Dark: Sic Mundus Creatus Est
December 3, 2017 10:49 AM - Season 1, Episode 6 - Subscribe

Ulrich looks to the past for answers and dredges up disturbing family secrets. Armed with new tools, Jonas probes the cave’s murky depths

*In the opener, 1986 Regina is tied to a tree outside the cavern entrance. She calls for Ulrich and Katharina to untie her, and begins screaming for help, then 2019 Regina wakes up from the nightmare.

2019:
*Jonas asks Hannah how she met Michael, and she tells him it was at the hospital when she was 14 and Michael was there with a broken leg. At the police station, Ulrich looks at the Mads case file, and listens to the recording of his mother being interviewed by Tiedemann. At the Neilsen home, Martha gets into a fight with Katharina over going out to perform in the school play, she snaps that everyone is avoiding the truth that Mikkel is dead and never coming back, Katharina slaps her and Martha storms out, and hugs his mother.
*Regina gets a letter from the mammography screening center.
*In his room, Jonas finds that "Follow the signal" has been written on his cavern map.
*Ulrich goes to his parents house and tells his father he knows he and his mother lied about Tronte being home the night Mads disappeared. Did he lie about the night Mikkel disappeared too? Tronte leaves, and Jana tells Ulrich she lied in 1986 because she knew Tronte was out sleeping with Claudia when Mads disappeared. Regina was the last to see Mads alive.
*Magnus digs up Franziska's money tin from the train tracks but it's empty, he pokes around nearby and finds a necklace on the ground and pockets it.
*Jonas packs the suicide note, the map, lantern, and device into his backpack and heads to the cavern.
*Backstage of the auditorium, Martha prepares for the performance. Bartosz comes to see her, to apologize for taking them all to woods the night that Mikkel was lost. He tries to kiss her but she puts him off. He asks if she's heard from Jonas, since he hasn't since he was a no-show for his meeting with Noah.
*Katharina at home, looking at the itemized phone bill, calls a number on it and hears Hannah answer, "Ulrich?", and Katharina hangs up without a word.
*Jonas enters the cavern, and uses the new lantern to follow the map route.
*At the hotel, Ulrich confronts Regina over Mads' disappearance. He asks if she knew his father Tronte and her mother Claudia were having an affair and she did. She tells him it's Ulrich's fault Mads disappeared, as Mads had been walking her home because she was so terrified after what Ulrich and Katharina did to her. Ulrich thinks she deserved it after getting him arrested; Regina is amazed to learn that Ulrich thinks Regina was the one who lied to the police, turns out Hannah told Ulrich it was Regina, and the penny drops. (Then Ulrich goes back to the station and reads his old file, and sees Hannah listed as the witness.)
*Katharina calls the radio station and says that someone in Winden is the murderer, that the whole town is rotten.
*Peter and Ulrich's father Tronte meet at Peter's cabin and go down to the underground shelter.
*Aleksander sees the mammography letter, calls the center claiming that he and Regina are still waiting for results, and is told that the results were mailed out days ago and Regina's cancer has metastasized.
*In the caverns, Jonas finds a red string and follows it.
*Ulrich goes to Hannah's and confronts her. She still wants him.
*Martha performs the school play, as Ariadne in the story of the maze and the minotaur, and we alternate between the play, and Jonas in the caverns. He reaches the end of the thread, then turns on the geiger counter and follows the clicks to a smaller and smaller tunnel, that ends with a door with symbols and "Sic Mundus Creatus Est" (thus the world was created) on it. Onstage, Martha breaks down crying after her monologue about death, and Katharina comes onstage to hold her.
*Jonas goes through the little door and it slams shut behind him. Lights flicker everywhere. It is 9:17, one of the times in a handwritten list in a notebook Peter and Tronte have.
*At the school, Katharina walking Martha out passes Regina, who makes a snide remark about Katharina's radio call and says she and Ulrich deserve each other, and Katharina hits Regina until Magnus pulls her off.
*In the tunnel, Jonas comes to a fork and chooses the right. He goes through a (the?) Sic Mundus door again and goes through, and the tunnels get wider until he finds himself back outside.
*Ulrich sits in his car looking through the family photo album at pictures of Mads. Regina comes home and weeps in Aleksander's arms.
*Martha goes to Magnus' room to talk, and asks to sleep in his bed that night.
*Ulrich is struck by one of the pictures, and the memory of the story his mother told him about how Mads got a cut on his chin once when the brothers were fighting. He goes back to the morgue to look at the dead boy, and realizes that it is Mads from 1986 somehow only 16 days dead in 2019.

