‘Dark’ on Netflix Season 3 Episode 7 Recap: In Between Days

Welcome to Dark: The Lost Years.

In a way, “In Between Time” (that’s the episode title as translated by the subtitles; Netflix bills the episode as “Between the Time,” a more literal but also more nonsensical translation) is an answer to “An Endless Cycle,” Season 2’s tour de force. While that episode broke from the usual structure in order to depict a single, pivotal day in the Winden saga, the day of Michael Kahnwald/Mikkel Nielsen’s suicide, this one bounces around time and space much like most others do—but it’s the times to which it bounces that are the key. We visit the years in between the pivotal years, the years that fall outside of the show’s 33-year time-traveling cycles. It’s a way of showing us how the characters grow and develop when the threat of apocalypse isn’t imminent, and when Adam and Eva’s plans to alter or facilitate that apocalypse aren’t operating at a fever pitch.

Take Elisabeth Doppler and Hanno Tauber, better known to the world as Noah. We follow their lives on and off from 2020 to 2040, watching them work to excavate the passage under the caves with Adam’s promise of a paradise free from pain as their goal. They join forces with Jonas despite his Adam-prophesied betrayal, and lose their daughter Charlotte to kidnappers (namely an older version of Elisabeth and her mother/daughter Charlotte herself). It’s the quest to find Charlotte, under the tutelage of Adam, that turns Noah into the fanatic we first met back in Season One.

Meanwhile, Jonas and Claudia work for years trying to reactivate the God Particle beneath the power plant and re-open the portal. Eventually Jonas despairs and attempts to hang himself in the same room where his father killed himself at the start of it all. He is saved by a young Noah, who gives him a gun to demonstrate that he can’t possibly kill himself, given that an older version of himself exists; “Time won’t allow it,” he says, in a casually mind-warping aside.

Nearly two decades later, in 2040, we learn that Claudia has deliberately been sabotaging Jonas’s attempts to reopen the portal, at the behest of her doppelgänger from the alternate reality and the doppelgänger’s boss, Eva. Even as Noah warns Jonas not to trust Claudia, Claudia herself ends her relationship with her extradimensional double by killing her and taking her place, pretending to be her so she can pass between worlds and work against both Adam and Eva to secure a future where everyone lives and no worlds need to be sacrificed. She becomes the elderly version of Claudia who emerged as Adam’s antagonist last season.

From 1890 to 1911 we focus on Bartosz, the time-displaced acolyte of Jonas, whose body is beginning to incur the scars we see in his Adam persona thanks to the unstable god-particle portal generator he’s been working on. We watch Bartosz lose faith in Jonas’s work. We see him fall in love with a Silja, the formerly unnamed Girl from the Future, and have two children with her, Hanno and Agnes. We discover that she died while giving birth to Agnes. We see Hannah Kahnwald show up with a younger Silja, her daughter by Egon Tiedemann, in tow. (No explanation as to how she got that facial scar, however.) And we see Jonas, who by now is fully scarred up, kill his mother and kidnap his sister, presumably to send her into the future where she will grow into young adulthood.

A few years later, in 1920, Noah arrives searching for Adam. The old man denies taking Charlotte himself, and promises Noah all the answers he seeks are in the missing final pages of the time-travel notebook that’s been getting passed around like a hot potato all season. He must find them, with help from Helge Doppler—setting up the kidnappings and attempted-time-travel killings that marked Noah’s conduct in the first season.

Meanwhile, in the 1970s through the 1980s, inventor H.G. Tannhaus works tirelessly on his own large time machine (built in hopes he can resurrect his family) in that bunker everyone seems to wind up in eventually, apparently getting it to work in the pivotal year of 1986.

In 2052, Jonas finally succeeds in stabilizing the God Particle, and is given instructions by Claudia to lead his younger self to where he needs to go, without deviating from the path. This triggers a flashback montage of key moments from throughout the entire series.

In 2020, Bartosz stops Martha from running into the house to rescue Jonas, allowing him to progress in his own reality without crossing over into hers.

In the alternate reality, Martha confronts her older self, who gives her her telltale facial scar and asserts that to follow her is to follow life, while “choosing Adam is choosing death.”

In the past, Adam finishes using the weaponized God Particle against the alternate-reality Martha who’s pregnant with “the origin,” but after she is wiped out of existence he realizes nothing has changed. That’s when the old version of Claudia appears to him, saying hello.

It’s Claudia, the “real” Claudia, who truly keeps hope alive. She rejects both Adam’s nihilism (he wants to destroy the spacetime knot in order to erase everything from existence) and Eva’s utilitarianism (she wants to kill one world so that the other might live). For her, it all comes down to preserving the possibility of bringing back her daughter Regina in a life free from the pain of her lethal cancer.

Is that even possible? According to Tannhaus, yes. “If time is relative and nothing is ever really in the past, and the simultaneous overlapping of different realities is possible, then shouldn’t it be possible,” he asks, “to bring back something that was dead long ago, and to create a new reality where what was dead now lives again?” He uses the example of Schrödinger’s Cat, both alive and dead simultaneously until our observations pin its reality down, to illustrate his point.

With one episode to go, Dark is Schrödinger’s Series. When the characters open the final box of mysteries, will they find life or death?

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 7 ("Between the Time") on Netflix