Dark Netflix season 2 episode 1 Beginnings and Endings Adam Television 

Five Thoughts on Dark‘s “Beginnings and Endings”

By | August 21st, 2020
Posted in Television | % Comments

The Summer TV Binge now enters the second season of the German Netflix series Dark, released June 21, 2019 (the day of Michael Kahnwald’s death). Before we proceed: yes, it is funny no one is social distancing or wearing face masks in the scenes set during 2020 — man plans, and God repeats Himself, if I recall the Yiddish saying correctly. Now then:

“Beginnings and Endings (Anfänge und Enden)”
Written by Jantje Friese and Daphne Ferraro
Directed by Baran bo Odar

June 21, 2020, six days before the apocalypse: Winden’s nuclear power plant is closing down, while Charlotte restarts the investigation into the town’s disappearances with the newly arrived federal investigator Clausen. Jonas is trapped in the hellish wasteland of 2053, and longs to find a way home before the 33rd anniversary of the disaster means it’s too late to go back.

1. Noah’s Leash

In a primal cold open, we see the young Noah (Max Schimmelpfennig) excavating the time corridor in the caves with an older man, who is tattooed with Khunrath’s depiction of the Emerald Tablet. Noah senses the man has lost faith in their leader, Adam, and kills him. Before he does, the faithless man says, “I hope eventually a day will come where you won’t believe everything Adam tells you. You should ask why he took you in — and why he chose to call you Noah.”

Noah counsels his younger self in 1921

Noah meets his older self at St. Christopher’s Church, which is under construction in 1921. He’s upset about taking a life, but his older self assures him that he will understand why it was necessary someday, stating “Adam will be proud of you. I had that same feeling. It will pass.” He explains to his younger self that intent matters as much as action, when determining what is right and wrong: it’s certainly a logical conclusion, for a murderous fatalist.

Old Noah subsequently meets Adam (Dietrich Hollinderbäumer) in a grand study room, the centerpiece of which is Peter Paul Rubens’s The Fall of the Damned. Adam, whose face is seemingly covered in chemical burns, tasks him with recovering the missing pages of Claudia’s diary, saying the apocalypse must happen — whether it’s the murder of children or mass devastation, their society believes death is fine to end suffering. You must wonder how much influence a culture that spawns Rubens’s depiction of an angel throwing souls into Hell had on their thinking.

2. Jonas’s Journey Home

Jonas’s story in 2053 begins with a bang, no pun intended: we see him dreaming about sex with Martha, who claims they “are perfect for each other,” despite their blood relation — nightmare or fantasy? The latter suggestion is reinforced as Jonas wanders Winden, wearing a cloth mask and giant armored backpack, going back-and-forth between his ruined home and the Doppler bunker. He gazes at a photo of Martha on a table, and observes her grave while visiting his father’s, implying he wants to return first and foremost to prevent her death on June 27, 2020. He listens to a tape recorded by Claudia a few months after the disaster, which states stabilizing the “God Particle” may be the way to return home and save everyone.

Martha's grave marker in 2053

The adult Jonas chooses to visit his mother on returning to 2020 (using his own key no less). Hannah has grown suicidal, the disappearance of her son compounding her grief on the anniversary of losing her husband. Jonas begins his intervention by proving he’s her son with stories from their past, including their encounter in 1986. It’s a somewhat touching scene — it’s very fortunate that Hannah didn’t shoot him with Aleksander’s gun.

Jonas reveals he closed the temporal loop in the caves, but he didn’t erase it and its consequences from history as planned; he presumably had to spend time repairing his personal time machine again, hence why it took him over six months to return to the present, and why his younger self can’t just crawl his way back. When he goes to sleep in his old bed, Hannah can’t help but observe the scars on his back, a caring moment of motherly affection rendered strange by how close in age they’ve become.

Continued below

No such comfort for the young Jonas in 2053: the troops in that era, led by a grown-up Elisabeth Doppler (Sandra Borgmann), and her interpreter Silja (the girl who gave Jonas a rude introduction to the future), are fanatics, who execute any trespassers they find, and believe a passage is opening soon to take them to paradise. Small wonder Jonas wants to stay away from them, and has developed no attachment to them; it’s probably for the best too — he might be related to one of them.

3. Everyone’s an Investigator Now

Inspector Clausen (Sylvester Groth) is a fascinatingly dull authority figure — his idea of an inspirational town meeting is to quote Freud and retell the story of the blind men and the elephant, which causes Jurgen Obendorf (long time no see) to yell back, “My son is still gone. The next time I need to find an elephant, though, I’ll be in touch!” Weirdly, he and Noah both mention they don’t believe in coincidences, almost like he’s a glimpse into a world where the pastor is an uncharismatic bore.

