Welcome to this week’s installment of the Summer TV Binge of Netflix’s Dark, analyzing the second season finale of the twisted German time travel series, released June 21, 2019.
“Endings and Beginnings (Enden und Anfänge)”
Written by Jantje Friese and Daphne Ferraro
Directed by Baran bo Odar
June 27, 1921/1987/2020/2053: the day of the apocalypse is here — Clausen orders a sweep of the plant for the bodies of the missing; Noah confronts Adam; Jonas tries desperately to ensure Martha survives; and Regina and Charlotte are reunited with their mothers.
1. Charlotte’s Mother is…
The word “apocalypse” derives from the Koine Greek apokalypsis, which means “unveiling” or “revelation” (hence the name of the final book of the Bible). We get a major reveal off the bat, as the episode opens with the grizzled adult Elisabeth Doppler looking at polaroids of herself, Noah, and their daughter — Charlotte. As Noah’s juxtaposed discussion with his younger self in 1921 confirms, Elisabeth is her own grandmother. Noah explains he couldn’t tell Charlotte who her mother is, just as he can’t tell him what’s going to happen, because to do so would jeopardize everything.
Of all the bizarre twists on this show, this is perhaps the most outrageous instance of a causal loop yet — why is Charlotte descended from her younger daughter? Is this why Elisabeth is deaf, or why Noah abducted and killed her childhood “boyfriend” Yasin? (And why was this far less disturbing on Futurama?) Regardless, young Noah must go to the future, or else his granddaughter Franziska — whose older self is with Magnus to take him to the time machine — will never be born. Perhaps it’s also why he saved Helge Doppler’s life: he is Elisabeth’s paternal grandfather, Charlotte’s father-in-law, her great-grandfather, and so on…
2. … a Widow
Noah confronts Adam about his lies in his study, accusing him of not waging war on God but mankind, and flings the last pages from Claudia’s notebook at him. He then fires his pistol at the old man, but, unfortunately for him, the gun jams, and continues to do so despite his desperate attempts to fix it — this Vader won’t be unseating Palpatine anytime soon.
Adam takes the portrait of young Elisabeth off the study’s family tree, so Noah may look at her one last time, before Agnes (looking as uncharacteristically androgynous as she did in the photo taken earlier that year) enters the room with Magnus and Franziska. She takes the pistol from her brother, fixes it, and kills him instead (shooting him in the heart, no less). Noah dies, failing to reunite his family, while his younger self heads out of the church to the bunker in 2020.
Noah is dead: long live Noah.
3. A Back-and-Forth Rush
It’s the day everything changes in 2020, and everyone who is aware Winden is an abscess in the fabric of reality are scrambling to get each other to safety (so much so the distances everyone travels over the episode seem a bit implausible, given how spread out the town has felt until now). Adult Jonas, using Aleksander’s old gun, forces Martha into the bunker, to ensure her survival, pleading with her to remain until his younger self returns. Peter, knowing what Noah said about only those in the bunker surviving, reluctantly takes Elisabeth there, even though Charlotte and Franziska aren’t responding to his messages — Martha uses their arrival as an opportunity to escape.
Meanwhile, Bartosz says goodbye to his cancer-stricken mother, finally giving her her mother’s message from 2019, and leaves to escape with Magnus and Franziska — only to learn Katharina has his time machine. Mrs. Nielsen has, in turn, taken it to Jonas so he may explain to her how it works, unaware he left home to sequester her daughter. While waiting for him to come back, she picks up one of Michael’s photo albums, and finally sees how her little boy grew up — she also learns of the secret cave passage from his map.
Continued belowYoung Jonas and Claudia reopen the caves’ temporal corridor in 1987: he tells her to take the briefcase device to the bunker while he looks for his mother (unaware she’s in 1954). The older Jonas, now back home, tries to explain to Katharina why she simply can’t retrieve her son from the causal loop: when the corridor reopens, the power flux causes her to realize what’s happened, and she decides she’ll find Mikkel and Ulrich through there instead.
