Welcome to this week’s installment of the Summer TV Binge of Netflix’s Dark, analyzing the first season finale of the twisted German time travel series, released December 1, 2017. Please be aware that the following analysis contains discussion of suicidal thoughts and feelings.
“Alpha and Omega (Alpha und Omega)”
Written by Jantje Friese and Ronny Schalk
Directed by Baran bo Odar
November 12, 1953/1986/2019: Bartosz reconciles with Martha, and learns more from Noah. Ulrich is incarcerated. Helge Doppler confronts his younger self. Jonas decides to change everything.
1. Flashback
The cold open is unusually swift for Dark, revealing Peter Doppler and Tronte Nielsen are on Claudia Tiedemann’s side of the war, by briefly taking us back to the night of Mikkel’s disappearance (November 4, 2019). It’s shown Peter was mulling cheating again with Bernadette, but retreated to the bunker out of shame. As he recited the Serenity Prayer, a rift opened and deposited Mads’s corpse.
After vainly trying to resuscitate the boy — too shocked to notice his eyes — Peter recovers his ID card, and calls Tronte on discovering who he is. Tronte arrives and grieves on recognizing the body, after which Claudia appears and informs them that they don’t have much time, and that they must move the body to where it’ll be discovered. We found Peter and Tronte suspect at the start of the season: now we trust them, while we know the senile, sympathetic Helge was a monster.
2. Lost in the Past
Ulrich has his mug shot taken after his arrest in 1953: everything he says sounds like inane babbling to Egon and the rest of Winden’s police, who attempt to beat Helge’s location out of him. He recites the Kreator lyric Egon hated so much in ‘86 (“My only aim is to take many lives, The more the better I feel”), which hardly clarifies his origins or motives for them.
In 2019, Charlotte learns her father-in-law has disappeared from the care home for longer than usual. Still dwelling on Ulrich’s phone message, she decides to look up newspaper reports of Helge’s disappearance in 1953, and is stunned to see Ulrich’s photo in the microfilm. It’s unnerving, seeing a person you know reduced to a 2D artifact like that — is that the ultimate fate of all of us? To become archival shadows?
3. Noah Casts a Spell
Mark Waschke is utterly magnetic as Noah, and here he gets two incredible narrations allowing us to fully observe how he leads his flock astray. When the middle-aged Helge is having another crisis of faith in 1986, Noah decides to tell him a story from his childhood, which not only foreshadows this episode’s big twist, but one in season two as well (my jaw may have dropped on realizing this during my subsequent rewatch):
”A stranger came to us. He looked as if he’d been in the war. Didn’t talk much. There was this sadness in his eyes, the kind you sometimes see in those who want to die, but life won’t let them. He took a room in our house, the bedroom right next to mine. And sometimes I heard him talk in his sleep. Confused words. But one night, he was suddenly very clear. He stood in the hallway, his eyes wide open, and said, ‘Nothing is in vain. Not a single breath, not a single step, not a single word. Not pain. An eternal miracle of the One.’
I didn’t understand any of his words. Only years later, when I felt the pain, did I understand what he meant, that none of the horrible things that befall us should be in vain, that they make us what we are, that they give us our strength. Your pain made you who you are, Helge, but it no longer has power over you.”
His voice is calm, soothing even. Over in 2019, we see him turning Bartosz against his own grandmother. “We belong to the light. Don’t forget that, even though some of what we do is of a dark nature,” he says. “But no victory is ever won without sacrifice. As long as we’re in this time loop, we who know have to make sure that every step will be repeated exactly as it was before, no matter how inhumane it seems to us, no matter what sacrifices it demands of us. But believe me, the others are the ones who are truly inhumane. They have lost all humanity. They belong to the shadow. Your grandmother, Claudia, belongs to the shadow. Never trust her. No matter what she says.” He sounds almost convincingly righteous.
Continued below4. Jonas Wants to Die
Haunted now by Mikkel’s face, Jonas meets his grandmother to ask if she ever knew her adopted son was from the future. Ines gives him the letter his father wrote, the letter she read the night he went into the past, confirming she knows. Jonas states he cannot cope with knowing Martha is his aunt, but recognizes it’s not her fault, because it’s his existence that is unnatural. (“They’re okay. I’m what’s wrong,” he says.) Ines tries to comfort her grandson, saying “things… no matter how abnormal or strange they seem to us, happen for a reason. Who are we to play God?” By invoking God, it seems she’s trying to warn him against taking his own life as his father did, by subconsciously reminding him it’s a violation of God’s sole right to take life.
When Jonas returns to school, he’s accosted by Bartosz, who found out about his brief dalliance with Martha after she drove herself back into his arms. Martha breaks up the fight, and Jonas walks home. Tellingly, the out-of-focus Martha in the background does not check if Bartosz is injured, and watches Jonas walk away instead, but he can’t see that; he can only think about how he has lost his best friend and the girl of his dreams. After inspecting the room his father died in, and the beam he hanged himself from, Jonas returns to 1986; we hear Noah’s description of the one who has “sadness in his eyes, the kind you sometimes see in those who want to die, but life won’t let them” — he will bring back Mikkel, even at the cost of his own life.
5. “Ich bin du”
When Jonas enters Mikkel’s hospital room, he is greeted by Noah, who — in another iconic moment — puts his finger to his lips so that he remains quiet, while Helge chloroforms him. Jonas awakens in the bunker’s creepy bedroom, and sees the Stranger watching through the door viewer.
