Dear Child – Season 1 Episode 6 Recap, Review & Ending Explained

For Lena

Episode 6, and the season finale of Dear Child, begins with the man watching Jasmin put on Lena’s clothes through the camera. She smiles to herself in the mirror. Gerd dreams of Lena calling for help. He wakes up in his car, still outside Jasmin’s house. The other detective asks him why he’s here but he doesn’t say.

Matthias brings Hannah home, hiding her from the reporters. Karin doesn’t seem happy. At Benedikt’s clinic, Ruben tries to talk to Jonathan but he says he isn’t allowed to speak to others. A flashback shows the man carrying the driver’s dead body inside the house. He tells Jonathan to stay there and not look.

Matthias shows Hannah her room. Her drawing from the hospital is taped on the wall. When Mattias asks her about the baby the mother is holding in the drawing, Hannah tells him about baby Sara. Karin calls Matthias down and argues about whether this is the right place for Hannah. When he doesn’t listen, she packs a bag and leaves.

Aida tells Gerd they identified another dead woman from the remains in the forest. She was from Croatia. They also got a tip about a Dutch man named Jasper who is missing. His car matches the car of the hit-and-run driver. And his face matches the reconstructed face of the dead man. Since he moved back from South Africa only four months ago, it’s clear that he’s not the perpetrator. Aida tells Gerd to find out why Jasmin lied.

In her apartment, Jasmin reschedules her therapist appointment and mentions that she’s pregnant. Karin visits Jonathan at the clinic. He has an upset stomach and Karin pats his back when he throws up.

A flashback takes us back to the scene at the house when Jasmin was cold and wearing just a thin nightgown. After comforting her, the kids want to go back to their lesson (she had been teaching them from a book). The father approaches and the three line up with their hands out. The kids are let go but he accuses Jasmin of crying in front of the kids.

When the man says that Jasmin will have to take a pregnancy test, she seems to reach her brink. She grabs the snow globe and hits the man as he turns towards her. This time, we see his face — it’s the head of the security company, Lars Rogner. As the man collapses, the kids are shocked but Jasmin takes his keys, unlocks the door and runs out. She screams at the kids to run as well.

Matthias wakes up in the night to find that Hannah isn’t in her bed. She’s in the living room, waving out to someone outside. She says someone threw pebbles at her window. Matthias pulls the window shutters down and Hannah goes back upstairs, telling herself she did everything right. Jasmin wakes up even before the clock hits seven o’clock.

In the morning, Matthias is unable to locate Hannah again. Turns out, she’s in the van with her father. They watch Jasmin on his screens. The man tells Hannah to sleep for a while. He watches as Jasmin hides a knife in her sleeve. Jasmin then gets a text from him, saying he’ll be waiting around the corner from her apartment complex.

At the same time, a bunch of reporters turn up outside Jasmin’s building, sent there by an anonymous text. Gerd sees Jasmin sneak out from a different exit and rushes after her. He turns around the corner and loses sight of her but sees Lars entering his van. While following the van in his car, Gerd calls Aida and tells her about Hannah. He also tells her to find a connection between the Becks and the security company.

In the van, the man has Hannah put handcuffs on Jasmin. Hannah asks if they could have Nurse Ruth as a grandma in their house but Lars says no. Hannah mentions that Lars too was raised by only his grandparents.

At the security company, the secretary is unable to find any connection to the Becks. In Rogner’s office, Aida finds that Lars Rogner’s mother looks a lot like Lena. In fact, Lars never had a father and his mother ultimately ran away. Aida takes a picture of the photographs. The secretary finally finds the records of the company setting up the alarms and security of the Beck household — 13 years ago!

A flashback shows Lena accidentally getting locked out of her house while her parents are out of the city. Lars Rogner comes from the security company and helps her out since her parents are away. She offers ice cream as a thank you and he, all too happily, agrees. In the van, at present, Jasmin asks Lars why she was allowed to live when all those other women died. Hannah says it was because she asked for it.

On the day Jasmin ran, we see that Hannah went after her. It was Hannah who knocked out the driver. She then meets her father, who is now awake, in the forest and tells him what happened. She asks for an ambulance since she wants to keep this mother. She likes Jasmin’s stories since they’re similar to Lena’s. Seeing Hannah’s tears, Lars agrees.

He takes the shard of glass from Hannah and goes to deal with the car driver. He cuts up his face and then leaves Hannah with instructions on what to say. He tells her that he knows she did everything right and she’s a big girl. Gerd and Matthias speak on the phone, with the latter panicking about Hannah. He realises that Gerd has an idea about where she is. An announcement from Gerd’s GPS alerts Matthias to his location. He grabs his coat and runs out of the house.

Aida shows Jonathan a picture of Rogner Senior and he recognises it as an older version of his father. He also says Rogner’s mother looks like Lena. When Aida asks why he didn’t run out the door, Jonathan says Hannah told him not to. Since Hannah wants to see the sea before going home, Lars takes them to the beach. When Jasmin gets out of the car, he takes the knife she had hidden in the sleeve.

Aida tells Gerd what she’s found and is heading to one of Lars’s properties.

Using the toilet as an excuse, Jasmin takes out the shard of glass from her underwear (it was wrapped in a sanitary pad). She pretends to fall and Lars comes over to see what happened. She then stabs him with the shard, telling him once and for all that her name is not Lena. Gerd finds the empty van and investigates it.

He follows the path and finds Lars bleeding out on the sand. He asks her where he buried Lena. Lars said he buried her at home, in the garden. Hannah and Jasmin step into the sea water and Hannah removes her sunglasses for the first time. Matthias arrives and sit by Gerd, on the sand, watching Hannah and Jasmin play.

Later on, Lena’s body is indeed found and her parents get to bury her. Karin and Matthias go to a support group and work towards healing again. We see Hannah meet Benedikt at the clinic while Jonathan is now playing with Ruben. Gerd packs up his work desk. Jasmin is at home and her hair is brown again. We see one last shot of Lena, walking on a beach.

The Episode Review

While this miniseries has kept its sense of tension and ominous atmosphere throughout, the ending feels a bit lacklustre. After all that building tension, the resolution comes fairly quickly. It is really clever of Jasmin to have been pretending this whole time and the shard of glass in a sanitary pad was a touch of genius.

It also makes sense now that her sense of peace came from the decision to kill Lars and not from her backsliding. It’s pretty satisfying to see Lars get stabbed. At the same, I wish we spent more time with him and understanding his motives before witnessing his death.

There’s a similar lack of explanation that characterises Dear Child’s entire finale. The big bad guy is dead, yes. But what next? As we’ve seen before, it’s pretty easy for a victim to remain haunted. More importantly, what happens to the kids? Do the Beck grandparents adopt them? Hannah — so taken in by Lars that she knocks a grown man out — does she ever grow out of the brainwashing?

For an episode titled For Lena, we don’t see a lot of the titular character. I do think this finale would have more impact if it explained things a little more instead of simply hinting at mommy issues and an obsession with Lena. Less is more but in this case, less is too less.