Dark “Zwischen der Zeit/In Between Time”

Wait, what’s this…the next to the last episode and the show is actually tying up loose ends in a coherent manner?  Something tells me a lot of American TV shows could stand to learn this lesson.

So, here’s the thing:  all this time in season three, we’ve focused on the show being something of a Cold War between Adam and Eva’s respective allies.  We’ve mostly seen Adam do his thing through various surrogates, and he’s a nasty dude.  However, we’ve also seen Eva isn’t much better.  Adam is looking to destroy the origin, something we know is the Unknowns, the son he had with Eva.  Eva is looking to protect her son.  Both need the Apocalypse to happen to do that.  Adam wants to use the power of that destruction to destroy the Unknown before he’s born.  Eva wants to use it to ensure Jonas and Martha meet in order to have the Unknown in the first place, but something about the way both are going about things is to somehow just save their own world/timeline.

And these plans have resulted in a lot of time travel screwiness.  Elisabeth is her own grandmother.  Hannah, stuck in the past, has a daughter by Egon, Bartosz’s grandfather.  When Bartosz has enough of Stranger Jonas, he goes off and meets Silja, Hannah’s daughter by Egon, and the two of them fall in love and give birth to two kids.  One of them is Noah.  The other, Agnes, will become Tronte’s mother, Ulrich’s grandmother, and so forth.  Oh, and Noah is Elisabeth’s partner and therefore Charlotte’s father.

That…is one huge mess.

Except, it is easy to forget Claudia.  The Claudia from Jonas’s world died when Noah shot her, and now we know it is because he believes (incorrectly) that Claudia took baby Charlotte away from him and gave the infant to H.G. Tannhaus.  Adam told Noah that lie, and Noah believed it.  He only found out after Claudia died that Noah was lying.

That said, Old Claudia had some other tricks up her sleeve.  See, Claudia doesn’t care about the apocalypse.  All she cares about is that Regina doesn’t die.  That’s it.  Neither Adam nor Eva’s plans hold go in that direction, and while the Claudia of Eva’s world sided with Eva, the Claudia of Adam’s world realizes it’s pretty easy to kill the other her and take that woman’s place.  And then, well, we see how everything that came before all links up as Eva demands Young Martha kill Jonas and Old Claudia goes to see Adam about destroying the origin and why it doesn’t work.

So, while we were focused so much on two power-players, we overlooked a third with a much more modest goal.

And all this because Tannhaus spent 12 years trying to build a time machine in order to save his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchild.