‘Dark’ on Netflix Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: I, Claudia

Time travel, kidnappings, cancer, nuclear apocalypse—yes, sure, all well and good. But for this review of Dark, I’d like to start out by showcasing some acting. That’s an advantage of having two or three different actors play every single character at different times in their lives, right? There’s a lot more acting to go around!

I don’t mean to make light of it, either. “Ghosts,” the third episode of the German Netflix drama’s second season, shows how important the cast is to making this crazy-on-paper project work. Following young, adult, and old versions of characters spread across a hundred-year timespan, often interacting with each other anachronistically and even starting whole new lives out of sync, is demanding work for the audience. Rooting that work in the happiness, sadness, and shame of the characters—making them people, not plot devices—is the secret of the show’s success.

First, a bit of foreground. This episode focuses primarily on the Tiedemann family, Claudia, precocious kid turned nuclear power plant administrator turned time-traveling good witch, and her cop father Egon.

In the ’50s, Egon continues to investigate the mysterious prisoner blamed for the abduction and murder of several children, including poor Helge Doppler, who shows up alive after months of captivity and experimentation by the sinister priest Noah. He’s also trying to keep his marriage together, not realizing that his wife Doris has fallen in love with their border Agnes Nielsen. (Agnes is Noah’s sister, and the mysterious prisoner is her grandson Ulrich.)

In the ’80s, Egon revisits the case, connecting the now aged and still incarcerated prisoner—Ulrich Nielsen, of cousre—to his time-displaced son Mikkel via the heavy metal lyrics Ulrich anachronistically quoted during his interrogation decades earlier.

Claudia’s saga is both more mindbending and more melancholy. As a child in the ’50s, she nearly catches her mother and Agnes in the act; she convinces Agnes’s son Tonte to show her his penis (years later they’ll have an extramarital affair); and she comforts her dad after a very long and trying day.

As a time-traveling old woman in the ’50s, she visits Agnes to provide her with vital information about her own death, as well as encourage Agnes to take her mother’s feelings for her seriously; she visits Egon to tell him how sorry she is for all that will happen to him and how a person as good as he is doesn’t deserve any of it; she visits local clockmaker H.G. Tannhaus to give him a copy of his own book on time travel; and she gets killed by Noah for lost manuscript pages, which she knew all along would happen (hence encouraging Agnes to “betray” her to Noah). The pages reveal information about Charlotte Doppler, the police chief in 2019/2020, that upsets Noah badly enough for him to lie to his boss Adam about ever having found them at all.

And as an adult woman in the ’80s, Claudia learns her father has cancer; she visits Tannhaus to show him a copy of his book, which he tells her she herself gave to him long ago as an example of the “bootstrap paradox” of time travel; she attempts a rapprochement with her daughter Regina, who her older self warned her had a limited time left to live; and she uses the machine to travel into the future, where the sight of her now-adult, cancer-stricken daughter moves her to tears.

I think that’s basically everything?

But it’s not, not really. Like I said, the performances fuel the whole thing. It’s in the way actor Anne Ratte-Polle chokes down surprise and dismay as Ines Kahnwald when, in the middle of sipping coffee with the visiting Egon, he asks her if her “son” “Michael” has ever mentioned the name “Ulrich.”

It’s in the way actor Sebastian Hülk’s eyes widen with wonder, sorrow, and joy he can’t even properly understand when, as the younger Egon, he meets the remarkable old woman who on some level he recognizes is the little girl he loves more than anything in the world.

It’s in the weariness that radiates from actor Christian Pätzold with every step as the older Egon as he retraces the steps of his greatest personal and professional failures, and how the weariness seems to get knocked out of him like a winded athlete when his semi-estranged daughter hugs him after hearing about his grim prognosis.

It’s in a similar moment from actor Mark Waschke as Noah when Helge Doppler, the boy he’s been using as a lab rat, runs to him and hugs him during a visit to the Doppler family home—his mask of studied coldness and fanaticism slipping ever so slightly as he appears to realize what he’s done to this innocent, loving, now irreparably damaged child.

It’s in the face of actor Julika Jenkins when she sees her sick daughter in the future—her mask of studied reserve and decorum collapsing into the sobbing visage of a mother who realizes how much time she’s wasted keeping her daughter at arms’ length.

“You don’t deserve any of this,” the old time-traveling Claudia tells her young police-officer father Egon in the ’50s. “But sometimes the good ones get hit hardest.” “In the end, we all get what we deserve,” says her nemesis Adam to Noah at the end of the episode. This debate lies at Dark‘s heart. The time traveling exists to offer its characters a tantalizing possibility: If they do everything exactly right, they can break the cycle of the world that punishes the innocent and the undeserving. You can see the strain of that struggle all over their faces.

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 3 ("Ghosts") on Netflix