Welcome to this week’s installment of the Summer TV Binge of Netflix’s Dark, analyzing season two, episode two, of the twisted German time travel series, released June 21, 2019.
“Dark Matter (Dunkle Materie)”
Written by Jantje Friese and Ronny Schalk
Directed by Baran bo Odar
June 22, 1987/2020/2053: Jonas works to stabilize the God Particle. Charlotte and Clausen interview Regina Tiedemann. Egon realizes his last unsolved case may be connected to one from his early career. Mikkel finds he’s still struggling to fit into his new life. Claudia meets a familiar face at work.
1. The Passion of Jonas
Jonas briefly stabilizes the God Particle in 2053 by applying a voltage, while Claudia’s tape is heard explaining the properties of the stable field, including the ability to travel through time. Needing more power, he distracts an enemy militia by hooking up a walkman to a loudspeaker, playing Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds” to draw their attention while he steals petrol from their vehicle. However, on returning through the wall, he’s caught by Elisabeth’s soldiers — suffice to say, it was quite foolish of him not to wait until nightfall.
Jonas is sentenced to hanging, and Elisabeth shoots him in the calf for talking back. She relents after he struggles for some time, and shoots the rope, albeit leaving him with the neck scar his older self bears. Silja is baffled, and that night she confronts him in his cell, demanding to know his true identity. His throat scorched, Jonas struggles to respond, so Silja asks him to show her what’s really inside the dead zone instead. On returning to the God Particle’s chamber, Jonas stabilizes the field again, and limps towards it. Silja expresses worry, but he coldly responds, “Whether I die out here or in there doesn’t matter.” The sphere returns to its volatile state immediately after he enters it.
2. A Journey Through Time
In 2020, the adult Jonas tells Hannah he believes the town’s ignorance of its true nature is what’s preventing the time loops from ceasing to exist entirely, and that he will begin by taking her back in time, to show her where her husband came from. He takes her and the time machine to the cave to ensure no one sees them coming or going.
Back in 1987, it’s the last week of school, and Mikkel still feels he doesn’t belong; Ines reminds him of how they talked about how “the past is the past,” but he can only think about how it’s his mother’s birthday. Ironically, the teenage Katharina shoves him when he arrives at school, calling him a “douchebag,” and so he decides to skip school.
While playing in the forest, he hears the roar of Jonas and Hannah’s traversal coming from the cave, and runs there, expecting someone to emerge to retrieve him. However, he only encounters Noah, sitting outside on a log while peeling an apple. As always, Noah oozes a mesmerizingly passive-aggressive menace: he acts out the role of father to his parish, while continuing to have his switchblade out. “I come here a lot. It’s special here,” he says; it’s probably the only honest thing he’s ever told the boy.
He understands why he’s skipped school, but advises against going into the cave, explaining “it’s like a maze.” Mikkel changes the subject, asking the pastor about what he said at the hospital, that God has a plan for everyone. “What if God doesn’t know what he’s doing? If the plan is wrong? If God is wrong?,” he asks. “God is never wrong,” Noah replies. “Sometimes we need faith that things will get better for us again.” He waltzes off, tossing his half-eaten apple into the forest.
Returning home, Mikkel finds Ines had been informed of his absence, and worried he had run away again. She chooses not to make an issue of it, offering up some Toast Hawaii instead. Mikkel asks if she believes in God, and if He has a plan. (It may seem strange he doesn’t recognize the cross she wears, but Mikkel is a very young boy who was raised by a strident atheist.) Ines says, “I believe, for example, that God made sure you came to me. And that his plan for me is to take care of you. So, let’s make this Toast Hawaii, yeah?”
Continued belowJonas and Hannah watch this rare moment of happiness from a distance: she’s overwhelmed seeing her husband as a child again, and the realization of his true identity. Her son embraces and comforts her, and for a moment, we overlook how awful she’s been — it’s an uncanny ability Baran bo Odar has, as anyone who’s seen his first film, The Silence (which I won’t spoil here), will recognize.
3. Old Regrets
Also in 1987, a retired Egon Tiedemann is struggling to tell his daughter about his cancer diagnosis. Haunted by his failure to find Mads Nielsen, he rereads his old journals, and remembers he never got to interview Helge Doppler about his exact whereabouts on the night of his disappearance. He makes a visit to the hospital, where Helge is still recovering from the car accident. Doppler’s mental health is more fragile than ever, and he starts babbling about the man who attacked him as a child, as well as “the white devil.”
