Category Archives: Mythology

Includes philosophy, science, religion, physics, metaphysics, and all kinds of speculative wankery.


Is Bakker an impostor?

I was going to write this as a goodreads update, but decided to move it here, since it’s relevant to continue “the head on the pole.”

Chapter 4 is rather troubling. Some of it seems disappointing, or dismaying. If the whole cryptic section on the head on the pole was open to suggestive interpretation, this chapter implies the head on the pole is the No-God. At the very least the purpose of the chapter it to lead the reader there. Is it misdirection? I don’t know and I don’t worry about it, because I’m not reading to outsmart Bakker, or anticipate the story and guess it right. I’m only trying to… understand.

The head on the pole being the No-God “flattens” the number of interesting possibilities. It’s kind of plain and not especially surprising or insightful. It is not meaningful. Kellhus has gone mad, he’s now doing what he himself accused his father would have done: side with the No-God and fight the heavens. It doesn’t add to it or solve anything. It only hammers it back to what it was.

But as I was reading, I realized that I was going through similar emotions as Proyas. The interplay goes on so many different layers that I can’t even properly backtrack them again here.

Kellhus/Bakker and Proyas/me as a reader.

Is Kellhus an impostor?
Is Bakker an impostor?

In the same way Proyas is dismayed, but clings desperately to his own faith, he seizes not the present, but the past. He was there. He has seen those days of the holy war. He knows. In the same way, I, as a reader, know what Bakker is writing about. I know what it is and why it’s meaningful. It’s not in the present, but cemented in the past of what I already read before. In the same days of the holy war, but physically as a book.

And yet Serwe burns in Hell.
And yet, for all I’ve done, the world burns.

What is left here?

Sorrow and scrutiny.

There is no recompense… save knowing.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

I decided to take a look across the internet, trying to dodge spoilers. And I glimpsed two important aspects: the first is that this is seen as a rather unique passage in all the books, and that it doesn’t seem like Bakker clarifies it through what’s left for me to read.

This motivated me to write down here what I’m thinking. Through several rereads, across many days, there are layers to my thoughts and so many ideas going in different directions that I have no hope of retrieving from memory and archiving the whole of it. But at least if I write here what I currently have, at least I won’t lose that. I use this blog more for myself than communicating with the outside.

Let’s start from the end: “The living shall not haunt the dead.”

This is something that troubled me because I don’t have much to offer. It felt incongruous with the rest of the scene. But it comes here first because it comes first in the chapter. This is the first line, and it comes attached to a different part, with the men of the Great Ordeal eating Sranc. That line is appended there, so that it then returns to close the section I’m commenting here. But in the case of Sranc, it doesn’t tell me much… These are dead bodies being eaten, echoing what happens inside the section. The living aren’t haunting the dead, maybe the opposite since the sense of the first scene is some men complaining the practice of eating Sranc is changing them from the inside. “The meat.” “What of it?” “My… my soul… It grows more disordered because of it.”

There is more to the meat, but this we’ll see later. The living, here, aren’t haunting the dead, because the dead are dead and the living still living. This “divide” has been a theme in these last few books, and the line is thinning. But at this point there is no crossing over, and if anything those men are complaining something of those Sranc is lingering back, rather. I’m wary of considering the opposite because there are too many implications attached and what I’ve read up to this point isn’t very coherent with the idea going that way.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

While this is probably quite “troubling” for most fist-time Bakker readers, for me it makes instead an anchor. Or maybe it feels like one and I’m being fooled. But the first time I read this passage, for me it was a fixed point. Because I immediately linked it to this blog post.

It is the same concept that is familiar: the darkness that comes before. The head on a pole is yet another “fashioning” of the same concept. So the way I interpret its meaning is: you believe the movement of your thoughts are your own, but there’s something that comes before, here behind, that precedes your thoughts, shapes them and your actions. The key points are that you don’t control what you think you control, and more importantly, you have no perception of it. Same as the practical example in that blog, the “feature” of the head on the pole is to be perpetually just behind you. You cannot turn to see it. You have no direct perception of it.

All of this is reinforced at various points. This inner scene is surrounded by different pieces of the scene between Kellhus and Proyas. Right below the passage Kellhus is described as IMMOVABLE “in the eyes of his Exalt-General.” But he’s also controlling everything. He’s not so much in front of Proyas, but behind him, controlling and shaping each of his thoughts. “Kellhus had ruled Proyas’s heart, became the author of his every belief.”

“Kellhus could have reached out and behind him, manipulated the dark places of his soul.”

This much is quite clear, about the philosophical underpinnings of this “metaphor,” but not quite enough for me to see clearly through it… The following section is a huge problem:

He is here … with you … not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.

“He is”, should exclude this being the God of Gods, this scene is too authoritative to have slips like that. Who’s there? We don’t know. It’s Shakespearean. Who’s there? I am.

“With you.” Yes, it’s the same thing. He’s one with you. You think there’s one where there’s two. Master and manipulated. Kellhus and Proyas, in the example scene. One can be used to decode the other, even if the link may be less direct than this. This scene is not about Proyas, it’s about Kellhus in the Outside.

How does Kellhus reach the Outside? At this point of the book I have no idea. If it’s some kind of trance or meditation, like the Thousandfold Thought, then his consciousness wanders. Also meaning he’s in two places at once. So it started to open possibilities while I read. This, also, could be an anchor for Kellhus. He could either be the head, with the head on the pole behind him. Or he could be the head on the pole. Or, more likely, SEE through the head on the pole, like his anchor point in the Outside. But what to make of all this? I don’t know. It doesn’t coalesces into something usable, just suggestions.

“Not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.” This for me trips all over everything and why it is so confusing. We established there’s a “he.” We then established there’s a “you,” and he’s here with you. But then there’s a third. “Me.” This me, speaks with YOUR voice, and HE’S HERE.

Up to this point we were always playing with a double. Consciousness and preceding darkness. Master and slave. But it splits in three ways and I don’t know what to make of it, beside the fact that all of these three still coincide with the same point. There’s a he who speaks with your voice inside me. But if this voice is inside me, then how can it be other than MY voice? Again, the darkness that precedes. Who’s speaking here in the first place? Kellhus? It sounds incongruous.

But what if instead this is Kellhus talking to himself? It’s still incongruous for the way Kellhus has been shown before, but “you” could simply be self-reference. Your internal monologue that speaks to you as a double. “You’re really an idiot”, saying your internal voice, referring to yourself. Soooo… He’s here with me. Not so much inside me, but speaking with my voice.

I am being controlled. This is my voice, that I hear, but I’m not the one speaking.

We pondered you, says the most crocodilian of the Sons.

“But I have never been here.”

This “surprise” sounds like Kellhus. The further reply, “You said this very thing” is to me so clear that it’s probably misleading and false (more on this, at the very end). I just can’t see alternatives, and alternatives are what’s probably needed to decode the whole thing…

“And what was your reply?” (Kellhus? asks.)

“The living shall not haunt the dead.

And we’re back to the line that caps it all, but that for me means the LEAST. What we know is that this is spoken by one of the “Sons,” likely some kind of lesser gods in this Outside, or something pretending.

What does it mean? You should not be here. Only dead souls crowd the outside, to be eaten by the gods. This is HELL, after all. You should not be here. You are still alive … and there’s a head on a pole behind you. But do the gods know about the head on the pole? This is more likely Kellhus private knowledge. The head is an anchor point to the outside, to peer through? We don’t know.

Other parts here and there are easier to parse, or should be. Again, not because I’m smart, but because I’ve been onboard for a while, and read Bakker explain stuff through his blog. I often can see parallels between the story and the actual philosophy it comes from. So here we go:

“And he sees that these things are meat, here. Love is meat. Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat – seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.”

I immediately recognized this coming from a section of the blog, that I cannot find now. It was too many years ago. I don’t even remember if it was someone else in the comments. But it refers to a video. The concept is still at the foundation of eliminativism a science of human consciousness. There is no magic, it’s all basic science. Therefore the nature of emotions is still inscribed within the “meat.” Using the abstraction that we are just meat. Our brain is meat. Emotions have to be encoded within that same meat, if we accept there isn’t something “more.” The hard problem of consciousness. There are also different versions and I’m not sure the one that we used at the time, but the concept is the same. Even a cursory search through the blog offers some explicit quotes:

They need to understand that thoughts are made of meat. Cognition and communication are biological processes, open to empirical investigation and high dimensional explanations.

But how literally things are encoded here?

You can eat the brain of a wise man, without getting the wiser. Digestion would rather destroy that information, if we want to be literal. Already this is problematic, because this scene is in the Outside. If these are souls, how can they be meat? Maybe the parallel Bakker made isn’t direct at all and I’ve been mislead by prior knowledge, rather than helped?

So let’s stick to what’s written… Which doesn’t help. Because he’s offered that meat, whoever “he” is. The head on the pole cannot be moved (we’ve seen why), but here it appears to be used as a motive for what comes after. “He seizes the lake.” This seems quite an intentional stance, rather than a passive observer. Which is weird. The Sons, who are speaking and doing here, are also seized within the whole. “He rips them around the pole.” No idea what to make of this specifically. It may be as well bound to conceptual things Bakker uses for his ideas of time and place, but I never delved deep into that, and it’s complex stuff that would require time. “He transforms here into here,” and everything on that scene… But doesn’t seem to do anything with it. That phrase ends. He seems to wrap the whole place, but then what?

“You refuse to drip fear like honey – because you have no fear.”

Here the causal chain seems linked to the head on the pole. He has no fear of damnation… Because there is a head on the pole behind him. But let’s stick to the mention of fear, and go back.

Fear is just meat. It is encoded in the meat same as every other emotion or feeling. Fear is just meat… Because there is a head on a pole? More or less. Again, how literally things are encoded? Kellhus cannot be eaten. Because he’s not there. The living should not, can not, haunt the dead. He’s tricking them believing him being there, but he’s not.

But the moment you see things for what they are, the moment you shift the perspective back to the head on the pole, then you exit that personal consciousness. You understand the movement of a person’s soul. You know what is being moved, you know how. Kellhus knows how. He is inhuman in that way, the same as (well, not really) Non-men described later as “False-men”: “This is what made them False, inhuman … The way they made beasts of Men.” The same as Kellhus makes children of all Men. Toys. The bestial being used as “lesser than,” same as the Emwama in that scene.

