Welcome to this week’s installment of the Summer TV Binge of Netflix’s Dark, analyzing the fifth chapter of the twisted German time travel series, released December 1, 2017.
“Truths (Wahrheiten)”
Written by Martin Behnke and Jantje Friese
Directed by Baran bo Odar
November 7, 2019: fed up after Yasin’s disappearance, the town starts protesting outside the police station. Jonas becomes torn between his friendship with Bartosz, and his affection for Martha, while the Stranger prepares a bombshell for him. Noah makes his presence known, and the full extent of Hannah’s infatuation with Ulrich is made horrifyingly clear.
1. Original Sin
This episode exposes the deep roots of Ulrich and Hannah’s affair, revealing she’s been obsessed with him since she was a kid. While friendly towards her, he didn’t reciprocate those feelings because of their age gap, leaving her resentful of his relationship with Katharina.
During these flashbacks to 1986, we see Hannah accompanying her father while he’s making deliveries around the town. At the hospital, she strikes up a conversation with Mikkel, bonding over their mutual interest in magic: she tells him, “Know what I sometimes imagine? That I can do magic. I imagine that I want something. Really badly. And then it happens, because I imagine it.”
At the next stop, which is the school, Hannah hears a noise and spies Ulrich and Katharina having sex in a storage room. That night, she tells her father, and then Egon Tiedemann, that she saw Ulrich raping Katharina, and he’s immediately arrested.
In the present, Hannah makes an awkward visit to the Nielsens to provide support after Mikkel’s disappearance. Ulrich offers Hannah a lift home. After diplomatically trying to make it clear he’s no longer interested, he raises his voice and tells her to “get lost,” stranding her in the cold and rain. Ulrich doesn’t know, as we find out, the full extent of what Hannah will do to get what she wants.
At night, Katharina tells Ulrich she suspects he’s been unfaithful (and from her tone it seems she’s ready to forgive him given the loss they’re suffering) — if only he were as good at deducing the truth as her. Maybe he would’ve, if the allegation had prevented him from becoming an investigator, and their marriage.
2. Noah Revealed
Bartosz receives a call from Erik’s phone: it’s Noah, and somehow he knows Bartosz is on the other end. The boy assumes he was Erik’s supplier, and arranges a meeting with him in the evening. He invites Jonas, who is preoccupied by Martha calling him, something he declines to tell his friend.
Meanwhile that morning, Charlotte orders Elisabeth to give a description of Noah to the police: she behaves far too aggressively, something Peter rightfully calls out, but she responds by asking about him lying about his whereabouts on the night of Mikkel’s disappearance, and reopens the rift between them by suggesting he’s involved.
Mikkel receives a visit in 1986 from the new parish priest, whose name is also Noah. He asks him if he believes in God, and we learn that Ulrich is a devout atheist who encouraged his kids to be antireligious. When Mikkel says the Big Bang and evolution created the world, Noah patiently asks, “And what was there before the Big Bang?” He tells him it’s good his father raised him to be skeptical, but that he should also “question those who question things.”
Noah’s a common name, but here’s the rub: Elisabeth mentions Noah wore a hat, a fashion choice that singles out the character in 1986. It’s finally confirmed all these Noahs are the same when we see the police’s facial composite, and when Bartosz meets him: the man is clearly a time traveler, whose profession has given him ease of access to children across the decades — and it seems after their conversation, Bartosz has also fallen under his spell.
3. Our Lives Become Ironic
At the station, Ulrich tells Charlotte he became an investigator because of Egon’s failure to find his brother. He confesses, “Now look at me. I’m a joke. I cheat on my wife. My son has vanished. I can’t do anything. 33 years – everything is the same. Now I’m that incompetent asshole.” We must remember Ulrich’s father Tronte also cheated on his wife and lost his son Mads: it seems we all become our parent(al figure)s eventually — perhaps it’s “predetermined by the beginning.”
Continued belowLikewise, in 1986 Katharina reminds Ulrich before they have sex to wear a condom, fearing getting AIDS or becoming pregnant. “No kids. Never,” the future mother-of-three, and principal, says. Still, perhaps this coming around (there’s that cyclical theme again) should be appreciated: she could be Hannah, still desperately clinging to her childhood crush.
