‘Dark’ on Netflix Season 2 Episode 2 Recap: We’re Caught in a Trap, I Can’t Walk Out

Pop quiz, hotshot: Can you spot the line of dialogue delivered by the bad guy?

A) “Secrets are what’s destroying us. The secrets.”

B) “What if God has no idea what he’s doing? What if the plan is wrong? What if God is mistaken?”

C) “Sometimes we have to have more faith that everything will be okay again.”

D) “In the end, life is just a collection of missed opportunities.”

If you guessed C, congratulations! You figured out that only villains are optimists. You are as dark as Dark is.

As you might have guessed from these swing-for-the-fences statements about the meaning of life, episode two of Dark‘s second season—titled “Dark Matter,” appropriately enough—is getting right back down to the philosophical and emotional nitty gritty. By the end of the hour we’ve caught up with almost all of the show’s main characters, at various ages and in various time periods. We’ve essentially been briefed on who they are, when they are, and what they’re doing. After experiencing the vertiginous plunge back into the show’s extremely convoluted plot in the premiere, it now feels easier to get a grasp on who’s who, what’s what, and why it matters.

For one thing, the episode opens with the biggest and clearest infodump on the nature of the time-portal phenomenon plaguing the people of Winden that we’ve received to date. Stranded in the year 2052, young Jonas Kahnwald listens to a tape recording in which a woman, later revealed to be nuclear power plant CEO turned time-traveling white wizard Claudia Tiedemann. In the recording, she explains that running electrical current through the amorphous solid/liquid/gaseous “God Particle” blob can stabilize it into a portal through which objects can travel through time.

Young Jonas spends the episode working hard to do exactly that. Realizing he needs more fuel to generate the necessary voltage, he distracts a patrol of gun-toting post-apocalyptic militants by blasting Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” from the window of an abandoned building, then sneaking down and siphoning gas from their vehicle.

When he returns to the so-called “Dead Zone” to complete his mission, however, he is intercepted by the extremist leader Elisabeth Doppler, who orders his execution for violating their taboo against entering the forbidden area. Jonas is already hanging with a gunshot to the leg when Elisabeth—who likely understands he’s a time traveler and knows he’s telling the truth when he yells at the assembled crowd that she’s bullshitting them about a portal to paradise inside the Zone—shoots the rope that’s strangling him, allowing him to live.

He is then freed by the still-unnamed young woman who captured him at the end of the first season. Desperate to know who he is and why Elisabeth would let him live, she follows him back into the Zone and watches in amazement as he stabilizes the portal and walks right through. If he dies, he says, then oh well—dying inside a spacetime-continuum warp and dying inside a post-apocalyptic prison cell amounts to the same thing.

Jonas keeps busy across his lifespan and through multiple timelines. In the present day, the time-traveling Adult Jonas shows his mother Hannah the clockwork time machine he helped construct based on the ideas and designs of local eccentric H.G. Tannhaus. He uses it to take her back to the ‘80s, where she sees her husband Michael as a little boy.

Of course, Michael is also Mikkel, the time-displaced son of Ulrich Nielsen, whose disappearance set the plot in motion. He spends the episode struggling with his plight—missing his real mother, comforting his adoptive one when she fails to lift his spirits (that’s a brutal emotional beat for any child character), and questioning the existence of a wise and just God. (See statement B.)

That last bit is what gives the evil priest Noah, who follows Mikkel to the local cave entrance when he hears the telltale rumble of the time-travel portal as Jonas and Hannah enter their time period. Noah has the faith of a fanatic that things will be alright, and the unspoken narcissism to believe only he can make it so. (See statement C.)

He should try telling this to the Tiedemann family. In the ‘80s, Claudia Tiedemann receives a visit from her old time-traveling self, who uses the time machine in front of her and gives her the location of a time capsule she buried in her younger self’s backyard decades earlier. Older Claudia tells Adult Claudia that if things go right, her daughter Regina’s life can be saved, against all odds. (See statement D.)

Meanwhile, Claudia’s aging father Egon discovers he has advanced cancer, but puts the information aside to visit an old prisoner in a local mental hospital.

Yes, it’s Ulrich Nielsen, who’s been incarcerated since the 1950s. It’s a stunning revelation, since the natural expectation is that Ulrich would somehow escape his captivity in that time period and continue his quest to stop Noah’s child-killings. Instead he’s spent an entire lifetime locked away, everyone believing him to be insane, no one any closer to stopping what’s coming.

And in the present, Egon’s granddaughter Regina, herself stricken with cancer, is interrogated by Charlotte Doppler and the outside investigator Clausen about both the proximity of the family’s nuclear plant and its secret cave entrance to so many of the disappearances and the true identity of her husband Aleksander, who took her last name in part to escape his past as a convict from before he arrived in town as a teen in the ‘80s.

Regina blows that line of questioning off as best she can. However, she reveals to the cops that she has a stash of Adult Jonas’s bizarre time-travel ephemera, which he left behind after staying in her hotel. She thinks indicates he was the kidnapper and killer.

Charlotte, however, recognizes this stuff as partially the work of her grandfather H.G., whom she always just believed to be kind of a nut…and who never told her who her real parents were. (Considering how close Jonas and the unnamed girl from the future are getting, I have my theories.) Meanwhile, Charlotte’s Type A daughter Franziska angrily rebukes Mikkel’s brother Magnus when he accuses her of turning tricks for money; in reality she’s selling hormone-therapy prescriptions to Bernadette, the local sex worker, via her dad’s prescription pad. (See statement A.)

As always, getting through the raw plot of the show takes up a lot of column inches. But don’t let it take up all the storage space your brain has allotted for the show. While the family tree is a maze of brambles and the timelines look like the tangle of wires connecting your TV to your Xbox, the emotions are recognizable and real. Feeling like you don’t really know the people who are supposed to love you; feeling like you’re trapped in a great cosmic fuck-up and the only way to be happy is to try to just ignore it; feeling powerless to stop oncoming tragedies both great and small—that’s the stuff this show is working with, the stuff it really cares about. It’s dark matter indeed.

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 2 ("Dark Matter") on Netflix