‘Dark’ on Netflix Season 3 Premiere Recap: Another World

There’s no easy reentry into the world of Dark. Netflix’s twisty time-traveling psychological thriller, created by Baran bo Odar (who directs this episode, entitled “Deja-vu”) and Jantje Friese (who wrote it), has no shallow end of the pool to step into. You’ve got to plunge in head first where it’s deepest and, yes, darkest. That’s where the show’s sophisticated, character-rooted approach to one of science fiction’s most shopworn devices shines the clearest.

So let’s dive in, shall we?

We resume right where we left off in Dark Season 2, with our primary time traveler Jonas meeting an alternate version of his girlfriend (and aunt) Martha, just after his sinister older self Adam shot the “real” Martha to death before his eyes. Using her portable, spherical spacetime-traveling device, she warps the two of them into the cave system underneath town, then warps herself back out.

Jonas emerges into a Winden that’s familiar, but strangely different. The Nielsen family lives in what used to be Jonas’s house, for example. Parents Ulrich and Katharina are divorced instead of merely fragmenting; Ulrich lives with Hannah, who is a) very pregnant and b) now his wife, rather than his mistress. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t have a mistress: He’s hooking up with Charlotte, his fellow cop in the Winden police department.

Charlotte is still married to her husband Peter, but in this world he’s a reverend. (Whether or not he’s carrying on an affair himself, as he was in the “real” world, is unclear.) They have two daughters, Franziska and Elisabeth, one of whom is deaf-mute—but this time, that’s older sister Franziska. Franziska is hooking up with Magnus Nielsen as per usual (repeatedly and graphically at that), but they seem to be much more of an official “thing” than they were in the original timeline. Elisabeth, meanwhile, tends to the needs of her grandfather Helge, who in this world has only one eye and who keeps repeating things like “It will happen again” and “Tick, tock, tick, tock.” Note that this man is not to be confused with the slightly crooked cop Wöller from the original timeline, who’s missing his right eye, not his left. (In the new world, Wöller is missing his arm, not his eye at all.)

Over at the nuclear power plant, Alexander Tiedemann is still stonewalling the police investigation into a missing boy in order to cover up the plant’s dumping of toxic waste; the boy is Erik Obendorf, brother of Killian Obendorf, the boyfriend of this world’s Martha (who wears a yellow raincoat not unlike Jonas’s trademark fit). But Tiedemann’s mind is also on the death of his wife, Regina, who must have succumbed to the same cancer that plagued her in the “real” world.

Alt-Martha gets confronted with a version of herself covered in black goo in the forest while running away from the caves with her frightened friends. They hole up in the Doppler’s bunker, where a wormhole opens up and dumps out the corpse of Mads Nielsen, Ulrich’s missing brother from the ’80s.

One kid missing from the group this time around is Mikkel Nielsen, the boy whose time-warp mishap sets the events of the series in motion. Without him getting thrown into the past, he can’t grow up to become Jonas’s father. Jonas realizes that he has traveled to a world where he doesn’t exist.

Let’s see, what else…there’s a trio of figures with cleft lips, presumably the same man as a boy, an adult, and a senior citizen, who kill the retired head of the power plant back in 1987, after torching Adam’s room full of photos of the people of Winden in the episode’s cold open.

And the time-traveling alt-Martha appears to an adult Jonas way back in 1888 as he works on a time machine; he appears shocked to find her alive, which means that she couldn’t have appeared to him in the present day when he was still a teenager, or he’d recognize her for who and what she is. Meanwhile, an older time-traveling version of Martha appears to Jonas, saying the two of them are to blame for the apocalypse to which both worlds are doomed.

Got all that? I’m not sure even I do, and I write about this show for a living.

But the thing about Dark is that you don’t need to maintain a complex diagram of overlapping timelines and rootless family trees (remember that in the original timeline, Charlotte and Elisabeth are each other’s mothers!) to maintain an interest in what’s happening to the people of Winden. The strength of young love between Jonas and Martha, and young lust between Magnus and Franziska—that’s recognizable and real. So is the resentment Katharina feels towards her ex’s new wife Hannah, and the creeping sensation in Hannah’s gut that Ulrich is being less than honest with her. The need to feel like your choices matter, like you’re living and not trapped merely existing, the central metaphor of loops in time standing in for the ways we feel at the mercy of forces beyond our control—all of it stems from unflinching observation of real people’s hopes and fears.

That’s where Dark thrives. I’m glad to see it back.

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.

Watch Dark Season 3 Episode 1 ("Deja Vu") on Netflix