‘Dark’ on Netflix Episode 5 Recap: Split Personality

Three truths about “Truths,” the fifth episode of Netflix’s increasingly engrossing supernatural drama Dark.

Truth #1: Dark is brilliant with splitscreens.

This latest installment of the time-traveling trials of the men, women, and children of Winden is bookended by lengthy splitscreen montages. It’s the most effective, and stylistically bold, use of the technique I’ve seen since Fargo Season Two. And rather than showing us multiple points of view as characters move toward confrontation or through a suspense sequence, the splitscreens are used to compare, contrast, and highlight the emotional reactions of the characters to the romantic and familial trauma they’re experiencing. It’s like calling in Brian De Palma to cut an Ingmar Bergman film.

Here are just a few examples:

Here’s Hannah Kahnwald as an adult in 2019 and as a child in 1986. It’s a simple way to connect the two different faces into the same person.

That’s Charlotte Doppler, the lead investigator on the rash of disappearances occurring in 2019, and Egon Tiedemann, her drunken and vindictive counterpart from 1986. Contrasted first with Charlotte visually here, Egon later comes up as an example of everything her partner Ulrich swore he’d never be when he became a cop, only to come to believe he’s just as big a joke and failure. The splitscreen makes that contrast visible, while at the same time demonstrating the commonalities between the cases bedeviling everyone involved.

Here’s a series of splitscreen cuts that make connections across the length and breadth of the story: adults to children, girl to boy, abuser to victim, wife to husband. Every juxtaposition is loaded with plot and thematic meaning.

And here we’re back to another relatively simple use of the technique, making it clear which actors are playing the adult versions of other actors playing their childhood selves. The difference here, though, is that this does more than clear up potential confusion — it solves a mystery. In a letter from his late father Michael sent by the mysterious stranger we’ve seen skulking around, who claims to have known the father but not the son, Jonas learns that his father was actually Mikkel, the missing boy whom Jonas was the last person to have seen. He was sent back in time, adopted by his nurse Ines, and in the fullness of time grew into the man who fathered Jonas before killing himself prior to his own childhood disappearance. Mikkel/Michael — a double image for a double life.

Truth #2: Dark grapples with almost untouchably difficult matters of the heart.

Let’s return to the most complex series of splitscreens, the ones connecting Hannah, Ulrich, and Katharina at various stages in their lives. Prior to this sequence, we’ve followed Hannah around on the day Ulrich and Katharina make the businesslike decision to have sex for the first time, with Katharina vehemently insisting on condoms to avoid having kids. (“No kids,” she says. “Never.”) Waiting after school for her father to attend to some business inside, Hannah overhears the two making out, and spies on them as they begin removing their clothes. (This happens just after she introduces herself the time-displaced Mikkel, who’d grow up to become her husband Michael, asking the kid if he thinks she’s pretty because she’s reeling from Ulrich’s romantic disinterest.)

When next we see her, she’s gingerly asking her dad if she should report something she’s seen that she knows should not have happened. When he says yes, she tells him that Ulrich raped Katharina. The accusation comes as a shock, since after all the planning we saw Ulrich and Katharina do together, and after all the jealousy Hannah has displayed, it reads like a lie. Even after Ulrich is arrested, the logical thing to do is chalk that up to the vendetta Egon has against the young delinquent — just another one of the mistakes and misdeeds that made Ulrich want to be a better cop himself when he grows up. But the splitscreen then shows an upset Katharina with an enormous bruise over her left eye. By providing this new information, our understanding of Hannah’s accusation changes completely. Now it seems she’s telling the truth.

But it doesn’t stop there. When the three teenagers grow up, Katharina is married to Ulrich, while Hannah is having an affair with him. How does this square with Ulrich assaulting the former and being turned in for the crime by the latter? And what about Katharina’s vehement insistence that she never wants to have children? Could there be a person, a parent perhaps, responsible for her feelings on the matter, and could that person be the source of her wound? If so, did Hannah make a mistake, or did she deliberately distort the truth? If none of this is the case and Ulrich did indeed assault Katharina, what does this say about their marriage, his affair with Hannah, Hannah’s friendship with Katharina, Katharina’s feelings about their children, and on and on? It’s a breathtakingly complex tangle of very difficult issues and emotions.

Truth #3: Dark is so good at investigating desire, despair, secrets, lies, and the interpersonal compromises we make to get by that it’s worth questioning whether the time-travel murder-mystery plot is superfluous.

Everything described above — as well as its echo in the 2019 love triangle between Jonas, Ulrich’s daughter Martha (actually his aunt), and Egon’s grandson Bartosz — takes place in an episode that also finds time to drop bomb after bomb in its supernatural storyline. We learn the sinister, mysterious Noah is a time-traveling priest who served as missing teenager Erik’s drug plug. As mentioned before, we learn that Mikkel is Jonas’s father Michael. This definitively rules out two possible identities for the mysterious hood-wearing stranger. (The leading candidate now has to be Ulrich’s missing brother Mads, though my guess based on a close read of what he says and doesn’t say to Jonas during their conversation is that he is a grown-up, time-displaced Jonas himself.) It ends with the stranger approaching the scientist whose theories about the spacetime continuum have peppered the narrative, and whose strange golden device is in the stranger’s possession. Do we need any of that when the character work is so strong? Could we at least get away with a version of the supernatural plot reduced to its bare essentials — an unexplained time glitch resulting in tragedy, with none of the attendant Da Vinci Code stuff?

My honest answer is that I don’t know. In many ways the show Dark reminds me the most of is The Affair, a drama that takes a similarly kaleidoscopic approach to its characters (though it uses differing points of view on the same events rather than time jumps across the lifespans of the same people), tapping a vein of psychological and behavioral material so rich I think many critics just instinctively laugh it off. They’re aided by a murder mystery — and eventually an attempted-murder mystery — that enable the show’s detractors to claim it’s either a goofy potboiler or that the crime angle gets in the way of the quiet character study the show would be better off being. But I think the murder angle is the hook on which everything else can hang. It’s a stake driven into the dramatic soil the show is claiming. If it works out, I suspect we’ll look at the time travel material the same way.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Dark Episode 5 ("Truths") on Netflix