‘Dark’ on Netflix Season 3 Episode 5 Recap: The Many Deaths of Winden

We haven’t even heard the opening line of dialogue in Dark Season 3 Episode 5 by the time we witness the disposal of its first dead body. The body belongs to Regina Tiedemann, buried by her time-traveling mother Claudia after dying of cancer. The first line of dialogue is “Why do we die?”—and it’s a question this episode answers in detail. One of the most melancholy and death-haunted hours of Dark to date, and boy is that saying something, “Life and Death” continues to add new wrinkles to the series’ complex spacetime-travel plot, while rooting itself deep in the fears and resentments of everyday people.

Take Katharina Nielsen, for starters. Having traveled back to 1986, she promises her aged husband Ulrich that she’ll spring him from the mental hospital where he’s a patient-slash-prisoner, using her knowledge of the schedule of her mother, a nurse at the facility, to take possession of her keycard. But the attempt to stick Helene Albers up for the card goes wrong when a struggle ensues, and becomes a disaster when Katharina reflexively calls her “Mom.” Now convinced that this familiar-seeming crazy stranger is the fetus she aborted somehow grown to adult life in hell, Helene bashes Katharina’s skull in, then weighs the body down and drags her into a nearby lake. When she finally gets home, she viciously turns on her then-teenage daughter Katharina, hitting her and calling her a slut and saying she should have “got rid of” her too. Such is the sad, short life of Katharina Albers Nielsen, doomed to abuse and abandonment, killed by the woman she cared about despite herself.

Elisabeth Doppler, we know already, has a very hard life ahead of her, too. The deaf-mute child of Charlotte and Peter will grow up to be the one-eyed leader of Winden’s band of post-apocalyptic survivors. But in the days just following the conflagration, she’s still with her father, searching for her mother and sister. Not knowing they time-traveled just prior to the explosion, she despairs of the search, leaving her dad to go alone while she heads back to their trailer. But she finds she’s not alone: A stranger has broken in, searching for food. He knocks Elisabeth out, ties her up, and then, after wolfing down his meal, does what we’ve been dreading he might do and starts unbuckling Elisabeth’s pants. He’s surprised and thwarted by the returning Peter, but he gets the drop on the smaller man and kills him with a knife to the throat. Elisabeth, in turn, gets the drop on him, and bashes his brains in with a fire extinguisher. It’s her first killing, and from what we can gather of her fate in the post-apocalyptic landscape, it’s far from her last. (She meets up with her new caretaker, Noah, that same night.)

After running the emotional gauntlet of those two sequences, the death of Jonas feels comparatively easy to swallow, given the way it echoes the death of Martha at the end of the previous season. Having finally, officially grown tired of following orders from people proven to be liars, he disobeys the orders of Eva, the elderly self of the alternate reality’s Martha, and takes that Martha to Eva’s lair to demand answers. He doesn’t like what he hears: He was brought to this world with a single purpose (impregnating alt-Martha), and now that that purpose has been served, Eva and the adult version of alt-Martha and the slightly older version of the teenage alt-Martha who sent him there in the first place turn on him and shoot him to death. (What this means for the fact that we’ve seen older versions of him running around since the first season is presently beyond me.)

But even as Jonas lies dying in alt-Martha’s arms, secrets are all around them. Literally—they’re written on the tiles that chart the family trees of the people of Winden, in both worlds. Look closely and you’ll see the name of Egon Tiedemann and Hannah Kanwald’s yet-unborn child: Silja. Our girl from the future, perhaps? What’s more, Silja and Bartosz Tiedemann are the parents of “Hanno Tauber,” aka Noah, and Agnes Nielsen; I’ll see your “Jonas is fucking his aunt” and raise you a “Bartosz is fucking his great-aunt.”

This is less pertinent to the plot, but we also learn definitively that Helge Doppler is not the biological son of original nuclear power plant chief Bernd Doppler; I can’t make out the last name, but the first is “Anatol,” making it a safe bet that he was part of the Soviet army’s counter-invasion of Germany in the Second World War, hence Greta Doppler’s maltreatment of the boy.

Secrets and lies are as much a presence in this episode as death itself. As a kid in the 1980s, Charlotte Doppler learns that her “grandfather” H.G. Tannhaus isn’t her grandfather at all: He raised her after she was brought to him by two strange women the night his son’s family died in a car accident. On her way out of town (she reconsiders), she bumps into a young Peter Doppler, who’s come to town to find his father Helge just after the death of his mother, who only told him who his father was on her deathbed.

And in the post-apocalypse, the haggard time traveler Claudia Tiedemann is approached by her doppelgänger from the alternate reality, who tells her to reject Jonas (“He belongs to the shadow”) and join Eva in her quest to save the two worlds. It’s this meeting, and the book of notes given to her, that set her on the path to become Adam’s rival in this world—but it’s also bullshit, because the alt-Claudia claims Eva wants to save both worlds (whereas Adam wants to destroy them all), while we know that Eva actually believes only one can be saved.

It feels appropriate to me, somehow, that Dark appears to be asking what makes life worth saving just as much as whether lives can be saved as it nears its endgame. The suffering that the people of Winden have endured/are enduring/will endure—is it worth it? The thing is, the show has never wavered in its conviction that yes, it is. The characters who see life as expendable are always revealed to be manipulators, fanatics, and liars. The characters with the most reason to give up hope given what their centrality to it all, Jonas and Martha, are the ones who keep hoping. I hope they’re right.

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 5 ("Life and Death") on Netflix