'Dark' Season 3 Episode 6: Why does Adam try to kill Martha a second time?
Spoilers for Season 3
Back in Season 2, there were more than just one daunting cliffhanger to chew half our nails over. There was the ever confusing paradox where Charlotte and Elisabeth Doppler were revealed to be each other's mother and daughter at the same time. And then there was the mystery surrounding Jonas Kahnwald's (Louis Hoffman) older self Adam shooting Martha Nielsen (Lisa Vicari) in the stomach, causing her to death.
While the alt-Martha arriving right after to save Jonas from the apocalypse was too consuming for us to wonder why Adam kills Martha, Season 3 springs a whole other torture scene from the past, where Adam is trying to kill alt-Martha this time.
Seated under the Higgs field generated by Adam's apparatus — a writhing, screaming Martha can be seen in agony, getting consumed by the wormhole's electric pulse. But why does Adam have to torture alt-Martha having already killed the one in his world? The secret, like most things, lies in the ending which funnily enough, is also the ending. The gigantic mystery that 'Dark' always has been, everything is connected, and nothing can be explained without spoiling the ending. So this is your cue to leave if you hate spoilers with as much intensity as the general populace.
For others, the answer is simple. Jonas and alt-Martha must never consummate their feelings for each other. But to understand that, one needs to know about the origin — where clockmaker HG Tannhaus was responsible for trying time travel for the first time ever, but instead of bringing back his dead family, he ended up splitting their world into two — Adam's, where the events have panned out before our eyes, and Eva's — which is Martha's older version, and a world where Mikkel Nielsen never time traveled, so Jonas doesn't exist.
Unfortunately for themselves, and everybody else, Adam's Jonas and Eva's Martha do have sex, thus leading to a child born out of incest — The Unknown from Episode 1, who takes charge of making the apocalypse happen on a loop. Theories suggest Adam had to kill the original Martha in his world because, without her dying, alt-Martha, who is at the time pregnant with Jonas' baby, cannot make her entrance in their world. And once alt-Martha appears in their world, Adam's mission is to ensure the child she is carrying must never be born. So he decides to kill Martha in his world, to break the cycle of loss and despair and stop the apocalypse from happening at all.
'Dark' Season 3 is now available for streaming only on Netflix.