That is how the news report on the current apocalypse sizes up the state of the world in 2020, following the time-traveling, God Particle tampering antics of the cast of Dark wreak their havoc around the world. You do not demand a diagram to figure out how to apply that sentence here.
But in addition to sounding prophetic, that is creepy, it’s a description of this plot. The impacts of all the time travel continue to spider outside with no end in sight, into the lives of the families of Winden.
We start with alt-Martha, who has traveled back in time. Here she and Magnus, who have been hauled at present, and our planet’s Bartosz, Franziska meet the apocalypse occurred. Their ringleaders would be the grownup Jonas, who’s cautious and suspicious of alt-Martha, and a blind older man named Tanenhaus, who presumably either is the spacetime theorist H.G. Tanenhaus or one of his ancestors. (Or Descendents with this particular show, who knows?) For a way to create paradise on earth, Tanenhaus sees time traveling like his unnamed father before him, enabling humanity to eliminate catastrophes until it happens and prevent pain. Best of luck.
Bartosz describes to alt-Martha that grownup Jonas is trying to recreate the time system that he observed from the Sic Mundus society lair when he traveled to the 1910s. It drops to alt-Martha to describe how Adam is Jonas himself, a fact Jonas has concealed from his young acolytes.
Katharina Nielsen (née Albers), who has been stuck in the 1980s for months, searching for her son Mikkel rechristened Michael by his eldest mum Ines Kahnwald when he time-traveled for this period. But he and Ines are missing; a cop says they’ve been relocated to a secret location following the abduction attempt by the older Ulrich, who’s been the past year, in an insane asylum for decades. Katharina has a touching reunion with Ulrich, but not until she’s unpleasant run-ins with her future rival Hannah (who gets married to Mikkel/Michael and has an affair with Ulrich, each of which struck Katharina near home) and her mum Helene, who abused her as a teenager.
In the’80s, the parents of Ulrich hold a memorial was kidnapped and murdered by the fanatical Noah. His mother, Jana, openly berates her husband, Toronto, for being more worried about his mistress, Claudia Tiedemann (who is also missing, journeyed into the future) than he is about his son. Claudia’s daughter, Regina, who’s caring for her lost mom’s time-displaced dog, is run into by Bronte afterward. In a dialogue that serves as a partial rapprochement, Jana hints heavily that Tronte is Regina’s birth father…
This is a pretty back-breaking issue to recall later in the event when an elderly Toronto suffocates the cancer-stricken Regina in the postwar 2020 timeframe. (And boy oh boy does”post-apocalyptic 2020″ ring different in the ear than it did when this series started.) He does so at the behest of the unnamed” that she”; presumably, he means the elderly time-traveling variant of Claudia, whom we have not seen yet this year.
Elsewhere in 2020, his daughter and Peter Doppler Elisabeth hunt in vain for any hint of Franziska and their family members Charlotte. (The former traveled into the future, where she communes with her mother/daughter Elisabeth; the latter, as mentioned before, went into the past.) They are approached by a young version of Noah, who’s hard at work excavating the partially blocked cave under the city where the trouble started. Noah promises Elisabeth that he will protect her after Peter is killed.
Additionally, young Jonas is still stuck in the alternative world, conversing with Eva, the old version of Martha (Adam and Eva, get it?). And that trio with the cleft lip shows up again to murder the secretary in the plant. I’m very, very curious to learn who is/who they are/who that they… are? But you set it, and it’s a brand-new mystery.
However, for all its storyline density, for all its family trees and timelines and multiple worlds, it doesn’t feel like bullshit for a second. It’s too hot towards its personalities for that. And no, warm in this situation doesn’t mean kind or soft it means respecting their essential humanity and putting that in the forefront of the story, not the mind-teasers.
Katharina is a terrific example of this. As played by Jördis Triebel, she’s alienated and worn out of anguish, as it does when she almost assaults the teenaged Hannah, and that could entail lashing out. However, the tenderness with which she greets Ulrich is heartbreaking, as would be the tears in her eyes when she meets her mother, a nurse at the psychiatric facility of Ulrich. Like Jonas and Martha and Elisabeth and Claudia and Regina and everyone else, she’s a person, not a plot device.
This mentality has a much better effect on filmmaking. In throwaway setting shots like you can see the orange glow of this ember away from the psych hospital, and every time a nurse lights a smoke, you notice it. There is no reason for that to be there because sometimes people step outside for a smoke. Dark never loses sight of what people do by just being people. Time does not change that. To borrow a phrase from the other spacetime-warping show, humanity is Dark’so constant.