Dark Season 2, Episode 5
"Lost and Found"
Original airdate: June 21, 2019
Writers: Jantje Friese, Ronny Schalk
Director: Baran bo Odar
Cast: Peter Benedict, Karoline Eichhorn, Winfried Glatzeder, Sylvester Groth, Louis Hofmann, Dietrich Hollinderbäumer, Moritz Jahn, Julika Jenkins, Deborah Kaufmann, Daan Lennard Liebrenz, Paul Lux, Michael Mendl, Christian Pätzold, Andreas Pietschmann, Anne Ratte-Polle, Maja Schöne, Gina Alice Stiebitz, Jördis Triebel, Lisa Vicari, Carlotta Von Falkenhayn, Mark Waschke, Lea Willkowsky
"Lost and Found" feels like it’s full of reveals and moments that could be the highlight of a season of television, yet it’s just past the midway point of Season 2. What feels like a finale is just another step in Winden's journey. It’s what makes the show so remarkable, and what makes a re-watch so compelling.
And yes, this show is terrific, even though the opening scene of this episode shows an older Jonas dreaming of sleeping with the love of his life, a woman who also happens to be his aunt. Much like the younger version of himself, older Jonas is haunted by what has been and what’s to come.
Meanwhile, the younger Jonas wakes to find Adam watching him. Jonas just wants to go home. Adam will do that, but not after a long talk.
Katharina tries to let her children in on what’s going on, but after being absent for months, they don’t want any part of it. They storm out of the house, leaving a woman who’s lost her husband and her son even more alone.
Aleksander Tiedemann is trying to shake off the special investigator Clausen. Regina comes to tell him that Bartosz didn’t come home last night. Aleksander suggests that he’s with Martha, though Regina knows they broke up. Regina, clearly fighting a losing battle against cancer, asks her husband to tell her everything will be alright. He does, and they hug.
Claudia looks at her father’s obituary. Later in the episode, she’ll ask him to move in with her and Regina. He seems to think it’s all a little rushed, as if he’ll die tomorrow. Little does he know what she knows. Also in this episode, Claudia will ask a nuclear power plant employee to test the God Particle specimen, having been given it by Bernd Doppler. She believes if it’s what he says it is, it could change the world.
In one of my favourite themes of the show, Adam tells Jonas that every person dies three times in their lifetime. The first is with the loss of naivete, the second with the loss of innocence and then, finally, when you actually die. It seems evident that Jonas has lost his naivety, but that more deaths are yet to come.
Ulrich now realizes, thanks to Egon, that his son is in the same timeline as him again. He smashes a glass over a care home worker’s head and escapes the asylum he’s been kept in for 33 years. He’ll run to Mikkel. The two sit and have a glass of juice together. Mikkel realizes that this is his father. The two missing Neilsens, reunited at last.
Meanwhile, Katharina visits Hannah. The two have come to terms with the fact that Katharina’s son was with them the whole time; she just never knew it. Mikkel, who became Michael, is the man Hannah married. Katharina tells Hannah that while Ulrich may have said he loved her, he always chose his family. That’s evident by the fact that he’s missing, having travelled back in time to find his son. The two are interrupted by Clausen, who is himself looking for The Stranger. The two women lie and say they haven’t seen him. He’ll ask Hannah about working for Aleksander, then wonders how Katharina could be so understanding of the affair.
The conversation between Jonas and Adam continues. While Adam says he knows what the future holds, he doesn’t know what people will do. What Jonas really wants to know is whether the future can be changed. Adam says he has finally figured out a way to escape this hell.
Adult Jonas leaves a St. Christopher pendant on Martha’s bed, then meets Charlotte in the bunker. She wants to know who Noah is, and Jonas tells her he is a follower of Adam. Charlotte probes further, asking if he knows who her parents are. He doesn’t know, but he knew her grandfather. She asks if he was a traveller, too, but Jonas calls him a pawn like so many others. Jonas reveals that he has a time machine and admits that he knows what happens in the future.
The teenagers return to the caves to find Bartosz still tied up. He eventually relents and shows them a time machine, taking them back to 1987.
Charlotte heads back to her grandfather’s shop, where Noah greets her. He reveals that he is her father, though he holds back from telling her who her mother is. He tells her that she loved him, and still does. She had promised to bring her back, but never found a way. He tells her the apocalypse is just two days away. He knows he must stop it by stopping Adam.
Returning home, Ines finds that Mikkel is gone. She calls Egon, who knows exactly where the boy and the man from the insane asylum went. They head straight to the caves, where they stop Ulrich and Mikkel from entering. Ulrich promises to kill Egon the next time he sees him, and Ines embraces Mikkel. While Ulrich is taken back to the asylum, drugged and restrained, Ines is also drugging Mikkel to keep him from fretting about being lost in time. Like father, like son. In an extra bit of cruelty, while being driven away, Ulrich sees his other children on the side of the road.
Adult Jonas comes home and asks Hannah if he ever loved his father. He also tells her that he knows of her affair with Ulrich. His mother admits she messed everything up, and Jonas says she’s always done that.
Adam tells Jonas that the entire cycle they are in is a knot that can’t be undone. Having been in Jonas’s position before, he could never believe that he’d be where he was, sitting across from the man he’d become. But now that he’s here, he understands it all. He tells Jonas that the only way to stop this from happening is to travel back in time. Jonas knows exactly when - the day before his father killed himself. If he can do that, Mikkel will never travel back in time, and while Jonas will never be born, everyone else will live. And so, Jonas heads back to the future.
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