-up Jonas, aka Adam, is the mastermind of one mirror world, what’s going down on
the other side?
There, in the parallel mirror world, we have Martha, now called Eve.
When mirror Martha kidnaps Jonas at the end of season two, we cross over into this mirrored
timeline where things are sort of different but mostly the same.
These mirror worlds, and the war between Adam and Eve (aka old Jonas and old Martha), might
make us wonder: who’s on the right side of this effed up history?
If there’s no free will and no architect of fate, is there even such a thing as good
and evil?
Not according to your favorite party ruiner Schopenhauer.
If the world is Will, it’s an endless striving with no end in sight, devoid of knowledge
and law, entirely free and self determining.
Within Schopenhauer’s vision, there is no “God” to be comprehended.
The world is inherently meaningless and therefore beyond any ascriptions of good and evil.
So neither Adam nor Eve is right or wrong.
As if to literalize this point, Jonas and Martha’s interdimensional baby, a human
trilogy of antichrists, seems to be single handedly trapping everyone in this hellish
timescape.
In the ultimate interdimensional custody battle, they fight over how to deal with their demon
baby: Martha has a maternal desire to keep him alive, and Jonas wants him dead, hoping
it will put an end to this ugly time loop.
Moral of the story: maybe having a baby with your aunt from another dimension isn’t the
best idea.
And in case you thought we were stretching with all the Schopenhauer stuff, season three
opens with this quote by the German shitlord himself: “Man can do what he wills, but
he cannot will what he wills.”
And the show reaffirms this view by revealing a few remaining secrets about the town’s
closed time-loop: the apocalypse is unavoidable, Jonas’ Dad can’t be saved no matter what.
Oh, and also, a number of people end up being their own parent and/or grandparent which
would lead to the world’s weirdest 23 and me results ever.
And again, everything is inevitable and infinitely repeating.
So upon realizing all of this, what can Jonas and Martha do?
Well, they can commit a weird type of metaphysical suicide by preventing the event which created
each of their timelines in the first place.
By denying their desire to “fix” their suffering, they might be able to finally move
past it -- in a way.
This is an extreme version of the self-denial that Schopenhauer describes as one cure for
human suffering.
According to Schopenhauer, this type of self-sacrifice helps us give up the desire to find meaning
and purpose in our suffering.
It’s sort of his cranky German version of the moral wisdom that Buddhist monks have
practiced long before Netflix was a thing.
Jonas attempts to remedy his suffering by ending his own life, and those of everyone
around him.
But this doesn’t work.
Instead, the creators of Dark robbed me of ANOTHER peaceful slumber by creating:
A third dimension which precedes the timelines of both Adam and Eve, the origin world.
And it turns out our mirror worlds only exist in the first place because a distraught scientist
and clockmaker in the origin world tried to build a time machine that accidentally split
reality into those two timelines.
And it’s only by stopping the painful event that motivated this “mishap” that Jonas
and Martha can destroy their own worlds completely and stop the endless cycle of suffering.
Unfortunately, doing so will turn them, everyone they know, and all those incest babies into
sparkly dust.
But, wait.
What about the will to live?
According to Schopenhauer, if you were to truly realize how hopelessly immoral human
nature is, you’d be so disgusted by the pointless striving of Will that you’d simply
deny it.
Like, you’d give up the will-to-live, resign yourself to what is, and actually find some
tranquility in doing so.
Basically, once you realize how truly shit everything is, you’re able to stop giving
a fuck and thus worry about your suffering a lot less.
And Jonas and Martha, having fully realized all of this, peacefully make the choice to
correct the origin world by saving the clockmaker’s family in the origin world, thereby erasing
the tragedy that brought themselves into existence.
But isn’t this sad?
Not really.
In accepting their role in the perpetuation of suffering across multiple generations and
timelines, they’re able to do something both moral and selfless, which is to simply
let go.
In the show’s final scene, at a dinner party with the only characters whose existence hasn’t
been erased, one character, Hannah, describes a dream:
This all sounds a lot like Schopenhauer’s tranquility
in self-denial.
This sentiment, that the world is better off without Winden, has been previously expressed:
The repetition of this idea drives home the theme
of the show: in Winden, to erase the world is to erase the tragedy and suffering of existence,
which seems like a total bummer from one perspective.
But the show makes a final choice that actually veers away from Schopenhauer a bit: Hannah
says she’s thinking of naming her new baby Jonas.
And you can make of that vaguely hopeful note what you will.
Maybe it means that there’s a future somewhere for Jonas and Martha to be together after
all.
Or maybe everything is shitty forever and your Dad is your crush’s little brother
and your crush is your aunt and by some weird logic your mother is also your great-great-great-great
grandmother and why can’t Germans just make a happy show!?!
But what do you think Wisecrack?
Is Dark the ultimate exploration of a totally deterministic universe?
Or is there another way to read the ending?
Let us know in the comments.
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as always, thanks for watching.
Later!