‘Dark’ on Netflix Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: A Day in the Life

“Where did it all begin? Where did things begin? In the past? In the future? Who can say where it began? Will we ever be capable of knowing the origin of all things? Or is there still an origin before that? And before that? And before that? Do beginning and end even exist? Or is it all connected in an endless loop, and are ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ just different words for one and the same moment?”

Or in other words…

REEEEEEWIIIIIIIIIIIND!!!!!!

One of the series’ best episodes to date, “An Endless Cycle” takes us further back into Dark‘s history than we’ve ever been before. Not further back in the dramatic retrograde leaps through the decades that we’ve seen already, from 2019 to 1986 to 1953 to 1921 and so on. Further back in the linear lives of the characters, to the extent those lives are linear at all. Back to the morning of the day Michael Kahnwald, né Mikkel Nielsen, committed suicide, allegedly the start of the loop in which the people of Winden have been stuck all this time. Back to the origin of the origin of all things.

After a striking cold open, in which that monologue about beginnings and endings from Adam accompanies scenes from Season One played out in reverse, we rejoin Winden on June 20, 2019, the day of the suicide. Everyone’s going about their business, and it’s mostly upbeat business at that.

Ulrich and Katharina are preparing for their 25th anniversary party that night, and tending to Mikkel, who’s come down with rubella but is otherwise in good spirits. Katharina shares her excitement with her pal Hannah, whose too-lingering glances with Ulrich go right over her head. Both Hannah and her husband Michael experience unnerving flashes of déjà vu when they see Jonas’s yellow raincoat and Mikkel Nielsen respectively, but I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.

The teenagers, Jonas and Martha and Magnus and Bartosz, are headed out for a day swimming at the lake, a dreamily playfully hormonal outing in which Jonas gets an eyeful of Martha in her swimsuit—and Magnus stumbles across a skinny-dipping Franziska in her birthday suit. In the middle of it all, a strangely subdued Jonas rejoins the festivities after leaving to visit his grandmother, tells Martha they’re a perfect match, kisses her, and leaves again. I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about either.

Granted, Charlotte and Peter Doppler are having a rough time of it. Charlotte knows Peter is cheating on her with Bernadette, the trans sex worker who lives next to a mysterious truck. Aleksander Tiedemann’s having a hard day as well, after seeing that police are still searching for two suspects in a murder that’s now over three decades old.

But by the time of the party everyone’s in high spirits. Katharina drinks and dances to the biggest hits of the ’80s, and Ulrich follows suit. Martha drags Jonas up to her room, and despite how perplexed he is when she brings up the things he said at the beach, they have sex for the first time.

Unless I’m mistaken, so do Ulrich and Hannah, who get caught outside in the rain after Katharina snuggles the sick Mikkel to sleep and falls asleep herself. Peter and Bernadette get it on too, to the chagrin of his daughter Franziska, who’d gone to Bernadette’s trailer to sell her hormone-treatment prescriptions. Meanwhile, Magnus pines over Franziska’s facebook photos; like Bartosz, who bellyflopped when trying to get his crush on Martha across to her earlier in the day, pining is all he gets to do that night.

And across town, the time-displaced Jonas, fresh from confessing his feelings to Martha before his then-current self could do so, tells his father Michael he knows he too is time-displaced and begs him not to kill himself.

Which, as the visiting time-traveling Claudia points out to them both, is precisely what will cause him to kill himself.

In retrospect, I should have seen this coming. But if you suspected Adam wasn’t telling Jonas the truth about his plan to break the cycle by stopping Mikkel/Michael’s suicide, you were right. Adam sent Jonas back to cause that suicide, the only way events can play out the way they must. Later on, we learn that the time-displaced Jonas is also responsible for luring Mikkel through the time portal in the cave below town on the night he disappeared. As an adult raising Jonas as his son, Mikkel/Michael had sort of suppressed that memory, but now it’s all coming back to him. By the time he sees the suicide note Jonas shows him, his fate is set. He’ll be writing that note before the episode is over.

From the opening montage to the closing scene, which appears to reveal that Magnus and Franziska grow up to be among Adam’s cult of time travelers, this is a tour de force episode of Dark. The everyday trials and tribulations of the adult and teenage characters are sexy and sad and often both. The Hannah/Ulrich/Katharina triangle of love, lust, friendship, and betrayal clicks in every respect. The beach scenes are funny and hot. The party is both sweet and, knowing what we know about the fates of everyone involved, brutal. Ben Frost’s music, particularly during the Martha/Jonas love scenes, is huge and rapturous, the way doomed young love feels.

And the meeting between Jonas and Michael is powerful and quietly crushing given its outcome. Actors Louis Hofmann, a truly extraordinary talent, and Sebastian Rudolph seem to pour themselves out all over the table where they sit and talk. What’s more, unlike the Ulrich/Mikkel material from the previous episode, the emotional impact of this father/son reunion isn’t hampered in the slightest by relying on sci-fi shenanigans to take place.

It feels like what it is: a son trying to save the man he loves most, a father trying to save the boy he loves most, and the both of them arriving at a decision over who must live and who must die. It takes the toughest decisions we must make as members of a family, as children and as parents, whether we’re ever actually forced to make them or whether they remain the stuff of troubling daydreams and what-ifs, and uses the science-fiction genre to probe that nerve as directly as possible. It does the same with falling in love, with the loss of virginity, with marital infidelity, with motherhood, with couplehood, with friendship. It’s reminiscent of “The Garveys at Their Best,” the standout episode from the first season of HBO’s The Leftovers—the episode that showed that series would become a classic. It’s dynamite. I’m glad it exists.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Dark Season 2 Episode 6 ("An Endless Cycle") on Netflix