'Dark' Season 3 Episode 7: Who kidnaps Elisabeth's daughter Charlotte to send her back in time to Tannhaus?
Spoilers for 'Dark' Season 3
Ever since the giant reveal at the end of Season 2, fans of Netflix's German show 'Dark' have been more confused than ever. How can the same people be each other's mother and daughter, both, at the same time? Such is the curious case of the Dopplers — mother Charlotte (Karoline Eichhorn), and daughter Elisabeth (Carlotta von Falkenhayn).
From the beginning, we see Elisabeth as Charlotte's younger, mute daughter. In Season 2, we find out Charlotte's father is actually Noah (Mark Waschke), Adam's (Dietrich Hollinderbaumer) right-hand man who puts all the pieces of the game where they should be, and also informs Charlotte that her mother is alive.
Season 2's ending sees Elisabeth in the post-apocalyptic Winden, reminiscing about a lost child in a photo that shows her, a baby, and Noah. It is the same photo that Noah uses to convince Charlotte she is his daughter and thus is established the most paradoxical relationship even for Dark's universe. At some point in the future, somebody took Elisabeth's daughter with Noah and traveled back in time to hand her over to the clockmaker HG Tannhaus (Christian Steyer), who then goes on to raise her as his own ward.
What makes things even more twisted is Season 3, Episode 7's big reveal that shows Elisabeth and Charlotte both travel in time to kidnap baby Charlotte and hand her over to Tannhaus in the wake of his family's death. It's very confusing, but let us break it down for you here.
Season 3 split 'Dark' as we knew it into dual worlds, and overlapping realities. There is Adam's world, which is the Season 1 and 2's world with Jonas Kahnwald (Louis Hofmann), and then there is Eva's (uncredited) world, where Mikkel Nielsen (Daan Lennard Liebrenz) never traveled back in time so Jonas doesn't exist; Martha Nielsen (Lisa Vicari) grows old to become Eva who knows and must stop Adam at any cost to keep the flow of life in her world intact in a loop. In Adam's world, we see him do the utmost to ensure Jonas exists, by placing things exactly as it is, with Mikkel traveling and returning as Michael Kahnwald. His world also consists of the very paradoxical Doppler relationship that, as we find out, is a crucial element to his plan.
The past sees Tannhaus explain to a young Charlotte how she came to him; he claims two women brought a baby in a bundle to him one night and said that night he would lose everything, but also be given everything. That was the night Tannhaus' son and daughter-in-law died in a car crash; they also had their baby daughter on board but she was never found. While Tannhaus sternly states Charlotte's parents weren't his son and daughter-in-law, he also hands her the same pocket watch he had made for his own granddaughter, also called Charlotte, as engraved on it.
A lot of critics and fan theories on Reddit have cited The Bootstrap Paradox to explain Charlotte's existence in the past: "It is a theoretical paradox of time travel that occurs when an object or piece of information sent back in time becomes trapped within an infinite cause-effect loop in which the item no longer has a discernible point of origin, and is said to be 'uncaused' or 'self-created'." And while 'Dark' Season 3 doesn't go to elaborate lengths to ascertain why Charlotte is so crucial to the plot, it does necessitate Elisabeth's inclusion in ensuring Jonas doesn't cease to exist.
Simply because everything should be at the right place, and the right time for Adam's plan to go flawlessly, he sends Elisabeth and Charlotte to the past, to kidnap Elisabeth's baby, before sending them back to Tannhaus with the baby, the night his family dies.
It is the beauty of 'Dark' to see someone travel back in time to kidnap their own baby and thus cause themselves immense pain, only because they are unfortunate enough to be birthed by someone who is part of a paradoxical loop. The older Charlotte becomes a part of Adam's plan because she needs to see for herself just how twisted their world is, all because time travel was attempted in the first place.
Even though it was in the origin world, it led to the creation of two separate worlds, and Adam has to keep ensuring that Tannhaus' failed attempts don't split worlds further, so in his world he keeps things from falling apart by giving him back a little child to replace his granddaughter. Of course, that is just a speculation, and one of the many theories that lovers of this 'Dark' universe will come up with to explain the anomaly. But the entire sequence Elisabeth kidnapping and teleporting her own baby through time is quite chilling, to say the least.
'Dark' Season 3 is available for streaming on Netflix.