Welcome to this week’s installment of the Summer TV Binge of Netflix’s Dark, analyzing season three, episode five, of the twisted German time travel series, released June 27, 2020.
“Life and Death (Leben und Tod)”
Written by Jantje Friese
Directed by Baran bo Odar
September 25, 1987/2020/2053: Katharina attempts to break Ulrich out. Peter and Elisabeth encounter an intruder. Claudia learns of the other world.
November 7, 2019: Jonas and Martha attempt to enter the plant.
1. Claudia Tiedemann
After burying her daughter, Claudia returns to the abandoned police station and encounters… another Claudia. (Namely, her counterpart from Eva’s World.) The contrast between our filthy, post-apocalyptic Claudia, soaking wet and armed with a crowbar, with her still stylish, albeit more subdued counterpart (who is, crucially, the same age), lends the encounter a dryly humorous quality — it’s like a surreal take on the mirror scene in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.
Alt Claudia extends an invitation to our Claudia to join Eva’s side: she also reveals Jonas is still alive, and will gradually become bent on destroying everything. She tells Claudia that she must ensure everything happens exactly as it has before, and gives her the Unknown’s triquetra notebook. She then departs with her own golden orb device, leaving our Claudia alone to pore over everything recorded in the book.
2. Charlotte Doppler
In 1987, Tannhaus finally decides Charlotte is old enough to learn she’s adopted — he takes out a box, and shows her a photo of his son, daughter-in-law, and their daughter, who was also named Charlotte. He explains they died in a car accident, after a truck ran them off the bridge into the river, and reveals that night, before he received the news of their deaths, two “peculiar” women knocked on his door, and left our Charlotte with him.
It’s intriguing and important that Tannhaus is receiving a deeply poignant backstory now, a loss that echoes the grief his 19th century ancestors wrestled with, something that’s reinforced when he reveals the women gave him his ancestors’ pocket watch, engraved with the words “for Charlotte.” It’s also our first clue that Charlotte may not have always been her own granddaughter, but that there may exist a timeline where she is related to Tannhaus by blood.
Stephanie Amarell is superb in this scene, intensely, yet quietly, portraying the anger bubbling under Charlotte’s surface. Upset learning that her grandfather doesn’t know who her parents are, Charlotte leaves the house, and decides to take the next bus out of town. However, she has second thoughts when the bus arrives, and serendipitously, this happens to be the bus Peter arrives in Winden on. He explains his mother recently passed away, and that he only learned on her deathbed that his father lives here.
Peter can sense Charlotte feels downtrodden, and doesn’t mock her when she starts asking strange, rather Tannhaus-esque questions like, “You think it’s possible to bring someone back who’s died?” Their marriage had its ups and downs, but it’s clear from their conversation that he was a great listener, precisely the stuff therapists or priests are made of, and that in another life, they could’ve just been very close friends.
3. Elisabeth Doppler
As much as Dark lives up to its name, it avoided sexual assault — until this episode. And though I qualify this statement as a man, Jantje Friese is a woman, and here she shows writers of other series can avoid trivialising this trauma by depicting it when only absolutely necessary, and as substantially as here.
In 2020, Elisabeth has become anxious about continuing to accompany her father during the daily check of the bodies recovered by the military. She has lost faith that her mother and sister are still alive, and leaves her father at the camp to return to the caravan by herself. There, she discovers an unnamed man helping himself to their food, and is knocked out when she tries to flee.
She awakes to find herself bound on the bed. The man sits next to her as he finishes his meal, quietly watching her as the camera draws ever closer, while she (and we) silently beg him not to do the stomach churning thing he’s contemplating. After eating, he pins her down and straddles her, just as Peter returns.
Continued belowDuring the ensuing fight, Elisabeth cuts herself free after reaching for a knife, and tries to use it on her would-be rapist, but he knocks her back, and takes it for himself. He corners Peter and drives the knife towards his throat, and Peter is too weak to stop him: he slumps to the floor, dead, 33 years to the day he arrived. Elisabeth pounces at the man — who is too distracted by what he’s done — with a fire extinguisher, and ferociously beats him to death with it. Afterwards, she sees her father’s lifeless body, and breaks down — the man may not have raped her in the end, but her innocence was still irrevocably shattered.
In 2053, Elisabeth has been reunited with her mother and sister, but now they must say goodbye. Franziska opens the control room door for Elisabeth and Charlotte — now a full believer in Adam’s cause, after discovering the “cruel game” time has played with her — as they enter the God Particle, to carry out Sic Mundus’s next move.
4. Katharina Nielsen
Back at the ward in 1987, Katharina tells her husband to wait for her at the entrance later that night: knowing what time her mother leaves work, as well as her usual route home, she plans to confront her and take her key card — if anyone asks, he can tell the other staff he can’t sleep. She also promises him that they’ll get Mikkel back.
Katharina follows Helena on her route through the woods, and pulls a knife on her, demanding she hand over her card. Helene fights back when Katharina grabs her bag though, and as abusive as she is, Katharina is unable to bring herself to attack her own mother, yelling, “Mama, stop it!”
