‘Dark’ on Netflix Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: Adam Bomb

“Death created time to grow the things that it would kill.” —Rust Cohle, True Detective Season One

“God is Time, and Time is not merciful.” —Adam, Dark Season Two

Six of one, half dozen of the other, no?

Adding an entire working theory of theology, theodicy, and the nature of the universe to, y’know, families in the German suburbs being torn apart by time travel, episode five of Dark Season Two offers a lot to ponder, from plot to philosophy. It offers an eye-opening look at both the tactics and the worldview of Adam, the prime mover of Winden’s cross-generational “war” for control of time and the wormholes within it. Yet it muddies up some of the show’s more directly effective and affecting interpersonal elements.

We’ll start with the good stuff. Speaking to Jonas, his (alleged) younger self, from within his well-appointed underground bunker, Adam explains that all the powers ascribed by humanity to God throughout history—seeing all that happens, controlling our lives, holding out the possibility of freedom and choice, doling out rewards and punishments, a direct link to the great puzzle of mortality—are actually ways of describing things for which the universal force of time is responsible. His goal is nothing less than overthrowing God-Time and enabling humanity to be truly free of its despotic, murderous constraints.

Adam does provide Jonas, and the audience, with a decent explanation for why his decades of meddling across multiple time periods haven’t produced his desired results. Adam likens it to the waY the wheel had to be invented before anyone could drive a car. In order to have the exact form of time travel he needs to pull off his plan—a portal that can be precisely targeted to any date, rather than fixed 33-year intervals—he first needs all the other forms: the doorway in the caves, the child-killing chair in Noah’s bunker, the portable briefcase-mounted time machine, the incident at the nuclear plant in the ‘80s that gave Bernd Doppler and his successor Claudia Tiedemann a sample of the show’s science-fictionalized version of the Higgs boson “God Particle,” the apocalypse-causing God Particle blob the avoidance of which is the lynchpin of future society.

Adam’s room-sized Frankenstein-lab array wouldn’t be possible without these test runs. These test runs wouldn’t be possible if intervention in the timestream had occurred at an earlier point. Only now, with everything else in place, is he free to send Jonas to halt the start of the cycle: his father Mikkel’s suicide on June 20, 2019. Saving him would wipe all versions of Jonas out of existence, but it would be the deathblow for time’s godlike reign over life as well.

Why that’s the case is…well, it’s a little fuzzy. Moreover, Adam doesn’t explain how it would be possible for him and Jonas to break out of the “bootstrap paradox”—eg. John Connor sending Kyle Reese back in time to father him and save his mom, so he can grow up to send Kyle Reese back in time to father him and save his mom, so he can gro up to send Kyle Reese back in time to father him and save his mom, world without end amen—in this particular way, when it’s impossible under every other circumstance.

There are two possible answers here. Option A: Forget it Jake, it’s time travel. Option B: Adam’s lying.

Alright then, let’s speculate about Option B. In the present day, Adult Time-Traveling Jonas is still taking potshots at Adam’s arch-enemy, Old Time-Traveling Claudia. He describes her as the master manipulator everyone else seems to think Adam is—and who Adam himself describes himself as being, for that matter. This would lend credence to the idea that Adult Jonas and Adam are one and the same, and that they’re on the same side.

But! Adult Jonas is having nightmares about the God Particle blob erupting from the nude body of his teenage girlfriend Martha in the middle of sex. He later confronts his mother Hannah about her infidelity and deception. This isn’t how you’d expect someone who’s in on a master plan to rewire time and kill God to feel, think, and behave, right?

What’s more, the only word we have to go on as to whether Adam is Jonas as an old man is that of Adam himself. Yes, they have matching rope-burn scars around their throats, but judging from what we’ve seen of the post-apocalyptic future that strikes me as a not-uncommon eventuality. Adam’s disfiguring burn scars hide any further likeness he and Young Jonas or Adult Jonas might share.

Even taking that into consideration, they still don’t look nearly as alike as the exceedingly well-cast versions of other male characters at different ages tend to look—think of the Ulrichs, the Egons, the Mikkels, the Noahs, the Helges. You know who does have a similar round facial structure, though? The mysterious Inspector Clausen, whose interest in the nuclear plant and whose cryptic enthusiasm for receiving his job investigating the town indicate there’s more to him than meets the eye. Is Adam really Jonas at all, or is there another more likely suspect out there?

Normally I try not to belabor these kind of questions. At a certain point, you start reviewing material that exists only in your head, rather than the stuff that’s actually on screen. But to the extent that we’re meant to poke at these anomalies and discrepancies and strategic lack of intel, which we clearly are, it strikes me as fair game as long as it’s kept in perspective.

That said, I’m also going to go way out on a limb and suggest that Charlotte’s mother is Elisabeth, her own daughter, hence Apocalyptic Leader Adult Elisabeth’s insistence that no one screw with the time-travel portal. Why not go for broke!

Anyway, I say all that to say that I’ve got another boostrap paradox of sorts to mull over. Am I focusing so much on the time-travel mishegas because the personal material largely fell flat this episode, or did the personal material largely fall flat this episode because it was so focused on the time-travel mishegas?

I’m thinking specifically about Old Ulrich’s cross-time reunion with Mikkel, their thwarted escape, Mikkel’s return to the sleeping-pill clutches of his overly attached adoptive mother Ines, and Old Ulrich’s accidental run-in (or drive-past) with his other kids, Martha and Magnus, who themselves have traveled to the ‘80s to discover the truth about their estranged friend Bartosz’s wild time-travel claims. It could simply be that Ulrich has been pushed to the sidelines so much this season after spending the first as one of the real co-protagonists, or that there’s not as much weight and chemistry behind watching an older version of the character, played by an older actor, reunite with his little boy.

I’m leaning toward it being a performance issue. Thanks to sterling turns by Karoline Eichhorn and Mark Waschke, Charlotte Doppler’s world-shattering reunion with Noah, her child-murdering father, hit harder than the end of the show’s central and essential parent-child estrangement. So there’s no inherent reason why a slightly sci-fi-wonky verison of a Noah/Mikkel reunion couldn’t hit just as hard.

But this is an occupational hazard for Dark. It’s set a very high bar for itself to clear in terms of genre trappings, plot complexity, and demanding interpersonal dynamics all at once. It can’t clear all three every time; doing so even half as often as it’s done would make it a show worth studying.

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 5 ("Lost and Found") on Netflix