As Dunyain, Kellhus has mastered fear. Not as simple control of one own’s emotions, but because fear is “explained away.” Once you have an understanding of reality, fear goes away, same as fear becomes just more “meat.” Once you have a fundamental description of reality, once you’re one with the world, you become fearless. Not so much as an act of will, but as an act of… physics. Fear is determined by what comes before. The nature of fear is for being incomplete and abrupt. To have no bridge between before and after. The moment you switch back to the perspective of the head on the pole, fear becomes at best a tool, not an emotion. By eating that meat you also eat fear, but in the sense that fear becomes illusory, same as consciousness is illusory. The appearance of something else.

Again, how literally things are encoded? Kellhus is not there (so he has nothing to fear, the Sons can’t get him), but he’s also fearless as a state of mind. But so is Theliopa:

“The bottomless indifference of her gaze was the only thing that terrified.”

“She gazed at him with piscine relentlessness, her pale blue eyes dead, void of passion. And for the first time he felt it … the menace of her inhuman intellect.”

“She looked like a thing graven, the goddess of some lesser race.”

I like how Bakker writes, because describing those “piscine eyes” he never flatters. The horror always lies in the truth of the mundane. And Bakker is a genius because Kelmomas sees her cunning, IN HER SKIRT (it’s not a pun, it’s like that).

But these considerations are beside the point. Is Theliopa also fearless? Is she… without a soul? That’s what I meant with “how things are encoded.” Because when it come to metaphysics we don’t know all that much, and it may be that achieving a certain impersonal otherness, the way of the Dunyain, may also translate with them being literal meat, without a soul. But there’s nothing indicating anything like this, up to this point, so this is another diversion trying to interpret this passage, leading nowhere.

We pondered you.

“But I’ve never been here.”

What if he had? This was my first idea. On the whole scene and the identity of the head on the pole.

“This was what his father’s Thousandfold Thought had made.”

“A pattern conquering patterns, reproducing on the scales of both insects and heavens; heartbeats and ages. All bound upon him.”

My guess was that the head on the pole is Moengus. But it may as well be a wrong guess. I’m still biased by the fact I don’t feel the end of the third book complete. I still rage at what I can’t come to terms there. And Bakker STILL teases me, right in this chapter. Moengus couldn’t explain why Kellhus had haloed hands. Here, Kellhus still has no idea why, either.

“He raised a hand into the dim air, gazed upon the nimbus of gold shining about them.”

“Such a remarkable thing.”

“So hard to explain.”

This is Kellhus. “Most failed to even notice his evasion.” I read this almost as if this is Bakker, also evading poignant questions, leaving just “odour of profundity.” Make believe. “They assumed they were being misdirected for some divine reason, in accordance to some greater design.”

This here is a dressing down, pretending to have greater answers where there’s none.

But it’s also a missing point. What’s the matter of the haloed hands? Miracle. Moengus was fooled, or maybe pretended to be, in order to enact. Kellhus doesn’t know. He’s being moved by a head on a pole behind him. By his father’s Thousandfold Thought.

He goes to the outside, but he only moved through the path his father already traveled before. Kellhus has never been there, but Moengus had.

“He was as much a creature of the Thought as it was a creature of him. For it whispered as it danced, threading the stacked labyrinths of contingency, filing through the gates of his daylight apprehension, becoming him.”

This is what I currently have. Which is a collection of SOME of the thoughts I had, just the more recent. I either write them down or lose them. As it happens, these moments stay clearer than what they become later on. So better hold on them while they are here…

(for example, I left out considerations about the first quote in the chapter about the game of Abenjukala, map and territory. It still is an example of occlusion. This was actually something I planned to start from, writing this whole thing, and now I can only stare dully at the page, wondering what I meant to write and then forgot… Sigh.)

The Malazan Reader

I spotted a tiny recommendation for the Malazan series, on Twitter, and I got carried away adding some of my unsolicited thoughts to it.

I always said that Malazan is very hard to recommend to other readers. For example it’s a lot easier to recommend Sanderson, despite Sanderson not really needing any help to get known, since now he’s all over the place. But it’s accessible, and pretty good for a very wide range of reader types. You can read 100-200 pages and see by yourself where the qualities are. And know whether it’s your thing or not.

Malazan has this, instead:

To a certain extent, it’s true. But it’s still a narrow explanation. I ask often myself, why am I a Malazan/Erikson reader? What do I find there? Why it’s so important for me? Malazan is recommended a lot, often next to the more popular Martin and Sanderson, but I’m convinced it has a very low “success rate”. I mean readers who accept the recommendation, give it an honest try, but end up not enjoying the read at all. I always asked myself why.

For many, it’s all about a matter of taste and personal disposition. But that’s not a satisfying explanation for me. I always seek a reason, trying to find an objective motivation… that can describe what is that precisely works for me, and doesn’t for other readers. Many others.

I think I grasp at least some of the reasons why it happens. When I recommend Malazan I try to give objective, useful information. It doesn’t mean that I diminish the qualities there, but I do emphasize what the obstacles will be. And it depends on who’s on the other side of the recommendation. Because of the above, and because Malazan is huge, the main dilemma is that the reader doesn’t know if it’s worth committing. Therefore, the paradox: do I commit to read thousands of pages? Where is the threshold where one stops and decides if it’s worth continuing or better stop and read something else more satisfying?

That’s where I draw the line. Do you intend to commit to something huge, from the start? Fine, follow “the rules”. Start at the beginning. But if you are undecided, skeptical, and you want to know what’s there before fully committing, I’d suggest some …alternative, unconventional paths.

Garden of the Moon, the first book, is not a bad introduction to Malazan, but it is a bad introduction to Erikson. Its themes are buried very, very deep. Easy to miss. On the other hand you are buffeted by a million of things thrown in your face, constantly, vehemently. Scenes that seem inconsequential get lot of attention, scenes that are pivotal, or fundamental information end up being omitted only to be referenced offhandedly much later in casual conversation… or just vanish like a dead end. Sometimes things seem pointless, sometimes it all seems coming in the wrong order. Most readers feel confused, or detached from everything.

Eventually, through a lot of patience and a certain devotion, you read a few thousand pages and you have a map. You become the Malazan reader. Knowing where each piece fits, even appreciating the gaps, for they have an use too. You understand what, where, and why (a bit less when, but that’s not so important… Just to make a joke about the often criticized chronology that on occasions is a little wobbly).

Most successful writers use some proven “devices” to seize the reader. The book must have the reader in its center. The book is about Harry Potter, you identify with Harry Potter. The book is about you.

Me, me, me, me. I want the book to be about me.

The focus needs to be all about the reader, feeding this hole of attention. Malazan does some of this, but its greater part is the opposite. Kicks you out: fuck off, get out of the way. Take yourself out of focus, and maybe something worthwhile can be said. Stay quiet, observe. I’ll return to this…

Malazan is not lonely, but it is solitary, brooding, a bit forlorn. Especially now it represents the time. With lockdowns, being separate, and yet it’s now that we’re all connected, more than ever. And we can observe all, everything around us, collapsing. Governments that blindly repeat actions that have failed, imprisoned in a psychotic loop, rewriting and bending science to what’s more convenient. Over and over we know, with clarity, that measures are effective the more they are timely, focusing on prevention, and what we do is the opposite, we wait until too late, feeding onto a pervasive fatalism. We simply accept a number of deaths, making it a norm. Minimizing risks to make believe everything’s fine. Follow these five simple rules for a false sense of security. All because the world doesn’t want to change, and power needs to be preserved. And we can only observe, passively, this slow, progressive deterioration of reality itself. We just observe from our places. Solitary observers of something set into motion. Sorrowful but unable to act, like ghosts.

Malazan is the pain of the world, when it is spoken through a living or unliving mouth. You are meant as the vessel, Itkovian.

That’s why I sometimes I suggest a new reader to start with “Forge of Darkness”. If you are uncertain, whether or not to commit. You could start from the proper beginning, but you’ll have to dig, probably for a long time before you find those themes. Forge of Darkness is not an introduction, but it can be read on its own without prior knowledge. It might feel that you’re missing pieces you’re meant to know about, but you have to trust the text. The book is confusing even for veteran Malazan readers, in some cases even more because it plays around by scattering some expectations. You can go in blind, but read slowly, give it thought. Malazan is not a page turner, even if it has page turning scenes. Mull on the paragraph you’ve just read, not thinking about it only after you’re done. Dig for meaning.

Forge of Darkness is a brooding, mysterious book, but it has its themes on the front, explicit. Impossible to miss. You want to know what it’s all about without reading a million of pages, then it’s all here, wrapped up and well presented. One book, even if part of a trilogy it’s sufficiently self contained. Not an easy read, but it’s there, and you’ll see it.

But I wanted to go further. Condense more, to a point. What is Malazan about?

“Secret… to show… now.”

https://loopingworld.com/misc/erikson-test.zip

(This link includes two scenes, one from book 2 Prologue, one from book 7 Prologue. Six pages in total. No spoilers. You can read these without knowing anything else. The images are taken from Amazon previews.)

I read this prologue and this scene many months ago, but I immediately realized… This is Malazan, right here. Just three pages. It’s everything.

A woman walks up to this cliff. For the reader this is a blank page. You get the description of strong winds, the ocean beyond. Agitated waters. You get a mention of a Meckros City that sunk there. If you are new to the series you know nothing about it, but me, Malazan reader, don’t know all much more beside that these people built floating cities on the sea. So they knew how to be out in the ocean, and the fact they sunk here leaves an ominous feel about the place.

Like a painting, a white canvas, you add detail. Brush strokes. This vast open space in the ocean. You follow with your mind a small fisher boat, blown off course to these treacherous waters. Miraculously surviving the experience and reaching the shore. But something is missing from the picture. Something like a shadow, looming on the scene. Depending on what you use, there’s always an exclusive, irreplaceable quality. For example, in a movie you can use some tricks, but you show what you have to. The attention goes where it has to. But in a book, you control everything. You decide what is or isn’t there. Here you believe what you’re told. You have an ocean dominating the canvas, and then your attention is drawn to a tiny boat, thinking it’s the center, when it is instead pushed to the margin. There’s a giant shadow that dominates the canvas… but no perception of it. Just… A sense of urgency. A secret… to show.

The wind pushes her away, she endures. Drawn to this shadow. Some more details seep in, but the scene is interrupted by “a presence at her side”. A distraction. A merchant she completely ignores. He makes his presence known, loudly. He’s ignored again. The shadow is there, like a tear in reality. The wind rushing out of it, from a different world (a warren).

“Preda?”
“What?”

He tries to shake her as if she’s asleep or in a trance. She didn’t turn to him, she didn’t acknowledge his presence. It’s the shadow that draws her. And bit by bit, it is revealed. Half a million people that just vanished.

It’s already all here for me. The way a mystery is shaped, the choice of what is and isn’t shown, the momentum leading to the revelation. The contemplation, and an environment that takes shape to become a character. Telling its story, piece by piece. The sense of urgency that builds up… for something already happened, already over. The scene, beside the wind, is quiet. You don’t need to read 500 pages for the solution, in two/three pages you get both the set up and the pay off. A book of 900 pages, in a series of 10 book, and you get the pay off in three fucking pages. The mystery isn’t inflated and built by pretense, it’s there. Immediate. Fully delivering its awe. And when the answer comes, to fully deliver its promise (what is she seeing, why does the sight chill her?) you get an opening for more. It’s just an introduction.

And, why not? We see a woman, commanding the military, ignoring and then bossing around a rich, probably powerful merchant. There is no emphasis about any of this. It just is.

(imo, this scene already has too much dialogue, too many asides. It could have used less. Erikson, who’s never generous, already gives too much. Erikson works better the more he’s entrenched. Going the opposite way. Say less.)

I’m not commenting the other prologue scene because there’s a lot, and most of it is quite explicit, even if open ended. But it’s ironic that I could write a lot about those first three lines: “What see you in the horizon’s bruised smear, that cannot be blotted out by your raised hand?” What other witty commentary is possible when it’s all so straightforward?

Well, for me Malazan is always about a sense of scale. Big books, each one, ten of them. A sense of history, a large cast of characters, a big world, creatures, dragons. And yet it thrives on the small, intimate. Introspection. Often duos on their solitary journeys, like Mappo and Icarium. The human, more intimate scale (hand) is always the view on the world, on things much bigger, the gods, alien worlds (the horizon). A sense of reality that has to go through the filter of human perception. The world through, or into your hand. Animated. A construct. Maybe even a pretense of control, that is always mocked. Gods that are dragged, taken down. Heboric again. Erikson always plays with scale, and knows what he’s doing.

(btw, Paran – Felisin – Laseen, make an important pillar for the first FOUR books. And it’s omitted. Nothing about it is shown. Imagine reading Game of Thrones… and there’s no chapter on the Starks. The story is the same, you just don’t get any direct view of them.)

Malazan can be summarized in a word, a concept. Malazan is… “contemplative.”

It is all about the voice. If you take Lord of the Rings and you know Tolkien was a linguist, you’ll realize that everything that makes LotR what it is, to its core, is language. Language is the filter for everything, something that Bakker understood really, really well. It’s not one possible angle on that book. It is everything. It’s a dimension. Even the metaphysical/religious aspects are all about language (the elves who represent art, immortality, the god-like power of creation, and the world that begins shaped by music, all is a form of language).

Something similar happens in Malazan. Erikson was an archaeologist. This well known fact is often used to explain why the worldbuilding is so good. Because that knowledge gives Erikson a way to look at things, make them more realistic. But I think that worldbuilding in Malazan is extremely overrated. Even Sanderson that I mentioned above does worldbuilding better and more meticulously. What Erikson does is something else, and it is pervasive in the same way language is pervasive in LotR. An archeologist is someone who walks onto a site. He looks around, observes. Contemplates. He reads the place. In his mind he interprets the signs he sees, connects them. He imagines the people there, the culture, the life and blood. He walks though a place that is no more, and yet still there. Like a ghost, walking through an alien world.

Being an archaeologist, an observer of human culture, isn’t an angle, a point of view. It is an enclosure of the world. A receptacle, a symbol. An almost religious experience. Like Heboric before the Jade Giants.

How to observe the world, species, your people, your life?
How to understand things, how to give them meaning?

The same as Heboric in front of the Priest of Hood, there is a sense of urgency. But it’s about the world, not you. The observer is Felisin, not Heboric. It is not you. Felisin that came from a different world:

“The same city, but a different world.”

Passivity is her theme through the book. The flies crawling on her thighs are the least terrible thing that is going to happen to her, nothing is normal anymore. Her world collapsed, leaving her not even scared. Just numb.

This flow of human events that seems nonsensical, vain, empty.

Like Heboric watching the Jade giants, Heboric and the ghosts of a world that is no more: I observe my time as if I’m outside, but I am in it. And yet outside, observing with an external god-like quality… of inaction (powerlessness). There’s nothing to judge, because it’s like a river. It goes downhill. It’s not its merit, it’s not its fault. You get to understand it only when you aren’t anymore part of it. Because when you are in it, you are swimming for your life. The world is about you. You cannot understand the world until you surrender yourself to it. Until you stop pretending to decide its course.

Silence your ego, lets the world speak with its own voice. You stop deciding, you start understanding.

The secret of Malazan is transforming its readers in… Ascendants. From reader to witness. We are the witnesses, from this outside. Given sight.

The writer is a jade giant, the reader is a jade giant. We are all jade giants. We watch. Erikson teaches how to tune in. To the hum of the world. We give voice to these otherworldly giants. We are receptacles. We are vessels of the world. We do not find answers, we must answer.

(The buzzing of Hood’s files, they speak. The buffeting wind, it speaks. “The world is very, very old.”)

(In Game of Thrones Martin transforms Bran into a tree. He can do it. In Malazan, he cannot do it, Erikson transforms the reader.)

Tenet as a symbol of modernity: anti-scientific propaganda

Disclaimer as usual: this isn’t a review of the movie, this is a review of its conceptual framework.

“Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

That’s a direct quote from the movie.

You cannot go back in time and kill your own grandfather (for whatever reason) because if you could you wouldn’t exist and everything in this reality happens for a reason. If this makes sense to you, then this movie is for you.

If that makes sense to you, then it reveals you have a deep set anti-scientific bias.

I’d usually now write to build toward that conclusion, but lets spoil it right away. Science is about testing knowledge, put it through the grinder to see if there’s something left at the end of the process. When you have a theory, a description of something, an anti-scientific mindset would operate to DEFEND that theory. A scientific mindset, instead, works to take it down in every way possible. If you prove the theory WRONG (or a more recent example), then you’ve learned something. An opportunity to move forward.

Most common understandings of science are the exact opposite: you work to prove things true. Nope, science works in reverse: you learn by proving things wrong. By drawing further distinctions and pruning. You move forward when you know you don’t know.

At the foundation of Tenet there’s a common theme I covered already many times. It’s funny because just a few weeks ago I was writing about Dark, and now this movie appears and it’s the same thing, all over again. From Arrival, through Dark, and now Tenet, we see the exact same structure being repeated without ANY variation. The “innovations” that Tenet brings to the table are exclusively “visual” and performative. The concept of time, and time-travel, is IDENTICAL. Just wave away all the obfuscation the movie throws at you, and you’re left with the same structure, and nothing new being said about such structure.

Tenet, just like Arrival and Dark (and Watchmen), is founded on a flawed premise. This is easily proven, and the example I use is a simple one that I’ve already explained. But let’s quickly go through it again.

Tenet is based on a concept of time, and time-travel, where “what’s happened, happened.” That means it pushes away hypothesis of parallel worlds forked by time-travel. There’s only one timeline, everything that happens has to be inscribed in that same time fabric. This consequently means that time is “fixed”, nothing can be changed, and every cause produced through time-travel is always already part of the flow. Nothing is ever being “added” to the time flow. If something appears to change, it only changed because of limited perspective and knowledge of someone observing. It’s illusory change due to perspective and perception. But reality, and time, are fixed. And of course all this opens the philosophical theme of free will and what happens to conscious choice.

As I said, this framework is flawed in its premise and is easily proven with a thought experiment meant to test the thesis itself. As in typical scientific investigation you have an hypothesis (“time cannot be changed”) and conceive an experiment meant to test whether it is actually true or not.

The experiment itself is much simpler than the tortuous machinations the movie throws at you: imagine a simple computer that uses as input two big buttons, labeled A and B. The computer is programmed so that if you press the button A, then the computer outputs a B on a screen, if you press B instead it will show an A. The opposite of the button you press. To contextualize this experiment to Tenet, just imagine sending a “protagonist” in reverse. Being in reverse, he experiences time in the inverted direction, so first he will see the output on a screen, and his memory will record the letter that appears on that screen. Let’s say it’s “B”. His instructions are simple. After seeing the letter on screen he will have to press on the input the letter that he saw on the screen.

That’s all.

If he sees a B on the screen, then he presses B, because that’s what the instructions he was given say. But if he presses B then his action OVERWRITES the future, and the screen will show A, as it is programmed to do. But if he went in reverse and he saw A, then he would press A, but this again overwrites the future. And yet, none of this can happen, because we’ve established as the premise that time cannot be changed. So no overwriting can happen.

It is not about free will, it’s about contradiction. You can replace the protagonist with an inverted mechanical object and the contradiction will take place just the same.

Here’s a new experiment with mechanical devices only. The simplest proof of how Tenet falls apart.

Tenet defeated

Let’s take two devices, one that is wholly normal, and proceeds linearly through time, that we name Billy. The other instead is reversed, and we name it Tom.

Billy, the linear time one, is equipped with a microphone, and programmed so that if it hears one beep, it activates a projector that shows the color red on a wall. If instead the microphone hears two beeps then the projector will show the color blue on the same wall.

Tom, the one that is reversed, is instead equipped with a camera and a sound emitter. The camera is pointed at the wall of the first device, and Tom is programmed so that if the camera sees the color red on the screen, then the sound emitter will produce two beeps, if instead the camera sees blue, the emitter will produce one beep.

Caveat: there’s a small loophole that can be exploited, and that wants that Billy doesn’t show anything, and Tom, not seeing anything on the wall, doesn’t emit anything either. This can be easily patched up with an added rule that if Tom reaches Time 1, as described below, without the camera seeing a color, then it is programmed to emit either one or two beeps randomly. This makes sure than in all cases Tom will see a color at Time 2, and so won’t have to use the random function at all.

Let’s establish then two discrete points in time. Time 1 and Time 2. They are labeled in linear order. So in common linear time first we have Time 1, and then Time 2 follows. Tom, in reverse, experiences Time 2 before Time 1.

Summary:
Billy (normal), one beep = red, two beeps = blue.
Tom (reverse), red = two beeps, blue = one beep.

Since Tenet establishes that the past cannot be changed, and everything is inscribed already in the same timeline, then it means Tom, at Time 2 will have to perceive a color, because it has always already also proceeded to Time 1 and emitted a sound. But of course this opens the contradiction because if it sees red, then it emits the two beeps that will cause Billy to project the color blue, and so Tom cannot see red, it sees blue. But if it sees blue at Time 2, then at Time 1 it will emit only one beep.

Conclusion: this contradiction cannot be solved, because the fundamental principle Tenet is based on is flawed.

