Written by contributor Kajree Gautom
After the immense success of the first two seasons of the German Netflix series Dark, fans eagerly await the third and final season to this fantastic series. The second season, which released in 2019, introduced a range of new characters and a new storyline as the residents of Winden fight the upcoming apocalypse along with all the newfound secrets. So many twisted secrets were revealed in the previous season that it can be tricky understanding and making sense of it all!
The second season takes place from June 20th to the day of the apocalypse, June 27th, over the years 1921, 1954, 1987, 2020, and 2053. It has been a year since the last season, so let’s do a recap of it by breaking it down according to the different timelines!
1921
This season introduces us to a new timeline, 1921. At the very start of season two, we see a nameless man and young Noah digging inside the cave, probably trying to open the gates of time travelling. This man has the emerald tablet tattooed on his torso, similar to Noah’s tattoo on the back. His interactions with young Noah also prove that this man had considerably lost faith in the ‘prophecy’, and questions Noah why Adam gave him his name. Ultimately, he is killed by young Noah on the orders of Adam and adult Noah, as part of an initiation rite for young Noah.
In Episode 4, a young and confused Jonas finds himself taken in by Erna, where he also meets Agnes and young Noah. Here, young Noah takes Jonas to a man named Adam in what appears to be a lavish room in the church basement holding many, many secrets. It is also revealed that Adam is actually future Jonas and that Jonas is eventually destined to fight all odds until he becomes the future version of himself aka the villain aka Adam.
Adam explains to Jonas about his motives and about the Sic Mundus, who call themselves the travellers. The Latin phrase ‘Sic Mundus Creatus Est’ means ‘Thus the World was Created’, and it is a motto of the ‘travellers’. Noah, Adam, and many others are part of it. Adam tells Jonas about the group, which is explained as an opposition to religion and time. “We’ve declared war on time, on God,” Adam tells younger Jonas. “We’re creating a new world, without time, without God.” Adam is adamant about creating a world without time where human beings are slaves to it, where free choice might exist, where there is no concept of time per se.
After all this, Adam sends Jonas back to the day his father, Mikkel/Michael committed suicide, telling him that Jonas could save his father. Finally, in the end, we also see older Magnus Nielsen and Franziska Doppler with Adam, and it is correct to assume that they become travellers too.
1954
In this time period, we see adult Egon Tideman as a police officer who tries to get a word out of Helge. In the previous season, we saw Ulrich brutally beat Helge, which disfigures part of his face, turning that wound into a significant scar that he carries for the rest of his life. Helge was kidnapped by Noah, who brings him back home using a new time machine, but Helge wouldn’t speak to anyone except Noah.
We can see a budding relationship between Agnes Nielsen, and Egon’s wife. They are having harmless fun when Claudia sees them together. At the same time, we can also sense some kind of relationship growing between Claudia and Tronte, which can be seen during the time when they walk together in the forest and Claudia tells him to open his pants.
Older Claudia visits Egon in his office and apologises. Egon is confused and goes home with a bouquet of flowers for his wife (as he felt like their marriage was taking a hit). There, he sits with his daughter, younger Claudia, who has seen her mother and Agnes fooling around. When asked if the flowers were for her mother, Claudia tells her father that he was a good man and that the world didn’t deserve him, which was also what older Claudia had said to him in the office.
Agnes, Noah’s sister, used to be part of the Sic Mundus too. She tricks older Claudia into giving her the last pages of the notebook in hopes of rejoining Sic Mundus, which Adam desperately searches for. Noah later finds Claudia to get the missing pages of the book and kills her in the process.
In the later episodes, Hannah arrives in the 50s and visits a distraught Ulrich in the prison. She also meets Egon there, where viewers could clearly see some sparks brewing. Hannah persuades Egon to let her go and see Ulrich as she thinks he might be her husband. But, Hannah takes this opportunity to get back at Ulrich for hurting her and leaves him to rot in prison. Later, she tells Egon that she was planning to settle there and start a new life.