Sensing there may be a connection to the mysterious man they arrested over the two boys’ murder and Helge’s disappearance in 1953, Egon checks that he’s still alive, and learns he’s being held in a psychiatric hospital. There, he comes face-to-face with an aged Ulrich, now ironically known by the staff and other patients as “the inspector.” First, Winfried Glatzeder looks so much like Oliver Masucci that you genuinely believe Ulrich has aged 34 years since you last saw him. Secondly, it is devastating learning Ulrich did not escape, and spent almost half his life trapped, alone and anonymous, in the past.
Ulrich instantly recognizes the version of Egon who harassed him as a teenager: he sniffs the familiar stench of alcohol on his breath, and recites again the Kreator lyric he hated so much (“My only aim is to take many lives, the more, the better I feel”). He calls Egon an idiot for still not recognizing it, and makes a veiled reference to his imminent demise: “Maybe that’s your fate. To die as clueless as you were born, you know? Everybody gets what they deserve.” While getting blamed for Erik and Yasin’s murders may have been cosmic justice for attempting to kill Helge, Ulrich certainly didn’t deserve to be consigned to the ash heap of history like this.
4. Claudia Learns Time Travel is Real
Meanwhile, Claudia is informed that an old woman is waiting in her office, wanting to talk to her about her dog. She says to the seemingly homeless woman that the animal shelter told her no one had reported the dog was missing, and that she took her in because of her resemblance to her childhood dog. “Gretchen,” the old woman replies, revealing herself to be the old Claudia. She further proves her identity by predicting an incident involving two colleagues, and adds that she was in the cave that winter, guiding Gretchen to her younger self.
They go to the cave storing the barrels, where Old Claudia reveals her time machine. She tells her, “You will accept your part in all of this, and what it means you’ll be losing,” and cryptically warns about Adam. She also says, “You don’t have much time with Regina. But if everything works out… she will live.” She departs with the machine, but leaves her a marked map of her garden. That evening, Claudia digs two holes, and retrieves from one a box containing the time machine, which we simultaneously see her older self burying at the marked construction site in 1954 — no matter how old she is (or how she’s dressed), Claudia is a tough, self-reliant woman.
Below: old Claudia buries her time machine in 1954
5. Doppler Drama
During 2020, Magnus confronts Franziska over her association with Bernadette, asking if she’s also been prostituting herself. Enraged by his mistrust, she angrily explains that she sells Bernadette hormone prescriptions, which her father paid for until Charlotte found out about their affair. It’s an upsetting moment — good thing little Elisabeth couldn’t hear a word of it.
Continued belowElsewhere, Charlotte and Clausen are interviewing Regina; like many, he suspects the power plant is at the center of the disappearances, and is curious why Aleksander Tiedemann took his wife’s name. Although ill, Regina is perfectly lucid, and gives them a package containing the research the adult Jonas left in his hotel room: Charlotte is shaken by the evidence, recognizing much of it as taken from her grandfather’s book, and the implication he wasn’t the madman his contemporaries believed him to be.
She excuses herself, claiming she forgot Elisabeth had a swimming lesson, while Clausen asks Regina what the “homeless” stranger looked like. Charlotte calls Peter from her car, tearfully telling him what happened; she mentions Tannhaus never told her about her parents, seemingly beginning to verbalize a theory why. That night, Peter consoles her, and they quietly ponder the impact secrets and lies have had on their family.
Other Observations:
– If you’re wondering why the show’s name is Dark, but this episode’s German one is “Dunkle Materie,” well, it might have to do with dunkel being a kind of lager. (Though let’s face it, German viewers would probably find Dunkel a silly sounding title as well.)
– Elvis is referenced again when Ines makes Mikkel Toast Hawaii, as she mentions her father used to dance like him. Toast Hawaii was popularized in West Germany during the 1950s, when Elvis was stationed there during his military service; he subsequently played an Army veteran in the film Blue Hawaii.
– During a date with Aleksander in ‘87, Regina implies she’s studying Antonia Barber’s 1969 novel The Ghosts, a novel involving time travel. However, it’s possible this is instead an allusion to Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts, especially as it involves a character named Regina, whose true parentage is one of the main twists — incidentally, the father of Dark’s Regina has not been revealed at this point.
– Mikkel’s bedroom in 1987 is the same one used by his son in the future.
– The childhood photo Jonas looks at reveals he had very long hair as a boy.
– It doesn’t escape Egon’s notice that his daughter’s new dog resembles the one that disappeared in 1953.
Join us next week for the thirteenth episode, “Ghosts (Gespenster).”