Claudia detours to her daughter’s home. It’s another rare, sweet, moment for the show: Regina is battling cancer, her husband has been indefinitely detained, and her son has left her to die alone, but now her mother has returned, unaged 33 years after her disappearance, apologetic and making up for lost time by saving her life — it’s nothing less than a thermodynamic miracle. It’s questionable how long Regina will have without chemotherapy, but at least she’s been given the chance to die peacefully with her mother at her side.
4. Jonas’s Uncertainty Principle
In the caves in 1987, Jonas tells Claudia what her older self believed about changing history: that “the big things and the little things don’t follow the same rules. We won’t be able to change the grand scheme of things… but the details. We change a grain of sand, and with that, the whole world.” Otherwise known as the butterfly effect, it’s an important reminder that small changes to history (eg. the presence of a boy 22 years before he was born) may have enormous consequences. Consider for a moment: what might’ve happened if Noah’s gun hadn’t jammed?
In 2020, adult Jonas struggles with the prospect history may not always unfold the same way, deploying circular logic when explaining to Katharina why Mikkel can’t come back. (“I’d give my life for his if I only could,” he says, “but I can’t, damn it! Because my future already exists.”) After she leaves, young Noah enters the house. Jonas points his pistol at him, but Noah calmly approaches, appealing to his savior complex (it appears, even as a young man, Noah was incredibly persuasive), and hands him an envelope from “Martha.”
Holstering the gun and reading the letter, Jonas is amazed to learn he apparently prevented her death: now believing founding Sic Mundus is essential to that outcome, he departs with the time machine Katharina left, to save Bartosz, Magnus and Franziska as well.
5. Chekhov’s Gun
“Chekhov’s gun” refers to Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s principle that everything must pay off in a story: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
The young Jonas and Martha reunite at the Kahnwald home, but Adam appears, wielding the pistol his mother retrieved in 1986, and his middle-aged self took, but which still hasn’t been fired. After proclaiming his destiny remains using the dark matter to destroy the world, he shoots Martha in the chest to ensure Jonas becomes his nihilistic old self. Adam taunts Jonas as he leaves, saying “You can stop me. Or you can try to save her.” Jonas chooses to remain at her side as she bleeds to death: it’s futile, but he’s emotionally compromised.
We should’ve known: we saw Martha’s grave in 2053, and that she remained a teenager in Adam’s daydreams — but like Jonas, we held out hope it wasn’t true, or that her fate could be altered. Instead, the older Jonas caused the inevitable with his foolish efforts to prevent it, further ruining his younger self’s life. Martha truly is Ariadne, fated to never be with her Theseus: at least she got to kiss him one last time before her life was cruelly taken.
6. (Not) Local Man Ruins Everything
Clausen receives a search warrant for the plant, and vows that, while he might not get justice for his brother, he will prove Aleksander is behind the disappearances in Winden. Believing the barrels buried in the former spent fuel pool contain the bodies of the missing, he orders the police to don hazmat suits and drill through the concrete. Charlotte finally returns to work, and after being informed by Woller about what’s happening, she realizes the radioactive waste is what causes the apocalypse.
Continued belowIt’s easy to blame Clausen for accidentally causing the end of the world (and as is par for the course on this show, by trying to do the right thing), but Woller and Charlotte are culpable too: if he had confessed his involvement in Aleksander’s cover-up, Clausen may not be digging up the Cs-137, and likewise, perhaps Charlotte shouldn’t have hidden what she’d uncovered about Winden’s twisted history. When she arrives at the plant, her desperate attempt to explain they mustn’t open the barrels comes across as utter nonsense to Clausen. (Similarly, when she fills Woller in en route, he’s as confused as anyone who’s only read the CliffsNotes for this show.)
Furthermore, the Cs-137 wouldn’t remained inert as Elisabeth is stabilizing the God Particle in 2053, and opening a portal — and that alone isn’t the cause of the apocalypse. Winden on June 27, 2020, is becoming the eye of multiple storms, between Elisabeth causing the God Particle to appear at the plant; the corridor being reopened and used by Jonas and Claudia, and then Katharina; and Adam traveling from 1921.
