Dark: Double Lives (Doppelleben)
December 3, 2017 6:06 AM - Season 1, Episode 4 - Subscribe

Bizarre occurrences give Charlotte a sense of déjà vu, and she suspects Peter is hiding something. Franziska snaps when Magnus confronts her.

"Black holes are considered to be the hellmouths of the universe. Those who fall inside disappear. Forever. But whereto? What lies behind a black hole? Along with things, do space and time also vanish there? Or would space and time be tied together and be part of an endless cycle? What if everything that came from the past were influenced by the future?"

BACK IN 2019
*Charlotte and Peter Doppler get an awkward start to their morning, and daughter Franziska accuses her little sister, Elisabeth, of stealing her lipstick (and of being a brat who uses her deafness to fool her parents into thinking she's not). Peter visits his father, Henge, at the rest home, where he keeps repeating "I have to tell him. It has to stop."
*Driving Elisabeth to school, Charlotte breaks open a wildlife observation camera box and steals the memory card from the camera. At school, Elisabeth tells her she has a boyfriend, Yasin, now.
*Jonas enters the caverns with his father's map, while the hooded man observes from a distance. Inside the cavern, Jonas tries to follow the map but hits a dead end. When he returns to his bicycle, someone has left a red lanyard thread on his handlebar.
*The coroner does a bird autopsy for Charlotte, who is having deja vu from seeing dead birds with white spots on their feathers same as 33 years before. Checking the wildlife camera during the time of Mikkel's disappearance, she finds Peter was driving, belying his alibi.
*Peter shakes red dirt (of the same color found on the dead boy) from the floormat of his car.
*Magnus crashes one of Franziska's classes, then follows her out of the school when she ditches, to see her dig up a metal container from by the old railroad tracks and take a small package from it, then back to school where Franziska changes in the locker room for a gymnastics/dance class.
*Charlotte goes to the RV of a sex worker and asks if Peter was there the night of the disappearance, but the worker says Peter hasn't been there in a year. Charlotte goes to the cabin in the woods Peter works from, sees the red dirt in the driveway, and looks around the underground shelter in the yard. The coroner calls to say that though the white spots on the dead birds' feathers are similar to what they saw in irradiated birds after Chernobyl, these birds have normal radiation levels -- but their eardrums were all burst, which likely caused them to fall and crash to their death.
*Magnus confronts Franziska in the locker room over the package of money, wanting to know how she got it and what it's for. She tells him to fuck off, that she wants to get away from Winden because everything sucks, her parents haven't shared a bed for a year because her father only wants dicks now. And then they make out.
*Charlotte calls Peter and asks him to pick Elisabeth up from school for her. But Elisabeth has gotten tired of waiting - she puts on her sister's stolen lipstick and starts walking. Meanwhile, Helge walks out of the rest home. Elisabeth splashes her way through the rain, and finds a chocolate bar wrapper on the ground.
*Charlotte picks up Ulrich from the power plant; he had climbed the fence to search for Mikkel, but Aleksander is willing to let him go rather than be charged with trespassing. In the car, Ulrich harangues Charlotte for not finding Mikkel, then stomps off in the rain. Peter calls to say that Elisabeth was not waiting at the school - she tells him to go home and call all the parents to see if one of them gave her a ride, then spots Elisabeth's hat on the side of the road.
*Charlotte arrives home and wordlessly shows Peter the hat, and they embrace. Search parties look through the woods with their flashlights, then a lone Helge approaches a police car, saying "I have to tell him. He has to stop."
*Elisabeth walks into the house, to her family's relief. Charlotte asks why it took her so long to walk home, and Elisabeth says she met someone, Noah, who gave her a pocket watch he says he got from Charlotte. It has 'To Charlotte' engraved on it.
*The hooded man sneaks into Jonas' room as he sleeps, and writes something on the map.
*Back in the rest home, Helge grabs the nurse's wrist and says "I have to stop him", she asks "Who?" and he says "Noah."
*In the woods, Yasin stomps along, signing to himself that he's big enough to walk alone, then is stopped by the hooded man, who says that Noah sent him.
posted by oh yeah! (6 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Are there two hooded men? The one in the woods at the end seems to have a bigger, deeper hood than the one who entered Jonas' bedroom.
posted by AFABulous at 7:46 PM on December 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


Plus I feel like we see the face of one of them all the time, and one whose face is never shown.
posted by AFABulous at 7:46 PM on December 3, 2017


Good catch, AFABulous, I think you’re right about that.
posted by oh yeah! at 8:34 PM on December 3, 2017


I was under the impression that the face-unseen hooded man is Noah, but I guess it's someone else

The scruffy hooded man is credited as "The Stranger". He's also first in the credits so far after he appeared in the 2nd episode. I just finished this episode and I'm making a wild guess that he's actually Mikkel all grown up 30 years later.
posted by numaner at 11:25 PM on January 7, 2018


It took me until I finished the episode to catch it, but the episode title seems to be kind of an oblique pun in the German. "Doppel" (double) lives, and we spend most of the episode following the Doppler family, whose name is very similar to 'doppel'. Delightful!
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:25 AM on July 12, 2020 [1 favorite]


Less delightful was the introduction of a seemingly one-off trans woman as a sex worker at a truck stop. If you're only going to have one trans character on the show... don't do that.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:39 AM on July 12, 2020 [1 favorite]


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