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In the series DARK, Claudia tells Adam in the end that she spent 33 years toggling between the two worlds that are knotted together. That both these worlds must be an ulcer created from a third Origin World. Based on her assessment of Regina's parentage, she figures that Regina is not bootstrapped and therefore must be present in the Origin World, alive and well.

But from there she also goes on to talk about how H.G. Tannhaus makes the mistake of building a time device and destroying the Origin World in the 1986 and giving birth to the two knotted worlds. In the knotted worlds, H.G. Tannhaus is mysteriously given a bootstrapped baby Charlotte and because of that he doesn't obsess over his dead son and family.

My question is:
How could Claudia from Adam's World gain the knowledge of Tannhaus' time device incident and date in the Origin World, given she has access only to knotted worlds which don't give any clue about the parent Origin World?

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    I haven't seen a great answer on this either. We do know a few things she could piece together with some research and her science knowledge, like the existence of the exploitable loophole. I've always wondered if there's a bunch of hints to the real world on rewatch. One thing that always seemed suspicious to me is that the loop created a Charlotte, who winds up as Tannhaus' adopted daughter/granddaughter, and Origin Tannhaus was trying to save his granddaughter Charlotte.
    – JMac
    Commented Jul 15, 2020 at 15:29
  • That's correct. I too would peg that as the real Origin of the knotted chaos. But beyond that she couldn't have guessed the whole H.G. Tannhaus creating a time device which fires 16 years after the death of the son. Claudia gets to somehow follow this Origin World's H.G Tannhaus for that period of time to understand the connection to the knotted worlds. :|
    – MovieMe
    Commented Jul 15, 2020 at 15:48
  • @JMac: I suspect the Charlotte name is (a) Tannhaus' decision as he pretends as if his adopted daughter is still his real daughter (for administrative purposes) and (b) Elisabeth names her daughter Charlotte after her own mother, to honor her after she went missing in the apocalypse. Keep in mind that "new mom" Elisabeth does not know that her daughter will be taken from her, she doesn't name her child Charlotte because she e.g. knows that the child will grow up to be Charlotte (her mother).
    – Flater
    Commented Jul 23, 2020 at 16:40
  • @Flater I was never implying that. What I meant was that Claudia might have been able to recognize that the two worlds that got created essentially made a replacement "Charlotte" for Tannhaus; which probably could have stood out when she realized that Tannhaus just lost his Charlotte and was delivered a baby (from the time loop) on the same day.
    – JMac
    Commented Jul 23, 2020 at 17:27
  • I'd reckon that Claudia looked into the mysterious blast of nuclear energy that created the Boson in 1986. Both worlds had this happen on the same date. Both worlds had a leak and Claudia would have realized the leak was caused by the unknown. So she would go back to understanding the energy blast. Given she knew her quantum science (Boson) .. I guess she somehow concluded that the blast originated from a third world. The nature of blast being identical also suggests a single origin? Maybe. After this... the script writers really need to fill in :)
    – atm
    Commented Jul 25, 2020 at 8:11

1 Answer 1

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Part of this is inference on Claudia's behalf. She was exceptionally clever to figure it out. It wasn't easy to figure this out and the evidence is few and far between.

However, it's important to realize that the knotted worlds were created after Tannhaus' family died, since origin-Tannhaus does so after Marek, Sonja and Charlotte were killed). That means that both Adam-Tannhaus and Eva-Tannhaus have also lost their family.

The same applies to essentially everything that happened in the Origin world before Tannhaus created the knot.

When you compare Adam and Eve's worlds, some things match and some things don't.

  • The things that don't match all originate from the Unknown in some way.
  • The things that do match are facts that carried over from the Origin world.

You can start making a few educated guesses here. If both Adam-Tannhaus and Eve-Tannhaus lost their family and delved deep into the idea of time travel, then Origin-Tannhaus is likely to have done the same. Especially if you find out that he was already into it before his family got killed (since Marek himself throws it in his face in the series finale).

We don't know Claudia's full thought proces. We just see her explain what she already knows to Adam, she doesn't explain how she found it out.

But given the cyclical nature of events, and the bootstrapping done by (old) Claudia constantly transferring her complete knowledge to (middle age) Claudia, that means that Claudia essentially had an infinite amount of time to expand her knowledge and figure it out.

Every cycle's Claudia has 33 years of knowledge to pass to the 33-years-younger Claudia, who then in turn passes that acquired knowledge + her own 33 years of knowledge down to the next Claudia, and so on.

We have no way of knowing how many cycles there have been. It could have been millions, billions, trillions, ...

It's reasonable to assume that Claudia would at some point have a theory. Maybe she had thousands or millions of other theories that never panned out.

We only get to see the theory that turns out to be correct.

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  • @Gaston nice icon ;-)
    – Déjà vu
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 17:01
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    "Every cycle's Claudia has 33 years of knowledge to pass to the 33-years-younger Claudia" - oh no no no no. Not at all. Any predestination causal loop is cyclical in nature only for the observer of the loop. For the loop itself. The people in the predestination loop live non linearly inside it but never looping on themselves over and over. This not Edge Of Tomorrow or Groundhog Day. Not one bit. Claudia is born, she continuously ages and eventually grows old and dies. Each thing she experiences is only once at that particular age.
    – MovieMe
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 18:40
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    The Predestination Paradox and Bootstrap Paradox are elements of science. They go way back. Cinema only applies these concepts to show them visually. The source material takes the name of Bootstrap Paradox quite clearly. So there is no doubt that this is a singular Predestination Loop. Even if old Claudia gives the information to young Claudia, she can do it only a finite number of times. E.g.: if each year of her life's learnings she gives it to her younger self. Assuming she lived 33 years. Then that is 33days that Claudia got information. There is no millions or infinite in Dark.
    – MovieMe
    Commented Jul 25, 2020 at 7:01
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    @Flater, Even if Claudia wrote all the information for 33 years and gave it to her younger self, then that additional information is the result of the bootstrap paradox and will happen a total of one time. This is exactly like how the information in the notebook or the blueprints for the time machine. But that still doesn't explain how she could jump to a conclusion about the exact date Tannhaus turned on his "mystery"machine in the OW. Remember, she herself could not visit the OW. IMO that's still a very big gap which can be filled with just about anything and nothing ;)
    – atm
    Commented Jul 25, 2020 at 7:34
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    Dark specifically resolves it plot by pointing out that cycles can change I think think there are too many things wrong with what the answer is proposing. Apart from the fact that there is no infinite loop that any person is experiencing, there are a total of two outcomes. (1) The OW is destroyed and the two worlds exist within a predestination paradox with one set of events, and only those. (2) The OW is saved which leads to the alteration and therefore the destruction of the two worlds. That's it. There is no step by step change and no one is reliving their lives over and over.
    – atm
    Commented Jul 25, 2020 at 7:40

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