7. Creator and Creatus
During the stunning climax, set to Peter Gabriel’s rendition of “My Body is a Cage,” Elisabeth and Charlotte stare at each other through the portal linking 2020 and 2053 at the plant. Elisabeth signs, “mama?,” and Charlotte immediately recognizes her. They reach out ala Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, the second time in a row a Dark season finale has homaged the painting, after Jonas and Helge simultaneously touched the portal in the bunker.
Since we know the show’s “Adam” is Jonas, and the last finale depicted him making Helge what he was by accidentally transporting him to 1986, it appears Jantje Friese and her co-writers were acknowledging the secular interpretation of the painting, which is that Adam is imagining God in his own image. Here, the image of Charlotte and Elisabeth, both the other’s mother and daughter, touching the portal, suggests a more nuanced take: we give shape to God by the measurement of our lives, but God creates the circumstances that make us, us.
A Higg’s field appears over the plant as they make contact, and expands to engulf the whole town, returning it to what it was in the Biblical account of creation: a world shrouded in darkness.
8. Final Count
Noah is the last to enter the bunker: he catches Elisabeth’s eye — perhaps she subconsciously recognizes him as the man who gave her the watch she carries. The older Noah once quipped the bunker was his Ark; it seems he was given his name by Adam because he would lead the survivors out of the apocalypse, like his Biblical counterpart.
Adult Jonas is greeted at the Nielsen household by Bartosz, Magnus and Franziska, who had chosen to wait for Martha and Katharina before heading to the bunker: after a hurried introduction, he activates the time machine to transport them all to the safety of the past. Bartosz demands to know where Martha is, or when they’re going, but Jonas does not answer, indicating that their relationship will remain strained. Katharina follows the white chronal particles in the cave, and opens the corridor, which now glows as she enters it.
Charlotte is pulled into the portal before the detonation: given the grave marker for Martha in 2053 turned out to be accurate, we can also assume Aleksander and Woller perished since we saw their graves (along with Clausen and anyone else at the plant). It’s staggering to realize how many characters likely died, since we don’t see them in this episode — the death toll must include Bernadette, Yasin and Erik’s parents; the entire police department; teachers, students and librarians; hospital staff and care home workers; farmers; and anyone else we’ve seen. That includes Ines Kahnwald’s generation: what an unceremonious offscreen exit for them.
9. Infinite Possibilities
At the Kahnwald house, Jonas continues to weep over Martha’s body, promising to make things right, when he’s startled by… another Martha. She takes an intricate golden orb from her bag, and activates it to transport them elsewhere. She doesn’t have time to explain to Jonas where she’s from, but she does respond, “The question isn’t what time, the question is what world.”
Continued belowFor two seasons, we’ve seen characters traveling into the past and future, and now they’re entering the third dimension: the flipside. Naturally, Jonas and Martha’s love story couldn’t just end here, but for those who felt Claudia’s reference to seeing a world without Jonas wasn’t adequate enough foreshadowing, consider: time travel into the past is considered theoretically impossible without parallel universes. I’m not a physicist, but from what I’ve gathered eavesdropping, traveling into the future is a relatively simple matter, it’s a question of moving very fast, but travel into the past requires the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to be true — for history to be accessible, there needs to be identical versions of it across the multiverse.
This is the method of time travel depicted in J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek and Avengers: Endgame, as well as the Catalan series If I Hadn’t Met You — Dark can marry the two versions because of the notion of wave function collapse (or something like it, again, not a physicist), where realities fold into each other because they’re so improbable: as unlikely as Mikkel’s own presence in the past is, his remaining there for 33 years means it’s become permanent. (To use the Endgame comparison again, imagine if the Infinity Stones and Mjolnir weren’t returned: the alteration of history would’ve slid from improbable to certain.)
But more importantly, it makes thematic sense: if we are only one possibility in an infinite multiverse, then we really are the depraved imaginings of God, doomed to repeat ourselves — the roads not taken have been fleshed out elsewhere. The dystopian mirror universe of Star Trek is not another reality: we are the distorted reflection of the best possible world.
Also? The opening credits depicted infinitely reflected versions of everything on the show the entire time.
We’ll return next week for the start of season 3, “Deja Vu.”
