Lovers in a Dangerous Time

Hello,I just stumbled upon your podcast on Apple podcasts after finishing DARK a week ago as I was striving to search for more content ,because nobody around me have watched it because they are conservative about subtitled shows for some unknown reason and it was driving me mad not being able to discuss it with anyone else.I am sure anyone who has watched the show will identify with the feeling!!

Almost all DARK related stuff delves a lot deeply into the scientifiic aspects of the show and while the mental gymnastics trying to keep up with all theories surrounding it is fun,the show lends itself to a lot of other different things too!!
I particularly enjoyed your podcasts about the discussion regarding the respective usage of colors in the show and the discussion regarding secrets that the citizens of this town go out of their way,to hide from each other.The non-formal casual nature of your discussions make it a lot more enjoyable to listen to and I am thorougly enjoying all your episodes so far!!

I just finished listening to your latest podcast about “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” and you guys pondered whether the showrunners were pitting parental love against star-crossed love in a way and then the discussion regarding Regina-Claudia dynamic turned up and how it eventually leads to a solution.Now that I have had some time to chew on the ending, I want to address something that I have noticed but not really seen directly adressed by anyone.I am curious to find out your observations regarding my almost contrarian theory.

So at the end of the series,Claudia comes out as this brilliant scientist/nuclear power head who eventually figures out how to untie the knot.But there are some major inconsistencies in her dialogues throughout all three seasons that make me question her true motivations.I am not going into the tangent of how actually she figured it out because she ,pretty much being in character,never gives any of the characters in the show a definitive straight answer right throughout the three seasons.

In her explaination in the last episode,Claudia explains that their thinking is shaped by dualities – dark and light, good and evil, Adam and Eva- but the world actually works in three. But that is directly contradicting what she herself said to young Jonas.Remember when she told Jonas in season 2 episode 6,that there were two sides to the time war, and Adam was the dark and she was the light?Btw,this comes an even more glaring omission of evidence from her side because this is also the episode ,where she reveals about having seen a “world without Jonas”.

So she herself is pretty much laying the groundwork for Jonas that turns into Adam’s thought process in the future.Not only that but also,that Jonas spent 33 years being told that he can actually change stuff(thats 3 decades worth of blatant lies being fed to a depressed individual who has seen his loved ones die in front of his eyes,pretty much qualifying it to be some sort of highly effective brainwashing that can actually drastically change someone’s outlook towards life.)You guys found Elizabeth-Noah dynamic slightly disturbing with all its implications in the post apocalyptic world.This Claudia-Jonas dynamic is personally for me equally disturbing.If you talk about Jonas believing her blindly unlike Noah,well the adult Noah have actively tried to kill him back in season 1, while Claudia hasn’t done anything nefarious to him from his vantage point up until that point.Its sort of easier not to trust someone who has tried to actively murder you once I would think.

She also cites that there is no free will.If that is the case,then I would like to point out towards Egon’s death scene.There was no one to tell her not to immediately dial up the hospital and tend to his wounds,after that accidental shove he received.She did that to protect the knowledge of “time travel” from spreading around the world .I have seen a lot of people interpreting that as how she didn’t save Egon because her older self had not given her any information and she trusted her older self more than anyone.So apparently she let go of her desire or something to that affect and thats why she is a “queen”.

Drawing back to what she said in the end,if the cycle has been continuing endlessly,her younger self kills Egon in every single cycle and then an older self goes back to say sorry for killing him that many number of times and not for once,did she actually tell her younger self not to go down that trajectory to begin with?

Its virtually impossible for older Claudia to not know what had actually happened to Egon,because she always had that Triquerta book written by the Unknown ,and she only gives it to others after tearing away the last few pages(which has information I am assuming about the alternate world dynamics and the switch point) and it has nothing to do with Egon’s death since we see young Jonas at the end of s2 episode 7 taking Claudia away so Adam must have known about that particular scene too.

