Yeah, I didn't like the child deaths. But I think you have seen the worst of it now. This is the most complex time travel show I have seen or heard of. There are a LOT of characters in this show, including three different actors for each character, one for each time period shown in season one.

There is some time travel guru, Adam, who wants to bring about some ultimate apocalypse. He starts in 1921, you will find out later. Anyway, I get the sense that Adam and his disciple, Noah, are kind of evil liars working their own agenda. That kid Jonas seems to be the most pure character and he plays a central role in the story.

It helps to find one of those wiki or fandom sites with photos of the all the characters in all time periods. That and notes. Here is one, but there are others also. This one shows the different time periods with photos. https://dark.netflix.io

Thanks TC - I will check it out. I find time travel stories very confusing - like in "The Terminator" when John Connor sends his father back in time in order to conceive him? I still can't get my head around that one !! I suppose in this kind of show it is better just to go with the flow and not think too much. By the way "River" is on Netflix over here. I am really annoyed that we don't have Broadchurch - when I searched for it all I got was "Titles associated with". Someone should tell the writers of "Dark" that it would help viewers if the characters names were used more often. One thing - maybe I am missing something and this is a really stupid question but - if Jonah's mother as a young woman met Mikkel as a young man in the hospital and he became Jonah's father then why doesn't Jonah's mother recognise Ulrichs son Mikkel as the same young man? I remember what my first boyfriend looked like at the age of sixteen and that was many years ago.

Time travel plots always have some kind of paradox. Ever hear of the "boot strap paradox"? Also called a causal loop, it's when some initial event happens now which causes something else to happen later, and then that later event (or person) becomes part of the cause of the initial event.
An example is what you mentioned: a man travels back in time and fathers a child, who turns out to be his own father. So if he never traveled back in time, his father would never have been born. He is his own grandfather.

It means there is no origin for the events, which cannot be true. Time travel shows always tease us with brain twisters this way, one of the reasons a lot of fans like them.

In this story, Ines Kahnwald adopts Mikel when he travels back in time to the 80s. His name is changed to Micheal Kahnwald who grows up and fathers Jonas Kahnwald. And yes, Ines Kahnwald must have seen young Mikel again after he was born, grew into a boy and then went missing. She always knew something was strange about it all. When she saw young Mikel again, Ulrich's son, she must have wondered what was going on. Mikel had told her he was from the future. But of course she initially thought he had a strong imagination fueled by comic books. Later when she saw Ulrich's son Mikel she would have remembered that and wondered if it really could be true. Why didn't she say anything? I don't know.

When Jonas learned the truth he realized that he had fallen in love with his aunt Martha, the daughter of he real grandfather Ulrich. That was a shocker.

Groans.....oh my head hurts !!! Thanks for explaining what you could to me - I think I am just going to float along with it and see how it all turns out !!

I just wish they would release about 5 or 6 seasons at once. haha. When I binge watch, the show is over too quickly. They should use one of the time machines to go back and make more shows.

I have a silly theory about how Hollywood is able to make some of the movies it makes look so realistic. How can they hang people, shoot them, make them have accidents and die and look so real. OK, here it is.

Aliens gave them a lot of advanced technology, including advanced cloning techniques so they can clone and rapidly age actors and stunt doubles, etc. Then they really hang them and shoot them, like in those westerns. If they make a mistake in the scene and have to re-shoot it, they just make another clone and age it quickly (sort of like in the movie "The 6th Day"). That way the actors are never really in any danger.

You may ask, "well, why would aliens give such technology to the Hollywood movie makers?" I have another silly theory about that.

Back in the 1950s Hollywood began making "Mighty Mouse" cartoons and broadcasting them across the nation. Some of those signals went into outer space where the aliens picked them up. They were very impressed with the movie makers who able to get a highly intelligent, super strong, mouse to make movies for them. The aliens wanted to hire this mouse. They figured he could fly into the tight spaces in the ship to do maintenance and effect repairs and such. So they secretly contacted the Hollywood movie moguls and offered them all their advanced technologies.

