'Dark' Season 3: Claudia Tiedemann hailed as more powerful than GoT's 'Daenerys and her three dragons' by fans
Spoilers for season 3
Netflix's first-ever German show 'Dark' is criminally underrated. Creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese did and thought of everything to make the story about time traveling and family trees more complex than a wild bird's nest. But the two masterminds also excelled at everything that 'Game of Thrones' (GoT) creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss pretty much botched in the final season. Especially if one compares Dark's White Devil, Claudia Tiedemann (Julika Jenkins), with GoT's Khaleesi aka Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke).
'Dark' might have boiled down to the forbidden love story of Jonas Kahnwald (Louis Hofmann) and Martha Nielsen (Lisa Vicari), but there's no denying she was the real hero of the story. Something that Daenerys, despite being the pivotal all-powerful Mhysa of GoT, couldn't quite accomplish in the end.
There's no explaining 'Dark' or any of its characters' significance without spoiling the blissfully simple ending to the complex web of timelines and alternate worlds with overlapping realities. And it's only fate that Claudia, who traveled back and forth in time and between worlds to save her own daughter, was also the one to give Adam (Dietrich Hollinderbäumer) the answers to his problems.
Claudia not only manages to beat time and its many loops and save her daughter from dying in the original world, but she also helps Adam, Jonas's older version, untie the knot that started the loop in the first place. Meanwhile, our all triumphant Khaleesi was handed a shoddy fate wherein she died at the hands of her own nephew-slash-lover because the writers couldn't quite think of an appropriate ending for a female character that epitomised empowerment at the beginning.
In the end, both 'Dark' and 'Game of Thrones' became a story about an incestuous relationship.
In GoT, Daenerys's world came tumbling down when she realized that the man she loved, Jon Snow (Kit Harrington), was her own brother's son and not Ned Stark's (Sean Bean) bastard. In 'Dark', the time-traveling loop saw Martha's brother Mikkel Nielsen (Daan Lennard Liebrenz) travel back in time to become Michael Kahnwald (Sebastian Rudolph) in the past, who married Hanna (Maja Schöne) and their son is Jonas.
But if it wasn't for Claudia, Jonas and Martha's struggle to 'fix it all' would have been futile. Claudia's time travel reveals to her the origin of the knot, which is clockmaker HG Tannhaus (Christian Steyer) splitting the origin world into two - Adam and Eva's (Martha's older version in her alternate world, played by Barbara Nüsse). She corrects their ideas about what created the loop, and it is her help that makes Adam realize Jonas and alt-Martha must travel back to a time to stop Tannhaus's before his experiment fails and splits the worlds. And that seems to have won hearts more widely than Daenerys's shabby ending ever could.
Taking their opinions to Twitter, fans have been buzzing about the ending of Dark's final season 3 ever since it premiered on Saturday, June 27. "Claudia Tiedemann is more powerful than Daenerys and her f**king three dragons. Period," tweeted a fan. another chimed in "Claudia Tiedemann made Time its b**ch and deserves more recognition. That’s the tea."
Noting how a mere element in Jonas and Martha's love story became the answer to their tribulations, a fan wrote: "While Adam n Eva were busy in their Narratives and Malicious intends of Control and Power. This woman, Claudia Tiedemann worked her ass off for 33 Years. Solved interlinks = found the way out for her Daughter to live! An Icon. A Queen." Another lauded the complex character's brave attempts at making a world where her child survives, sharing: "Dark will definitely not be DARK if there was no Claudia Teidemann. I was pretty sure about her character growth and the importance of presence in both dimensions. She's a great mother and kindest human being ever exist. Hands down."
But it wasn't just Claudia who pleased fans and blew their minds. Touting the show's perfect ending, a fan enthused on Twitter how "#DarkNetflix fully deserves the quote of sir Isaac newton "What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean" Best Sci-fi show ever made. In S3 everything makes sense (even the title song - Neither ever, nor never goodbye). Character Claudia Tiedemann is an MVP of the show."
All three seasons of 'Dark' are now available for streaming only on Netflix.