 Quick warning, this video will be full of spoilers for Dark, so don't watch this until you finish the series. Throughout Dark, it became clear that Claudia was perhaps the most important character on the show, at least in terms of figuring everything out. She also has a pretty interesting timeline, especially considering she continued to play a critical role after her death at Noah's hands. There's also the question of, how did Claudia figure everything out? How did she find out about the loophole, the origin world, and how to destroy the knot? What even is the loophole? And maybe an even more challenging question is, why did she figure everything out now, in this cycle? Theoretically, the cycle could have repeated an infinite number of times, so why did Claudia solve everything in this cycle, rather than the one before it or the one after it? We'll dive into all these questions and more as we trace Claudia's timeline throughout Dark's three seasons. I'm going to start out with a full recap of Claudia's timeline before diving into my theories on some of the questions and mysteries mentioned. For the recap, I'll try and stick only to what is explicitly shown on screen, or what we can confidently infer based on the events of the series. I'll save the theorizing and educated guesses for after the recap. Last thing I'll say is, if you're mainly interested in those theories and want to skip the recap, feel free to use the chapter markers in the description to jump ahead. With that, let's get started. In 1953, Claudia is a young girl and very smart for her age. One day, as she tutors a young Helga, Agnes Nielsen and her son Tranta show up at her house. They are there to rent a room being offered by Claudia's parents, Egon and Doris Tiedemann. Claudia and Tranta quickly grow closer as she takes him on a tour of Wyndon's Forest, including a pit stop at the cave. While there, Helga, sort of a third wheel in this situation, throws a stick into the cave. Claudia's dog Gretchen follows and goes missing. In the following year, in 1954, Claudia begins a relationship with Tranta and continues tutoring Helga. One day, when she arrives at Helga's home, she overhears his father, Bernd Doppler, arguing with someone on the phone. He is struggling to get the necessary permits to complete construction on the nuclear plant, something Martha's son helps with. Once off the phone, Bernd comments, look at you, you're all grown up. A real lady, pretty and smart as a whip. About 20 years later, Bernd and Claudia will conceive a child, Regina. Bernd offers Claudia a healthy sum for her services tutoring Helga. When Claudia and Tranta insist it's too much, Bernd offers advice. If you really want something, then take it. Things don't just happen by themselves. This perhaps stokes Claudia's ambitions, which eventually lead her to become Bernd's successor as the nuclear plant director in 1986. On her first day, she is greeted by Helga, working as a cleaner at the plant. As a gift, he hands her a copy of HD townhouses, a journey through time. Inside, she bumps into Tranta, the boy she liked back in 1953. He is now married to their mutual friend, Yana. However, Claudia and Tranta were carrying on an affair until she put a stop to it recently. In her new position as plant director, Claudia quickly begins to uncover some strange things. First, the financials don't look right. And then, more importantly, she learns there was some kind of accident due to issues in the volume control system a few months earlier. This accident was not reported to the public. Bernd takes Claudia to a gorge leading into the Winden Cave. Inside, Bernd has hidden yellow barrels containing nuclear waste, a byproduct of the accident months earlier. It has been hidden here to cover up the accident. Claudia does not yet know that these barrels contain an isotope of cesium, which can be used as fuel for time travel. Later, returning to the cave on her own, Claudia has her first brush with time travel. Her dog Gretchen, who ran into the cave 33 years earlier following the stick thrown by Helga, reappears. She at first assumes it is just a dog that looks quite similar to her own. She does not yet realize the two dogs are one and the same. Ultimately, Claudia embraces the plant's cover up of the accident. Her daughter's new boyfriend, Alexander, comes to the plant looking for work. Claudia hires him to well shut the door leading to the barrels of nuclear waste. A few months later, Claudia is visited by her older self for the first time. Older Claudia explains that she, in 1953, waited in the cave to grab Gretchen and transport her to 1986. After telling her younger self this, she adds some things have to happen as they always have. Older Claudia knows that events must be repeated so the cycle leads her younger self to become the person she must, the person who knows about the loophole, the origin world, and how to destroy the knot, ultimately saving Regina. Some