The Stranger clarifies he’s not involved, but he’s not here to rescue Jonas either — he must remain there. Jonas finally asks who he is, and the Stranger, surprised he hasn’t figured it out, explains why he left the older version of his father’s suicide note on his bed:
”You’ll carry that letter for almost 33 years before you pass it on. To yourself. [Ich bin du.] I am you. My name is Jonas Kahnwald. I sent the letter to you. Or should I say, to me. Everything you’re experiencing, I’ve already experienced. I burned the letter, just like you. I got it back from our grandmother. I’ve already had this conversation. But I was on the other side then. We think we’re free, but we’re not. We follow the same old path. Again and again.”
Jonas breaks down in hysterics, practically begging his older self to prevent him from playing out this “sick shit” for the next 33 years — I’m only a dozen years older than Jonas, yet my paternal instincts kicked in so strongly that I wanted to reach in and console him myself. It’s an incredibly cruel fate that the old Jonas leaves his teenage self to deal with alone.
6. Helge Kills Himself
In another moment of deja vu, Old Helge confronts his middle-aged self at the cabin, trying to make him realize Noah is evil. Helge flees back to his car, and continues to assist Noah with kidnapping Jonas after their reassuring talk. It’s while he drives home at night that we finally witness the accident Peter mentioned in “Crossroads,” when his car is rammed by another at an intersection. A bloodied but alive Helge stumbles out of his car to check the other driver, and sees it’s his older self, now dead as a result of his attack. Whether he would’ve managed to take his younger self out with him or not, Helge was always going to make a futile attempt to pay for his crimes, but no one knows who he is or why he crashed his car in 1986, so his sacrifice was ultimately an useless attempt to assuage his own guilt — and it’s certainly of no comfort to Mads, Erik, and Yasin.
Continued below7. Master Zhuang’s Paradox
Mikkel’s adoption by Ines is shown, as well as some insight into his psychological state for the next 33 years: like his son, he wonders if this is all a hallucination, one that he wants to “wake up” from. Ines tells him about “Master Zhuang’s paradox,” the tale of a waking man who cannot tell if he dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. It implies he chose to live his life as if he were in a daze, explaining Hannah’s comment that “you never knew if he meant something seriously or not.”
It brings to mind something artist Andy Warhol said about the dissociation he felt: per The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, “People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television – you don’t feel anything.” He clarified, “When you’re really really involved with something, you’re usually thinking about something else. When something’s happening, you fantasize about other things.”
A social worker comes to take Mikkel to the adoption agency, and he’s despondent, unable to even turn and face her. Recognizing he’s uncommunicative towards any adult besides her, Ines pulls her away and informs her that she’s chosen to adopt him, as well as to take care of him until it’s made official. During the closing montage, we see her carrying him into their new home, the home he’ll spend the rest of his life, uncertain whether he is a boy in 1986 dreaming he is from 2019, or a boy from 2019 dreaming he is in 1986.
8. Oedipus
Old Jonas picks up the earlier version of his time machine from Tannhaus, which the watchmaker built from the blueprints Claudia provided. We learn from Jonas the substance in the barrels, used to power the device, is caesium-137, a radioactive isotope that, when combined with a Higgs field (in other words, a “God particle”), generates the black hole necessary for time travel. Accepting Jonas is a time traveler, Tannhaus asks what the future is like, to which he responds he hopes it’ll be altered tomorrow — he is going to take the time machine into the tunnel, and use its black hole to cancel out the vortex there.
We also see Tronte in the bunker telling Peter the future will be altered, when he questions why half the pages in Claudia’s book have been torn out. But everything until now has indicated changing the past is a fool’s hope, even with time travel, and Noah tells Bartosz as much, demonstrating his grandmother has been manipulating Jonas with his copy of her diary — he claims Jonas’s attempt to destroy the black hole will be what creates it: he is its alpha and omega.
It’s then I realized how much Jonas’s story is Oedipus as well as Theseus, and not just because he discovered he was in an incestuous relationship: Oedipus fled Corinth for Thebes to defy the prophecy he would murder his father and marry his mother, only to fulfil it as he was unaware of who his true parents were — his desire to undo his own existence recalls Oedipus’s subsequent self-mutilation.
9. “Willkommen in der Zukunft”
The adult Jonas enters the corridor and activates the machine with Ulrich’s phone, which Tannhaus has jury-rigged into a remote. We see the background image of Ulrich’s family — Jonas’s paternal family — scramble as it turns on. He lies down — still seeing the face of his dead father — and drifts off to sleep, hoping to never wake up. Katharina tries to call her husband again, but he’s imprisoned, bruised and bloodied 66 years in the past, while his phone is used as something else in 1986.
The lights flicker and the earth shakes again in Winden across all three time periods. Peter and Charlotte reconcile at the bunker; Agnes Nielsen and Doris Tiedemann clasp hands in fear; Magnus and Franziska see a Raider commercial from 1986 flicker across the TV; and Aleksander and Regina witness thunder, lightning, and the Higgs field forming in the sky. A portal appears in the bunker to both the frightened little Helge in 1953, and young Jonas in ‘86. They reach out in curiosity a la Michelangelo, and Helge is teleported to 1986.
Continued belowJonas winds up in Old Claudia’s version of the bunker, the one covered in photos. Exiting through the unlocked door, he wanders outside and discovers Winden is covered in ash, and the nuclear plant is a ruin. Armed soldiers appear in a truck and quadcopter. Jonas surrenders to their leader, a girl his age (Lea van Acken, from the brilliant Stations of the Cross). He asks her what year it is, to which she replies by welcoming him to “der zukunft [future],” and by knocking him out with her rifle.
Why did Jonas emerge 66 years into the future instead of trading places with Helge? Perhaps his older self’s presence in the tunnel below the bunker had something to do with it; in any case, he’s about to undergo the same gruelling experience he had.
We’ll return next week with the start of season two, “Beginnings and Endings (Anfänge und Enden).”
