Dark Season 1, Episode 2
"Lies"
Original airdate: December 1, 2017
Writer: Jantje Friese, Ronny Schalk
Director: Baran Bo Odar
Cast: Louis Hofmann, Maja Schöne, Oliver Masucci, Stephan Kampwirth, Angela Winkler, Jördis Triebel, Daan Lennard Liebrenz, Lisa Vicari, Moritz Jahn, Paul Lux, Karoline Eichhorn, Gina Alice Stiebitz, Deborah Kaufmann, Tatja Seibt, Hermann Beyer, Peter Benedict
Every time I watch Dark, I'm struck by how quickly the pieces start falling into place. Episode 1, "Secrets," is pure set-up, introducing the main characters and their world before ending with the first major inciting incident. Episode 2, "Lies," builds on that momentum. It deepens the mystery of the missing kids, lays out a series of potential suspects, and then flips our expectations by the end. It's masterclass storytelling: the show lures you in with the appearance of a standard mystery drama, only to remind you that something much stranger is at work.
The town of Winden is waking up to the reality that another boy has disappeared. The police quickly discover that the body they found earlier isn't Mikkel at all. Charlotte Doppler briefs the force: the boy was dressed in '80s clothing, had a Walkman on him, and wore a copper pendant necklace. Already, the show is seeding its obsession with time, signaling that whatever is happening is not bound by one decade. Her briefing is interrupted by Ulrich, who has been scouring the caves himself. He's found a door leading into the power plant and suspects Mikkel may have gone through it. Charlotte begins the process of securing a warrant to investigate the plant.
Meanwhile, Jonas is both grieving his father and worrying about Mikkel. He has another vision of his father covered in black paint, a recurring image that feels like both a haunting and a warning. Searching through his father's art room, Jonas finds a map of the Winden caves with a note scrawled on it: "Where is the crossing?" Jonas later asks his mother, Hannah, if she knew what his father was hiding. She admits she's not sure she ever really knew him at all. Then, in classic Hannah fashion, she says she misses the idea of Jonas's father more than the man himself. Way to help your grieving son, Hannah!
Around town, other characters start showing signs of guilt or secrets. Peter Doppler, who was praying in Episode 1, looks ready to confess something to his wife Charlotte. Instead, he breaks down alone in his car, sobbing while a news report about Mikkel plays on the radio. Big sus!
Tronte Nielsen, Ulrich's father and grandfather to Mikkel, Martha, and Magnus, is even harder to ignore. He admits to Jana that he was out the night before but seems to lie about where he actually was, and later we see him washing a blood-stained sweater. When Ulrich suggests that Mikkel's disappearance might connect not only to Erik but also to his brother Mads, it feels almost inevitable to view Tronte's behavior and connection to two of the boys as deeply suspicious.
And then there's Jana. She embodies the long shadow of grief that hangs over Winden. Visiting the gravestone of her son Mads, she places a new action figure there, still trying to mother him, even decades later.
It's a heartbreaking moment that underscores the way trauma never really dissipates here; it calcifies. Jana represents the town's lingering wound, her quiet mourning a reminder that Winden has been through this before and is doomed to relive it again. Dark is nothing if not about cycles repeating.
Meanwhile, the Stranger makes his presence felt. He checks into Room 8 at the Winden Hotel with a mysterious briefcase. When he opens it, we glimpse a strange mechanical device. Is it the same one we saw used at the end of Episode 1? The parallel is hard to ignore, especially as we cut to Erik being dragged away by a man in a similar raincoat. The wounds on Erik match those of the boy found in the forest.
The power plant itself remains at the center of suspicion. Jurgen (Erik's father) and Aleksander (the plant director) share a tense exchange in which Aleksander insists something needs to be moved before the police find it. That night, he oversees heavy machinery hauling something away from the plant grounds. Combine that with his earlier refusal to let Ulrich inspect the facility, and Aleksander is looking less like a bureaucrat and more like a gatekeeper of Winden's darkest secrets. Could he be moving a body?
Jurgen also lands on Ulrich's list of suspects, prompting Ulrich to break into his junkyard. He finds a plastic-wrapped bag in a well, which turns out to be drugs, not a corpse. There's also a jug of old coins, which Jurgen dismisses as coins they find in the junk people leave behind. When Jurgen admits Erik was saving up for a motorbike, the two men share a fleeting moment of connection as grieving fathers. It's one of the few scenes where Ulrich's anger drops and we see his vulnerability.
On the home front, Katharina is also struggling with Mikkel's disappearance. She insists early in the episode that he'll come back, clinging to hope. But later she demands that if Ulrich knows anything about what happened, he tell her the truth. Their embrace is heartfelt but uneasy. There's a sense that secrets are already corroding their marriage. And, of course, Ulrich complicates things further with Hannah. After ignoring her phone call, she shows up at the police station. Despite his own son being missing, Ulrich comforts her. More demerit points for Hannah, who somehow manages to make Mikkel's disappearance about her.
Finally, there's Bartosz. He's discovered Erik's stash in the caves: a bag of drugs and a cellphone. He doesn't have the passcode, but the phone is a dangling thread that we know will matter later.
But then we get the big reveal! Mikkel stumbles out of the cave, dazed, as though only a night has passed. He heads home, but something feels just slightly off: the atmosphere, the house and the cars in the driveway. When he knocks on the door and insists he lives there, the boy who answers, who we quickly realize is a young Ulrich, denies it.
Ulrich hops on his motorbike with Katharina waiting for him. Mikkel is left standing in confusion and then he glances down at the newspaper and sees the date: it's 1986.
This is where Dark stops being just a story about missing kids and fully becomes a time-travel epic. It's a perfect execution of the show's central theme, that time doesn't just move forward, it loops, it folds, it repeats. For Mikkel, the horror isn't in being lost in the caves; it's in being displaced from his own life entirely. For us as viewers, it's the moment we realize the mystery of Winden isn't "who took the children?" but rather "when did they go?"