things have to happen as they always have, even something as seemingly minor as Gretchen time traveling from 1953 to 1986. In the cave, Older Claudia explains that the nuclear waste allows for time travel and shows her the suitcase time machine. It allows for travel 33 years back or 33 years forward. Older Claudia goes on to say that Claudia will have to make sacrifices and will have to stop Adam, someone she is not yet familiar with. Her older self then passes her a map and just before disappearing with the machine, cryptically says you don't have much more time with Regina, but if everything works out, she will live. Saving Regina will become Claudia's core motivation in Untieing the Knot. Following the map from her older self, Claudia finds a spot in her backyard and digs up the suitcase time machine. Older Claudia, after leaving her younger self behind, traveled to 1954 where she buried the time machine here. In search of answers, Claudia visits Helga and asks why he gave her Tonhouse's book last year. He does not give for many answers, but warns her not to trust Noah. Claudia then visits Tonhouse himself. He's been expecting her visit as years earlier, he met an older Claudia who told him they'd meet again. Due to her different colored eyes, Tonhouse recognizes them as the same person. When she shows him the book, Tonhouse explains the bootstrap paradox. The book is an example of one because he never wrote it. He simply plagiarized from a copy written by his future self, handed to him by an older Claudia. More importantly, Tonhouse teaches her how to use the time machine, something he learned from an older Jonas last year. Armed with this knowledge, Claudia travels to 2020 where she sees her daughter Regina suffering from cancer. At the library, Claudia learns of the prior 33 years of events. She herself reportedly disappeared, her daughter married Alexander, and on June 26, 1987, her father, Egon, is found dead in his apartment. Returning to her time in 1987, Claudia begins losing interest in her day job, something her assistant Jasmine notices. Visiting her ex-lover and predecessor, Bernd Doppler, Claudia learns the truth about the incident at the plant last summer. It resulted in a byproduct that, when tested, seemed to represent the God particle. Claudia wants to go public, but Bernd convinces her not to. People will want to know how they made the discovery, meaning the plant accident would be uncovered. On June 26, the day of her father's death, Claudia is intent on preventing it, so she spends the day with him. However, after his run-in with a time-traveling Ulrich, Egon has started to believe in the existence of time travel. When he wonders aloud why Ulrich was so intent on reaching the cave, Claudia defensively assures him that there is nothing there. Egon insists on calling the police to arrange a search. Claudia tries to stop him, but inadvertently injures him. Remembering her older self's words that she'll have to make sacrifices, Claudia lets her father die. Back home, Claudia is greeted by a young Jonas who has just spent a year training under older Claudia. Jonas promises that he learned from Claudia's older self how to reset things into a better timeline, one where Egon is not killed. So, she follows him to the cave. Jonas explains that his older self closed the passage, thinking it would break the loop, but it didn't. However, older Claudia told Jonas that if they change one small thing in the passage, then it will work the next time, meaning in the next cycle, when older Jonas closes the passage, it will successfully end the loop. We, of course, know this is a lie Claudia told in order to preserve the cycle one more time. Jonas takes her to the tunnel where they reopen the passage using Claudia's time machine. Then they travel to 2020, where Jonas instructs her to take the machine to the bunker. Claudia visits Regina and brings her as well so the two can survive the apocalypse. After the world ends, Claudia and Regina hunker down in the abandoned police station. Claudia's time machine no longer works, so she spends her days focused on understanding the connections between wind and residence. How is this family tree born of itself over and over in a continuous cycle? She also theorizes that the God particle could be a way back in time and a way to save everyone. While Claudia is out, her childhood crush Tronta kills her daughter, another step necessary to carry on the cycle. After burying her daughter, Claudia meets a version of herself from Eva's world. The other Claudia recruits her to Eva's cause, explaining that Adam wants to destroy the knot in both worlds with it. However, Eva wants to save both worlds, something that can only be done by preserving the knot and perpetuating the same cycle endlessly. Other Claudia leaves her to try to catch her notebook, which will instruct her on all the events that must occur to repeat the cycle. Then she promises she'll do her part