Welcome to this week’s installment of the Summer TV Binge of Netflix’s Dark, analyzing season two, episode six, of the twisted German time travel series, released June 21, 2019.
“An Endless Cycle (Ein unendlicher Kreis)”
Written by Jantje Friese and Martin Behnke
Directed by Baran bo Odar
June 20, 2019: Ulrich and Katharina are holding a party to mark their 25th wedding anniversary, and the Jonas of 2020 has arrived to prevent his father’s death the next day.
1. Sturm und Drang
The Jonas of 2019 doesn’t wake up from a nightmare at the start of this episode, reflecting how all was well the day before the tragedy, or at least how innocent and naive he was: he certainly doesn’t notice the declining mental state of his father, Michael, which is exacerbated by Hannah mentioning his parents’ names, and from seeing the yellow raincoat Jonas packs to avoid the weather forecast for later in the day (yes, this is literally the calm before the storm). Hannah cuddles her withdrawn husband, and tries to sway him into coming to the party, but he says he has to finish a painting.
Ulrich wants to mark the day with some morning sex, but Katharina fusses over what she has to do, and then has to take Mikkel to the doctor after discovering he has rubella. Martha and Magnus go frolicking in the lake with Bartosz, while Jonas (who’s clearly not a swimmer), watches. Martha sits next to him while drying off, and the two talk about how their parents’ marriages seem troubled, blissfully unaware that his mother will seduce her father. They find the St. Christopher pendant in the sand beneath them, which seems to be a good omen for their own relationship — we also see the beginnings of Magnus and Franziska’s relationship, when he spots her skinny dipping nearby, and briefly mistakes her as drowning.
These feel like scenes from another, less oppressive European drama, but the hideous secrets of Winden do make themselves apparent in the “original” timeline. After their medical appointment, the Nielsens make a stop at the Kahnwald home, where Mikkel needs to use the bathroom. Hannah is struck by the boy’s resemblance to Michael, but brushes it off as deja vu. Michael overhears him, and goes downstairs to investigate, but is overcome by existential panic, realizing the boy he wanted so desperately to avoid is here. On leaving the bathroom, Mikkel sees his older self staring and breathing like a creep, and flees without a word.
Elsewhere, it’s still raw between Peter and Charlotte after she discovered his affair; Peter behaves incredibly coldly about her mistrust in him, daring to imply her distant behavior is why he cheated on her — she decides to go to the party alone. (When asked, both she and Hannah simply say their husbands are unwell.) Bartosz is unable to go; his parents hold a small, lonely family dinner, a reminder of how much they hate the Nielsens. Aleksander, meanwhile, finds his own past haunting him again: he reads a newspaper report about the police still investigating a murder in Marburg from 33 years ago, and calls Woller regarding the search “for two fugitives.”
2. That One Shot
Aside from the last scene with Adam in 1921, the episode takes place entirely on the day in 2019, and with it comes an expanded canvas to explore how to tell the story — namely, with more naturalistic cinematography, and less heavy editing. These include scenes filmed in one take, such as when the Kahnwalds arrive at the party, and the camera follows Katharina as she tries to be an entertaining host. The most impressive moment comes during the sequence at the lake, when the older Jonas takes the opportunity to say goodbye to Martha, before he undoes his own existence.
The younger Jonas leaves Martha, amusingly, because he promised to teach Grandma Ines how to use the tablet she got for her birthday. 2020 Jonas, zipping up his collar to conceal his neck scar, then takes his place, in a searingly romantic and melancholy scene, presented in mostly one take, and set to the most beautiful track composed for the whole series:
Continued belowJonas: I thought I had more time. Why do people say that anyway? “To have time.” How can you have time when it clearly has you?
Martha: Has something happened? You’re different somehow.
Jonas: I wanted to tell you something. I’ve wanted to for a long time. I think we’re a perfect match. Never think anything else.
For Jonas, this is his apology for dumping her in “Everything is Now” (a moment also filmed in one shot), and a vain expression of hope that she’ll remember him in the new timeline; for her, this is him realizing he wasted a perfect opportunity, and romantically declaring his love for her before the moment has passed. They kiss, for the first time in her life, and caress each others’ faces — the camera circles around them, and the music swells; the sound is so intense, you can hear them breathing. He departs without elaborating again, leaving Martha as spellbound and silent as us.
3. The Ultimate Callback
There’s a lot of callbacks to the first season, such as the reuse of Nena’s “Irgendwie, irgendwo, irgendwann;” Ulrich and Hannah joking the bad weather is a sign of the apocalypse; and Magnus looking at a photo of Franziska performing rhythmic gymnastics on social media. One callback involves a minor moment between Jonas and Mikkel in the first episode, when they greeted each other (in English) with an “ultimate fistbump”: while driving, Katharina and Ulrich see 2020 Jonas, and offer him a lift, prompting Mikkel to extend his hand for an “ultimate fistbump.”
