Did Dark season 3 leave you dazzled, drained, and utterly deranged over the weekend? We’ll discuss it — in due time. For now, the Summer TV Binge’s weekly traversal through Netflix’s German time travel saga continues with the fourth episode of season 1, released December 1, 2017.
“Double Lives (Doppelleben)”
Written by Martin Behnke and Jantje Friese
Directed by Baran bo Odar
November 6, 2019: Charlotte Doppler suspects her husband is cheating on her again, but her investigation is interrupted when an even worse fear transpires. Jonas Kahnwald decides to venture into the caves with his father’s map. Ulrich Nielsen decides to take matters at the plant into his own hands.
1. Causal Labyrinth
H.G. Tannhaus, who explained to us that time is not linear in the first episode’s narrated cold open, returns asking if there’s more to a black hole than being the “hellmouth” of the universe — he starts suggesting, what if “behind” them, there exists no past, present or future? The show’s establishing the causal loop (aka the predestination paradox), and that everything that has happened will still happen.
Jonas begins venturing into the caves in this episode, and the Stranger observes him while he does, checking his watch like he’s ensuring he goes according to schedule. Our young hero encounters a dead end, and returns to his bike, which he finds someone has placed a red string on. That night, the Stranger sneaks into his bedroom and writes a message on the map. Tannhaus’s narration returns, telling us:
We’re searching for Ariadne’s thread, the one meant to guide us along the right path — a beacon in the darkness. We’d love to know our fate, where we’re headed. But the truth is that there is but one path through all times, predetermined by the beginning and by the end — which is also the beginning.
2. Doppler Effect
As suggested by the German title “Doppelleben,” the Dopplers are the main focus of this chapter, which gradually reveals that a year ago, Peter cheated on Charlotte with Bernadette, a transgender prostitute. After discovering Peter is lying about his whereabouts the night Mikkel disappeared, Charlotte goes to confront her, but she says she hasn’t seen him for a year.
Charlotte decides to inspect the old Doppler family cabin, where she notices red soil resembling that found on the dead boy, and the covered entrance to a nuclear bunker. Before she can find any evidence though, she receives a call from the plant, who tell her Ulrich Nielsen has made the incredibly daft decision to climb over their fence to find Mikkel. Aleksander Tiedemann decides not to press charges, but either way, the trust between Charlotte and another man in her life has been broken.
Franziska is stalked by Magnus Nielsen, who is obsessed with why she was also looking for Erik’s drug stash. He spies her retrieving an envelope full of cash from a box concealed in the town’s abandoned railway, and confronts her about it when she’s alone in the school locker room, asking if she was involved with Erik.
She doesn’t answer the question, but explains she’s saving the money to leave Winden, outlining what happened to her parents, and her hatred of their normal facade. The angry confession unexpectedly proves to be quite the turn on for both of them, and they consummate their simmering tension on the bench — it’s rather ironic that these two start a relationship while their parents fall out.
3. Elisabeth Riding Hood
The episode fully introduces Franziska’s younger sister Elisabeth, who is an adorably acerbic little girl despite being deaf-mute. First thing in the morning, she’s annoying her sister by stealing her lipstick; then on the way to school, after seeing her mother take the memory card from a wildlife camera installation for clues, she starts arguing there’s no difference between confiscation and stealing. When Charlotte sees her off, Elisabeth introduces her to her “boyfriend” Yasin (who’s also deaf), a rather presumptuous phrase for two such young kids, but she feels it’s accurate.
All this endearment pays off in setting off a sense of panic when Elisabeth, tired of waiting for her parents after Charlotte is delayed by Ulrich’s misbehavior, decides to walk home by herself. We know Mikkel escaped to 1986, which means it’s unlikely she’ll be as “lucky.” There’s something incredibly primordial about the fear of losing a child that seems to be ingrained in European fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, a tradition Dark evokes with Elisabeth’s fox-styled beanie, the Raider packet she finds, or the very setting of the forest — the show is explicitly laying claim to a far older lineage of storytelling than most modern dramas. It’s a fear so primal, it’s enough for Charlotte, Peter and Franziska to put aside their distrust of each other as they wait at home for news.
4. Self-Awareness
The reference to Ariadne continues a popular tradition: she’s often been a muse for German storytellers, from two separate operas titled Ariadne auf Naxos (one of which was composed by Richard Strauss), to Nietzsche’s poem “Ariadne’s Lament.” The parallels with the legend of Theseus in the Labyrinth must’ve been plainly obvious to the creators, and their acknowledgment of every mythological precedent enhances the sense that this time it’s real, that these events really are happening.
Similarly, during the scene where Franziska is in class, the teacher discusses Goethe’s Elective Affinities. He describes the book as having “a web of symbols and references,” and “a special form of repetition” called “doubling,” where “there are several encrypted references [in the first half] to later events in the novel.” He may well be talking about Dark, but whereas Goethe was writing fiction, Winden is actually going through the repetition of history.
(On that note, there is a lot of influence from Goethe on Dark that’s best left unpacked by someone actually familiar with Elective Affinities here.)
5. “Wo ist Noah?”
Thankfully, Elisabeth returns home safe and sound, albeit without her beanie. She tells her family she was late because she encountered a man named Noah, who gave her a gold pocket watch that he claims once belonged to Charlotte. Charlotte opens it and sees, much to her surprise, that there is an engraving reading “für [for] Charlotte.”
Elsewhere, Peter’s senile father Helge wanders out of his nursing home, babbling that he must stop the disappearances. The police find him and bring him back, but when he wakes up in the morning, he’s perfectly lucid, and demands to know where Noah is. Yasin walks to school by himself, annoyed that his mother wanted to accompany him. A hooded man appears, and says, “You must be Yasin. Noah sent me.”
Noah’s a potent name, instantly recalling the Biblical patriarch who was spared God’s wrath. A figure carved from pinecones resembling the ones in the blue bedroom indicates he’s the one presiding over these evil experiments — so why did he spare Elisabeth? Regardless, everything changes the moment you hear a name; it instantly becomes far more personal.
Other Observations:
– Speaking of meaningful names, Yasin’s name is Turkish, while his surname is Friese: that’s because Baran bo Odar’s mother is Turkish, while Jantje Friese is his partner.
– A pathologist confirms for Charlotte the birds died after their eardrums burst, which she attributes to an electromagnetic field in the radio wave spectrum. She also compares their unnatural white spots to the mutations studied at Chernobyl, but states the birds have normal levels of radiation, indicating the plant is not responsible.
– The imagery of dead birds lined up on a coroner’s table strongly recalls natural history museums: the look of Winden is truly drenched in entropy.
– Poor Torben Woller is totally treated as a peon by Charlotte, being left to handle the police’s public relations, and to waste time on the tire track search that had already led Ulrich to Erik’s father.
– It should be acknowledged Bernadette is played by cis male actor Anton Rubtsov; while there is nothing wrong with men playing women in theory, the widespread practice of cis actors playing trans characters deprives trans actors of opportunities, and unintentionally reinforces transphobic misconceptions of them — in any case, it’s too late to do anything about it here.
See you all next week as we reach the halfway point of season 1, “Truths (Wahrheiten).”