in maintaining the knot on her world before disappearing. Following instructions in the notebook, Claudia finds the God particle in the nuclear plant. There, she finds Jonas, where they begin a decades-long crusade to stabilize the God particle. Claudia strings Jonas along with the false promise of being able to save Marta. However, per other Claudia's instructions, she is actually sabotaging their efforts until the time is right, according to the notebook. Over the years, Claudia regularly meets with the Claudia of Eva's world, until 2040, when she has an epiphany. She remembers what her older self told her decades earlier about Regina. If everything works out, she will live. Claudia cannot believe that by this, she meant Regina will continue a tortured existence, in an endless cycle perpetuated by the knot between worlds. There must be a way to untie the knot without obliterating everyone, so that Regina can live. Determined to find this path that seemingly eludes Eva and Adam, she asks other Claudia if she ever met her older self. When other Claudia says no, Claudia realizes her counterpart's future does not exist, meaning Claudia's thought to kill her other self is correct. She kills the Claudia of Eva's world and takes her time traveling orb. With the orb, she visits Eva's world in the guise of other Claudia. Eva gives her blueprints for the suitcase time machine with instruction that they should be passed to H.G. Tonhouse of Claudia's world. Sometime soon after this, Claudia comes to the conclusion that not everyone is part of the knot. After we go through the rest of Claudia's timeline, we'll discuss how and why she figured this out. With that knowledge, she visits 2053 and brings Tronta with her. How does she get Tronta to 2053? Well, at this point she has the time traveling orb, which seems to be unrestricted in its travels. So she could easily have grabbed Tronta from just before the apocalypse or at some point instructed him on how to survive the apocalypse. We know that an older Claudia was guiding him and Peter. Either way, Claudia could have traveled to 2020, grabbed Tronta and brought him to 2053. In this time, they talk over Regina's grave and Claudia explains that Regina is not part of the knot, meaning she is not part of the impossible, cyclical family tree connected to Jonas and Marta's lineage. So Tronta is not Regina's father, as he once believed. And if they destroy the knot, Regina will get to live in the origin world. Then Claudia brings Tronta back to 2020 so he can kill Regina. This death is part of the cycle and part of what ultimately motivates Claudia to find the truth, so it must happen. From there, she heads to Sykmundus and meets with her older self. The tone of their meeting is not one of a reunion, so I suspect that after Claudia realized the truth, she and her older self began meeting. In their meeting, older Claudia explains that Jonas and Marta are currently on their way to the origin world where they will finally destroy the knot. Then, knowing her older self will be heading to the past shortly, Claudia asks her to tell Egon, their father, that she is sorry. From this point, Claudia likely returns to Jonas, Noah and Elizabeth, from whichever time she left them in, sometime between 2040 and 2052. We know that Claudia kept up appearances as much as possible, so she would not have wanted to be gone too long. So, she stays with them, continuing to sabotage their work on the God Particle. Over the next decade or so, Claudia continues to study the family tree and explore Adam and Eva's worlds, ensuring events occur as they must. This includes a visit to 1986 on Eva's world where she meets with an older Helga that just killed Ulrich. During all this, she at some point discovers the loophole and deduces the existence of the origin world. We'll get into the exact how and why of this after the recap. Come 2052, she has aged into the older Claudia we recognize and finally allows the God Particle to be stabilized, likely because the Triketra Notebook instructs that this is when it is meant to happen in the cycle. She gives Jonas her old broken time machine and tells him that HG Tonhouse can repair it. Jonas will take the repaired machine to 2019, where he'll use it to close the passage. His hope is that after altering the passage as a younger man, closing the passage in this cycle will end the loop. It, of course, will not. After Jonas departs, Claudia rips the last pages out of the Triketra Notebook. This ensures that anyone who reads it will be unaware that Eva and Claudia intend for events to play out as a repeat of prior cycles. Apocalypse included. Gil here, just a quick reminder if you're enjoying this video, to hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, and the bell icon so you get notified the next time we do a video. Back to the show. From here, Claudia begins some travels through time. It's hard to pinpoint the exact order of these travels, but