Under A Dark Sun Recap & Ending Explained: What Is The Series About?

2 天前

Under A Dark Sun Recap & Ending Explained: What Is The Series About?

What connects a family—is it the blood or the souls that merge generations after generations, bringing offspring into the earth who resemble their parents too closely? A family is a unit—a father and a mother, fused in the sacred tie of marriage, a vow to keep for life. It must seem pretty linear—the children inherit their parent’s doings. However, what happens when the units that make a family multiply? When a third person enters the marriage, it creates a pool of forbidden truths that needs to be covered up. For the newer generations to come, keeping a place within the lineage becomes a question of identity, but it also becomes a war against your own brothers and sisters. 

Netflix’s latest thriller, Under a Dark Sun, is a tale of murders within the family, deeply motivated by the cause of revenge, repressed secrets about birth, and patriarchs who caused heinous crimes against women. The drama is messy, and it implicates every involved character for murder, not once but multiple times, creating a deliberate maze of confusion. Rather than following the linear plot of “who killed Arnauld?”, it starts to introduce more violence and consequent red herrings that seem to muddle the plot, but by the end of the series, it rushes to tie its loose ends. A few more character nuances would have probably made it a delight to look back and analyze, but the series falls a little flat with regard to that. Despite this, at the core of the series lies a cycle of violence and how bloodline and trauma can flow right into the children, making them repeat the mistakes their parents once made. Under a Dark Sun explores the question of whether there is a possibility of closing this loop and making a start anew. 

Spoilers Ahead

What Happens in the Series?

Alba is on the run with her child, Leo, to go to Barcelona. She enters the town of Grasse and receives a recruiting mail from a flower farm owned by Arnauld Lassere, who is hiring seasonal pickers. Alba plans to stay at the farm for three weeks, gather some money, and then leave the country. With a complicated history of drug abuse and violence, her father, Thierry, thinks her to be unfit to take care of her son; hence, she has decided to escape. However, at the farm, Arnauld hires her immediately and, in cryptic words, asks her to meet him at the field. By the time Alba arrives, Arnauld is shot dead, and the police start implicating her for Arnauld’s murder due to her past history of killing her abusive partner, Dimitri, who is also the father of Leo. Alba had pushed off Dimitri in self-defense, causing his death. Soon after, it is revealed that Arnauld knew that Alba is his daughter outside of wedlock and willed one-fourth of his estate to her along with Beatrice, his wife, and his two children, Lucie and Mathiew.

While Alba has to prove her innocence for the sake of her son, strange occurrences start taking place around the farm. First, someone buries Alba in the same coffin as her father, but she is soon dug up. Noor, a flower worker, wants to tell Alba something, but soon she disappears. The only two people who step up to help Alba are Manon, Arnauld’s granddaughter, and Valentin, an employee at the farm. While searching for Noor, Valentin takes her to an abandoned cabin where they find a snuff room and footage of Noor. In addition, Alba also finds out that she was being surveilled. The police officer who arrives at the location is shot dead by an unknown murderer, and Alba escapes with Valentin. At the cabin, someone tries to put the murder weapon in Alba’s bag, and Leo finds it. Leo calls Thierry to go back home, but on the way gets kidnapped. The kidnapper starts to blackmail Alba by asking her to kill Jaques, Arnauld’s lawyer, who is all set to marry Beatrice, in exchange for settling old debts. 

However, before Alba pulls the trigger to kill Jacques, he drops dead with a heart attack. The anonymous instructor is satisfied, though, and they give Alba the coordinates to reach her son. Alba reaches to find Leo and Noor together but realizes that it is Valentin who has captured both. While Valentin takes them to a cliff, Noor ends up stabbing Valentin repeatedly and killing him for exploiting her for snuff activities. Back at the police station, Valentin is convicted for Arnauld’s murder under the prospect that Arnauld got to know about his illegal activities.

