This prologue begins 9 hours after Mikkel’s disappearance to a shot of the Winden Nuclear power plant. A dishevelled man carrying an odd suitcase crosses in front of the camera and picks up a dead bird. He is hooded and could be mistaken for the creature with a large head as Ulrich’s mother had described. We see Jonas waking, noticing a substance oozing from his ear and seeing his dead father in the mirror, his head covered in the same oily substance. A dream? Or a dream within a dream? One is reminded of the conversation Jonas had with Martha in Episode 1 about ‘The Matrix’ and her response about messages from an unseen realm.
We see the dead boy undergoing an autopsy. His eyes are gone and so are the mechanisms in the ear that orientate our body in the now. Ulrich searches the cave and finds a door with a radiation warning symbol on it. At his mother’s house we meet his father who is washing clothes that have blood on them and we are as unconvinced by his alibi (buying cord?) for the previous night, as his wife is. She warns him (and us) that history is repeating itself: ‘‘First Mads, then Mikkel.’’
For the first time we see a photograph of Mads and Ulrich taken in 1986 when Mads disappeared and was not found. In the briefing room Charlotte details the items found with the boy which include the Walkman, a shirt and a coin from the same period and then plays the tape from the Walkman. We have heard this song before when Erik was being strapped to the chair. Another connection made and once again the 80’s is the link. Ulrich arrives telling Charlotte about the door and suggesting that all three disappearances (Mads, Erik and Mikkel) are linked by location and that the local Nuclear Power plant must be searched.
At the Nuclear plant we are witness to an incriminating conversation between its Head and Erik’s father who is reluctant to carry out the plan proposed to him. But he silently acquiesces. To what though? At the Forest Hotel in Winden the hooded man we saw at the beginning of this episode arrives and books a room. To accompany his entrance noises of mechanical gears slowly turning fill the soundtrack. He is still carrying that suitcase.
Ulrich’s father is searching in the woods for Mikkel and for a moment, after a short conversation reinforcing the recurrence theme, he deliberately stops and touches a brown notebook in his pocket as if to check for something. We see the mouth of the cave again and a heavier industrial sound announces the exit of a hooded man, again. This is not the man in the Forest Hotel as we see him emerge from the shower into a room with a wall covered in pictures of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur of Ancient Crete juxtaposed with Astronomical phenomena and mathematical tables. Our occupant then takes out from the suitcase a wooden (Pandora’s?) box and opens it with a key found on top of a book titled: ‘A Journey Through Time’. Inside is an eye-catching and unusual machine, its purpose unclear yet the soundtrack pulses with power. It must be connected to the dark events in Winden. But how?
And now the rain starts to fall heavily, as if it too is mourning the loss of the children. Or is this something more biblical? Jonas uncovers a hidden map of the Winden Caves (heavily annotated) and as he does so, we see Erik strapped into the chair by the hooded man. No music this time but as a man on TV is discoursing how time and space could be bent around a Black Hole (creating a wormhole) and asking how far would scientists go to travel into one, Erik has the metal eye-covering bent around his face in preparation for the contraptions imminent use.
Jonas notices an enigmatic question written on his father’s map: ‘Where is the crossing?’ Ulrich cannot cross the guarded gates of the Nuclear plant as he has no search warrant and the man in charge refuses him entry. He is obviously hiding something. But what? On returning to the police station Ulrich examines the evidence found around the body and believes he can link it to Erik’s father. He searches the home of Jurgen and finds a distraught man. As they grieve together in the rain, the hooded man drags a dead body through the woods. It is Erik and his eyes are mutilated. At the same time a large van is being loaded up, overseen by Aleksander Tiedemann. It is a clandestine operation.
Whilst in the kitchen waiting for the power to come back on and surrounded by candles in an almost séance type setting Jonas and his mum talk about his father. Jonas asks his mum a series of questions. Her response is gnomic. She says she misses the ‘notion of him’ and that we never truly know someone but when Ulrich returns home his wife pulls him physically close and demands of him, no matter what, that he tell the truth and not lie to her about anything. We are shown the cave and as they hold each other in Mikkel’s bedroom that disturbing noise crashes through the screen signalling to us that another ‘event’ is imminent. Lights flicker rapidly in time to the ethereal voices we hear on the soundtrack and the solar system mobile spins round as if controlled by a supernatural force. Charlotte exits the school to find the ground outside covered with dead birds.
In the hotel room the occupant fixes a newspaper cutting to his wall next to other pictures. Its headline reads: Where is Mikkel? But he changes this to: When is Mikkel? He smiles enigmatically as if he knows the answer. Moments later we know. Mikkel exits from the cave dirty and dishevelled but alive. But this is not our cave is it? Mikkel runs home but his key will not work. At the door he meets Ulrich who is not middle-aged but only a few years older than Mikkel. He notices a newspaper on the floor and reads the date: November 5th, 1986. We now have, not items from the 80’s turning up with a dead boy in 2019, but a living boy from 2019 turning up in the 1980’s.
The headline is about Chernobyl and this is where we find our clue to the real substance of this episode’s title. It opened with the Winden Nuclear plant and now it closes with the terrible cataclysmic event at the Chernobyl plant in 1986. It is not just the safety of Nuclear power that is being questioned but the lies that contributed to making it unsafe and the lie that having nuclear weapons makes the world a safer place. Remember the dead boy’s clothing? He is wearing an anti-nuke shirt and the Walkman is playing a song by Nena who was responsible for ‘’99 Luftballons’’, the most iconic anti-nuke song of the Reagan-era. So here are the real reasons for the title, as there are no lies told by any character in this episode. ‘Dark’ has every right to remind us of the terrible consequences when power whether nuclear or political is invested in only one system or one person. With the increased tensions in the world today and the threat of nuclear war once again on the agenda maybe repetition and Nietzsche’s recurrence are woven into humanity’s timeline. Only time will tell.
Marc Barham
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