This proves not only how and why Tenet is flawed at its foundation, but that also the theme of free will is completely misleading and misplaced. There’s no free will involved in that experiment. Just two mechanical devices operating with simple rules.

(By the way, I also know the outcome of that experiment if it really took place. For example Tom will see red and emit one beep. This whether or not time is fixed. It will happen simply because either the timeline was changed, so proving the thesis wrong, or a change is still perceived even if it doesn’t really happen. This because it’s a matter of perspective and you are experiencing an inner loop where information is still flowing in a limited, occluded way. If your epistemology is solid then all these apparent contradictions will simply go away. So yes, the experiment will produce a PERCEIVED contradiction, apparently impossible to explain. Either the thesis is wrong, or time is perceived occluded and so partially. I will return on this theme of partial perception.)

Now, even if I proved that the concept of the movie doesn’t hold up to scrutiny it’s still a stretch accusing this movie of anti-scientific propaganda. This goes a step further, so let’s get to that point, since I’ve more territory to cover here.

All that I’ve explained above pivots around what’s generally known as the Grandfather Paradox. This is relevant as the most common solution to this paradox contains meaningful elements that have a lot in common with the movie (but the movie doesn’t propose any solution to the Grandfather Paradox, it quotes it, but it doesn’t address it).

The common solution is straightforward, you go back in time, try to kill your grandfather only to eventually find out that you only believed having killed him, but he somehow survived (Dark offers this exact example). Or maybe he never was your true grandfather.

All these different possibilities rely on one aspect: that the time-traveler’s knowledge is imperfect and incomplete. You think you’re going back and changing something, but that’s a byproduct of incomplete knowledge, you’re proven delusional. Things were always set in a different way, you just didn’t know.

This is where everything comes together. You can indeed write time travel stories, like Tenet, where what you see happening is coherent. Those scenes are thought and built to avoid contradiction. Precisely selected. But this also means that we see what the director decided to show. The concept itself only holds up for those specific scenes, it doesn’t hold up in general.

But what does it also mean? That Nolan came up with an interesting concept, then built a story around it to make it work and deliberately DODGE all the problematic questions it implicitly opens. The movie directly references them, like the Grandfather Paradox and the problem of free will, but these crucial points are left hanging, going unaddressed and untested because the movie selectively shows only what can work.

This “process” is essentially the sublimation of a fallacy: confirmation bias. You come up with a theory and only point at those elements that reinforce the theory while ignoring everything that proves it wrong. You make a movie so fast moving and confusing that no one has time to understand and ask questions. It works through distraction.

Its purpose is mystification. Smoke thrown in the eyes.

“Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” said the illusionist.

The Prestige.

These are all signs of a bad story and a bad writer. Even if writing is an artificial process, good writers test their ideas and themselves. Writing isn’t simply putting on the page what you precisely know to indoctrinate who’s reading, it’s about discovering it. If there’s something of value for the reader is because the writer is also pushing himself on. Writing as a process of challenge and discovery, to push the boundary. You write to understand, you write to see.

“[Y]ou start working on something, and you find you’re really writing something else. You thought you were going this way; in fact, the text [the muse] is going another way.”

This movie is instead written to flee, to dodge, to hide from, to look elsewhere as soon there’s an hint of a problem. To distract. It’s a movie of mystification so that you fall for the illusion without questioning it. And all transpires for the general public, since you can read everywhere how the movie is convoluted, hard to understand, and no one truly believes it’s worth the effort of puzzling it together. The process is not fun because it’s felt as stilted and artificial. All these aspects surface to be perceived by everyone.

Tenet is a manual of confirmation bias. It shows what confirms the premise, ignores everything else that would undermine it. It explicitly asks you to watch it uncritically. To feel the illusion rather than reveal it. All the important themes and questions are brushed away and replaced by distracting loudness.

If Transformers by Michael Bay is militaristic propaganda, Tenet is anti-scientific propaganda. But where the first is explicit, the latter is devious, shifty, because it tries to sell itself as something else. Something clever, well thought and thought provoking. If Transformers is candidly sincere with its message, Tenet is deceitful. Going as far as choking dialogues with loud music so that you can’t even hear what they say. Because otherwise if you’d focus enough you’d see the sleight of hand, the illusion for what it is. The movie is only parroting complexity and depth.

A scientific mindset is that when you have a theory, you test it. An anti-scientific mindset is that when you have a theory you only look for confirmations while pretending not to see all that goes against it. Tenet is deliberately built to dodge all important questions and only show what’s convenient.

Tenet is built like a BELIEF SYSTEM. They state a holy principle and then go out of their ways to avoid testing it. Just like magic or religion. Characters in the movie either don’t know what they are doing (imperfect knowledge) or deliberately try to replicate it to avoid the risk of contradiction.

Tenet is a RELIGION, founded on faith and fate.

But Tenet is also exemplary of modern mythologies, a product of its time. “Fake news” work because epistemology collapsed and people operate through confirmation bias. They find confirmations for what they already believe and find soothing, convenient. To reinforce belief and identity, because they always come before truth. COVID deniers and Trump’s propaganda are so cartoonish that they wouldn’t be believable in a book. But they are the future.

It’s funny that the other main theme of Tenet is the nihilism of society and collapse, because that’s precisely the future that Tenet builds toward.

We’re driven by culture, to save us. And what do we get, precisely in these complicate days? Mulan, a propaganda for the Chinese regime, whose main actress coherently supported the regime itself. Deliberately a (misfiring) marketing move to win the sympathies of mainland China, following the example set by Blizzard a year ago (money runs further than short-lived boycotts, and Disney is the incarnation of pure EVIL). And Tenet, a movie built on anti-scientific mindset.

At the exact same time, Trump was tweeting…

And what’s this “critical race theory”, that I’ve never heard before and that got Trump so fired up?

“argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors”

Storytelling, counter-storytelling, and “naming one’s own reality”: The use of narrative to illuminate and explore experiences of racial oppression.

“Rather than marshal logical arguments and empirical data, critical race theorists tell stories – fictional, science-fictional, quasi-fictional, autobiographical, anecdotal – designed to expose the pervasive and debilitating racism of America today”

Storytelling, fiction. The culture that drives us. Those stories that tell you what and how to think. Those stories that make you feel before they make you think.

Modern mythologies, like Nolan’s, are the same old. Nothing changed. Modern mythologies are only lazier and sillier.

That’s why I’d support something bolder, like afrofuturism. From the last paragraph:

Afrofuturism has to do with reclaiming those identities or perspectives that have been lost.
“Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?”
Afrofuturism involves reclaiming some type of agency over one’s story, a story that has been told, throughout much of history, by official culture in the name of white power.
Because the ancestors of many African-Americans were forcibly removed from their homelands and stripped of their history like most slaves, any culture that has found its way into the Black lexicon is at its roots an Afrofuturist notion. It is at its heart reclaiming a past erased and creating a future based on that reimagined past.

Rasheedah Phillips writes about Black Quantum Futurism, a time-travel device.

A time-travel device to plant stories, mythologies, in the past so that we can have a different future.

Space-Time Collapse is an experimental writing and image series applying Black Quantum Futurism practices and theory to various space-time collapse phenomenon.

This inaugural collection explores possible space-time narratives and temporal perspectives of enslaved Black African ancestors, pre- and post-liberation. The slave ships and plantations themselves are traversed by the visionaries as chronotopes containing layers of different times, imprinted by the experiences of the people held captive therein.

The featured writers and visionaries attempt to visualize, hear, understand, and feel the experience of time overwritten — the rewriting of conceptions of the past, present, and future to a people displaced by the transatlantic slave trade. The works also examine perceptions of time and space in relation to Black memory, historical and societal change, systems and institutions, and technological development, and how these perceptions are sifted through or persist into the present. Some propose ways and tools for shifting the dominant linear progress narrative with alternative concepts and shapes of time.

If you look closely, there are traces here of Land-ian (Nick Land) CCRU accelerationism. Hyperstition: planting mythologies in the past to change the future.

Templexity, in essence, is the inherent nemesis that responds continually to modernism’s hubristically escalating negentropic reversal of the laws of thermodynamics. It is the radical externality of its defiance of the Void. When humanity plays with time, templexity is the whirls and eddies of disorder we leave behind.

All of this is more powerful and meaningful than Tenet’s sloppy time-travel and childish nihilism.

But obviously Nolan doesn’t know.

DARK: what doesn’t work (bootstrap paradox)

Part 1: illusion of sufficiency (Dark explained away)
Part 2: what does work (Deus Ex Machina)
>> Part 3: what doesn’t work (bootstrap paradox)

Bootstrap Paradoxes

Here we are at what doesn’t work.

What doesn’t work, then? The knot.

The knot and many (all) of its facets. A good number of those are necessary parts of the plot that go deliberately unexplained. Maybe because they would be too forced and not flow well in the story, creating a too gigantic and extraneous info dump. But there’s also the feel that things were simply hand waves because the thing face-planted against its own lack of coherence. You dig deep enough and find unsolvable problems, so to avoid them, you keep digging, but horizontally. Trying to fool everyone else. Practicing distraction.

For example: who creates the golden ball, the meta-traveling device that Eva uses and eventually ends in Claudia’s hands? Who tells Eva about the loophole, or how does she find out?

The knot itself, is a gigantic bootstrap paradox. Eva’s world (that we called “Beta”) is a world without a Jonas. She invades Adam’s world (“Alpha”) to bring Jonas to Beta, create the “origin” (her son), and through the origin manipulate events in both worlds so that Alpha and Beta would be fused together in a Moebius strip, a time knot that goes across both worlds before completing one cycle (the symbol of infinite “8”).

But how can Eva know of a Jonas in a alternate world, if Jonas doesn’t exist in hers?

Things get too complicate to follow in a really large chain of circular cause and effect like the overall knot, and then think about concepts, so instead of tracking details I’ll try to take out the most simple of bootstrap paradox, and analyze it for what it is.

The simplest version I’m aware of, back in Alpha world and when we didn’t know a Beta existed, is Claudia use of her portable time travel machine to go back in time, and bury the time machine so that her younger self will be able to use it.

This is, very obviously, a bootstrap paradox, and of a very bad kind.

Question: Who gave Claudia the time machine?
Answer: Herself, she took it from the future and brought it back in the past.

The same happens to the construction itself, because Tannhauser in Alpha doesn’t create any time machine on his own. He’s handed the book he’ll write in the future, so he can read it and write it, and he’s also handed the project of the time machine, so he can study it. He’s even handed a broken one, so he can study both the real machine and the plans. Everything he does depends on the same stuff being brought back from the future.