Why doesn't the military have access to such technology? Well, the aliens gave them some stuff, but not the really good stuff. Why? The aliens were kind of pissed at the military guys because they tried to force them to give them their tech. They water boarded some captured aliens they had taken to Area 51. Finally those aliens gave them outdated, faulty, plans for various technologies. But Hollywood got the good stuff. Cloning, time travel, velcro, etc. (Well, they shared the plans for Velcro obviously, but the other stuff they have kept to themselves.)

It would explain a lot - have you written all this for posterity on the walls of your padded cell deep in the bowels of Area 51? Do they keep coming in and scrubbing it off ? Seriously though -can you imagine what aliens would think of the human race if we ever did get a visit? I think we had better hope they never do because in my view they would exterminate the lot of us. Yet another theory - I watched a documentary some time ago - about how scientists are trying to introduce honeybees into killer bee colonies - just think how this theory could be expanded upon - how maybe it is already being expanded upon. I wont go into detail - I don't want to end up being prosecuted !! I will leave it to your undoubted intelligence to figure out what I am getting at.

Actually, I recall a news story some years ago about the dangers of killer bees and how they were worried that some African killer bees might have been brought accidentally to this continent. They are a dominant species and can kill off our honey bees if given a chance. So the idea of a hybrid species of killer honey bees might be, or might have been, a real danger. That would make beekeeping into a very dangerous occupation. I'm not sure where you were going with the idea though. Were you hinting at weaponizing the bees? Armies through history have found ways to utilize animals for war, mostly horses of course. But the Indians from India had war elephants, and Alexander the Great didn't know how to deal with those mighty beasts. In WWII it is reported that the US Navy trained dolphins to swim up to enemy ships and bump into the hull deep down near the keel. Of course when they went on the real mission they had live explosives attached to their noses.

When I read about that I felt sick. Those dolphins are intelligent mammals who felt affection for their Navy handlers. And they were unwittingly sent on suicide missions. Thankfully that program was short-lived. (I wondered how the Navy could be sure the dolphins would only hit Japanese vessels and not US ships. I never read about any mishaps, but that would certainly be a danger of such a weapon system.)

Could killer bees be weaponized? That might require using an attractant somehow sprayed over the enemy forces, then releasing the killer bees near enough to them so they could detect the attractant. That is a lot of work for a semi-lethal bio-weapon. Also, it would act as an area denial weapon. Our own soldiers would find it difficult to enter the area afterward. I suppose a massive aerial spraying action designed to kill the killer bees could be employed to make the area safe for humans once again. But again, that is a lot of work, requiring a lot of aerial access. Drones could be used for all steps, but if you could get that close with drones, why not just use predator drones and conventional ordnance?

But I think you had something else in mind. What was your idea?

I think the idea was to make killer bees less savage and aggressive by introducing the genes of a gentler species. I don't know whether it worked or not. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't because the strong always overcome the weak. I wondered if one version of this concept might be achieved via genetic engineering to remove aggression and make people more controllable. Of course there are more ways of engineering than genetic.

@strangebedfellows said:

I think the idea was to make killer bees less savage and aggressive by introducing the genes of a gentler species. I don't know whether it worked or not. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't because the strong always overcome the weak. I wondered if one version of this concept might be achieved via genetic engineering to remove aggression and make people more controllable. Of course there are more ways of engineering than genetic.

Good idea. I only took the basic genetics course in college. Dr. Adams was the genetics guru at the college. He had an ego. You basically had to make an appointment and go to his office and ask for help or else you would have a very difficult time passing the course. He made sure of it. If you went there with questions, even if you already knew the answers, if you just went there and played dumb and asked questions and let him explain it to you and then said "Ahhh, I get it. Thanks so much." and so on, then he would always give you examples you could be sure would wind up on the test. And they were things he didn't go over in class! Damned ego of his.

Anyway, I guess you would have to try to breed out the aggressive genes, and then hope the less aggressive strains didn't get killed off by the more aggressive ones. Hard to do. The aggressive strain is the one which is already naturally selected, so it is the hardiest strain. Any changes you artificially introduce might be less healthy by accident, in addition to faring less well in terms of fighting the original strain. I don't think the modified bees would be rejected as foreign. After all, they still have the same markings and scents and so on. They would just be less aggressive.

Maybe you could cross them to select for less toxic venom. That would help people survive being swarmed and stung by hundreds of bees. But would that make them easy prey for the others if there is competition for pecking order, or habitat? I would guess it would. So I like the idea but achieving a less dangerous killer bee might be a difficult and long road.

Your tutor sounds like a horrible man !! I know someone like that - who shall me nameless!!) he loves to expound on his favourite subjects - you cannot get a word in edgewise - he is completely insensitive to his audience - there have been times I have been the target of one of his monologues and I have sat there with my head in my hands with my eyes closed (honestly - no exaggeration) and he has just carried on. He criticizes all the time but the mere whiff of a criticism of himself and he explodes with rage. He ticks all the boxes of narcissism as does your tutor I think. I am on S2 E5 of "Dark" now - and it is getting very repetitive and tedious - the constant waking from nightmares is a bore now as are the repeated dire warnings of nothing can stop it - and Jonas did a bit more than kiss his aunt as it transpires !! I hope it is near the end now because I am getting impatient with it. I guessed who Adam was and I suppose the choice of biblical names was deliberate - Jonas means "dove" bringer of peace in most definitions and Adam of course is first man. This was too tangled a web for me to really enjoy - my attention was constantly distracted by trying to figure out who the characters were and most of them were pretty unsympathetic anyway. Hannah in particular - what a vengeful virago she was !!

Yeah, Hannah has a wicked nature. Jonas eventually figures out she isn't a good person. Ulrich was stupid to cheat with her. Ulrich wound up being fairly stupid when he traveled back in time and met the young Egon Tiedemann. He repeated the line from the metal band he liked as a kid, the line the old Tiedemann didn't like. It was something about wanting to kill lots of people. Well, that was a pretty dumb thing to say while he was in police custody under suspicion of killing two children, and possibly a third. He validated their suspicions with that line.

I read somewhere that the creators of this story were big fans of Twin Peaks when they were growing up and they wanted a German version of sorts.

Yes, trying to keep track of all the members of four families in three time periods while you're still learning them made that first season incredibly difficult to follow. I found the second easier to follow, but I had seen the first a couple of times before then. Also, the second season has fewer versions of characters.

Jonas had only kissed Martha in the first season. It was in the second season things got serious, and I think that was in Martha's dream.

That explains a lot of things - the fact they were fans of Twin Peaks - I watched that show - and it was fairly unique for it's time - that's why it achieved a cult status. But I think it's too easy to make things weird just for the sake of it - like "Blue Velvet" I am not impressed with that film - it was so false and stagey and obviously designed to become a cult classic. As you say about Ulrich - it was a stupid thing to say - and I wondered is it the norm to simply assume that somebody has killed children and imprison them without a trial for 30+ years be it in a mental hospital or anywhere else? Another silly question - who were the two children in the debris heap? I also found it bewildering when all four of them - Ulrich, Katharina, Hannah, Michael plus Mikkel met at Hannah's house and they obviously were staring at each other and trying to figure out what had happened but nothing came of it. Nobody asked a single question. If I saw my younger self as a child of a neighbour I would ask a lot of questions whilst having a brainstorm about it.!! I am also fed up with is Jonas a goodie in one time period and a baddie in another. I think viewers have to know if a character is good or bad even if the other characters don't know - it's too confusing to keep changing a characters persona to keep people guessing. I still haven't seen any explanation as to why they chose children as victims and why the mutilations. And Egon - he hated Ulrich - no reason given - and Egon was just a boozy incompetent according to Ulrich - yet here he is investigating the puzzle and figuring it all out on his own - it's an inconsistency.

Yes you're right on all that.

I think the two kids in the 1950s were the two kids missing from 2019. One of them was the deaf girl's friend. I have forgotten for the moment who the other one was. He was never an important character, just a name of a kid missing. The mutilations, which looked awful, were accidents during the experiments that Noah ran when he was trying to make his own time machine. He had brainwashed Helge to help him get kids to send through his time machine to test it. I think they tried it on three kids total. Helge kidnapped them for Noah. Helge trusted him after he met him in the 50s after Ulrich tried to kill him, thinking he was the cause of the missing children (which he was partially right about. Helge was never really right in the head. Finally, as an adult, after kidnapping those kids and helping Noah, Helge came to the conclusion that Noah was a liar.)