we know she gives Adam the orb in 2053. So at that point, she loses the ability to travel outside of 33 year increments, meaning after meeting with Adam, she can only travel to 2020 1987 or 1954. So her travels in 2019 1986 and 1953 must occur prior to her meeting with Adam. So that is where we'll head next. It's 2052 and older Jonas has just left Claudia. From there, Claudia heads to June 20, 2019, where she meets with a younger Jonas. He has just visited Mikkel the night before he hangs himself. Mikkel suspects that Jonas has not been sent to stop him, but to actually show Mikkel what he must do. Claudia arrives to confirm this is the case. Jonas cannot stop Mikkel and erase himself from existence. As Claudia explains, he plays a much larger role than he realizes. Jonas leaves with Claudia and they spend the next year together. Claudia teaches him and lies to him so that his path will once again lead to becoming Adam. During their time together, Claudia has Jonas lead Mikkel to the cave the night he disappears, so that Mikkel ends up in 1986. That same night, she visits Peter and Tranta, who have just discovered Mads body in the bunker. She guides them to hide his body in the woods and leaves them with the Triketra notebook. She also pays her grandson Bartosz a visit, leaving him a photo of her with Regina as a child. Then she heads to 1953, where she makes good on her promise to Eva and delivers HD Townhouse to Time Machine Blueprints. He'll spend the next 33 years working on the machine. She also hides out in the cave so she can grab Gretchen and transport her to 1986 to be found by a younger Claudia. At this point, she no longer requires the orb as the remaining travels fit within the 33 year increment limitation. It is finally time to deviate from the cycle. She heads to 2053 and meets with Adam. He has just killed Alt Marta, only to find that he has failed to identify the true origin. He still exists, and his world still exists. Claudia explains to Adam that his and Eva's worlds were born out of a third, the origin world. There, HD Townhouse created a Time Machine, but when he activated it, his world was destroyed and theirs were created. She also reveals that there is a true loophole. In the moment of the apocalypse, time stands still for a fraction of a second and cause and effect breaks down. As Adam puts it, you can change things. She gives Adam the orb so he can use it to send Jonas and Marta to the origin world and prevent Townhouse from creating the machine. After Adam departs, Claudia is visited by her younger self in the rundown Sykmundus headquarters. She informs her younger self that Jonas and Marta are on their way to unraveling the knot. Then, young Claudia asks her to apologize to their father. Claudia reminds her younger self that if everything works out, Regina will be saved. Then, with her broken time machine taken by Jonas from 2052 to 2019, she retrieves another iteration of it. When Jonas and his friends were stranded in 1888, it seems their suitcase time machine never left Sykmundus. Or if it did, it was at some point returned. 165 years later, Claudia retrieves it. With the machine in hand, Claudia's journey nears its end. She heads to 1987 to meet with her younger self. She shows her younger self the machine, tells her she'll have to make sacrifices to stop Adam, hands her the map, and says, you don't have much more time with Regina, but if everything works out, she will live. From there, she heads to 1954, where she buries the time machine. The next day, she meets with Agnes in the bunker. Their relationship is largely kept off-screen, but it seems at some point after 2040, once Claudia gained the ability to travel through time freely, she recruited Agnes to her cause. In the bunker, Claudia hands Agnes a newspaper clipping showing that Claudia will be killed tonight. Agnes will show the article to Noah, letting him know where to find Claudia later. Then Claudia visits her father Egon as a young man. She apologizes on behalf of her younger self, though Egon is unaware that she is his daughter, and that she is apologizing for murdering him. Before the end, Claudia has one more stop to make. She visits HG Tonhouse. He's been working on the time machine from her blueprints for about a year. It's still not ready. Claudia assures him that it will take 33 years to complete. Then she hands him a copy of the book he has not yet written, A Journey Through Time. When Tonhouse asks why she is giving it to him, she says, I don't need it anymore. I'll be dead soon. She also says that he'll see her again, and will have to explain to her how the device works. Finally, she ends by saying, all this will come to an end soon, but until then, everything must remain as it always has been. Meaning the cycle must be maintained, so Jonas becomes Adam, meets with Claudia, and uses the loophole to destroy the knot. Finally, Claudia heads to what she knows will be her death. Noah finds her