Welcome to this week’s installment of the Summer TV Binge of Netflix’s Dark, analyzing the seventh chapter of the twisted German time travel series, released December 1, 2017.
“Crossroads (Kreuzwege)”
Written by Jantje Friese & Marc O. Seng
Directed by Baran bo Odar
November 9, 2019 and 1986: Ulrich discovers reading Egon Tiedemann’s journal that Charlotte’s father-in-law, Helge, was meant to give a statement to the police 33 years ago, but failed to turn up. Jonas goes looking for Mikkel in the past.
1. Helge’s Guilty Secret
This episode blurs together past and present more than any previous hour: we open with Helge Doppler as a child awakening in the blue bedroom/execution chamber, his face bruised and bloody, explaining (yet not entirely) his distinctive scars. Then in 1986, when Helge is a timid cleaner at the plant, we see Egon arranging an interview with him about the routes and times of everyone working there on the night of Mads’s disappearance; we subsequently see Charlotte finally being granted access to search for Mikkel on the plant’s grounds in 2019.
Likewise, in ’86 we see Egon giving Jonas a lift to the hospital, and taking a shortcut through the forest to get there, intercut with Charlotte discovering fresh tracks into the forest in the present. Later, she’s informed that the path leads to the old Doppler cabin and bunker: returning there, she discovers a scrap of old wallpaper resembling that of the torture chamber from 1986, confirming the bunker and blue room were one and the same.
It’s eventually confirmed Helge was the hooded child killer: he’s such a shy, awkward character though, it’s hard to believe. Charlotte calls Peter and mentions his father experienced some trauma at the cabin as a child (presumably the one that caused his scars), yet he apparently still lived there. Peter replies he’s not sure if he did, stating he only moved to Winden to care for his father after an accident in 1986.
Helge certainly doesn’t look happy when we see him moving Yasin’s body out of the bunker. The question is not why, but who: Jana tells Ulrich she saw Helge arguing with a priest in ’86. As the episode closes, we see Noah scrubbing the unclad bunker, and marking the date in 1953, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is the orchestrator of these horrific events.
2. Ulrich’s White Whale
Ulrich visits Helge at the care home, startling him with questions about his whereabouts in November 1986. Like his confrontation with Hannah in the car, Ulrich tries to be patient at first, but stress gets the better of him, and the staff have to drag him out after he lashes out at the old man over his son’s disappearance. Charlotte, who was already fed up with Ulrich after he climbed over the plant’s fence, has no choice but to suspend him. Ulrich suggests Helge is involved in a conspiracy, believing that will be the clincher that allows him to continue the investigation, but Charlotte tells him to just “go home.”
Having alienated his co-workers, Ulrich returns home to find himself estranged from his wife, who quietly confronts him over his infidelity. She asks if he was ever truly happy: he doesn’t respond, possibly in denial over how much he took her for granted. Katharina moves on, telling him his mother called. After learning that she saw a man resembling middle-aged Helge in 2019, Ulrich remembers Mikkel’s joke about how “the question isn’t how, the question is when,” and sneaks back into Helge’s room.
Helge has wandered off again, but Ulrich finds a copy of Tannhaus’s A Journey Through Time with a threaded coin — like the one on Mads — inside, and sees that the old man is still nearby. Following him into the caves, he leaves a phone message for Charlotte, telling her “the question isn’t who abducted the children, but when”: it’s unlikely she’ll call him back, but then what else does he have to lose? All he has left is the chance he’ll find his son, which we sadly know is a vain hope.
Continued below3. Jonas’s Fateful Decision
Speaking of finding Mikkel, Jonas walks 1986 in a daze, unable to believe he’s not hallucinating, and how can he? If his father’s letter is true, then the girl he loves is his aunt. After going to the hospital to find his grandmother, he notices Mikkel on a bench, and mulls showing himself when the Stranger appears. Jonas asks him if any of this, including him, are real, or hallucinations like the visions of his father. (This indirect Fight Club reference is amusing in retrospect, but I’ve promised to not say anything regarding further episodes.) The Stranger’s reply does suggest however, that time itself is a delusion, recalling Plato’s Cave or Descartes’s Demon:
Sometimes it’s hard for us to grasp things that go against all we are conditioned to believe. How did people feel the first time they were told the Earth was round?
The Earth is round, time is round, or perhaps it’s a never ending loop like the triquetra: in any case, the Stranger warns Jonas against bringing his father back to 2019, pinning him against a van in an unusually emotional display. He tells him “every decision for something is a decision against something else. A life for a life. What will you decide?” It is a dreadful reminder of the unfathomable dilemmas time travel would create: for every triumph you could witness, you would also carry the burden of every tragedy you can prevent.
Ultimately, Jonas chooses self-preservation over what is undoubtedly the right moral decision: he walks away after watching his young parents meet up, and returns to 2019 through the tunnel. He takes the opportunity to remind his mother he’s there for her, and burns his father’s suicide note. You can’t blame Jonas, given the potentially catastrophic paradox that may’ve ensued, but it was a selfish choice, not a selfless one.
4. Katharina’s Family
We see Katharina in 1986 pleading for Ulrich’s release after his false rape accusation, stating he would never do that. Egon asks about her black eye, which she unconvincingly states was because she “fell down.” We’re given a hint as to what could’ve been the real cause during the present: when Katharina tells Ulrich his mother called, she says she only brings up Mads, commenting that she “thought [her] family was the one full of assholes.” It appears Katharina had abusive parents or guardians, explaining why we’ve never seen them; why she was a bully at school; and her disdain back then at the thought of ever becoming a mother.
5. Art
In the hospital, Mikkel becomes fascinated by a print of Heinrich Khunrath’s 1606 depiction of the Emerald Tablet, recognizing the words “sic mundus creatus est,” as well as the triquetra from the doors on the time corridor: this implies Mikkel became interested in art after researching the occult roots of his circumstances.
The real version of Khunrath’s woodcut doesn’t actually have the three-pointed symbol, but its incorporation here may be more than a concession to the audience. During the ending, when Noah cleans the bunker, it’s shown he has an enormous back tattoo of the Emerald Tablet, indicating a much older conspiracy has taken root in Winden: priests who’ve discovered time travel don’t just tattoo Hermetic symbolism, no matter how much it’s affected their life.
Other Observations:
– Noah’s extraordinary body art is an overt homage to Francis Dolarhyde’s William Blake-inspired tattoo in Red Dragon, but it also arguably cements his character as the show’s answer to Robert Mitchum’s tattooed Night of the Hunter villain.
– While searching the plant’s grounds, Charlotte rappels into the same cave entrance Claudia did 33 years prior, and finds flakes of yellow paint, which confirms for us Aleksander moved the barrels stashed there.
– Egon asks Jonas if people his age are into Satanism, having come to suspect Ulrich is involved in his brother’s disappearance: it’s quite funny, but also reflects no one would suspect a priest in the ‘80s. (Egon must’ve also thought Jonas’s earphones looked like a stethoscope.)
– Jonas finds young Regina sitting in the school corridor by herself, presumably hiding from Ulrich and Katharina.
Continued below– Helge recognizes Ulrich in his care room, babbling “it was him,” foreshadowing Ulrich’s journey into the past.
– Charlotte only got the search warrant for the plant because of the tremors caused by the journeys through time, as Winden is not near a seismic fault.
See you all next week for our look at “As You Sow, so You Shall Reap (Was man sät, das wird man ernten).”
