‘Dark’ on Netflix Season 2 Premiere Recap: I’ll Follow You Into the Dark

Previously on Dark…

Uh…well…see the thing is…what you gotta understand is that…ummmm…yeah, so…anyway here’s the God Particle.

Easily one of the most thematically ambitious dramas Netflix has produced (in any language), and certainly the most narratively complicated one, Dark has returned after a year and a half for a second season of sci-fi and sadness in the woody suburbs of Germany. It does so without making the slightest concession to the notion of jumping-on points for viewers coming to the second season fresh. This is not that kind of show. If you want to get the most out of Dark—if you want to get anything out of Dark—you’d better start from the beginning. This is a journey you have to follow every step of the way.

This despite the show’s central notion that time has no beginning, middle, or end.

According to the discoveries made by several of the show’s characters across the decades, the people of the post-war town of Winden exist on a Möbius strip of spacetime. It has several distinct loops located at 33-year intervals on the timeline—last season those dates were 1953, 1986, 2019, and 2052—between which it is possible to jump via a wormhole in the caves outside of town…but from which it seems impossible to escape.

The great innovation made by series creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese is to use this hoary old SF concept not to rehash similar concepts from The Terminator or Back to the Future (this show’s view of nostalgia is venomously skeptical, by the way) but as a metaphor for how difficult it is for anyone to alter, let alone escape from, their own nature. Anchored by mournful performances by fine, relatable actors of various ages, as well as a welcome willingness not to look away from their ugly, sticky, sometimes hot, occasionally cruel behavior, it’s the finest of the streaming behemoth’s contingent of science-fiction dramas.

The problem facing the season premiere (“Beginnings and Endings”) is that, well, there’s a lot of science fiction present here. Not in the world-building sense, mind you: wormhole, time travel, nuclear meltdown (probably), post-apocalyptic society (definitely), rogue priest murdering people to master the godless world created when the globular God Particle started the whole mess, there, that’s really everything you need to know from a technical perspective.

No, the issue is how the different timelines, and the way characters have bounced back and forth between them—some aging in linear fashion, some becoming old before they’re even born, some fathering their own sister’s future boyfriend—have gotten so tangled as to become opaque. Genre is supposed to make the real-world emotions and ideas it’s addressing clearer, not less so.

Like, I’m sitting here trying to think of how to go over what happened in this episode, which by its position in the season is at least supposed to serve as some kind of introduction. This is my third attempt to do so. I just kind of gave up after the first, and made an elaborate flow chart instead of actually writing a review for the second.

Judging from the behavior of the characters, I’m not alone.

Here’s the best I can do:

Our main character is Jonas, a teenager whose father Michael committed suicide and whose mother Hannah is having an affair with Ulrich, a local cop. Ulrich’s young son Mikkel disappeared in the pilot, just as his brother Mads did during his own childhood; his daughter Martha is Jonas’s on-again off-again girlfriend. Over the course of the first season, Jonas discovers that his father Michael is Mikkel, who was transported through time back to 1986 and grew up as normal to marry Hannah. That makes Martha Jonas’s aunt. (Paging Jon Snow.)

Jonas is our main window into the action of this episode. As a time-displaced teenager in the future, he gives us our first real glimpse of post-apocalyptic society, which appears to have integrated him under the fanatical local leader, Elisabeth. (In 2019, she’s a deaf, cool elementary-school student.) He’s defying her orders by attempting to get back into the “forbidden zone” that surrounds the shuttered nuclear plant, as well as the cave system where a series of crooked owners stored its toxic waste, so that he can re-access the wormhole.

As a time-displaced adult in 2019, he introduces himself to his mother, who’s about his age. She’s on the verge of killing herself, having royally fucked up virtually every relationship she’s had—her husband Michael/Mikkel is dead, her lover Ulrich cut things off with her when Mikkel went missing and is now missing himself, and she’s been getting along by blackmailing the current head of the power plant, Aleksander, who’s actually an ex-fugitive operating under an alias. Aleksander is closing the plant, which, given that we’re six days away from the apocalypse, seems like a bad idea.

Meanwhile, Ulrich’s surviving kids Martha and Magnus are concerned about their mother Katharina’s well-being, prompting them to look through the files their dad kept on the cave system prior to his own disappearance. Elisabeth’s mother Charlotte, Ulrich’s boss on the force, is continuing her own investigation while dealing with another detective, Clausen, who suspects Ulrich’s involvement in the child disappearances. One of her underlings, a one-eyed young cop named Woller, is secretly on Aleksander’s payroll, seemingly to help keep his transgender sex-worker sister Bernadette afloat. (She’s been keeping an eye on a truck filled with toxic waste until he can figure out a place to move it.) Bernadette has frequently been hired by Charlotte’s husband Peter, who’s been working with Ulrich’s father Tonte and the post-apocalyptic version of Aleksander’s wife Claudia (with whom Tonte had an affair in the ‘80s), to thwart the sinister rogue priest Noah. Aleksander’s son Bartosz, Martha’s other on-again off-again boyfriend, is working with Noah, who’s been providing him with both drugs and misinformation.

And Noah? He does this as a kid, to a man sporting the same occult tattoos he will later wear…

…on behalf of this guy, Adam, who I’d bet you a thousand dollars is a post-apocalyptic time-traveling version of a character we’ve already met, possibly even himself.

Like I said, it’s complicated!

And like I said, it’s so complicated at this point that it’s a problem. It’s not that it’s impossible to follow—it’s arduous, yes, but quite possible, as I hopefully just demonstrated. It’s not even that the show has wrapped itself up in a puzzle-box narrative to hide the fact that it doesn’t have a brain in its head, a la the fake-smart Westworld; the scripts, cinematography, and acting are all razor sharp.

But the can’t-tell-the-players-without-a-scorecard structure runs the risk of sucking up all the oxygen in the room. It makes caring about its characters’ often gripping and unsparing interpersonal problems even harder work than figuring who’s the future version of who’s son’s daughter’s mother’s boyfriend or whatever. Can Dark still make it work? I want to believe.

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 1 ("Beginnings and Endings") on Netflix