I’ve only watched Season 1, so please no spoilers for Seasons 2 or 3!

Please forgive me as I’ve also had surgeries over the past two weeks, so I’ve been watching it while recovering in hospital.

This is my first time watching Dark. I’ve watched Season 1 episodes 1–6 twice because I was struggling to take everything in. I’ve then watched episodes 7–10 once and plan to go through them again before starting Season 2 for the first time.

I have ADHD, so I sometimes struggle to comprehend information or piece together what’s happening. Sometimes I understand individual things, but my brain just doesn’t connect them all together. Other times, I don’t even think to question something until afterwards!

I’ve been using the Dark family tree for each episode, which has helped massively. I’m now aware of lots of the little clues I’ve picked up on and who’s who, but I still have questions.
I genuinely think some of these are things I should understand by the end of Season 1, rather than things I’m supposed to wait until Season 2 to find out. I feel like I’ve lost the plot a little, and my brain just isn’t putting everything together!

My questions (Season 1 only, please!):
The black hole / wormhole:

1. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on with the black hole thing or why Jonas wants to close it. My brain understands individual explanations, but I can’t seem to connect everything together. I’ve even asked ChatGPT to explain it, but I’m still confused. Can someone explain it simply and how it all connects?

2. Claudia Tiedemann and the power plant: What’s that place the Tiedemanns work at? Is it something to do with the time travel? And is the young guy who desperately wants a job there Egon, the policeman?

3. Ulrich travelling back in time: I didn’t even realise Ulrich had travelled 66 years back rather than 33! That’s how confused I am 😭 I kept wondering why he hadn’t found Mikkel yet. Have I understood this correctly now?

4. The older lady with grey hair: Is she a Tiedemann? I’m struggling to work out who she is.

5. The clocks and time travel: What’s the connection between all the clocks and time travel? Could there not just be a wormhole without all the clocks? I’m struggling to understand how the different elements work together.

6. The two women at the posh house: Who are the two women at that beautiful house? There’s the pretty woman who Egon clearly likes, but I think she’s interested in Egon’s wife instead? What’s the purpose of this scene, and what am I supposed to understand from it?

6. Noah and Helge: I’m SO confused about these two. Are we supposed to realise Noah is bad by now? Is he actually killing children, or are the children just disappearing through a time machine? What exactly are we supposed to understand about what they’re doing by the end of Season 1?

7. Erik: Where is Erik? Have we actually found out what happened to him, or is that still a mystery?

8. Mads: Was that Mads’s body in the laboratory that Ulrich saw in Episode 6? Or have I misunderstood that scene?

9. Regina Tiedemann’s cancer: Was her cancer mentioned in the letter she opened? Have I missed something important about that scene?

I’m sorry for so many questions! I’ve been looking through Reddit trying to find spoiler-free explanations, but I can’t seem to find answers to all the things I’m confused about.
I keep rewatching episodes because I genuinely love the show and want to understand it properly. I just feel like my brain is scrambled at the moment!

Also, is there anything else important or pivotal that I should understand before going into Season 2?

Please don’t spoil anything beyond Season 1. If one of my questions isn’t supposed to be answered yet, just tell me to keep watching! ❤️
Thank you so much to anyone who takes the time to help!

Hello, I have been watching the show slowly those last few weeks and just finished the last episode of the first season, I found everything quite clear though intricated until the end, but in the last 15 minutes of the episode I totally lost the plot of what was going on. I can't tell if it's supposed to be confusing at this point or if I just misunderstood what I watched.

My problem started during the conversation between Noah and Bartosz in the car where he explained that Jonnas tried to close the worm hole but actually created it.

1) Why would using the device close the worm hole? In the discussion with the clockmaker in the beginning of the episode they explained that it would actually create a wormhole, not destroy it, so why would it destroy it...?

2) If Jonnas is supposed to create the wormhole by doing that, how comes the wormhole with the tunnels are already here? It would make sense if he came back to the past at a moment where the wormhole wasn't here, but it already was, and the day before that we saw it again with Claudia's dog disappearing in the tunnel to show up 33 years later.

3) This is the msot cofusing to me: If Jonnas remembers having the same conversation with himself when Noah capture his 2019 self, it means that he already knows that the past is already determined and he can't change the future, so why does he still think he can do that? And if he think he actually can, then why doesn't he prevent himself from bringing back Mikkel, which would prevent him from existing and thus from creating the wormhole, that he wants to destroy...?