and points a shotgun at her. He believes she stole his daughter away from him, and he knows she has the missing pages. She explains that he still does not know how to play the game, and he is Adam's pawn. Then, Noah kills her. Watching dark, we are told over and over that the characters are trapped in an endlessly repeating cycle built from an infinite chain of cause and effect. In the finale, it appears this chain is finally broken by using a loophole. But what is the loophole exactly? Earlier in the season, we see Eva use it to alter Marta's path, resulting in overlapping realities where we can have two onuses, one who dies and one who lives to become Adam. Then in the finale, Claudia gives us more detail. She explains to Adam that during the apocalypse, time stands still for a fraction of a second. In that moment, cause and effect breaks down, and as Adam puts it, you can change things. So my initial understanding was that our characters are stuck on a predetermined path, doomed to repeat their miserable cycle of events, except in this one moment. In this moment, you can intervene. However, when you intervene, there is a side effect due to quantum entanglement. When someone's path is altered, they are split into overlapping realities. However, I think this explanation is misleading. First, it implies that changes can only be made during the loophole moment. And second, it implies that making changes always results in the quantum entanglement splitting effect. After giving it some thought and looking back on the show, I think neither of these assumptions are right. To the first assumption that change can only be made in the moment of the apocalypse, that just does not add up. If that were the case, how could someone decide to use the loophole in the first place? For example, Eva's use of the loophole involved her sending Bartosz to 2020 so he could stop Marta from rescuing Jonas. Outside of the moment during the apocalypse, Eva takes several actions. She decides to use the loophole. She sends Bartosz through time and space to stop Marta. Although these actions ultimately lead to some intervention in the moment of the apocalypse, the actions themselves leading up to that moment take place outside it. Eva sending adult Bartosz through time to recruit younger Bartosz for this task, for example, takes place outside the moment of the apocalypse. So clearly Eva is able to exercise some kind of free will and enact change in moments besides the one during the apocalypse. To the second assumption that changes always result in the splitting effect, that also does not seem to be the case. After explaining the loophole, Claudia tells Adam that Eva is aware of it and uses it to alter Marta's course. This creates two Martas, one who is killed by Adam and one who goes on to birth the trio. Then Claudia says that she herself used the loophole to be here now talking to Adam. I initially interpreted this as Claudia saying that, similar to Marta, there are now two Claudias, one who is killed by Noah and one who goes on to meet with Adam. However, several spreadsheets and a few diagrams later, I've realized that this explanation just does not work. There aren't really any points in Claudia's timeline that I can see where she would be present during the apocalypse in order to be split into two overlapping realities. We know she lived through the apocalypse as a younger Claudia in 2020, but it's hard for me to imagine that there was another Claudia running around for decades with no hints of it. Dark leaves a lot to the imagination, but does typically drop enough breadcrumbs that we have some idea of what's going on behind the scenes. So the loophole is not the exclusive moment where one is allowed to alter events, and altering events does not always result in the creation of overlapping realities. So what exactly is the loophole? In my opinion, the loophole is simply a shorthand way of saying that things can change from one cycle to the next. It is a way for Dark to have its cake and eat it too. The show can subscribe to the notion of a deterministic reality guided by an infinite chain of cause and effect while still ultimately breaking the chain for a satisfying ending. If you imagine that the characters go through many cycles as events repeat over and over, you can think of the loophole as a moment when the chain of cause and effect resets itself to reflect any changes enacted during the cycle. Further, if you exercise some direct change in the loophole moment itself, then you trigger the quantum entanglement effect. However, if you simply enact some change at another moment in time, then the impact of that change will ripple through the chain and perhaps alter the next cycle. So when Eva stops Marta from rescuing Jonas in the moment of the apocalypse, you get quantum entanglement. But when Claudia tells Adam about the true origin for the first time in 2053, Adam's path is altered, but there is no quantum