Now lets go through another story to make things simple:
—
One day, at dawn, Jonas suddenly wakes up in his room. He heard some weird noises coming from downstairs. So he goes to see what’s going on, and finds a big rhino standing in the middle of his dining room. Eventually, after moments of bewilderment, someone will call the fire department and they’ll be able to take that hapless rhino out of the room and into a nearby zoo. No one will ever be able to explain how that rhino ended up in Jonas’ house, though. Especially because the rhino is big, and the door too small. In fact, the firefighters had to take down half a wall to transport the rhino outside: a mystery.

For us, though, as external “readers”, the story has indeed an explanation: Claudia was feeling like playing pranks. A few years later she goes at night into the zoo, where the rhino is kept. Then she uses her portable time machine to travel back in time, and into Jonas’ house, bringing the inculpable rhino with her…
—

This simple story is functionally IDENTICAL to the paradoxes that Dark creates. The problem is that they come into existence without a real motivation.

Continuing from above:
Question: How was it possible for the rhino to appear in Jonas’ house?
Answer: It was brought there by Claudia, who found it at the zoo, in the future.
Question: But then why the rhino was at the zoo?
Answer: The firefighters brought it there, after they freed it from Jonas’ house.

This is the fucking causal loop. The past has its origin in the future, that has its origin in the past.

Does it make any sense? No. Then why people watching Dark largely accept it? Because you’re hit by a storm of details, as obfuscation. You don’t see clearly the moving parts, so it sort of seems to make sense, being complex enough to give the illusion of coherence. When you strip it bare, it’s obvious, but when you dress it up and put on it a nice bow, it’s …okay.

But that’s of course not enough for me. Why doesn’t it work? Why a circular causal loop isn’t acceptable?

Its function is fine. In general we’re used to a chain of cause and effect, that’s our reality. Within the context of Dark this chain of cause-effect isn’t broken, it simply loops around, but it’s functionally correct and identical in the linear perception of time. If we use a longer loop, we have a series of events, each one caused by another before. We only find out, as a sort of deja-vu, that we continue to return to the same event if the causal chain loops. In reality, where the causal chain doesn’t loop, we still have events linked one to the other, we can backtrack the chain, and continue back and forward to infinity. In the loop, the infinity is in the motion, but from the linear point of view it functions in the exact same way.

This gives us the idea of an hypothetical object that can function. The feel of a weird object, but not an impossible one. That’s why at least some of us accept it, even if it’s a paradox. It seems weird, but not absurdly so.

Now let’s examine what doesn’t work.

As I was saying, the problem isn’t “function”, but “being.” Ontology. The nature of existence. Not a problem of how the object operates, but WHY and HOW it is there. Who, or what, put it there. It CAN be there, because its functioning is fine. But why is it specifically there?

What was hidden in the story I wrote above is its IMPLIED CONSEQUENCE. Until we have bootstrap paradoxes made of common objects like a pocket clock or a necklace, that seems all fine. But what about a fucking rhino?

What I mean is that the moment we accept the existence of “bootstrapped objects” (or people) we accept the magical appearance of ARBITRARY objects. All around us things and people can suddenly appear without cause. Because their nature of being simply requires them being recalled from the future.

BUT WHO PUT THEM INTO REALITY?

Again, they function. It is fine. The question is: why this and not something else? Why Elisabeth and Charlotte, but not Georgina and Ivana? Who decides who appears and who doesn’t?

In the real world it’s A instead of B because of causality itself, but the bootstrap paradox splits function and existence. It creates objects that can function, but why, specifically, are they there? Why this and not that? why not millions of objects, small and large, all appearing without origin?

The consequence of this thesis, the possibility of this paradox, COLLAPSES REALITY. It’s a conceptual black hole that devours everything, because the nature of existence, ontology, becomes ARBITRARY. Ontology (existence) get unlinked from causality. So causality becomes wholly independent, creating objects out of nothing. Arbitrary object. WHO DECIDES (or determines) what does exist and what doesn’t?

“Hey, my name is Claudia. I kind of need a time machine, right now. Thank you. I’ll make sure to then send it back to my past to properly bootstrap its existence, don’t worry.”

This is, in a word… convenient.

And yet, because of the thousands of words I’ve written above, we know what a bootstrap paradox is. Perception. So we know WHY these impossible objects exist within Dark: they are written.

We know that in a fixed time loop change can happen only if it comes from OUTSIDE. External intervention. Bootstrapped objects can logically exist, as long SOMEONE EXTERNAL put them there. The hidden hand. The Deus Ex Machina.

Bootstrapped objects (and people) REQUIRE meta-travel, require external intervention. Something from outside, looking in. Something truly alien (foreign) to the internal dimension.

So ask yourself: who’s external and with the power of intervention, to Dark? The fucking writers of the show. (hello, it’s The OA)

A writer does exactly this. He creates characters and puts them “there.” Writing IS meta-traveling. A writer can conjure things into existence BECAUSE he’s external to the fictional dimension. External intervention.

Things are bootstrapped in Dark because they are… written. And because they are convenient in their appearance.

They can function fine, when they are there. But WHY are they there, in that specific form? For the plot. To tell a story. Because they are convenient.

This is what discloses its nature: this instance of bootstrap paradox isn’t science, it isn’t a philosophical concept, it’s instead a fictional device.

Who created Eva’s world, who told her about Jonas, why the giant family tree generated by the origin produces those specific characters but not others. The whole knot is functionally fine, but has no logical existence. No logical reason that isn’t that it’s being invented by a writer. Since we’ve seen it’s entirely “spurious” from the original world, and can be easily unraveled, it means that it doesn’t exist. IF it exists, and it has that specific shape, is just because that someone wrote it that way. A creation from nothing. Who’s responsible? The only hand in the room that thinks of being invisible: the writer!

And that’s of course not an acceptable solution. If they wanted to go to metafiction, they had to do explicitly, or use a character to produce bootstrap paradoxes because their actual origin was separated from a dimension that ceases to exist, like the finale. But the original “knot”, of Alpha and Beta, Eva’s motivations and the whole spurious family tree… so the largest construction in the show… has no foundation and is CANONICALLY flawed. They simply tell us bootstrap paradoxes are “real”, and being real make them not need rational explanation.

The origin of Adam’s world, Alpha, isn’t explained. The origin of Eva’s world isn’t explained. The origin of the knot, Alpha + Beta, even if it comes into existence all at once, isn’t explained. When they exist, fine. I can see how they function, and the way out. But how were they formed? Why they have the shape they have? Why Alpha and Beta and not a million of others, all arbitrary? Why those people, belonging to an impossible knot, why them and not someone else?

Jonas existence is fine. Mikkel travels back, marries Hannah. That works logically. Jonas doesn’t magically appear, at this level. But if you keep backtracking you see it’s the whole Ulrich family to be bootstrapped, eventually including Jonas. In the end all these things just magically appear, to give shape to a giant knot of characters and events, of Alpha fused with Beta, whose cumulative existence doesn’t make any sense. It’s just so complex that most people give up thinking about it and accept it as it is.

An illusory casual chain: you go back from one link, find another, go back again, find another… it all seems grounded just because the chain is so long you don’t immediately notice the point where it stops working. Most people won’t. Sleight of hand.

They fucked up, because they had an ambitious plan but didn’t have an equally clear vision to support it. The concept they aimed at was too high for their reach. They tried, they failed.

As I wrote in the first part, Dark still is an admirable construction, really well built, majestic even. But it’s like a tree canopy without a tree trunk below. Its central pillar isn’t simply flawed, it DOESN’T EVEN EXIST. Because they thought one was not necessary. That the tree canopy just sat there, suspended on air. Pretending “it just works.” The illusion of coherence.

The end.

After more than 8.000 words I think I’m done. I’ve left 30-40% of my notes out, there are countless other things. But still more than enough for me now. An important part that is left out is linking all these theories back to discuss again Watchmen, Arrival, and everything else (language theory, paradoxes of self-reference like Liar’s Paradox, Godel incompleteness and so on). But that also relies on notes that are months and even years old. It’s an impossibly large argument that I’ll leave for another time.

(I’m writing this after I’m done with the whole thing and now re-reading: the difference between my theory and most theories on the internet is that those theories establish that when a loophole is used two split realities are created. This for example means that the knot continues to exist, we just have two major alternate realities, one where Tannhauser’s son dies and generates the knot, one where he doesn’t and lead to the finale. But all that shit doesn’t simply vanish, it stays there in different quantum states, existing and not existing depending on who’s looking. Aside from the fact this is the product of childish interpretation of Schrodinger’s Cat, my theory instead says that when the loophole is used, the alternate dimension produced is THE ONLY ONE that exists. The reason why Beta doesn’t erase Alpha is because Eva actively knots them, so that this knot makes possible their existence as one thing, where one depends and sustains the other. Otherwise, one is created, the other goes away. That’s why, in the finale, when they create a new origin world, in my theory that world/dimension is the only one that is left in existence. Everything else is gone. Consequently, when in the origin world Tannhauser activates the machine, he erases his world and creates the knot. Then the knot is erased, and replaced by a new origin world. Every time a new world is created, the preceding one is gone. This is a more elegant solution for me, and it’s more coherent with the canon, since the canon implies Jonas and Martha are gone, not simply stuck into some separate, and silly, quantum dimension…)

DARK: what does work (Deus Ex Machina)

Part 1: illusion of sufficiency (Dark explained away)
>> Part 2: what does work (Deus Ex Machina)
Part 3: what doesn’t work (bootstrap paradox)

Circular family tree, and its unraveling

I’m not going to explain here the things the show explains well (in the sense that the show’s explanation is fine), there are so many websites and videos that do that job, showing how so much is actually really well made and meticulously put together. Lots of small details, references, links between characters. The overall picture is indeed daunting and impressive, awe-inspiring in its complexity, an overall masterful construction. Like clockwork, opening it and seeing all the small parts precisely built and arranged.

The one that works better for me is the circular shape, and concept, of the family tree at the end of the third season. There’s especially a chart on the wikipedia that is well arranged.

At the end of the second season the biggest revelation was the Charlotte-Elisabeth-Charlotte paradox, but with the third season we realize instead this is not some weird feature happening on the side, it’s the actual CORE.

It creates the concept of a ball of yarn, linking the family trees and the events. With the finale, and the removal of time travel, it’s like pulling one end and see this ball of yarn unravel… almost completely. You realize a number of characters will simply vanish, not just Jonas and Martha.

Part of the implied journey of Claudia would be exactly this: find out who’s “real” and who’s created by the time anomaly. When she realizes that a great number of people are “spurious”, and especially having found out that who she cares about (herself and Regina) are outside this mess, she decides to erase this current reality through the solution that we see happen.

