The voice from Episode 1 begins the prologue with a monologue on Black Holes as ‘the Hellmouths of the universe’ and wondering if those who fall inside disappear forever. This is accompanied by images of an open door to a bunker, the monstrous chair and room, occult symbols with Latin text and then that text tattooed clearly upon a man’s back. The voice continues asking rhetorically about existence behind a Black Hole and if time and space become one in a repeating cycle where the future and the past influence each other. To this we see images of the dead boys mutilated eyes, the mystery man looking at Mikkel’s newspaper cutting, ‘Captain of Tomorrow’ comic books, someone carving pine cones and then with old Helge sitting in his chair repeating the sound: ‘‘Tick-Tock’’ we see the hooded man standing in the cave to the exact same sound.
We start with another house and another family. Charlotte and her husband Peter have separate bedrooms and the painting on the wall reinforces this separation both by its content and by its positioning. Yet they live as man and wife. Our first double life. They have two daughters. The eldest confronts her mute younger sister, Elli (Elisabeth), about a ‘missing’ red lipstick. (A red lipstick is also mentioned in 1986) The husband goes to see his father, Helge, and finds him again repeating the same warnings. Jonas having looked at the map again, enters the cave, we assume to look for the crossing. As he enters the man from the hotel room is watching him and as Jonas enters the cave he looks at his watch. Why is the time so important? Or maybe the date?
Meanwhile Charlotte has taken Elli to school where she finds out that her youngest daughter has a boyfriend, Yasin. More poignant because of the lack of a relationship between her mother and father. In class the teacher is discussing Goethe with his pupils and the fondness Goethe had for repetition in his works known as ‘doubling’. He also mentions symmetry where the repetition branches off from a central imaginary spot to form a mirror image. As Franziska leaves the class Magnus follows her and we see on the blackboard a representation of this concept in Goethe, but it is also the mathematical sign for infinity.
As if life were imitating the art of Goethe we see Charlotte at the autopsy on the birds and tells the vet of a similar event 33 years ago. Then, on speaking to Woller at the police station he mentions the red dirt found at the scene. Charlotte asks him to check back further (15 years) for missing boys. Having taken the media card from a wildlife camera on her way to drop Elli off she examines the film and recognises a car at the critical time. We see Charlotte’s husband removing red dirt from the passenger seat of his car. Charlotte calls him to double-check his alibi and he stands by what he has told her. She knows he is lying now as she has seen him driving the car at the time of Mikkel’s disappearance. Yet there is something else. We next see her questioning a transvestite prostitute about her husband. He did not go there. Still searching for answers, she arrives at a log cabin where she discovers dirt of the same red colour that Woller had mentioned. She goes into the bunker which we had seen in the prologue. It is empty, but the lighting in the bunker is the same which lit the back of the tattooed man. She calls her husband to collect Elli from school as she is on her way to the power plant and again asks him to tell her anything that she should know as we (and she) must be viewing him as a suspect; he declines, again.
Elli is tired of waiting and putting on her sisters red lipstick she starts walking home at the same time as Helge leaves the Home and heads into the woods. (In 1986 when Mikkel goes to the school we hear Katherina informing us of a story concerning a girl who is murdered wearing red lipstick.) Charlotte has retrieved Ulrich from the plant after he was caught trespassing. In the car he tells Charlotte he is being punished for Mikkel’s disappearance. (For the sin of Adultery?) Charlotte is searching for Elli and finds her hat; we fear the worst. Her elder sister returns home unaware until she sees her mother and father in unexpected close contact. It is so unusual that she knows something is wrong. When we briefly see Ulrich and his wife at home without their missing child we are given another mirror image and another doubling.
A hooded man opens the log cabin that Charlotte had visited earlier. Woller and the police are searching late into the night when we see Helge arrive at their location and tells Woller: ‘‘I must tell him.’’ Tell who? His son? Yet, he was visited by his son earlier in the day and nothing was revealed to Peter or us. Helge desperately wants to talk, and his son desperately does not. Yet neither can properly communicate with each other. Another doubling? More an inverted doubling. Two sides of the exact same coin.
Elli arrives home soaking wet. Charlotte hugs her and then asks her where she has been all night. Elli hands her a timepiece and explains that ‘Noah’ gave it to her, to give to Charlotte. Charlotte does not recognise it. She opens it and inside is the inscription: ‘For Charlotte’
The voice begins his second monologue as the episode ends and we see the man from the hotel room enter the bedroom of Jonas at dawn. (The beginning of the day and the end of the night) As the mysterious man writes in the map we see Jonas lying asleep and the voice, sounding this time not like a theoretical physicist with knowledge of Samsara, but more like Nietzsche’s mouthpiece Zarathustra and proclaims: ‘‘We are searching for Ariadne’s thread’’ a ‘‘beacon in the darkness’’ (more doubling) that will guide us along the right path. Yet he pronounces, there is only one path, already ‘‘predetermined’’ by the end and the beginning, and that this is the beginning. To understand this idea just cast your mind back to the diagram on the blackboard in the class discussing Goethe: the infinity sign with a line of symmetry through its centre, a most helpful mise en abyme. (A mise en abyme can be considered a key to the text, a guide on how to read the larger work). So, trace the path of the infinity symbol with your mind and you will surely understand the path as a repeated doubling through a line of symmetry. The path is geometrically a simple one but Winden is caught on this path in real space-time and it is resulting in chaos and death. But how and why?
Finally, we see Helge in bed just as Jonas is in bed. He seems asleep but wakes with a start and grabbing the nurse’s arm again declaims: ‘‘He has to stop’’, the shocked nurse asks: ‘‘Who has to stop?’’ Helge replies: ‘‘Noah’’ As he says this we see Elli’s ‘boyfriend’ Yasin walking through the woods where he picks up a carving from the ground. The hooded man appears towering in front of him and says: ‘‘You must be Yasin. Noah sent me.’’ We know enough now of the path the hooded man takes and where he goes (his double life) for us to fear the worse for little Yasin.
Marc Barham
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