Egon’s death had absolutely nothing to do with Regina or her terminal condition.Infact he and Dorris should be existing in the Origin world too,so why the selectiveness in choosing between her own family members?Egon,just like Regina,had developed cancer since he came into contact with the adjascent power plant.If someone tells me,she was trying to look at the bigger picture,it is like drawing a false equivalence because if Eva,of all people,can actually convince Egon to join her side in the alternate world(she has white hair just like the White Devil!!) then I am having a hard time believing that Claudia with all her manipulative, persuasive power cannot convince her own father to join her side,if it comes down to it.So the only conclusion I can actually derive from this is ,older Claudia chose the secrecy of a forbidden knowledge over her own family.There might be a pragmatic utility to that sort of an outlook but it is still not really painting her in a good light.She comes across as being ruthless enough to sacrifice almost everyone dear to her in order to pursue her objectives which is in direct contradiction with her motif of “saving Regina”.She doesn’t need to kill Egon at all to save Regina and yet it happens every single time apparently.

To give you another example of this,I would again go back to s2 episode 6, after Jonas and Michael have that conversation.If indeed,Jonas going back in time and giving that letter to him is the reason why that suicide happened in the first place,why would Claudia need to appear there at the end very conveniently?

Why would Claudia need to specifically mention,”Michael needs to die so that Jonas can live.EVERYONE needs to make sacrifices”?
Why would she mention about a “world without Jonas” and its implications?She didn’t need to appear in front of them and mention any of it, if Michael was anyways convinced about it after his conversation with Jonas.If the argument is she did it to convince Jonas to join her side,she could have done the same even after Michael committed suicide since he was apparently convinced by his own son at that juncture,right?

The only conclusion I can derive is that she wanted Michael dead so that it can again shape up how Jonas/Adam viewed things in the future.She is willing to kill off innocents that stands in her way of achieving her ultimate goals.Michael living won’t have affected anyone else except for Jonas who would then lead a relatively normal life and he won’t become Adam.His death is one of the major factors why Jonas starts time travelling in season 1.But Claudia needs Adam for her own reasons.

Also Claudia further said during her last convo with Adam: “Both of you have done unimaginable things on your journey, because you can’t let go of your deepest desires. You have been trying to escape what you will become, but that’s impossible. You will end up facing yourselves again and again.”

If saving Regina was indeed her “true” motivation all along,doesn’t she sound hypocritical?
Claudia is the one who never, ever gives up her attachments then,isn’t it? Bernd taught her to take what she wants in s3 episode 04, by any means necessary, and that’s what she’s doing.Claudia has to constantly push these two,Jonas and Alt-Martha,into fighting over attachments. They only become Adam and Eva because of Claudia.

From my vantage point,I see Adam and Eve,are two people who become evil because they are purposely corrupted and exploited by a woman who has all the information and power at her disposal yet refuses to share it with anyone else because of her hunger for more knowledge.And for her to achieve it,she gaslights both the characters one way or another.As they famously say,”Half knowledge is more dangerous than none.”Both Adam and Eve are operating on half-baked knowledge and they never get the full info right up until the very end.Claudia,one way or another,ensures certain events happen regardless so that the eternal conflict between the two continues.

Claudia admits in the end that she lied to Adam and Eva to keep the knot in place. She had to keep everyone else from finding out the truth and keep everything happening the way it always has, maintaining the chain of cause and effect in both worlds.
So, in her search for a way to break these eternal chain of cause and effect, she had to make sure no one else found a way to break the chain of cause and effect? Because otherwise cause and effect would break all by itself or something? And it was very neccessary that she was the only one to perform this investigation, without any help from all of the intelligent scientists all over the world?

She might have been a nuclear powerplant head in the Eighties and that might be a big deal in Germany back then but I am pretty damn sure,thats not a real reflection of how the World operated because there would be as equally competent or even more competent individuals than her to deal with such scenarios.Is that why Egon had to die so that she can take credit for herself?Is that the actual reason why she kept on ignoring the French delegation(despite all the memes I have seen attached with them ,they were the ones who told Claudia info about the World standing still for a couple of seconds during the apocalypse over the radio) because they have latched onto something that she was trying to desperately keep to herself?