Katharina tells off her son for doing that, reminding him he has rubella, and Jonas turns down their offers, eventually walking back to his home while his younger self and mother are at the party. Michael is surprised to see him return so early, and Jonas, overcome with emotion seeing him again, hugs him. He offers him an “ultimate fistbump,” before confessing he knows he’s Mikkel Nielsen — it sounds utterly hokey on paper, yet watching it on screen you’re struck by how something so innocuous has become so devastating.
It’s also a testament to the soulful performances of Louis Hofmann (who is simply incredible here conveying how different both versions of Jonas are), and Sebastian Rudolph (finally given the screentime to flesh out Michael beyond Jonas’s ghostly visions).
4. What is a Tragedy?
There are many tragic events in Dark, but what’s impressive is its continued use of harmatia, which is the Greek term for a protagonist whose errors sets tragedies in motion. Here, Jonas’s solemn speech and declaration of love causes the smitten Martha to take his younger self from the party to her bedroom, to have sex: yes, they had sex, those dreams weren’t just nightmares, and the shame of knowing he committed incest partly explains why Jonas has such a death wish — and it’s all thanks to his older self.
Meanwhile, our Jonas tells his father about his suicide, showing him the letter he wrote, and begs him not to go through with it — except it becomes apparent Michael has no idea what he’s talking about. He starts to surmise his son is not here to stop him, but to show what he will do, revealing Jonas was there twice the night he went into the past:
We ran. Then I lost you. I turned around and you were gone. But suddenly you were back again.… You said there was something there, in the forest. Something evil. And that we had to return to the cave. You brought me all the way to the door, and through the tunnel. I was so afraid. But you held my hand. And then you said, “We have to stay here, all night, but when morning comes everything will be alright.” And when I woke up you were gone. All these years I’ve tried to understand why you did that. But then, at some point it all just faded away. It became ever more unreal, like a dream.
Jonas is unable to comprehend that he would do so something so devious, or that Adam would lie to him. Michael suggests perhaps it had to happen, because “your role in all this is much greater than you think,” something Adam also said. He then echoes what Noah told him as a boy: “God doesn’t err. He has a plan. For all of us.”
Continued belowOld Claudia walks in, introduces herself, and confirms Adam manipulated Jonas into ensuring his father’s death; she also tells him his “role in all this is much greater than you think. You alone can finally stop all this.” Jonas points out if his father doesn’t die, then Adam won’t come into existence, but she reveals she has seen a timeline without him, which is not “not what you’re expecting,” and that sacrifices must be made for the greater good. Michael, reluctantly accepting this, turns to his distraught son, and assures him it’ll all be ok in the end.
5. Repetition
This episode’s end montage further exposes how naive Jonas was, revealing Hannah and Ulrich’s affair began at the party, and was not the result of Michael’s death; likewise, Franziska sees her father continuing his affair with Bernadette, well before the guilt overwhelmed him on November 4 — it’s another reminder that everything bad does not spring from one mistake that can be resolved as cleanly as Alexander cut the Gordian knot.
Like the choice of end music in “Ghosts,” I’m not a fan of the decision to use Asaf Avidan’s “Twisted Olive Branch” here — the lyrics feel too obvious. It wouldn’t be an issue if the show weren’t so insistent on having a montage 40 minutes into every episode, but Dark is about how we’re doomed to repeat ourselves, as the replay of Michael’s voiceover emphasizes. As he writes the letter (the letter he knew how to write because his son made him read it), a new arrangement of the music used when Jonas read the letter is heard.
In 1921, Adam gazes at the St. Christopher medal still in his possession, visibly weeping for his lost innocence. Two associates enter the time machine’s chamber, and one of them admonishes him for manipulating his younger self. Adam ignores him, muttering that they don’t have long before they must reenact their pasts for one last time. After he leaves, the other associate reminds her partner, “Magnus, we all have to make sacrifices.”
Other Observations:
– Jonas’s tragic life plays out as the opposite of any normal people, who are often screwed over by their younger selves.
– Old Claudia also told her younger self about the need to make sacrifices.
– Two notes on Magnus: first, you can’t blame him for thinking Franziska had drowned, floating face first in water is very bizarre. Secondly, the resemblance between Wolfram Koch (old Magnus) and Moritz Jahn (young Magnus) is absolutely uncanny, they could be father and son: casting director Simone Bär must be the series’ biggest unsung hero.
– On that note, you’d think it would matter that Daan Lennard Liebrenz has visibly aged despite playing a younger version of Mikkel here, but it doesn’t hinder the suspension of disbelief at all.
– You can tell Michael is an artist from the way he notices the older Jonas’s hair is different, unlike everyone else.
– Walter Kreye and Tatja Seibt make their only appearances as the old Tronte and Jana during season 2 at the party.
– The aerial shots of wheat fields means this episode bears the strongest visual resemblance to Odar’s first film, The Silence, yet.
Join us next week for “The White Devil (Der weiße Teufel).”