(see me here crossing all those that I think are certainly gone)

At its core this is just a pure Donnie Darko: the current time travel knot is seen as some sort of evil corruption that needs to be eradicated to make things wholesome again. In Donnie Darko, Donnie is eventually “instructed” to sacrifice himself in order to resolve the anomaly. In Dark… Claudia is the bunny (even if moved by more egoistical motivations). She instructs Adam to do what Donnie does. A sacrifice to fix the timeline and make things “normal” again (they aren’t normal, but we’ll see this later).

I’ll examine this more in detail, but I appreciate this construction. The elegant unraveling of the ball of yarn, the way the family tree(s) was all connected, forming this overall giant loop that links all the families together. That’s rather well executed.

Claudia, as a logical and functioning Deus Ex Machina

Here we get to the real deal (and, if you scroll, you see this part being unreasonably long). It’s a mess. It’s a mess not because it’s especially dense, but because it’s made of two parts, and this is what created ripples all over the internet.

The two parts, when fused, become: the bootstrap paradox.

The bootstrap paradox is the meta-narrative knot. Because it doesn’t just represents the time-knot within the show, but it’s also the knot of the discussion here.

ALL OF US who have watched Dark to its end get split into two groups: those who think that the bootstrap paradox needs to have an explanation, otherwise the whole plot has no rational motivation to exist and makes no sense at all, and those who think the explanation of the bootstrap paradox is that… it’s a paradox. The foundation of Dark establishes this is the nature of time, that this paradox is real, and so there’s nothing to explain.

In the previous part I wrote that Dark gives a sufficient feel of depth because someone who studied a bit of philosophy, epistemology and ontology KNOWS that paradoxes do not exist. They do not exist and they cannot be found, without unraveling the whole concept of human consciousness. Human mind, and reality, isn’t compatible with the concept of paradoxes. Yet we use the concept and the word commonly in our daily life. And that’s why Dark can get away with it. It’s a common concept. But it works, for us, because the concept depends on the nature of representation, not reality.

More simply: paradoxes exist within models and representations, not reality. Paradoxes surface to point where our framework isn’t sufficient to correctly represent reality. When we have simplified and abstracted too much.

That’s why when you produce and find a (apparent) paradox that’s a sign you’ve made a mistake. It’s not the signal you’ve discovered something spooky and weird, it’s the signal you’ve messed up.

But this isn’t a philosophical treatise where I demonstrate paradoxes cannot exist and why, the purpose is to show that the bootstrap paradox specifically cannot exist within the context and rules Dark itself has established. It doesn’t work. This one paradox, not paradoxes in general.

One step back, I said all of us divide into those who accept the paradox and those who reject it, but this is also the mess I’ve pointed at: Dark uses two types of bootstrap paradoxes. It’s Dark itself that produces one form of bootstrap paradox that is inexcusable, illogical and self-contradicting, and then another whose solution exists, and is entirely logical and coherent with the given rules. Dark itself shows that the bootstrap paradox CAN be explained, if you do your job well.

In this first part I’ll re-explain what’s essentially an hypothesis about Dark’s finale. Why it can work logically, and why it can work ONLY this one way. It’s still an hypothesis because it’s merely coherent with all Dark established, but still speculation since what I’m going to say… hasn’t been shown. What I say is going to be COMPATIBLE with canon, but is not canonical. Because not explicitly shown.

Since we’ll deal with convoluted stuff, let’s spoil it from the beginning. Dark’s concept of time is like “solid determinism.” It means that time is fixed, and no character within this structure has “free will”, in the sense that every action is already inscribed in. Nothing can be altered.

There’s only one (logical) way to break this cycle: external intervention. This isn’t just one trick we have to break the cycle. It’s the ONLY trick. And it works. That determinism is very easily disrupted the moment you can create an interference. Something coming from the outside that slips in. Chaos theory, on complex systems (reality is of course a complex system), says that even a super-small variable introduced can trigger LARGE upsets all over the surface of the system. One tiny nudge and that fancy determinism goes ALL to shit.

Back to Dark: we need external intervention, even to create the POSSIBILITY of variation…

Let’s stop here a moment for a small sidetrack. In Dark time doesn’t cycle. Even if the canon tells you, again and again, that time DOES cycle. This is just utterly stupid and it’s worth clarifying. If something cycles identically, then there’s no point “ahead” of the cycle. Something doesn’t move onward if it’s always identically the same. Identity opposes variation. There is no motion, no distinction. If we observe a wheel turning identically, we measure these cycles because we reference the movement of the wheel with our external point of reference of time. We know the time, we know the position of the wheel. But in Dark there isn’t any meta-time tracking the progress of time. Time is one thing. We know that when the knot is formed (the two dimensions of Adam and Eva), it forms ALL AT ONCE, already incorporating ALL the actions of ALL characters. Characters within, perceive time linearly, but time itself appears in existence all at once. Without meta-time to track progress, and without progress because rules establish that nothing is different and everything is perfectly immutable, it means that nothing can fucking cycle. To determine a cycle you need at least two distinct points. It needs to move to cycle. But you cannot have two points of a thing that is fixed and identical. This is VERY important because it allows to then find WHEN the thing is kicked onward and the actual cycle happens. Sidetrack over.

Let’s start collecting these basic concepts. We have this universe, that is deterministic and fixed, it DOESN’T cycle. It’s called block-universe, in the sense that it’s fully formed and self-consistent. A syllogism: if we know the block universe is fixed, and the characters inside part of this universe, then no character will have even the hypothetical option to produce a change. How can this block universe be disrupted then? We already know: external intervention.

Here I go for a little story I’ve created to explain how time-travel works. It will feel like over-explanining, but I like to wrestle complex things to make them as simple and plain as possible. You either have patience and enjoy this journey, or not. It will be useful because we will set all the rules, then we’ll play the game.

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Let’s use an arbitrary cycle-block of years. It starts in 1950 and ends in 2000. Exactly 50 years. The theory of the “loop” wants that in the year 2000 there’s an apocalypse that resets time to 1950, and then it keeps cycling endlessly.

Let’s take any person who DOESN’T time travel, still part of this loop. Let’s say this guy in 1950 is 20 years old. Then in the 2000 year he’ll be 70 (his initial 20 + 50 of the cycle). At that point, from year 2000 we go back to 1950, but everything resets (this person doesn’t time travel), so he’s back as his 20 years old self, with no memory of the previous cycle (and the reason why we already know that nothing actually cycles, but it’s not important here). This is the standard: when the entire cycle loops memories don’t carry over to the next cycle. It’s a clean wipe.

Now let’s use a time traveler. Take a traveler, with a time machine, whose journey is set like this: a minute before the apocalypse he opens a gate and time travels back to 1990. Let’s also say that, before time-traveling, the traveler is 20 years old in 1990.

At the first go, the traveler is 20 years old in 1990, lives to 30 when we get to 2000. Goes through the first portal back to 1990. Lives again normally from 1990 to 2000, then travels back, always the same.

That means that every time he hits the 2000s he’s 10 years older, because he keeps going through the 1900 -> 2000 segment, over and over again.

It also means that a time traveler can perform “infinite” time jumps, that aren’t strictly infinite, because he keeps linearly aging. So he can only travel and experience the world as long he doesn’t die of age. As long his own personal linear time lasts. A finite amount.

This type of time travel allows the traveler to retain all his memories. All the information he gathers by going around the timeline is information that accumulates. Because these are internal jumps, and are of a different type from the overall 2000 -> 1950 world-time-loop we established above.

Internal time loops let travelers build information, general loops instead wipe that information and restart clean.

Explaining it better in the context of Dark: let’s say that whenever our traveler jumps back to 1990 he meets his younger self. Let’s also say that the traveler, before dying of old age, performs 7 jumps in total (so he gets to 90 years old). Since all these jumps are “internal”, the traveler will meet, already at the first jump as at the last, seven copies of himself at the same time. All of them being there at once. Each 10 years older than the other. Because these are internal jumps and so all coexistent and part of the same overall cycle.

From this we can deduce some general rules: it’s not possible to transfer knowledge from an overall cycle to another. When someone dies, his own memories are wiped with the cycle. But instead as long he lives he can jump internally and retain all he finds out.

(here I start using some conventions. “Alpha” defines Adam’s dimension, “Beta” defines Eva’s dimension. Won’t be used here, but I’ll also use Z1 as the original world and Z2 as the output of the finale)

All this, exactly as written, applies to the character of Adam in Dark. Adam/Jonas is a time traveler, within Alpha, who gathers knowledge by jumping around internally while he ages in his linear time. Of course he cannot send this knowledge to the NEXT overall cycle, because all memories are wiped and nothing carries over.

…But there’s another type of traveler in Dark: the meta-traveler.

A meta-traveler is Eva-Martha. From Eva’s Beta-dimension she INVADES Adam’s Alpha dimension, and “kidnaps” Jonas. She doesn’t simply travel internally within her native Beta, but she crosses over to Alpha.

Another meta-traveler is Claudia. She works for Eva, who entrusts her for the technology to travel to Alpha, and collaborate (or spy) with the other Claudia in Alpha.

Meanwhile in Alpha we have Adam, who between all these three is the only one who doesn’t know about this meta-traveling. In fact that’s why his plan to kill Martha and the “Origin” ultimately fizzles: because he’s not aware of the Beta world and so he doesn’t know there’s another Martha going around and still preserving the knot. He’s only aware of one half of the thing, and so his plan doesn’t add up.

…The other two, Eva/Martha and Claudia, not only travel internally, but also externally between dimensions.

This meta-traveling creates the premise for the “loophole.” We established above that to change this fixed cycle there’s only one way possible, external intervention. Well, meta-traveling IS external intervention. In principle.

Bingo? Nope. What we find out is that this meta-traveling isn’t external, it’s instead… delusional. This is what causes many headaches for a lot of people watching Dark, because they face a contradiction: we see through the first two seasons that some characters (like Ulrich) try to break the cycle only to *produce* what they tried to cancel. Yet we see Eva, as another blatant example, who actively works to PRESERVE the cycle, as if the cycle needed active intervention or risk going off the rails.

The solution to this apparent contradiction is that Eva is just as delusional as Adam (not really, but a complete explanation needs more pieces). what Eva does is PRODUCE the cycle. Because the cycle is not what it seems. We’re led to believe there’s an Alpha-Adam world with its cycle, and a “parallel universe” Beta-Eva, where Jonas normally doesn’t exist, with its own separate cycle. This is false. What we have is instead a Moebius strip (the “8” symbol of infinity). One half is Alpha, the second half is Beta. The actual cycle is Alpha and Beta as ONE cycle made of two parts, fused together as one. That’s why, for example, Eva sends that creature of pure evil that is her son to produce the incident in the nuclear plant, in BOTH worlds. She’s the hidden hand between many important events. She isn’t preserving the cycle, she creates it as it is.