4. Goosebumps
Jonas goes to watch Martha at a dress rehearsal, where she is playing Ariadne from the story of Theseus and the Labyrinth. In her monologue, she describes her mother, who remembers the old world, bringing to mind the Antediluvian era of the Biblical Noah before the Flood, as well as the story of Alexander and the Gordian Knot. As she recites her monologue, we see the Stranger return to the caves, Bartosz waiting for Winden’s Noah, and Hannah spying on Ulrich and Katharina in the past (to wit, Jonas watches Martha as his mother watches her parents):
The old world came to haunt her, like a ghost that whispered to her in a dream how to erect the new world, stone by stone. From then on, I knew that nothing changes. That all things remain as before. The spinning wheel turns, round and round in a circle, one fate tied to the next. A thread, red like blood, that cleaves together all our deeds. One cannot unravel the knots. But they can be severed. He severed ours, with the sharpest blade. Yet something remains behind that cannot be severed. An invisible bond.
Dark’s editing and score come together here perfectly for the first time, to make the hairs on the back of my head literally stand up: I can’t think of anything else that does this, to makes you feel cold and suffocated — maybe a Christopher Nolan film, but certainly not a show, and I certainly didn’t expect it from one about an incestuous town. But perhaps that’s why this series is so perfect at conveying the crushing weight of history — because humanity is one gigantic family, the ultimate invisible bond.
5. The Truth
After the rehearsal, Jonas visits Martha in her dressing room, and confesses he didn’t go to France after his father’s death, but was being treated for post-traumatic stress. He explains he didn’t want her to think he was a freak, and asks if they would still be together if his father hadn’t died, as well as why she called him instead of Bartosz: she responds by kissing him.
Jonas’s father comes under the spotlight another three times. First, in 1986, we see Ines sorting out Mikkel’s foster care: she’s asked if she has any children, and she discloses she had a son who died in infancy. That’s odd; Michael Kahnwald looked much older than 32. Then, while at his father’s grave, the Stranger approaches Jonas and mentions his father saved his life once, before abruptly leaving. It’s all cleared up in the end when Jonas returns home to find the Stranger’s left a package on his bed.
In it, he finds an orb-shaped flashlight, a Geiger counter, and a weathered version of the letter Ines opened on November 4. Its contents are devastating:
Dear Jonas,
By the time you read this everything will have happened, irrevocably. It can no longer be changed. I would have liked to explain things to you sooner, but I hope once you understand how everything is connected, you will understand my decision.
The truth is a strange thing. You can try to suppress it, but it will always find its way back to the surface. We make a lie into our truth in order to survive. We try to forget. Until we can’t anymore. We don’t know even half of the mysteries of this world. We are wanderers in the darkness. This is my truth.
On November 4, 2019, I traveled through time to the year 1986. The boy from the future stayed, and in time he became a man. Mikkel became Michael, who never knew where he belonged.
By the time you read this I’ll already be gone. Both as a boy and as a man. I hope you can forgive me. Everything is connected.
Mikkel/Michael
It’s heartbreaking: you realize the Nielsens are never getting their son back. It also means Martha is Jonas’s aunt, and perversely explains why Hannah married Mikkel/Michael: he was the son of the only man she ever loved.
Continued belowOther Observations:
– The skeleton jumpsuit Mikkel was wearing the night of his disappearance now appears to be a symbolic hint that he was already dead in 2019.
– Michael’s name may be a nod to Protestant speculation that the archangel Michael was Christ before he came into existence. In Hebrew, Michael means, “Who is like God?,” Hannah means, “He [God] has favored me with a child,” and Jonas/Jonah means “dove” (a common symbol for God the Holy Spirit).
– The Stranger asks Regina to deliver the package for Jonas: you have to wonder why he didn’t leave it under his bed when he was messing with Michael’s map the previous night, but then history can’t be rewritten.
– Jonas and Bartosz play The Surge, a largely forgotten game by 2019, but it is a German one developed by Frankfurt-based studio Deck13. Unlike the real game, the version in the show has splitscreen co-op — for more on the collaboration with Deck13, click here.
– Speaking of Frankfurt, Ulrich tells Hannah in the first episode that he was going to spend the weekend there training, indicating it’s the nearest city to Winden — while Dark was largely filmed in and around Berlin, the ’86 time period clearly shows Winden is somwhere in West Germany.
– While she and Ulrich observe the similarities between 2019 and 1986, Charlotte mentions her grandfather was fascinated by things like lunar calendars, which have 33-year cycles.
The Stranger walks into Tannhaus’s store, and that’s where we’ll also leave you until next time, when we look at the sixth episode, “Sic Mundus Creatus Est (Thus, the world was created).”