Also if someone tells me,that Winden itself is stuck in a macroscopic loop hence outsiders don’t come or people living here don’t go outside Winden,Claussen’s presence in s2 contradicts that(albeit he was instructed by the Unkown but he had no issues familiarizing himself with the intricacies of Winden) and the latter is more due to the inherent nature of some of these people living in the town.

My main issue with her motivations is that she states that a lot of these apparent sufferings are due to people’s inability to let go off their attachments and thus they are stuck in this eternal loop of sorts but the fact that is she is indirectly/directly responsible for facilitating a lot of these events in the first place!!(Take the Alt Ulrich-Atl Helge scene in s3 episode 8 for example)

As I mentioned before,if saving Regina was her primary motivation ,and she keeps on repeating these things over and over again and she herself can’t LET GO,how can she expect other people to let go of their own desires?She can’t have a moral high ground since she pretty much killed off her own father in cold blood of her own volition.Why would so many people have to sacrifice everything to facilitate her own wish?What makes her any different from the so called cancer that has been festering in the town?She is not an incestual child yet it still doesn’t stop her from killing other people.

You guys appear to love Magnus-Franceszka.What have they actually done wrong to not exist anymore?They have no control over their own birth situations.

Also,hearing you guys discuss about Jonas-Martha,one thing I would like to point out is that neither of them despite the strong feeling of attachment that they share between themselves,actually manage to spend a lot of time around each other.Jonas and Martha hook up in the anniversary birthday and I think the very next day,Michael dies so Jonas goes to the hospital for therapy and doesn’t come back for a few months.After he came back and they had a reconcilation of sorts behind Bartosz’s back,Jonas finds about Mikkel/Michael and all its implications,so he starts to avoid Martha and then eventually they break up under the rain in season 1.Jonas travels to the future and sees her grave in 2052 and regrets rejecting her while Martha’s emotions get more volatile as she doesn’t know whether Jonas is alive or not.Jonas eventually gets back to 2019 and kisses her,which was pretty much a last goodbye from his side because he thought he was erasing his own existence by talking to Michael.Both of them have that brief reunion on the day of the apocalypse where they kiss just before Adam kills her.Again,they don’t get to actually spend time together at all.For any relationship to work,communication is the most important thing.Regina-Alexander or Magnus-Franceszka look more natural in a way since in most of their scenes,they actually appear together so they are more in sync with each other’s emotions and feelings.

Now lets look at this from Alt -Martha’s perspective.She suddenly meets a guy who she somehow remembers seeing somewhere and feels an instant connection to him (she mentions it in s3 episode 3 I think).She has been fed a lot of information within just a few days about her future but she only has this one guy who she feels a deep connection to hold on to,if she doesn’t want to feel overwhelmed with everything that is developing around her.They hook up and then they decide to try and stop the apocalypse.But just after the day,she hooked up with her “destined one” in a way,he gets shot by her older selves and she starts time travelling trying to bring him and everyone back from the dead.Again,they don’t actually get to spend substantial time together at all.So both Adam and Eve share these deep connection between themselves but because they never get around to actually spend time together at any point of time because by that point they are trying to focus on doing the right thing(like saving their respective worlds from apocalypse by him trying to make God particle work or her preferring their children over each other) based on their own interpretation,after some point of time that distance between them starts to embitter themselves towards each other and it creates a monkey’s paw situation.Which brings back to my original point,who is actually the one who is keeping these two in eternal conflict by feeding them lies in the first place?

My own conclusion is Claudia is actually a psychopath that exploits two characters,one way or another,until they turn into something akin to a caricature of their ideals ,just so that she could find out more about the entire time travel dynamics and once she had found out enough,she tries to play the “bigger party “and tell both of these people and everyone in their worlds to erase themselves from existence because they are “wrong” and only her “family” matters to her.She was always more interested about the time travelling aspect,saving Regina is just a part and parcel of it.

Sorry for my extremely tangential rant in the middle but I am curious to know what are your thoughts regarding this?