1987
Mikkel is adopted by nurse Ines, his name changed to Michael and is also admitted to the school.
Egon, old and retired, decides to finally interview Helge, who is now in a mental facility. He also decides to visit Ulrich in the psychiatric ward, and Ulrich says to Egon, ‘you are going to die, just like you were born; oblivious to everything’. Ulrich is very cryptic and instils doubt in Egon’s mind, but finally tells the truth. He visits Ines to inquire about Michael’s parents, but Ines carefully keeps him away from Egon and we can see that she slips sleeping pills into Michael’s drinks, but Egon leaves with a photo of young Mikkel. The next day when he shows the photo to Ulrich, he lashes out of Egon for keeping him away from his son for so long. Later, Ulrich escapes from the mental facility and runs to find Mikkel. They both try to find their way back, almost making it to the cave, where he is recaptured and Mikkel goes back to living his new life with his new mother.
Meanwhile, Claudia is a little distant with the discovery of the ‘god particle’ and being in charge of the nuclear plant. Then one day, her childhood dog, Gretchen, who got lost in the cave years ago, time travels to Claudia in 1986-87, and this leaves her even more rattled. She also finds out that her father, Egon, is battling cancer. At the same time, older Claudia visits adult Claudia in her office, and explains to her about the time machine, that it is buried in her yard. Curious, Claudia uses the time machine to go forward in time.
She uses the library computer there and looks herself up, along with the date of her father’s death and the day she disappears. To right her relationship with her father, she asks Egon to move in with Claudia and Regina. She thinks this way, she would be able to prevent his death and save him. However, she reveals to him that she knows about time travel. Egon calls her the white devil (a name that Helge had repeated to him over and over when Egon visits him in the mental facility), and he tries to call the police, but Claudia tries to take the phone away and he gets pushed through a table and dies. Claudia leaves her dying father alone and goes back to her house where Jonas finds and convinces her to come with him to change the future.
2019 – 2020
With Ulrich, Mikkel, and Jonas missing, along with Eric Obendorf and other kids, the town is in a state of fright and despair. A new officer, Clausen, had been appointed to work on the missing children case, along with Charlotte Doppler. Concurrently, Charlotte is battling the truth about her parentage. Later, we find that Noah is actually Charlotte’s birth father, but he won’t tell her who her mother is.
Now, Clausen begins to interview the people of the town once again. He and Charlotte interview Regina when she tells them about the Stranger who had stayed in her hotel and turns over his belongings to them. Clausen, however, cannot stop being fixated on her husband, Aleksander, taking Regina’s last name. Charlotte finds some pages from her grandfather’s belongings with the Stranger’s items, which further confuses her about her upbringing.
Meanwhile, the Stranger who is actually adult Jonas initially freaks out Hannah when he shows up at the house, but he is able to convince and make her believe that he is her son, and explain to her about the time machine and the true identity of her husband, Michael. He also takes her back in time to prove that Mikkel is Michael. They decide to tell Katharina about Mikkel, but poor Katharina doesn’t take the news so well and instead lashes out on Jonas when he tells her about Mikkel and Ulrich. Later on, doubt and curiosity lead Katharina to search for class pictures of 1986, where she finds her son Mikkel’s photo. Later, she goes to explore the caves on her own, determined to find her husband and son.
We see a little flashback to the day Michael died, which was also the day of the Nielsen’s anniversary party. Michael decides to stay home, he is jittery and afraid. Jonas arrives with the hope to save his father, but we find that it is actually Jonas’s letter and information that prompted Michael to kill himself, ultimately making Jonas the cause of his father’s death. Older Claudia tells Jonas that his father must die so that things happen in the same way as it always had, thereby setting the cycle in motion. We also find that it was actually Jonas from the future himself that took young Mikkel to the caves that led him back in time to the 1980s.