Shouldn't people who knew the young Michael Kahnwald (Mikel) as a child have noticed 33 years later that Mikel Nielson looked exactly the same? You would think so, if they knew him well. Certainly Ines Kahnwald should have recognized him. Wouldn't she have said something, wouldn't she have shown his childhood photo to someone and said "look, this child looks exactly like the boy I adopted back in 1953"?
Are we supposed to think she was so introspective and private that she wouldn't have said something to someone, at least to her adopted son himself? "Michael, look at that boy. He looks EXACTLY like you did as a child, not just quite a bit, but EXACTLY. How can that be?"
Any normal person would probably have said something. "You told me when I met you at the hospital that you were from the future. But this doesn't make sense. That isn't you. You're here. But he looks exactly like you. How is that possible?" If that conversation ever took place, they didn't show it to us. What would the adult Michael Kahnwald have said to Ines? He of course would have known that it WAS him, before he traveled back in time. He would have seen that he was in two places at the same time, but different ages.

I am trying to recall now when the four of them, Ulrich, Katharina, Hannah, Michael plus Mikkel met at Hannah's house. When was that? I hope I didn't doze off for that scene.

This show is different to so many other time travel shows on another point. In many of them the idea is that you cannot be in two places at once, you can't go back and interact with yourself. In some of them, if two things from different times come in contact or get close to each other, something explosive happens. Almost all time travel shows say that changing anything in the past could change the future, possibly erasing yourself in the process. In this show they rarely mention this or seem to worry about it, except when Jonas and Adam talk about erasing themselves. (But that would change history which had already happened!) There are so many different types of time travel paradoxes. There is no way to reconcile any of them. It is like trying to pull yourself out of a hole by grabbing your own bootstraps and lifting yourself out, aka, the bootstrap paradox. So the writers try to distract us from thinking too much about that stuff, or just tease us with crazy explanations which contain loops of their own. When they are done well, these shows are very entertaining. But if not, the viewers roll their eyes and cry foul.

I give the writers of this show credit for trying to be different at least. I think the main reason they made the first season so confusing, with so many characters to keep up with and so many back stories to figure out, is that they didn't want us thinking too much about how impossible it all is.

The Jonas thing: they sort of dealt with that when Adam and Jonas were talking and Adam told Jonas "you are thinking there is no way you could ever make the decisions I have made, you would never do what I have done. I recall thinking that." So the implication is that Adam has some grand perspective which Jonas yet lacks which somehow justifies or validates his actions. But what that perspective may be, for now at least, they are keeping a mystery. This is one of those things the show must answer before the end. That statement creates a mystery, and an implicit promise to the audience to explain the mystery and and answer the question at some point. Good shows tie up those loose ends before the end. In fact, they have to answer them bit by bit as they go along or they will lose the audience. People cannot keep all those loose ends dangling forever. If they never answer the implied questions and mysteries, people wind up hating the show.

Egon hated Ulrich as a teenager because Ulrich was a rebellious sort who listened to metal rock music and had little respect for authority. Then Hannah told him Ulrich had raped Katarina, and Egon was slow to believe Katarina when she said she asked Ulrich to have sex with her. And when he met the adult Ulrich back in the 50s, Ulrich acted very suspicious and they couldn't make sense of what he said. Suddenly here is this weird man who showed up right after two dead kids were found, and he says he tried to kill Helge. And to top it off, Ulrich repeated those lines from that metal music from the 1980s about enjoying killing lots of people. Egon had reasons to not like Ulrich.

Egon was slow, but he was persistent. It took him his whole life to try to piece things together to the point that he bought into time travel. And when his daughter Claudia acted the way she did about the tunnels, it aroused his suspicions that there was something there. After all, he had twice caught Ulrich racing to get to the tunnel. He didn't have it all figured out, but he was finally looking toward the tunnels. So I don't find Egon's eventual awakening as difficult as you do.