1986:
*Jonas is at a bus shelter in the rain when Hannah and her father in the dry-cleaning truck offer him a ride. Jonas recognizes her, and refuses the ride.
posted by oh yeah! (10 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Oh, that Jonas in the tunnels sequence was so claustrophobia-inducing. Part of me wanted to pause and transcribe Martha's Ariadne monologue, but I couldn't get out of those tunnel scenes fast enough.
posted by oh yeah! at 10:56 AM on December 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


So I guess Mikkel and Mads climbed all the way through that labyrinth without a map, just by chance? I mean, it's fiction, but wow. Maybe there is something drawing them to the entrance/exit, or they found a guide.

I got lost a little in creating my updated mind map. Who is Bernd related to? (Bernd is the one who retired as plant chief in 1986.) We haven't seen him in 2019, I'm guessing he's dead. Helge (Peter's dad) is the one trying to warn everyone, right? Do we know who was creating the steampunk machine? Is the hooded guy Jonas' dad?

Mind map key: Orange = kids who go missing. Green = kids in the woods when Mikkel goes missing. Dashed lines = unmarried love interests.
posted by AFABulous at 10:08 AM on December 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


I think Mads was kidnapped and killed and then his body was hidden in the future. That's how 44yo Hegel showed up in both 1986 and 2019, because he took the body through. So only Mikkel found his way through by chance.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:27 PM on December 11, 2017


I got lost a little in creating my updated mind map. Who is Bernd related to? (Bernd is the one who retired as plant chief in 1986.) We haven't seen him in 2019, I'm guessing he's dead. Helge (Peter's dad) is the one trying to warn everyone, right? Do we know who was creating the steampunk machine? Is the hooded guy Jonas' dad?

Very late to the party, but I just figured this out. As far as I can tell, up to this point in the series - as far as I've gotten - the only evidence is a single line of dialogue in the third episode.

Bernd is Helge's father, and Helge was the power plant janitor who gave Claudia the "Journey Through Time" book on her first day. The implication seems to be that Helge was a bit "slow" and that his dad would have liked him to amount to more.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:58 AM on September 12, 2019


I know this is old as hell and I may be querying the void, but -

I can't figure out why Regina's husband (?) has the last name Tiedemann. In Germany is it more common for men to take their wives' last names? Because according to my bigass chart, it's Regina's side of the family that's named Tiedemann.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:08 AM on September 12, 2019


Showbiz_liz, i can’t tell if your comment is from today or not (it has today’s date, but didn’t pop up in my Recent Activity, but I did get a bump in Recent Favorites activity)

Regina’s husband taking her name is atypical for Germany — I think it should be clear to viewers by the end of S1 why he did it, but it’s addressed explicitly in S2 too.
posted by oh yeah! at 9:07 AM on September 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


They're all very cavalier about cave exploration on this show. Jonas crawling into a passage too small to turn around in with no idea where it goes and no one who knows where he is... even leaving aside the radiation that's a good way to get stuck and die.

It seems that the door he came out of is the same one he went in, just in the past. It also seemed like the passage between them, not counting the fork, was essentially straight.

What was on Jonas' left as he went in will be on his right as he comes out, but if he hasn't turned around, then that means that world he enters is mirrored. From the perspective of the world he's entering, Jonas is mirrored. Assuming he's right-handed, he'll seem to be left-handed. Any writing on objects he brought with him will be backwards. He'll write backwards himself, unless he re-trains himself. This could be used to identify time travelers.

Now, I don't think the show is actually going to play with that, and I don't think it's likely they've thought along those lines, but it would actually play perfectly: the way to flip a three-dimensional object (like a person) in that way is to move it within a four-dimensional space!

As a three-dimensional person, Jonas couldn't perceive it but the path he was on actually curved back in the 4th dimension while remaining (mostly) straight in the third. I assume, given the references we've had so far, that relativity and black holes will be invoked to explain this arrangement.

Also, I'm guessing that the other fork leads to 33 years in the future, which will turn out to be where the mystery man trying to stop Noah is from.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:34 AM on July 12, 2020 [3 favorites]


They're all very cavalier about cave exploration on this show.

1986 Claudia Tiedemann shimmying down a rope to go spelunking in the toxic waste cave dressed in her office clothes and high heels was just ridiculous.
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:33 AM on August 4, 2022 [2 favorites]


But speaks to her pluckiness.
posted by Miko at 8:34 PM on December 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


And given some of the fancy footwork I've seen from women in high heels, maybe not all that implausible. But still, think of the dry-cleaning bills, woman!
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:37 PM on December 28, 2022


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