However, Beatrice is sent to an asylum by her children, when she meets Josephine, Mathieu’s wife, who the family thought had abandoned her children and left. In reality, she was put there by Arnauld. Alba is searching for her mother after coming to know she is adopted, and her search leads to Natasha. She goes to confront Mathieu and gets to know that she is actually Mathieu’s daughter and not Arnauld’s. She also gets a call before somebody shoots Beatrice. When Alba arrives at the location, she is again implicated in another murder. However, Manon is with her, and Josephine confirms that Hadrien, Josephine’s brother, would come to visit her. Alba can instantly guess that Hadrien knew all along that his grandfather put Josephine in the facility, and when Manon reveals that Leo is with Hadrien, she starts rushing back to the house to protect her son. However, en route, Manon reveals that she had also known all along where her mother was, and she snooped in the computers to find Alba’s existence and lured Alba into frame for her grandfather’s murder. Manon is the one who hired Valentin to do the dirty work that she was unable to do, while giving Alba legal support so that she can steer her accordingly and frame her for the deaths she had wished to cause.When Alba reaches Hadrien, Leo could already identify him as the kidnapper by his tattoo, and he struck an arrow to his chest, killing him. Manon threatens to call the police on Leo, but Alba tells her to keep quiet, and in exchange, she would keep her silence. This quiet gives Alba and Leo a new head start; although she inherits nothing from the estate since she is not Arnauld’s daughter, she gets a job and tries to get her life back on track. The estate is sold, and Alba goes to visit it one last time as the new owner walks in—it is Alba’s mother, Natasha.

Is History Repeating Itself in the Family?

There are two recurring themes that influence the characters of the series—intimate violence-based trauma and revenge. The men in the series—whether it is Arnauld, or Dimitri, or Mathieu—were all abusive to their partners. In fact, Arnauld’s infidelity and violence may have shaped his daughter’s choices in men, as women tend to seek out partners who resemble their fathers. On the other hand, Mathieu has repeated the violent and adulterous patterns that he saw in his father with his wife, Josephine. With father and son having an affair with the same woman, it makes their identity akin to one another, thereby proving the identification with the father theory in psychoanalysis possible. While Arnauld was deeply flawed, he also wanted to protect his son’s reputation by claiming Alba as his own. Or he simply did not know that Alba was not his. He put away Josephine because she could pose a risk. 

When Alba tries choking Beatrice, she says that Alba has inherited Arnauld’s violence—the women in the series are the byproducts of the violence that men have caused. Beatrice leans into an infinite loop of gambling to put her mind away, Lucie has lived with the guilt of seeing Mathieu with Natasha and telling this to her father, which she thinks caused Josephine’s abduction, and Manon is repeatedly trying to avenge all the wrongs by framing her own sister. In all of this, the youngest, Leo, ends up getting his hands bloodied too. Years of repressed secrets rise up from beneath the ground and turn into a bloody killing game as part of a cycle started years ago by Arnauld and Mathieu. The series indeed asks us to look at the pattern of who is to blame and who the victims are till the very last moment.

Is There a Possibility to Break This Cycle? 

While women like Beatrice, Alba, Josephine, Natasha, and even Manon fell prey to this vicious cycle, there is a liberation that awaits them. When Manon and Alba decide to keep the silent vow protecting each other, there is a hidden admittance that the women did what they did to avenge and reverse the wrongs that happened to them. Putting Leo in prison would not lessen the bad blood in the family but increase it. Similarly, putting Manon in prison for committing the crimes that she did to find her mother is basically giving Arnauld and Mathieu a pass for their mistakes. Their truce hints towards an agreement of solidarity. Both women break the cycle and are able to start new lives on their new terms. Leo seems to be burdened by the death caused by his hands, but perhaps he would now understand his mother’s intent in killing his father to protect him a little better.

Beatrice gets her punishment by being shot and is then revived, and Lucie looks lighter with the burden of guilt off his chest. The selling of the mansion is symbolic to them—it is the site of the violence, the infidelity, and the counteractions; letting go of it gives them a sense of liberation to start anew. On the other hand, Natasha resurfacing to buy it is also symbolic—it is where she was wronged. Now she is able to buy it back—it is an act of reclamation, as well as an act of reunification with the daughter that was taken from her years ago. However, even with its attempt to close all the loops, the series fails to answer a few questions. Manon had already seen Josephine being taken away in a car and must have told Hadrien about it. It is strange that she did not speak of this to anyone or try to search for her mother earlier. She went to quite a length to frame Alba, someone she did not even know before she saw the pictures Natasha had sent to Arnauld as well as the will. The series also does not reveal the workings of how Manon had been plotting to do such an elaborate plan and her association with Valentin. Valentin’s snuff plot seems like it was hurriedly added just to create an alibi, and we are also left wondering as to why he would take Alba to the cabin. 

Under a Dark Sun tells the story of how cycles of violence and betrayal can be disrupted through solidarity as it doubles down on the refusal to let history dictate the future. In the final quiet moments, as Alba and Natasha reclaim their ground and Leo steps out of childhood marked by inherited wounds, the series dares to imagine a different legacy, one not of darkness, but of beginnings.

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