Here is a question. When Ulrich was in the mental hospital, when the time passed to the point that he was a police officer, why didn't he request to speak to his younger self? Seems like he might have wanted to at least warn him that Mikel would go missing.

With time travel shows, there are always issues like that.

I have the feeling that this show is not going to give any answers - they are going to hide behind paradoxes and people simply not answering questions. I mean when the young Jonas was talking to "Adam" and they decided that the only way to stop the 33 year cycle was to stop Michael/Mikkel from killing himself - why didn't Adam stop it? He is a traveller - surely he can beam himself to any point in time that he wants - he said the god particle machine could do that as indeed it did do for the younger Jonas. I think with regard to my opinion of Egon - Ulrich regarded him as stupid - just a boozy old loser - his persistence suggests an original intelligence that he didn't seem to have. Then again - maybe I got the wrong impression. There was really no reason given for Ulrich, his wife and Mikkel to visit Hannah - but Mikkel wanted to use the toilet so maybe we have to assume that Hannah's was the nearest house of their acquaintance. It all seemed very contrived to me and for no resolution which makes it even more irritating. You make very good points about people who knew Mikkel not commenting on his appearance in two timelines - normal people certainly would have asked questions - but we aren't supposed to. Why - as you say - didn't Ulrich ask to speak to his former self - again - the writers hope you wont think of this because there is no answer to it. I am preparing myself for a huge disappointment when this show ends - I hope I am wrong - but I think these writers started out with a great concept and wrote themselves into a corner.

@strangebedfellows said:

I think these writers started out with a great concept and wrote themselves into a corner.

Yeah, though I think it is almost impossible not to do that to some extent when writing time travel shows. The best way to avoid doing that, in my opinion, is to allow for alternate timelines to be created when a traveler goes to the past and changes history. The history he came from is already there, so it cannot really be changed, in my opinion. A lot of shows claim that altering the past can cause changes to future history, as when two people never meet and have children because the past was changed. But to me that is crazy. Because the future still exists as it is, and all the history and interactions have already happened. It seems crazy to me to think that all of that would just disappear the way it does in many time travel shows. I find it more plausible if there are alternate timelines, i.e. parallel universes, which are similar but different in some regards due to the interactions of the traveler and the sequellae of those interactions. That gets rid of one paradox. But it may make it harder for viewers to follow, and it means the writers now have to deal with finding a way to return the traveler to his own timeline, his original universe.

Also, when someone goes to the past, should that age him when he returns? There are different of ways to look at that.

1- He returns to the exact moment that he left, i.e. the time spent in the past is not spent also in the future. He is not absent from the future time. He was merely in the past, and that cannot affect his time in the future. I like this version. I would like it to be this way if I were able to time travel. I could go back in time, go to school and learn all sorts of things, and then return to the exact moment I left, and retain all the knowledge I gained while in the past. In effect, it is like you get extra time by time traveling.

2- Time spent in the past is added to the future time, so when you return to the future, the same time you spent in the past has also gone by in the future. This is how most shows treat it. It's not necessary to do it this way, but most of them do. But to me, this introduces another paradox. If time spent in the past is added to the future, so you are older by the same amount of time you spent in the past when you return, then why isn't time subtracted from your age when you travel to the past? Why are you the same age when you go to other times? Why are you not older when you go to the future?

That's why I like option number 1 better. (That and I would get to learn all that stuff and come back more knowledgeable. Just think, you could ace all your college course by taking them ahead of time in the past. haha)

I guess the writers could stipulate that the original time is the only one affected. They could say you cannot get free time, and that all time spent anywhere else ultimately affects the original time. That is kind of how they seem to treat it. But that is by convention. I don't think it has to be that way. What about when the time traveler chooses to return to the future, but some time before he originally left? Is he still older by the same amount of time as he spent in the past? But that makes him older than he is in the present, doesn't it?

Writers must create conflict, dilemmas, and tension in their stories. If not, viewers get bored.

If I died while living in the past, would I also die at the exact moment I traveled back in time? Or would I die later on, the same amount of time I had spent in the past before I died? Would I disappear from the present, and then suddenly appear dead some time later?