Future Jonas in 2019 also kisses Martha while they were at the lake, and tells her, ‘you and I are perfect for each other, never believe anything else’. Later when they meet at the party, Martha kisses Jonas again, and they have sex. The same night, Ulrich also cheats on Katharina with Hannah, as Katharina nurses a sick Mikkel.
Back in 2020, with a few days left for Winden to perish, Martha, Magnus, Franziska, and Elisabeth travel back in time with Bartosz, who is now a follower of Noah, after they learn about the time machine.
When Bartosz tells Martha that Jonas would return, she goes to find him but meets adult Jonas instead. But Katharina whisks her away, telling her about Martha’s true relation with Jonas, and barks at Jonas to stay away from Martha. A paranoid adult Jonas takes Martha at gunpoint to the bunker (as it was prophesied that people in the bunker would survive) as he wants her to be safe. But when Peter and Elisabeth open the bunker door, Martha runs away to find Jonas. However, she meets a brutal demise later as Adam kills her right in front of Jonas. Adam says that in order to become his older self, Jonas had to see Martha die. In the end though, a Martha clad in black and short hair arrives with a much-advanced version of the time machine, who claims to be from another world. She then takes Jonas with her before the apocalypse hits.
We also see Claudia from 1957, Regina, Peter, and young Elisabeth in the bunker, and later young Noah enters too. On the other hand, Stranger Jonas along with Magnus, Franziska, and Bartosz travel back in time (as young Noah had said to save them).
Simultaneously, Clausen arrests Aleksander Tideman on grounds of identity theft as that was Clausen’s brother’s name (who had apparently gone missing). We then find out Clausen’s true intention of coming to Winden – in the search of his missing brother, whose name Aleksander had stolen. He also gains access to the power plant, which leads them to find nuclear barrels of waste that Aleksander was hiding. Woller was an accomplice of Aleksander too, who we find out is Benni’s brother. The digging up of the waste matter leads to the creation of the god particle, due to which a portal is formed between Elisabeth in 2053 and Charlotte in 2020. Touching of their fingers supposedly triggers the apocalypse.
2053
Jonas is still in post-apocalyptic Winden with older Elisabeth as the ruler and Silija, her translator. She had organised the survivors into a militia, who believe in the prophecy of a paradise. Jonas tries to sneak into the power plant, which is forbidden by Elisabeth, and she hangs him in a public display, but later she shoots him down, which gives him a nasty scar across his throat. Here we learn that Elisabeth is also Charlotte’s birth mother as well as Charlotte’s daughter (I know, this was super confusing!)
Elisabeth puts Jonas behind bars but Silija, curious to find what Elisabeth is hiding, asks Jonas to show her. There inside the plant, they find the god particle and upon activation, Jonas travels through it and lands back in 1921.
Now, although we have a somewhat clear idea of the events that happened in season 1 and 2, there are still questions that remain answered…
- Who are Noah and Agnes’s parents? Why was Noah given that name and why was he chosen?
- Why does H. G. Tannhaus adopt Charlotte? Why did Noah say that ‘they’ had to take Charlotte away from him? Who are ‘they’? Why do ‘they’ separate her from Noah?
- Who is Regina’s father? Is she Tronte and Claudia’s child?
- Is Helge the birth father of Peter? Where did Peter come from? Are Greta and Bernd his real parents?
- Why was Eric Obendorf kidnapped? Was it random or is there any relation?
- Who was Agnes’s husband and her grandmother who she said was from Winden?
- Why did Noah pick Bartosz to give the time machine and the notebook?
- Who really wrote the book of prophecies?
- Why does H. G. Tannhaus have a phot oof the Sic Mundus? And also, why do Magnus and Franziska follow Adam?
- And what the hell is actually up with Woller’s eye?!
Thankfully, season 3 is coming out soon enough, which will hopefully answer all of these questions, or at least some of them, and give us a meaningful end. The season 3 trailer released on June 11th (watch the trailer here) and needless to say, it has all of us screaming with more theories and more questions.
