Dark series finale ending explained: Who does not exist in the origin world?

Created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, Dark, is a German sci-fi thriller series that gained universal acclaim for its complex and well-developed plot that revolved around a group of characters from a small town of Winden in Germany, who get trapped into a time travel that spans across generations and between various family lines. The central characters of the story are Jonas and Martha, who try to solve the time loop that they and their families have gotten stuck into.

Dark gained praise for its direction, plot, tone, musical score, and the immense complexity of its plot that neatly ties together and yet, requires immense concentration from its viewers. The ambitious plot of the show has made it a modern classic and even though the show aired for only three seasons, and ended in 2020, the show continues to create craze and is a pop culture phenomenon.

Viewers who are avid watchers of the show, Dark, can check out the below mentioned breakdown of the show’s finale episode and how it beautifully ties everything together. The article also talks about the different worlds in the series and who does not live in the origin world in the end.

Those who do not survive in the origin world are Martha, Jonas, Ulrich, Charlotte, and other characters from the Nielsen family.

Disclaimer: The article contains spoilers about the show.

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Dark: The series finale ending explained

Still from the show (Image via Netflix)

The series, Dark, has an interesting ending. The episode begins with Claudia approaching Adam (the older Jonas), even though this has never happened in any time loop. She says to Adam that even when he tries to destroy the time knot, it only stays intact, and Martha and the unborn child are repeatedly killed.

She also says that Adam and Eva’s (the older Martha) worlds in Dark should never have been created because they were accidently created when HG Tannhaus’ from the third or origin world created a time travel experiment to protect his son, daughter-in-law, and their child from a car crash, in which they had died, and because of which, the experiment had gone wrong. Claudia also says that she has spent 33 years across Eva and Adam’s worlds trying to stop the loop so that her daughter Regina does not die from cancer, but it is impossible to stop the loop.

However, Claudia realizes that there is a moment in time, during the apocalypse, when it stands still for a brief moment, and during that time, Adam must send Jonas from his world and Martha from Eva’s world to the origin world and stop the car crash that kills Tannhaus’s son and his family, and prompts the clockmaker to create the time travel experiment in the first place.

However, this will also mean that Jonas, Martha, and all the people who were created due to this time travel experiment, will also be erased forever. Adam decides to go to Jonas from his world, where Martha has just been shot and explains everything to him. Jonas then gets Martha from Eva’s world, just before the time loop is repeated again. They both travel to June 21st 1986, when the accidental worlds were created by Tannhaus and Jonas explains to Martha that when all three worlds get split, there will be a brief moment when Jonas and Martha must stop the car crash from happening.

In one of the most beautiful last scenes in Dark, Martha and Adam cross through a starry void, which is a bridge between all the three worlds and see each other’s childhood versions of themselves and how they found each other, before reaching the origin world. Both of them stand in front of Tannhaus’s son’s car and stop him from going ahead, which. Would have caused the crash and the son agrees and turns the car back. In the last shot, Martha and Jonas look at each other as they know that they will be wiped from history forever.

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Dark: Who does not exist in the origin world

Still from the show (Image via Netflix)

It is clear that Martha and Jonas do not exist in the origin world in Dark because their timelines were shaped by the accidental split in time created by HG Tannhaus. Therefore, when they stop the car crash that prompted Tannhaus to create time travel in the first place, they have effectively stopped him from carrying his experiment as his children lived on. This means that Jonas and Martha never came into existence.

However, in their final moments, Martha does ask Jonas that they both saw their childhood versions, so does that mean that they will remain in some form or that they never really existed. Jonas does not have an answer but the two hold hands as they slowly get erased from existence.

Other people like Ulrich and Charlotte do not exist anymore because the Nielsen family tree does not exist and because they were born out of time travel.

In the final scene, which is set in the origin world, which is now the only world, there is a dinner party going on and only those characters who were unaffected by the time travel or were born independent of the time travel, remain. These include many people from the Tiedemanns and Dopplers family tree, which includes Katharina, Benni, Woller, Regina, Peter, and a pregnant Hannah.

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Final Thoughts

Still from the show (Image via Netflix)

While the other worlds and the people who lived in it are no longer there, their memories remain as Hannah declares that she thinks Jonas to be a perfect name for her unborn child and she feels unsettled when she sees a yellow coat, the same coat the Jonas used to wear in the series. Dark is a vastly magnificent show that traverses across time and worlds, literally, to present a simple story about undying love and sacrifice. The stellar finale proves that the show, Dark, is a must-watch.