Welcome to this week’s installment of the Summer TV Binge of Netflix’s Dark, analyzing season three, episode three, of the twisted German time travel series, released June 27, 2020.
“Adam and Eva (Adam und [Eve])”
Written by Jantje Friese
Directed by Baran bo Odar
September 23, 1888: Bartosz confronts Jonas over not disclosing Adam’s true identity.
November 5, 2019: Eva persuades Jonas to mentor her younger self. Ulrich and Charlotte investigate the appearance of the body dressed in Mads’s clothes.
1. It Was Nice Knowing Old Tannhaus While It Lasted
The episode opens with a flashback to Old Tannhaus’s childhood, where his father, Heinrich, reads to him from his late wife Charlotte’s favorite play, Ariadne. Young Gustav asks him why people die, but his father responds that the dead live on, in “the eternity of time.” We see that Tannhaus’s father carries a pocket watch engraved with Charlotte’s name, which is the memento that will eventually be passed to Charlotte and Elisabeth Doppler. Gustav reminisces on this while being driven into town in the early hours of the morning in 1888, where he plans to send a telegram announcing the arrival of travelers from the future.
He notices his carriage being stopped, and hears his driver being killed. The Unknown enters, reciting Freud: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” (The quote heavily implies he wrote the letter that led Clausen to Winden in 2020.) He can’t allow Tannhaus to reveal their existence, and pulls out his garotte. He tells the old man something Isaac Newton said as he kills him: “What we know is a drop; what we don’t know is an ocean.” And like that, Gustav has gone to join his parents in the eternity of time, a single episode after his introduction.
2. Perfect for Each Other
In her study, located inside the caves, Eva continues to enlighten Jonas, who is still unclear on the nature of parallel universes (he asks if her world is a “duplicate” of his). She tells him it is a mistake to think of ourselves as independent entities, when we are fractions of a whole: that would be true even if there were no multiverse, but her point is that there are aspects of us, that identify us as us across all of time and space. She reveals that she has his St. Christopher pendant, demonstrating her younger self became as close to him as her counterpart from his world.
Eva ponders why Jonas can’t let her go, bringing up the idea of the invisible bond. She persuades him that to stop Adam and save his Martha, he must make her what she is today, and show her younger self the future. It’s very poignant when she sends him on his way: she holds his hand, and gazes as he exits, before clearly sighing, and restraining herself from becoming too emotional — you really do believe she was reunited with the young man she loved.
Afterwards, the Unknown enter the office, and place on Eva’s desk the copy of Ariadne Old Tannhaus had; the pocket watch; and the keys to the power plant, as well as the schematics for its volume control system. Like Magnus did with Adam, he asks why she didn’t tell Jonas where his path leads, though more out of curiosity than any audible concern. “Even if he knows, he will never stop trying to break the cycle,” she responds. “He won’t understand that we must preserve the knot. That his Martha must perish. So that all others can live.” Eva is as deceptive and manipulative as Adam: they truly are a “perfect match.”
3. Deja Vu, Part Two
The reboot vibe continues elsewhere in Alt 2019, as Ulrich debriefs his colleagues about the body Martha, Magnus and their friends encountered in the bunker. He believes someone murdered Mads, kept his clothes for 33 years, and placed them on the unidentified body. Charlotte notices how emotional this makes Ulrich, and asks Woller to take over while she consoles him in the records room. Ulrich gives almost verbatim the same speech he did about why he became an investigator in the fifth episode, this time adding he’s cheating on the woman he cheated on his first wife with, and calls off the affair with Charlotte.
Continued belowWhile Ulrich goes to check on his kids, Hannah comes to the station, bearing chocolates. She greets Charlotte with a hug, allowing her to lean in for a smell of her perfume: it confirms her suspicions that she is her husband’s mistress. (Katharina pulled the same tactic with her in the fifth episode.) Afterwards, she visits Aleksander in his office, showing him the plastic bag he stashed away his passports and pistol in 1986: this time, she requests he destroy Charlotte’s life, instead of Ulrich’s.
Charlotte examines the bunker for more clues, and finds a penny necklace like the one Helge has. She goes to Peter to verify his father’s whereabouts on the night of the body’s appearance, and finds him up late at the church, offering advice to Bernadette’s male counterpart. The two do an awful job of hiding their affection, but an oblivious Charlotte concentrates on showing her husband the necklace. Peter takes a call mid-conversation, and is astonished to learn his father went to the police station, and confessed to Mads’s murder.
