Dark Season 2, Episode 7
"The White Devil"
Original airdate: June 21, 2019
Writers: Jantje Friese, Marc O. Seng
Director: Baran bo Odar
Cast: Peter Benedict, Karoline Eichhorn, Sylvester Groth, Louis Hofmann, Dietrich Hollinderbäumer, Leopold Hornung, Sebastian Hülk, Moritz Jahn, Stephan Kampwirth, Lisa Kreuzer, Daan Lennard Liebrenz, Paul Lux, Oliver Masucci, Florian Panzner, Christian Pätzold, Henning Peker, Tom Philipp, Andreas Pietschmann, Maja Schöne, Mieke Schymura, Gina Alice Stiebitz, Jördis Triebel, Lisa Vicari, Carlotta Von Falkenhayn, Cordelia Wege, Lea Willkowsky
This week’s episode of Dark is all about the choices that some of the central female characters in the show make, and it shapes the course of what’s to come and what has been. It’s the beginning of Katharina taking matters into her own hands, Hannah rebelling against what she has felt has been done to her, and the transformation of Claudia into The White Devil.
Adam once again narrates the opening to the episode. This time, he imagines himself sitting across from Martha, the person he believes, or at least believed, is his true love. He tells us that people are driven by their desires. It’s a central theme of the show. It’s the thing that has driven so many of our characters so far, and will play out in this episode. Jonas is on a quest to save his father. Ulrich is trying to save his son. Charlotte wants to know who her parents are. All are driven by their desires.
Hannah has had enough of Winden, at least the 2020 version (hey, relatable). She takes Jonas’s time machine and leaves as she imagines Ulrich watching her. Martha looks at her St. Christopher medal while imagining Jonas. Katharina imagines having her boy back.
In 1954, Egon inspects the old woman (little does he know this is his daughter). He does recognize her as the woman who came into his office prior. It was the same day that Helge, the boy, returned home. Perhaps the two are connected, he wonders.
In 1987, Claudia is at work studying the samples. Today is the day her father will die. She leaves to go, presumably, prevent his death.
Adult Jonas wakes up in 2020 to find his mother has gone and his time machine is missing. Classic family stuff! We see Hannah walk into the caves.
Charlotte shows Peter the photo of her as a baby with Noah holding her. The priest had told her the world would end tomorrow. She tells her husband that her mother is alive. Meanwhile, Inspector Clausen is still on the case and has honed in on Aleksander Tiedemann.
We get an official break-up between Martha and Bartosz (thank god), after she believes that Jonas has returned due to the St. Christopher medal being found in her room. She’s half right, it’s just a much, much older version of her beloved Jonas who left the pendant.
Egon tries to figure out who the old woman is and asks Helge if he recognizes the woman. The boy knows of her and calls her "The White Devil," though doesn’t tell how he heard that moniker. He does add that Claudia wants to kill them all. When Egon insists that she is already dead, Helge gives a very spooky boy thing to say and says “she hasn’t even started yet.”
In the '80s, Claudia is trying to save Egon. She wants him to move in with them. He’s not interested, though he does allow her to join him for his first chemotherapy appointment. Progress! On the way, Egon will tell Claudia that time travel exists just like it does in Back to the Future.
Clausen gives us a big reveal. Turns out, he’s the brother of Aleksander Kohler, the man Aleksander is pretending to be! Clausen arrests him. Another man driven by desire - this time to find the man who murdered his brother. Extremely strange that it took this long for Clausen to arrest Aleksander.
Martha heads to Jonas’s house to find him and does ... sort of. Instead of finding teenage Jonas, she finds adult Jonas. She feels as though she’s experiencing deja vu. She figures out this is Jonas, just one from the future.
Hannah can’t help but mess things up in any timeline she’s in. She heads to the police station, introducing herself as Hannah Nielsen and asks to see Ulrich. The man being kept prisoner begs her to save him. He promises to leave Katharina. She makes him suffer, leaves him behind, and tells Egon that it’s not her husband. Later, when the two talk, there appears to be some flirtatious vibes between the police officer and Hannah.
Jonas explains how he went missing to Martha. The two hold hands, but cue the over protecting mom, though this one may have a point, when Katharina shows up and reveals that the love of Martha’s life is actually her nephew. Awkward!
At the Doppler house, Franziska, Magnus and Elisabeth share what they know with Charlotte and Peter. Now everyone is on the same page that time travel is real! When Franziska realizes that her parents already knew, she is furious as it’s just another secret like her father’s affair. Magnus gets a call from Martha and learns that Jonas is back and their father and brother are still alive, just stuck in time.
Magnus, Martha, and Katharina debrief and console one another. Magnus shows his mom the time machine, which she begins to study.
Claudia tries one last time to convince her father to move in with her. When he refuses, she begins to get upset. In a struggle, he realizes that she is the woman he saw all those years ago. He begins to call the police to get them to search the caves, but she tries to rip the phone out of his hands. In the confrontation, he stumbles back and hits his head. Claudia realizes that not only has he died, but that she has caused it. In the moments before he fell, he called her "The White Devil." Claudia goes to call an ambulance but hangs up, realizing that all of this must happen so that Regina can live.
She returns home and begins washing the blood off her hands. Teenage Jonas arrives. He tells her they must go. It was her older self who instructed him to retrieve her. When she asks where they are going, he simply responds “to the future.”
In the end, the episode circles back to Adam’s thesis: desire is the engine of everything. Each choice made here is both deeply personal and cosmically catastrophic. Hannah chooses herself, no matter the collateral damage. Katharina chooses action over patience, finally stepping into the role of a mother who will tear time apart to save her child. And Claudia, in the cruelest twist of all, becomes the very monster she was warned about, not out of malice, but out of love. The White Devil is not born from evil intentions, but from the unbearable knowledge of necessary intentions. Desire doesn’t just move the plot forward. It traps everyone inside it, forever repeating the moment where they chose, and could not choose differently.
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