Welcome to this week’s installment of the Summer TV Binge of Netflix’s Dark, analyzing season two, episode five, of the twisted German time travel series, released June 21, 2019.
“Lost and Found (Vom Suchen und Finden)”
Written by Jantje Friese and Ronny Schalk
Directed by Baran bo Odar
June 25, 1921/1987/2020: Jonas learns from Adam. Bartosz reveals the truth to his former friends. Claudia tries to find a way to prevent her father’s death. Ulrich escapes from the ward to find his son. Charlotte meets her father for the first time.
1. Fearful Symmetry
Martha and Magnus head out to return to the cave with Bartosz’s briefcase, but Katharina wants to share her discovery that Mikkel is in 1987. Martha is incensed by her suggestion they sit down, replying, “You’ve hardly spoken to us in months and now you want to know what we think? Look around you. We’re the kids, but you’ve been acting like one for months. I mean, fuck, mom, you think you’re the only one who deals with this shit?” In contrast her reaction in “Sic Mundus Creatus Est” (when she smacked her daughter), Katharina reaches out to stroke her, but Martha slaps away her hand. (Magnus doesn’t comfort his mother this time either.)
They meet up with the Dopplers, and interrogate the starving, dehydrated Bartosz in the cave. He reveals his apparatus is a time machine, and they allow him to prove it by activating the device, transporting them to 1987. Bartosz discloses everything Noah told him: Franziska is surprised to hear that name again, while Martha is more interested to learn that Jonas will return.
2. Is Altruism a Self-Benefit?
Speaking of Jonas, Katharina goes to find the adult version at the Kahnwald home, but learns he’s disappeared with the machine. (Ironically, he went to break into the Nielsen home, to leave his St. Christopher medal on Martha’s pillow.) Seeing the photos of Mikkel/Michael on the kitchen table, Katharina expresses disbelief Hannah slept with her husband and her son, calling her a parasite. Clausen arrives, asking why Hannah missed their appointment the day before: she replies she simply forgot. Clausen then shows them a reconstruction of the man Regina described (Jonas), asking if they’ve seen him.
They both lie they haven’t, and Katharina leaves to allow him to conduct his interview. He reveals he has evidence of Hannah blackmailing Aleksander, but she claims he’s only financially supporting her while she mourns the loss of her husband and son, and implies that’s why — despite the affair — Katharina tolerates her. It is alarming how smoothly Hannah can spin selfless rationales like this, to create the veneer Winden is an idyllic town, where everyone supports each other through tragedy and strife, and gaslight Clausen into thinking he may be a cynic who can’t comprehend generosity for the sake of it.
But as we saw when Aleksander Tiedemann gave a more sentimental reason for taking his wife’s name than the real one, there’s always some self-interest in why we do good. Selflessness is often beneficial, even if only because it’s emotionally cathartic. This paradox was the premise of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and perhaps why some Christians profess sola fide, the belief God forgives sins on the basis of someone’s beliefs, not their actions (echoing what Noah said in the season opener about intent determining morality as much as action).
When Jonas returns, he confesses he was alarmed to learn she had an affair with Ulrich, and has lost his trust in her: he wonders aloud if she really loved his father. Hannah acknowledges she made a mistake, but Jonas refuses to accept her apology. Perhaps, excusing her behavior would simply feed it, the way Noah’s consolation of Helge entrenched his evil deeds: however, Hannah is isolated, and loneliness can lead to desperate actions from those craving approval, so Jonas may have made a mistake being so firm towards someone as fragile as her.
3. Father Noah
In the bunker, Charlotte asks Jonas questions about Noah, Sic Mundus, and her family. He confirms Noah murdered Mads, Erik and Yasin, but admits he doesn’t know anything about her parents, though he met her grandfather. Charlotte coldly dismisses Tannhaus as not being her “real” grandfather, though she asks if he was a traveler. “He’s just a pawn,” Jonas replies, “like most of us. Claudia, she used him, like she used me, Peter and the others.”
Continued belowCharlotte returns to Tannhaus’s old shop, and notices someone else was there. Noah enters and greets her, his tone almost apologetic, careful not to provoke a fight-or-flight response from the unarmed woman. He admits, “I can’t make you change your mind about me. But… perhaps one day you will understand that I only did all this to finally put a stop to everything once and for all. So you won’t be taken from me again. Just like your mother was.”
He reveals a photo of himself carrying a baby, continuing, “They didn’t think you had much of a chance when you were born. You were premature, tiny. But you wanted to live. You were so strong. Your little hand grabbed my finger and wouldn’t let go of it.” Charlotte is horrified, her usually stoic demeanor giving way to tears as she learns the truth — Mark Waschke’s performance is as hypnotic as ever, but Karoline Eichhorn holds her own conveying how horrifying this is for her character.
Noah says “I kept searching for you. But you were here all along. Adam knew it was you. He knew it the whole time. He is preparing for what’s to come. I’ve read all of the last notes. The nuclear plant, Jonas. It’s all going to happen again, the apocalypse. In two days. But I know now… what I have to do. I have to end Adam so that everyone else can live. Not just those in the bunker.” Before he departs, Charlotte asks for the identity of her mother: Noah simply says, “She loved you very much. She still loves you.” She falls to the floor to weep after he leaves.
4. Found and Lost
In 1987, Claudia visits her father’s apartment for the first time he can recall in years. Having learned in the future that his death occurs there tomorrow, she desperately suggests he move into her home immediately. Egon scoffs, commenting she’s “acting as if I’m inches from death!” She lets him think it over. (It’s a good thing she didn’t kill him rushing him out of the door.)