entanglement effect. Or if it does occur, it is only at the quantum level, unobservable by humans. To sum it all up, the course of dark was stuck. It put forward the idea of cycles guided by cause and effect. Ultimately, this can lead nowhere but the same place over and over, which may not be the most satisfying conclusion to the series. So it needed a loophole, and this is it. Cycles begin and end at the point of the apocalypse, during which a phenomenon occurs, allowing for change. Whether that change occurs in the moment or simply ripples through it, flowing into the next cycle. If we accept all this as true, then what did Claudia mean when she said she used the loophole? What is the change she made which led to this cycle ending differently? She told Adam that the conversation between them has never happened before. She's never before revealed to him the true origin or how to untie the knot. So she must have altered something which resulted in her younger self learning the truth and eventually having this conversation with Adam. We'll talk about that next. I think Season 3, Episode 7, gives us a huge clue because we actually witnessed the Eureka moment where Claudia decides to find a way to untie the knot and save Regina. She tells the Claudia of Eva's world that she remembers what her older self told her. If everything goes right, Regina will live. Claudia then says, I've thought about that all these years. I just can't believe that by that she meant her suffering was to repeat over and over. I don't want to add more fuel to this confusing fire, but I'm going to bring up the movie Inception. That film focuses on the effect one idea can have on a person. By incepting someone with an idea they accept and integrate into themselves, you can significantly alter the course of their life. I believe this is what older Claudia did to her younger self. In this case, the idea is if everything goes right, Regina will live. Claudia says it herself. This idea is something she's thought about for decades, and ultimately it is what made her realize there must be a way to truly save Regina. Once she believed in the existence of a solution other than perpetuating Eva's knot, Claudia relentlessly searched for an answer which she eventually found. Older Claudia made her younger self believe Regina can be saved, which motivated her to discover the origin world, the loophole, and the way to destroy their two worlds. Throughout dark, Claudia was forced to manipulate and lie in order to keep Jonas and others on the right path. However, I think her lies often had a kernel of truth. For example, she told Jonas that by changing one small thing, they could change the world. Jonas believed the one small thing they were changing was something in the components of the passage. That was a lie. In reality, the one small thing they changed was something in younger Claudia's mind. They gave her the belief that Regina could be saved. This belief, as Claudia promised, changed the world. It erased the knot and prevented H.G. Tonhass' family from dying. With all that being said, how did Claudia actually discover the loophole and ultimately the origin world? I think it's a little easier to explain how she would have found the loophole. In season 3, episode 2, we hear on the radio that scientists observed that time stood still for a moment during the apocalypse. So, this bizarre phenomenon was no secret. Claudia and Eva, in their search for answers, would likely look to this moment as something they want to better understand. With time travel at her disposal, Claudia could visit this moment repeatedly and experiment with it. By doing so, she could discover the quantum entanglement effect and the impact on the chain of cause and effect. Eva or the Claudia on Eva's world may have similarly experimented to discover the loophole as well. The discovery of the origin world is slightly more complicated because it seems to represent another bootstrap paradox. Before we get to the paradox, let's first look at Claudia's explanation in the show for how she discovered the origin world. She explains it to Adam by essentially stating that she realized a third world must exist after exploring both worlds and studying the family tree. She kept asking herself how a family tree could be born of itself over and over until she realized that both worlds must have been born from another. So, Dark asks us to accept that Claudia is able to deduce the existence of the origin world by studying what is available to her in Adam and Eva's worlds. Which I think makes sense. She is extremely intelligent. She has access to Timehouse's book from the future, so she gets to start her research with a lifetime's worth of time travel knowledge and eventually gets the time travel orb which allows her to explore both worlds across time with ease. So, I think it's reasonable that someone with a science background with all these resources could deduce the existence of a