Therefore, meta-traveling between Alpha and Beta cannot count as actual “meta”. It LOOKS LIKE it’s external, because it’s either external to Alpha or Beta (interference in Alpha created by something that arrives from Beta, breaking Alpha’s stillness). But now we know the cycle is the FUSION of Alpha and Beta, so what comes in Alpha from Beta comes still from WITHIN the overall cycle. It doesn’t break any fucking pattern. It IS the pattern. Eva ends up just as caged as everyone else.

So? How’s the finale is possible (since it is logically possible, this is the conclusion I’m driving toward)? If we need external intervention and meta-traveling isn’t it, from where does it come from?

Well… Claudia. Claudia? Claudia is just internal to the loop as everyone else. So logically she’s just as trapped. What gives Claudia an utterly magical status that lets her steps out of the thing, give it a kick, and send it onto a wholly new course? Well, it’s the fun part. It’s also the part that Dark doesn’t show, so we have to speculate, staying within the rules we’re given.

To explain this I’m going to create some premises. These premises might appear arbitrary, but trust me, I only use them to simplify the solution, and they aren’t necessary.

The first premise is to set up the context. In the original world Tannhauser feels sad, this motivates him to create the device that eventually produces the mess as we know it, by succeeding essentially. So we assume that the moment Tannhauser’s machine is activated, Tannhauser’s dimension ceases to exist. Gone. In the part above we assumed (within Dark’s concept) that when a dimension is created, that dimension is created as fully formed all at once. It’s not built linearly, it’s built at once even if its logic still is compatible with a linear perception.

So, Z1, the original world of Tannhauser, ceases to exist. Is immediately replaced by what we identify as the “knot”, or the fusion of Alpha and Beta. You can think the knot as a cycle, but we know this is a superficial perception, the knot appears into existence as fully formed, and it’s stable, static. It doesn’t really cycle because time doesn’t move. The linear flow of time is trapped in there, and we know the only disruption possible needs to come from outside. But outside there’s no disruption because Tannhauser’s world is gone. When the knot is created, that’s the ONLY world/dimension that exists. Outside there’s only the void of emptiness. And so it looks like a dead end: we need intervention from outside, but the set-up establishes there’s nothing outside.

It’s like a locked-room mystery where it’s simply impossible to have a solution. There’s just no leverage.

But we have a Claudia, and we have a loophole.

What Adam believes, is plausible and legitimate. An Alpha dimension, that loops on itself. He just happens to be wrong because there’s this loop, but it’s built by the fusion of Alpha and Beta. Eva knows this, but she wants to PRESERVE this cycle, apparently happy enough of how things turn out. Who’s not happy at all, is Claudia, who knows what Eva’s doing, knows this knot being built of Alpha and Beta. Through her own travels back and forth Claudia also puts together the overall family tree, to find out that both herself and her daughter aren’t caught in that messy web. And that’s why she decides to unravel it… who cares about everyone else if both her and her daughter end up in a better place? She’s just another player of the game who’s been served a lucky hand.

Up to this point I’ve explained why characters do what they do, but I haven’t explained HOW Claudia does what she tries to. So let’s move to examine the loophole.

We know there’s a loophole, because I’ve introduced it above, the meta-travel. Eva can travel to Alpha and kidnap Jonas, creating the knot itself. The knot is created through the loophole that Eva uses. Traveling between Alpha and Beta. But Eva uses the loophole to preserve the knot. Eva then entrusts Claudia to perform various activities, without realizing that Claudia eventually finds out she’s outside the monstrous family tree and there’s a possible alternate dimension where both her and her daughter are much happier. Adam doesn’t know the loophole, Eva knows it, but uses it to preserve it, Claudia knows it, through Eva, who carelessly trusts her, but eventually Claudia has her own wishes, and decides to use the loophole to BREAK the cycle. She is in that unique position because she knows how (the loophole) and wants to (because she’s researched the family tree and understood its anomaly, and that it can be unraveled, returning to her “normal”).

Here we find the first of the two keys needed to open the lock of the locked room. The loophole creates alternative universes. This is an exception to the rules of Dark. We had established that time is fixed, solid, no change possible unless from outside. But during season three we know there’s ONE EXCEPTION: the loophole. The use of the loophole splits dimensions, because it creates real change. Beta is split from Alpha. Adam, who didn’t know of the loophole, was logically believing in Alpha being autonomous. But there’s Beta. Beta is a divergence. An actual change. This is THE FRAUD, the key. Eva could have used the loophole to produce change, but she didn’t merely because she willed the cycle. She worked to produce it. But the loophole doesn’t HAVE TO produce a cycle. The dimensions can be split. Eva split them to then forcefully bend both Alpha and Beta to be fused, but all this isn’t mandatory in the rules, it’s simply produced by her personal will.

Claudia, who’s entrusted to this knowledge by Eva, betrays Eva to develop her own agenda and pursue her own goal. Her own goal being to weed out this time travel mess, because she knows she has a better alternative. She CAN use the loophole TO bring change. Because that’s what the loophole does as it was defined: produce change. Unless that change is produced by an Eva, that simply uses it to generate a larger mess. It could have been just an Alpha looping, like Adam believed, or Alpha + Beta, aka the knot. Or maybe 16 dimensions all entangled together into a giant mess, even if that’s quite hard to motivate.

What I mean is that there isn’t anything mandatory that says there needs to be one dimension looping, or two, or twenty. We just happen to have two, the knot. And then have a Claudia that doesn’t like it, and has reasons to disrupt all of it.

We know what Claudia wants to do and why, but HOW can she escape the loop?

We established above that when an entire cycle loops (the overall fusion of Alpha and Beta, in this case) all the memories the characters have, are wiped. This means there’s no way for Claudia to pass over information to the next cycle, so that 100, or 2000 cycles later she might find out something new. In fact we know that when the second cycle starts, everyone is hammered down into the same roles. So, the second cycle is going to be identical to the 2.000.000 cycle, and so on.

The trigger is the first. And here we obtain the second key, that is already enough to open the lock and explain what we see.

We know that when we are at the second cycle, we’re already locked in. But that leaves a door open in the very first cycle.

Yet, canon wants that when Claudia reaches Adam she tells him that the cycle has gone on and on, and yet again she also tells him it’s the very first time they met at that point. I’ll try to stay within this.

Claudia needs to act at the very first cycle. So she does know (has to) about the loophole before the first cycle closes. And she has to use it, before this cycle closes. What she could do, but isn’t shown, is to use the loophole to do something else rather than immediately go to Adam to close the thing. She needs to know more, first.

So… during the very first cycle, Claudia of the Eva world goes to Claudia in Alpha, collaborates, shares information, including the information about the loophole coming from Eva. She doesn’t need to understand everything at this point, just knowledge of the loophole. As I said, the distinction from Eva is that Claudia can use the loophole for different ends, rather than simply preserve the knot as Eva does.

Claudia takes the meta-travel device, and uses it as information-transfering device. This sounds completely weird, so I’ll explain it better. Before the first knot closes (she would be trapped if she doesn’t act before the end of the first cycle) she uses the device to travel to another dimension, lets call this “Gamma.” This is possible, it’s what Eva does when invades Alpha from Beta, to then fuse the two. But Claudia doesn’t want to fuse anything. When her old self at the end of the first cycle travels, she travels to her younger self, to tell her EVERYTHING SHE LEARNED. Pay attention here. This isn’t time-travel to a younger self. She isn’t doing this through the time travel machine. She’s using the golden ball, and she travels to a younger Claudia of ANOTHER DIMENSION. Because, as we see in the split of Alpha and Beta, this type of travel and loophole creates a discrepancy. The younger Claudia, with all the information revealed to her by an older Claudia, is divergent from a younger Claudia that doesn’t know anything.

What happens at this precise point, when Claudia meta-travels, is that she creates an alternate dimension that copies IDENTICALLY the knot. The (A+B). She creates an alternate dimension where everything is exactly the same, with one single exception: Claudia. She obtains a Claudia that knows all the stuff that the older Claudia told her. Now she’s young, she has another ENTIRE LIFE to go around and learn shit. At the end of the cycle, when she gets old, she uses the devices, makes a new copy and transfers the new knowledge to a younger self. OVER AND OVER, until she’s tired of this shit.

She acquired god-like power, became a literal (and logical) Deus Ex Machina, since she’s external to the machine. Every time she copies the world, she has freedom to act independently (the external intervention I introduced at the beginning).

This world is copied identically as long she takes care to replicate the actions that her older self made, in a similar way as Eva was doing. Trying to preserve the cycle, essentially. But only so that she could continue to gather information, and eventually find out the optimal solution to tear it apart. When(ever) she will find that solution, she will use the device to go to Adam, hand him the mystery ball and tell him: “Take this, and go end this shit.” Game over.

Consider the detail: she HAS to preserve the knot. This isn’t like the other cases where the knot is automatically preserved no matter what people do. The difference is that the world is copied identically with one exception: Claudia. And because this is a wholly different copy, it isn’t locked into a pattern. Claudia is external. If she doesn’t work to preserve the knot she can have all sort of major repercussions coming from her own divergent actions. In fact she’s in the position to create INFINITE divergent worlds. RADICALLY divergent. Totally new timelines. That’s what the loophole does, creating divergences every time it’s used. Claudia just happens to believe and desire that her best choice is going back to the “normal” (the “new normal” since Tannhauser’s son isn’t dead and talks about his vision of angels).

In fact it’s a “new normal” because it’s not a return to the origin world, that’s completely false. The origin world is gone. What is created is a copy of the origin world where Tannhauser’s son is alive. Claudia simply decided this was the best choice among infinite options.

In the end Claudia was the ONLY player, since she has been the only one to find a way out before the first cycle ended. The only player on the field. Adam knew jack shit. Eva did, but worked to fuse the worlds and remain happily trapped within, Claudia is the only one who was handed the keys for the lock by a clueless, unsuspecting Eva. She found herself as the director of the show.

Again, the loophole creates divergences. We ended up with the (A+B) knot merely because Eva wanted to save both worlds at the same time, and the fusion was the only way to keep both, so used the loophole for that end (there’s a lot of silly handwaving, but Eva needed Alpha fused with Beta, since Jonas doesn’t exist in Beta natively). But with the device in the hands of Claudia the loophole doesn’t create anymore convoluted artificial knots, it creates new realities. And Claudia has free reign. She can change everything.