Meanwhile, Egon’s nemesis Ulrich knocks out an attendant delivering food, and uses his key card to escape the hospital. He runs to the Kahnwald home, where Mikkel is outside playing with a Rubik’s Cube. He asks if the exhausted old stranger needs help, and serves him some orange juice. In a breathtakingly emotional scene, Ulrich recreates the magic trick his son performed when he last saw him at the breakfast table all those years ago, and Mikkel finally recognizes and hugs his “papa.”
Ines arrives home early after being told about the escaped prisoner on the loose. Seeing Mikkel is gone, she calls Egon, who realizes where Ulrich is heading, and alerts the police. History repeats itself, as the police’s warning shots stop Ulrich and Mikkel just short of reentering the cave. The police escort Ulrich away: on seeing Egon is with them, he vows to kill him the next time they meet.
Adding insult to injury, Ulrich sees his other children examining the bus stop’s contemporaneous posters while being driven back. He calls Magnus and Martha’s names, but they don’t hear him through the car window, which must’ve been agonizing — if they’d only walked out of the cave later, Ulrich and Mikkel’s destinies would’ve changed for the better. The kids return to 2020 none the wiser, and leave Bartosz be. Ines carries Michael back to the house, almost as if she’s infantilizing him: she dashes more sleeping pills in his drink to calm him down, her good intentions paving the way to Hell.
5. Killing God
In 1921, the young Jonas is insistent on returning home now, but Adam points out they have, “strictly speaking,” 99 years until the apocalypse, so he should be patient and listen. Despite his ravaged voice and appearance, Dietrich Hollinderbäumer’s performance as Noah is so soulful that I could comfortably listen to him talk about time and fate for an entire episode. When Jonas asks if Sic Mundus is a cult, he reveals a profoundly Schopenhauer-esque philosophy, stating that the question of God is not if He exists, but what He is: Adam says “God is time,” and that they’ve declared war on Him.
Continued belowIt feels like true wisdom, strongly recalling the beliefs of deists like George Washington in God as Providence: people ask, “How could God allow something terrible to happen?” But what if God is the strings of destiny, the probabilities that shape our existence? We would love to believe we have free will, and the universe is pure chaos; to deny bigotry and ancestry have shaped our status in life, and that the tragedies of natural selection are responsible for our very existence — the universe may as well be the lurid imaginings of an omnipotent creator, where the characters can only occasionally surprise the author. We are all conditioned: all we can do is to decide the right thing to do in the moment, or fail as Ulrich did in ‘53.
Adam expresses wonder at how his conversation with his younger self is playing out the exact way it did before, saying “All my life I was convinced that… this moment here could never be repeated this way. I would never be able to say the words that my older self said to me back then. Because I couldn’t understand how I could ever want what he wanted. Now, 66 years later, I understand. There are moments that change us forever. There is pain you never forget. But there is also a way… that leads out of all this gruesome, senseless futility.”
He reveals there is a loophole that will break the cycle, one that took him decades to realize. He explains all these terrible events had to take place to pave the way for a far more refined time machine — the chair, the briefcase apparatus, the sphere created at the plant in 2020, all of these and the deaths they caused, progressed time travel technology to the point they could create a Higgs field capable of sending you anywhere in time you want.
Over in 1987, we see Claudia forcing Bernd Doppler to admit what the plant actually discovered the previous summer, and then asking a scientist to analyze the Cs-137 — and the seeds of what she planted have borne fruit in 1921, where Adam brings Jonas to their own God Particle, suspended in a vast Frankenstein-style chamber. He says it will allow him to untangle this Gordian knot — the question is, when do they start unravelling these events, and what will it sacrifice?
Jonas immediately points to June 20, 2019, the day before his father’s death: Adam recognizes, “If you can prevent him from taking his own life, then nothing that follows will occur. Mikkel won’t travel back. You… I… will never be born. But everyone else will live. Martha will live. If you succeed, we will reorder the whole world.” Jonas dons a wartime gas suit, and steps into the singularity after Adam stabilizes it — after his younger self disappears, Adam looks on darkly, remembering what he put himself through.
Other Observations:
– Middle-aged Jonas still dreams about sex with Martha, though the creepy age gap is slightly mitigated by these being nightmares, where the Cs-137 emerges from her body to consume everything.
– Adam watches his younger self sleeping: based on Noah’s behavior last time, apparently no one in Sic Mundus knows how to knock. He also reveals his knowledge of the future lets him know which stocks to invest in, which is convenient.
– Adam’s war on time emphasizes the symbolic value of Jonas’s name, as it’s the Germanic equivalent of Jonah (arguably the Biblical prophet best known for disobeying God).
– Claudia constantly rescheduling the French delegation’s visit to the plant is a great recurring gag: perhaps they were the trespassers Elisabeth executed in 2053?
– Bernd Doppler has a broken arm in 1987: accidents happen, but it may have been because Helge wasn’t around to look after him.
– Noah spying on the kids behind a tree deserves to become an Internet meme.
– Adam mentions the Higgs field would’ve been considered “aether” by the ancients.
See you next week for “An Endless Cycle (Ein unendlicher Kreis).” Until then, stay safe, and remember that the events of season 3 take place next week beginning Monday, so you may want to synchronize your next viewing accordingly — after all, you won’t get a chance to experience the show’s events on the day they happen for another 33 years.