third world and even pinpoint that Tonhouse was the one responsible for destroying it. One imagines that at some point in her travels, Claudia heard the story of Tonhouse losing his family. Between this and the book, A Journey Through Time, I think she could at least point herself in the right direction. So, we can imagine a scenario where Claudia, through pure intelligence and research, discovers the origin world and how to untie the knot. However, why didn't this happen in previous cycles? Why was this only possible now? Well, this is where the Bootstrap Paradox comes in. Earlier, I theorized that all of this was enabled by the idea that Regina could be saved. However, where did Claudia get this idea from? She was given it by her older self. The idea has no true origin. Older Claudia gives younger Claudia the idea. She grows up to become older Claudia who subsequently passes the idea down to younger Claudia. It is a Bootstrap Paradox. However, if we accept that cycles can differ from prior cycles, then the Bootstrap Paradox is resolved. Watching dark, I think many of us imagined time as a sort of circle. Events recur in an endless loop over and over in so-called cycles. But since we just said that cycles can change, let's instead picture time as a coil or slinky. From the top down, it looks like a circle. But that's just an illusion. If you turn the slinky sideways and stretch it out, it looks more like a series of circles or cycles, where each one leads into the next. Each cycle is nearly identical to the previous one, but due to the loophole during the apocalypse, each can actually differ slightly. Further, we see direct evidence that information can be passed from one cycle to the next. Tonhouse's book A Journey Through Time is a great example of this. The book's existence seems to be a paradox. No one ever wrote it. Tonhouse simply plagiarized from his future self when Claudia passed it down to him. So Tonhouse copies the book, publishes it, then Claudia takes it back in time so Tonhouse can plagiarize it again. No one actually came up with the ideas in the book. It just exists eternally in a loop. We can resolve this using the slinky analogy. In this model, Tonhouse did at some point write the book as an original work, based on his own research. Then Claudia took it back in time so Tonhouse could plagiarize it and write it again. However, when Claudia takes it back in time, instead of imagining that she goes back to the beginning of a circle, instead imagine that she has moved from one loop of the slinky to the next. She did not bring the book back into its own past, but instead brought it to the beginning of another cycle. So in one cycle, Tonhouse writes the book as an original work. Then in the next cycle, he simply plagiarized it from his future self. It becomes a bootstrap paradox. To find its origin, you have to travel backwards on the slinky to a previous cycle. I believe this is why Claudia only discovered the origin world now in this cycle. In each cycle or each loop of the slinky, Claudia and others accumulate more knowledge. For example, Tonhouse's book and the Trequettra notebook. Both of these contain information which would require decades to accumulate. However, once written and taken through time, our travelers begin the cycle armed with the information contained within these books. So unlike their predecessors from previous cycles, they do not have to start their search from scratch. For example, young Claudia in the cycle we witnessed begins her time travel adventures already armed with the knowledge in Tonhouse's book. It's also possible that outside of what we were shown, older Claudia passed other knowledge down to her younger self. So she spends one cycle searching for answers, accumulating clues and knowledge. Then she passes this down to her younger self. So in the next cycle, Claudia can get even further in her search. In this final cycle, Claudia has finally learned enough to know what events must play out for the knot to be destroyed. All the pieces are in place so that if given the right motivational push, Claudia will grow to find the origin world and prevent Tonhouse from creating time travel. So older Claudia gives her this push. Through the magic of knowledge passing from one cycle to the next, she tells young Claudia that if everything goes right, Regina will live. Anyway, I think we can wrap it up there. This video more than any of my other dark content has a ton of my own theories and speculation. So I definitely love to hear your thoughts on it. What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? What did I miss? And what are your theories? Let me know in the comments and we'll keep the conversation going. And if you enjoyed this video, please go ahead and hit the like button, hit the subscribe button and of course the bell icon because that way you'll get notified the next time we do a video. Thanks for watching and see you on the next One Take.