Alarmed, Helene makes a run for it. Katharina accidentally falls and drops the knife, but continues chasing her. They come to the lake and struggle: Katharina grabs a rock, and knocks her mother out. However, as Katharina checks her bags for the card, Helene comes to, picks up the rock, and strikes her daughter: believing her to be the child she aborted 33 years ago, she bellows, “I’m not your mother. You come from Hell. The devil sent you. You’re not real. I got rid of you. I got rid of you!” Helena hits her repeatedly, the same way Ulrich beat Helge: Katharina struggles, but only manages to pull off her St. Christopher necklace, and dies.
Helene, realizing what she’s done, stuffs Katharina’s bag full of stones, and drags her body into the lake: she does not notice her necklace is missing. She returns home, bloodied and distraught, and the young Katharina approaches her, wondering what happened. Helene notices a bruise on her daughter’s neck, and — without any self-awareness — asks if it’s a hickey from Ulrich, before lashing out at her. “You are unworthy of the name I gave to you!,” she screams — how awful it is that Katharina never escaped her monster of a mother.
Meanwhile, Ulrich waits forlornly at the entrance at his wife, who’ll never return, while Mikkel arrives back at the house with Ines in a taxi. He notices someone broke into the house while they were gone, but doesn’t comment on it, and remains otherwise completely unaware of how his mother also came back in time to find him. Likewise, when Martha and Jonas find the St. Christopher necklace buried in the sand in 2019, they’ll have no idea just how much of a dire portent of their family’s future past it is.
5. Jonas Kahnwald
Jonas feels guilty about sleeping with Alt Martha, seeing the face of his version of her before waking up. She’s likely aware of this, adding to the awkwardness of the morning after. When they come downstairs, the native version of Katharina expresses anger at her daughter for disappearing, and demands to know who Jonas is. Knowing she’s destined to die tomorrow, Martha doesn’t protest, and hugs her mother, telling her everything will be fine before solemnly departing to carry out their mission.
Continued belowJonas cuts open the fence surrounding the nuclear plant to intercept the delivery of the barrels. Martha scratches her cheek crawling through the wire, and Jonas becomes alarmed, recognizing the cut from the older version of her who rescued him. He becomes uncertain whether stopping the barrels being opened will stop the apocalypse or not, and decides to confront Eva over the truth.
On the way to Eva’s lair, Martha asks Jonas to consider if her older self was still telling the truth about them only being able to save one world, and if so, which one would he save? His silence speaks volumes, and he eventually admits, “I didn’t want any of this. You have to believe me.” Like the tragic romantic moments in “Everything is Now” and “An Endless Cycle,” this scene is filmed in one take, and like the former episode, Martha asks, with a kiss, how their relationship could’ve been a mistake. Once again, Jonas can only respond that their love was “wrong,” and Martha recognizes he is not enjoying this.
They move on into the caves, where Jonas accuses Eva of lying, and demands to be returned to his world. She ominously replies, “Naturally you’d want that, but there’s no way back for you at all, and continues by reciting something Adam once said: “A human being lives three lives. The first one ends with the loss of naiveté. The second, with the loss of innocence. And the third with the loss of life itself. Yours ends here and now.”
The middle-aged Martha enters, informing him his role has been fulfilled, followed by yet another Martha, bearing a fresh version of the long, vertical scar her older counterparts have. Four Marthas?! It’s a startling departure from the usual symbolism of three on the show, but before we can absorb that, the slightly older Martha apologizes to her younger self, and shoots Jonas, in an exact echo of when Adam murdered the prime Martha.
Jonas falls on the engraved family tree, while the older versions of Martha depart. The youngest Martha tries in vain to put pressure on the bullet wound, and Jonas passes on his St. Christopher pendant before losing consciousness. Now, when I first saw the episode, I assumed he would somehow survive bleeding out on the floor, because Adam exists — and yet, Jonas is the third death in this episode. How can he be simultaneously dead and alive? Unfortunately, we’ll have to discuss that next week, but for now, I can’t imagine what kind of wild theories we would’ve had if the show had premiered weekly.
Other Observations:
– As is often the case, Alt Martha’s nightmares in “The Survivors” turned out to be flashbacks, not symbolic fears and hallucinations.
– When Jonas bleeds out on the floor of Eva’s study, the engraved family tree resembles a pair of angelic wings.
– Alt Charlotte’s storyline allows us to see how Peter and Elisabeth would’ve reacted to learning Helge is a murderer: Peter remains in denial, while Elisabeth skips school.
– According to the official website, Peter’s mother’s name was Ulla Schmidt — given he didn’t know his father’s identity until 1987, it’s a little surprising he took (or has) his father’s name. (Goodness knows what he had to deal with after Bernd’s murder.)
– Young Peter Doppler actor Pablo Striebeck is the son of Peter’s primary portrayer, Stephan Kampwirth.
– In “An Endless Cycle,” Bartosz playfully menaces Magnus and Martha with the tale of a woman who drowned in the lake: many fans have retroactively interpreted this to be foreshadowing of their mother’s death.
See you next week for “Light and Shadow (Licht und Schatten).”