The lack of progress has inspired Katharina to investigate her husband and son’s disappearance herself: she’s seen mapping out and entering the caves to find them. Martha tells Bartosz she’s gone “crazy,” ceasing to be a source of emotional support, and so has he — she breaks up with him, complaining something has changed in him, that he’s become cold and distant. Bartosz protests he’s been dealing with his mother’s cancer treatment, but Martha can tell he’s hiding something else — she may not know who Noah is, but she’s clearly learned to be astute from her father.

Bartosz and Martha have the summer blues

Martha returns home to check on her mother, and discovers she’s turned Mikkel’s bedroom into an evidence storage room. She examines her parents’ research, and learns about the steel door blockading the cave that the barrels of caesium-137 were kept in. “Everyone out there knows something we’re not supposed to,” she tells Magnus. “Mom, Bartosz, the police, too. They all have a secret they’re keeping.” It’s great seeing her no longer being a bystander, but bittersweet too, given she apparently hasn’t got long to live.

4. There’s Bernadette

Magnus does some investigating of his own too: tired of Franziska’s secrets, he secretly watches and waits the next time she checks her lockbox in the abandoned railroad. This time, he sees Bernadette (the trans prostitute her father had an affair with) leaving money in the lockbox. He follows her back to her trailer, where she assumes he’s a new client. Shocked Franziska’s benefactor is a sex worker, Magnus flees without a word.

Torben and Bernadette eyeing the plant's truck

Bernadette’s surprising role continues when Torben Woller (Charlotte’s one-eyed colleague) visits her in the evening. We assume he’s a client, but it turns out they’re siblings, and that he asked her to keep an eye on the truck storing the barrels. “I’m glad to get rid of that thing,” she says; he asks her to get in touch with their mother. Torben drives the truck and its cargo to the plant, where Aleksander oversees the burial of the barrels in concrete. One wonders where else Bernadette will turn up.

5. Sic Mundus, Sic Mundus

The Latin phrase from the Emerald Tablet, “sic mundus creatus est (thus the world was created),” stamped on the doors in the caves, appears everywhere: young Noah and the faithless man mull its implication that the world simply is, and therefore meaningless, in 1921, while in 2053, the phrase has become a rallying cry for Elisabeth’s militia.

Over in 2020, young Elisabeth and her father comb through the belongings of Charlotte’s grandfather, whom we learn was Tannhaus. (It’s why she mentioned he was interested in calendars.) Elisabeth opens a copy of The Kybalion, and discovers a photo of Adam, Noah, and their associates, dated January 21, 1921: “sic mundus creatus est” is also written on the back.

The photo of Adam, Noah and associates from 1921

As Peter says when he displays the photo to Charlotte, “these people, who are they?” Why did her grandfather have this photo? What connection do they have to Elisabeth’s future group? Observe who’s standing next to Noah in the photo by the way: it’s Agnes Nielsen, looking exactly as she did in 1953, albeit with more androgynous hair and clothes.

Continued below

The words are seen one last time when Jonas spots a hole in the wall surrounding the plant’s ruins. Venturing inside to solve the mystery of the apocalypse, he notices “sic mundus creatus est” has been graffitied on the wall outside a particularly radioactive spot. Donning a still intact hazmat suit, he enters the room and discovers an enormous, floating mass of writhing black liquid and blue light — the prima materia, the world creator: the God Particle.

Other Observations:

– Jonas is now seen bearing a medal of St. Christopher, the patron saint of bachelors and travelers like him, as well as Winden’s church. (Incidentally, many of the philosophers who influenced this show, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, were bachelors.)

The pendant's depiction of St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child

– While I miss the first season’s cold November Winden, the summertime setting for the scenes in 2020 generates truly vivid yellows and greens, that contrast better with the post-apocalyptic 2053.

– Almost everyone’s hair is longer and shaggier, so at least one thing about 2020 was accurate. Of course, the real reflection of the true 2020 comes with the yellow face mask Jonas wears in 2053: a true trendsetter for the apocalypse we didn’t see coming.

– The French trespassers hanged by Elisabeth’s followers wear skin-tight suits straight out of a Franco-Belgian sci-fi comic. On that note, is the scene an illustration of the apocalypse destroying post-war cooperation, or a joke that German-French relations never change?

– The episode confirms Elisabeth is Winden’s leader in 2053 for anyone uncertain with a wonderfully simple technique: a match cut.

– Perhaps we should’ve known Bernadette and Torben are siblings: the former means “brave bear” in French, while the latter is Danish for “Thor’s bear.” (Meaning his one eye may be interpreted as a nod to Woden.)

We’ll return next week for our look at season two, episode two, “Dark Matter (Dunkle Materie).”


//TAGS | 2020 Summer TV Binge | Dark

Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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