Super-summary: Dark gives us a concept of time as a fixed and immutable structure, including internal time travel loops than cannot alter what happens in any way. It’s all fixed and deterministic. But during the third season an exception is introduced, a loophole. The use of this loophole, at a precise moment, can introduce a discrepancy, a real change. And it does so in the classic time travel way of creating an alternate dimension where things take a different path (the classic “Back to the Future” canon). Only two characters know and use this loophole, Eva and Claudia. But Eva actively works to save both worlds and fuse them together, a Moebius strip, making them dependent on each other and creating this A+B “knot.” Claudia instead decides to use it for her own ends and, eventually, to unravel that knot. It is mandatory that the loophole has to be used BEFORE the first cycle completes, otherwise the characters would be already caged in. Therefore the loophole is either used every time, or never. Eva uses the loophole every cycle, to re-create and preserve the knot, with no other possibility to alter its course beyond what it is. Claudia instead can use the loophole first to “copy” the (A+B) knot, and then study it through a number of different cycles, because she can use the loophole to keep everything the same with one exception: herself. She uses it at the first cycle to become external to the loop and seize her agency, repeats this through an unknown number of following cycles/dimensions, then uses it one last time after she’s completed her plan, to instruct Adam and send him to destroy the knot. The finale we see.

We’re far from a complete solution though. This whole ordeal explains the ending, and explains how Claudia can become Deus Ex Machina. It explains how it was possible to break free of the knot, and how to return to the origin. It also explains why the return to the origin ISN’T a bootstrap paradox. It’s just a new divergent reality that begins from a convenient starting point. Aka: before the time travel mess, to prevent it. And it can prevent it, instead of causing it as everything that happened before, because Claudia (and then Adam) didn’t time travel, but meta-traveled using the loophole. If she simply time traveled to save Tannhauser’s son, she would have caused the incident (because time travel is an internal loop, so it cannot produce any real change). And that’s why, again, Jonas and Martha DO NOT cause the incident, as many people instead expected: it’s a divergent word, produced through the loophole, through meta-travel.

In Tannhauser’s true original world, his son is dead. In the “new” world the son is alive. They aren’t the same world. We aren’t back to the origin. This is the same that happens in Donnie Darko: a time anomaly is created, during its development Donnie is trained by the bunny to be an instrument to the solution of the anomaly, and Donnie’s sacrifice “fixes” the anomaly, returning the world back to how it was. But it’s not the same world, because Donnie’s gone. In Dark and Donnie Darko both, the anomaly left a faint trace. It existed, developed, was resolved, and with its resolution it “fell off” subjective perception. As if time was like a tree branch, then a “leaf” develops, is bent around and closes on itself, to eventually excise itself and “fall off”, leaving a faint trace, while the branch continues on its path… slightly altered. A faint trace.

If Claudia didn’t find a way to escape the cycle during its first loop, then time would have hit a “cul-de-sac”, an inescapable dead end. Either continuing forever, or deteriorating as in Donnie Darko (where time collapses if not fixed).

And yet again, we’re far from a complete solution. I’ve said at the beginning the problem is having this part of the bootstrap paradox that can be explained logically, and another that doesn’t work at all. This part I’ve examined here works because it deals competently with the fundamental distinction: perception and reality. The bootstrap paradox APPEARS in perception, but doesn’t exist in reality. It is the limited subjective point of view that creates the illusion of a paradox.

If “characters” are trapped within their own dimension of experience, then they have a limited “cone” of subjectivity and information. Limited knowledge. That’s why things that “magically” appear can do so. A meta-traveler is a traveler from outside. He can step-in unseen and create interference. He can transform reality, because while he operates within reality, he still operates outside the limited perception.

If the rules of TIME AND PHYSICS are the rules of reality, then they can play around perception. Like a toy. A paradox can appear within limited perception, but can also be explained in reality.

A bootstrap paradox can be EXPLAINED by imagining what is there but that isn’t seen. Something that has to exist but wasn’t perceived. We see a paradox, but we see only the limit of our vision. Always the same core concept of Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory.

Now we know that yes, bootstrap paradoxes can be explained logically. No, paradoxes don’t exist in reality. They exist in conscious perception. The paradox is in the map, not the territory, especially when the map (perception and representation) isn’t correctly modeling the territory (reality). We’ve seen Dark creating a bootstrap paradox that can be explained through these patterns, that can be solved. And yet it’s a trainwreck. Because the main paradox is left unexplained and not explainable, with the canon telling us that paradoxes just exist and don’t need a logical motivation.

People confuse this as a problem of cause and effect. A cycle of cause and effect that links past and future, in a loop. Accepting this circular paradoxical pattern. But that’s not how it works. Dark has a serious and deep philosophical problem with ontology. Ontology is about existence, not function. The cause-effect loop of a bootstrap paradox tells us these objects can FUNCTION, but it doesn’t tell us that they can EXIST. This is what I’m going to write in the next part.

DARK, and the illusion of sufficiency (or: Dark explained away)

>> Part 1: illusion of sufficiency (Dark explained away)
Part 2: what does work (Deus Ex Machina)
Part 3: what doesn’t work (bootstrap paradox)

Spoilers unbounded. (spoilers may also touch other stuff, like Donnie Darko, Watchmen, Arrival…)

This is going to be hard to write, especially because I already know I’m going to be dissatisfied, since I like completeness when I write about this stuff. It’s going to be impossible to be complete here. There are too many angles, and the most interesting ones, like the general philosophical concepts that go beyond Dark itself, are giant sidetracks that would take way too much time to analyze.

I’ll start by saying that Dark is complex even if I try to summarize my personal reaction. I “casually” followed the first two seasons, but I prepared for the third, so that I had a much clearer picture about the family trees and tangle of plot. The first two seasons were still mostly straightforward to follow in their main story beats, but many nuances and minor characters got over my head. This time I did my homework. I had low expectations about the show finding an elegant conclusion, and for the most part it was WORSE than I expected. The solution itself was something I guessed right away from the beginning of this season, and simply because it’s identical to Donnie Darko (the yanking out of the problem: the moment they show Eva-Adam, and their symmetrical goals, you realize they both have to go). Nothing else, when it comes to concepts and ideas, was introduced (aside one thing, but that is very poor). The last episode itself, the one that usually needs to make an impact or at least try for a plot twist, went precisely as expected, and was very dull to watch. Probably the episode I liked the least among all three seasons.

So, the whole thing is a giant failure: it didn’t succeed to provide a logical explanation (for its plot, its concept), but at the same time it’s also not garbage. The show is a really good TV show overall. It’s well executed. And some of its ideas, like the circular structure of the family tree, and how it falls apart in the end, are really, really good. Claudia’s journey, even if for the most part not shown, is really good.

…But, despite some excellent ideas and great execution, Dark pivots entirely around a central concept, and this central concept is fatally flawed. It completely collapses on itself. It’s not just a plot hole one can decide to ignore… It’s the whole framework, the whole structure that sustains Dark as a concept. And it’s a train wreck.

This adds another dimension: for most viewers the finale and overall explanation is going to work. From what I expect, and what I’ve seen, most people embrace the logic behind that finale, and many of them even think it’s a great one, even a PERFECT one. Saying that Dark succeeded where Lost failed (excuse me: DARK and LOST, because ambition is better represented by caps lock). I can see why. Dark gives the illusion of complexity, of deep philosophy for someone who never read actual philosophy, science for someone who doesn’t know how science works.

Dark is “sufficiently” complex to satisfy. Made for an impressionable audience, but in the end no more than pure illusion of depth and meaningfulness. A well made fraud. LOST, despite its many flaws, contains a lot more earnest values, and for me stays on a wholly different level than Dark (and not really comparable as productions, anyway).

A bit like its own conclusion, Dark has that fatal flaw that, when you pull that one string, it unravels everything. And nothing remains.

… but it’s still a great show. One whose concepts, quality of philosophy and science is really bad. But we’ve also seen what happens. The fatal flaw of Dark is also the one shared with Arrival and Watchmen, and these two, even more than Dark receive critical acclaim. (while Arrival is indefensible, Watchmen has a lot more than that concept, so Watchmen’s quality and reputation don’t depend on its concept of time travel)

Since I want to keep this post at a mostly sane length, I’m going to write about only three aspects, but they will touch every most important point.

The good stuff:
– Circular family tree, and its unraveling
– Claudia, as a logical and functioning Deus Ex Machina

The bad stuff:
– Bootstrap Paradoxes galore

The good things outnumber the bad things two to one, if I went in detail to list everything, the good things would hugely outnumber the bad things. So is this good? Nope, because as I said, all the good things “hang” from the single bad one. Everything falls off after that central point fails.

What’s more important to understand is that the writers of Dark didn’t just fail to provide a good “solution” for the Bootstrap Paradox, that then I might have judged as too weak or unsatisfying. They instead decided that the Bootstrap Paradox DOESN’T NEED A SOLUTION. The paradox “just exists.”

One might think: okay, it’s science fiction, time travel doesn’t exist either. This is just a fictional concept where both time travel and Bootstrap Paradoxes exist, at the very foundation of that fictional make-believe. You either accept it for what it is, or you entirely reject, and argue endlessly about, science fiction in general…

The real problem is instead a different one. Once you set up those rules so that the Bootstrap Paradox exists, and doesn’t need a logical explanation, using those same rules in its premise (ironically) everything else ALSO unravels. It’s not simply to accept/refuse the paradox, but that if you accept the paradox also everything outside of it ceases to exist. It’s a black hole, a thing that self-destroys.

So again, it’s not just about accepting its existence, but the fact that its existence causes the collapse of everything around it. Ironically, again, as a perfect metaphor of Dark: an impossible thing that leads to its own ERASURE.

But while on the fictional level the erasure happens in the story, and the finale we see. The Bootstrap Paradox instead erases Dark at its meta-level. As a product that tries to be coherent, and fails. It erases it outside the fiction because it doesn’t work. A thing that wants to exist, but it doesn’t because it’s a giant misunderstanding, clumsy philosophy and even worse “science.”

Dark is an impossible story. One that shouldn’t exist, as long we care for logic and coherence. A story killed by its own ambition. A recursive loop of NIHILISM, where what is created destroys the possibility of its existence. A BOOTSTRAP PARADOX.

(and yet, we know what paradoxical objects really are: the product of misunderstanding. Nothing so fascinating.)

This was my overall “take” about the show in general and its concepts. Now I’ll go more in detail about the three points listed above.