At the station, Peter is incredulous at his father, hoping this is his dementia speaking, and not true. Ulrich arrives and immediately becomes physically aggressive: the others have to pull him off Helge, who backs away. The old man expresses confusion that Ulrich is “alive,” exclaiming “it was him! It was him!,” the implication being, like his prime counterpart, Ulrich is responsible for his facial scars. He dangles the penny necklace from his fingers, and Charlotte notices that he didn’t snatch it, but that it’s in two places at once.
4. Future Past
Ulrich decides to check in with his kids at Katharina’s house: Martha reluctantly lets him in, which is striking since we only ever saw their prime reality counterparts together (at the breakfast table) in the very first episode. He questions her and Magnus’s description of the body’s appearance (falling from a rip in space-time), and asks them to be honest with him: did they take drugs from Kilian? The accusation angers both his children, and Ulrich makes a prompt exit, though not before a halfhearted attempt to calm down his son.
Martha admits to Magnus that she’s uncertain Kilian didn’t slip her something, and sneaks out of the house to speak with him. She finds him in his father Jurgen’s caravan, having been kicked out of his dormitory after her father called, asking the same questions. Martha asks him if he did slip her something, causing him to angrily respond he wouldn’t. Incensed, he accuses her and her friends of hypocrisy, stating “None of you can get it out of your system. I haven’t lived here for two years, but I’m still the trailer trash everyone points the finger at.”
He adds that he suspected “you were only with me to stick it to your parents. You couldn’t care less about me or Erik. You better go now.” Martha respectfully agrees and leaves, unaware Jonas watched the exchange. It’s a striking speech, touching on the theme of class, and adding a shade of gray to the young Martha, who can often feel (thanks to Jonas’s point-of-view) like a venerated saint, instead of a living person.
Jonas approaches her in the forest, and begins sharing childhood memories that he can remember, despite not being there in her world. He then tells her he knows about her vision the previous night, revealing her older self told him about that, and convinces her to join him in the future. She follows him to the cave and through the tunnel, and emerges in that world’s version of 2052, which is a completely dry, sand covered desert, ala the world outside Eden in Genesis. They are approached by the female Stranger (Nina Kronjäger), who unwraps her veil to reveal she’s the middle-aged Martha. She tells her younger, visibly alarmed self, “Welcome to the future.”
5. Past is Present
Back in the prime timeline and 1888, Bartosz has been informed by the slightly older Martha that Jonas is Adam, and he confronts him over his lie by omission, leading to a fight outside in the rain (just as their younger selves did in 2019). Bartosz screams the truth to Magnus and Franziska after they intervene, and Jonas, once again, walks away from the problem.
Continued belowLater, he speaks with Martha again in her room, asking why he can’t remember going to her world. She doesn’t know why, and also states she didn’t write the letter: she in turn asks him what Sic Mundus is. Jonas reveals Old Tannhaus’s father tried to resurrect his wife, “convinced that time travel would be the world’s salvation. He thought every error could be prevented before it occurred. But it doesn’t bring salvation — only damnation.”
Martha’s upset by this comment, still believing she can bring back her dead family. Recognizing he doesn’t trust her enough to persuade him back into believing destiny can be changed, she offers him the last vial of fuel from her space-time machine. Jonas places the cs-137 in a basin, and briefly creates a God Particle with the workshop’s generators, until the power runs out.
The group goes to check the liquid, which remains slightly suspended in time. Franziska notices Martha is gone: having lied about how much more fuel she had, she retreats to her room, and manages to transport herself before the others enter. Recognizing she had the means to take them away, but left them stranded anyway, Jonas glares at Bartosz.
Martha appears in 2053, where Adam has set up a new base in the nuclear power plant’s ruins: perched in an shielded control room where he can observe the God Particle, he checks that she gave his younger self the dark matter as instructed, and quips that he always was gullible. It’s a fascinating symmetry: she’s working with him, while Jonas is carrying out her older self’s orders.
Other Observations:
– In Eva’s World, the doors to the time corridor are emblazoned with the words Erit Lvx (“let there be light”), and the caduceus, the staff of Hermes Trismegistus himself. It’s confirmed on the official website that Erit Lux is the name of Eva’s organization, just as Sic Mundus’s doors bear the Latin inscription they derive their name from.
– Incidentally, Alt Magnus’s chest tattoo is that of the caduceus.
– Also, in her world, the touch activated lantern from the 2050s is shaped like a bar, rather than an orb.
– The adult Martha bears a long, vertical scar under her left eye, which consequently becomes much more noticeable on Eva. “Welcome to the future” is also what Silja said when Jonas arrived in their version of 2052.
– Bernd Doppler, who was murdered by the Unknown, also recited Isaac Newton’s proverb to Claudia in the third episode of season 1.
See you next week for “The Origin (Der Ursprung).”
