From the opening montage to the closing scene, this is a tour de force episode of Dark. The everyday trials and tribulations of the adult and teenage characters are sexy and sad and often both. The Hannah/Ulrich/Katharina triangle of love, lust, friendship, and betrayal clicks in every respect. The beach scenes are funny and hot. The party is both sweet and, knowing what we know about the fates of everyone involved, brutal. Ben Frost’s music, particularly during the Martha/Jonas love scenes, is huge and rapturous, the way doomed young love feels.
And the meeting between Jonas and Michael is powerful and quietly crushing given its outcome. Actors Louis Hofmann, a truly extraordinary talent, and Sebastian Rudolph seem to pour themselves out all over the table where they sit and talk. What’s more, unlike the Ulrich/Mikkel material from the previous episode, the emotional impact of this father/son reunion isn’t hampered in the slightest by relying on sci-fi shenanigans to take place.
It feels like what it is: a son trying to save the man he loves most, a father trying to save the boy he loves most, and the both of them arriving at a decision over who must live and who must die. It takes the toughest decisions we must make as members of a family, as children and as parents, whether we’re ever actually forced to make them or whether they remain the stuff of troubling daydreams and what-ifs, and uses the science-fiction genre to probe that nerve as directly as possible. It does the same with falling in love, with the loss of virginity, with marital infidelity, with motherhood, with couplehood, with friendship. It’s reminiscent of “The Garveys at Their Best,” the standout episode from the first season of HBO’s The Leftovers—the episode that showed that series would become a classic. It’s dynamite. I’m glad it exists.
I reviewed episode six of Dark Season Two for Decider.
Tags: dark, decider, reviews, TV, TV reviews