There must be something I missed about all of this during this episode, I want to make sure I understand everything I am supposed to at this point before moving to the next season.

i recommended this show to my best friend and these are that son of a bitch's review (till season 3 episode 6) :

1) the series does not have the "fun element" and seems pale and bland and he says interstellar is better.(this last part always makes me laug)

2) Jonas should have used condom is season 3 , so this all should have never happened.

3) too much use of bootstrap paradox and he says that it feels repetitive.

4) the location of the plant was bad and it should have been somewhere else , not in a crowded town like Winden

5) the vfx has made the show what it is and without it the show was doomed.

6) the pacing is slow as fuck and it is not enjoyable.

7) the should have been represented in many better ways.

8) the cave should have been searched and closed due to many missing cases.

9) the series didn't paid off according to the time spent and so it is all a time waste.

10) an anime called black clover(which i also like) is better and more interesting than this series.

11)all in all series is a huge waste of TIME

Just realized the ultimate dark detail about the Cleft Lip character (The Unknown): It's the literal biological consequence of massive, generational inbreeding within Winden's closed loop. Since Jonas and Martha are aunt and nephew, their child being born with a severe congenital defect like a cleft lip isn't just symbolic—it's genetic poetry for a world that's entirely rotten at its core. These showrunners thought of everything.

Another thing is Katarina mom naming her after hannah who she met when she was a child, but hannah took the name Katarina from her when she was old.

Hi, filmmaking lover here. Been debating for a while which series that I never saw before to watch next, then randomly stumbled upon ''Dark'' while searching IMDB. After looking a bit deeper I saw that it seemingly is widely considered to be a masterpiece from beginning to end and it's possibly about time travel. I have no issue with subtitles so I decided to try it out.

If you feel like telling me one sentence before I fully start the show, something that doesn't spoil anything, maybe helps keep in mind what to keep track of while watching (since I saw many comments saying it is kind of complex) or just some random comment, feel free to say anything here. I would just tremendously appreciate 0 spoilers.

Thank you for your time.

as much as i condemn noah’s actions and how he was so blinded by adam, i understand the intention behind it and why he was driven to do what he did. he was desperate to find his daughter and have her back and blinded by which, he didn’t care if he gave the same pain he was suffering through to other parents and other people. i legit felt bad for him when he was shot by agnes- the betrayal and horror on his face was heartbreaking. and gosh, i loved noah and elizabeth together. he truly loved her and he was the only one she had left after she lost all that she loved. her entire family. as much as i seriously do not like noah and ulrich, they were just desperate fathers who wanted their children back and it’s heartbreaking. the entire show is literally about- despite the slightly fucked up family dynamics- the relationship between a child and their parents. jonas and mikkel/michael, ulrich and mikkel, noah and charlotte, elizabeth and charlotte, egon and claudia.

don’t even get me started on the origin, adam and eve. they’re in an entirely different league of their own if we’re talking about it😭🙏🏻

god, this show makes me miserable but is the finest piece of television ever created and i would never get tired of watching it all play out from the beginning till the end and then from the end to the beginning.

Could be better, but this is my semi-finished product.

Watched this show like 5 years ago, absolutely loved it and I'm rewatching it now. Keep in mind I don't remember S2 and S3 that well, I only remember the major details

Just finished rewatching S1 and I have a personal nitpick: it doesn't make sense for ulrich to believe in time travel so fast and with his clues.

For every other character I can see them believing in time travel. Like Jonas saw it by going through the door, Charlotte has her suspicions with the weird happenings and her seeing Ulrich in an old picture in the last episode, bartosz, Peter, tronte, and Helge believe it due to noah.

But for ulrich? Its not that believable. The clues he got were Helge saying he can change the past and future, and the tanhaus book he found on helges desk. Ulrich suspected Helge to be the murderer, but it could've been Helge orchestrating the murder with other people. It didn't have to necessarily mean he was time travelling.

Though you could argue his grief for Mikkel and desperation to find him causes him to believe in something as wild as time travel. And also mad's body didn't make sense for him either. But couldn't anyone who knew their family, have killed a boy, dressed him up as mads, and even cut the chin to throw off others?

This is just my personal nitpick. From a real world perspective, personally, urlichs belief of time travel didn't make sense. What's your thoughts?

Saw this on Facebook while trying to understand the ending:

“Just like a man can't kill his grandpa by travelling to past bcoz that'll contradict his existence... Similarly, tannahaus can't be successful in his experiment bcoz that'll contradict its own existence as the end result is always J nd M preventing the accident...
So, if the accident doesn't happen everything is normal...
But,if the accident happens it will eventually lead to prevention of the accident in the first place... So, no matter whatever we try the DESTINY is that no such accident ever happens in the first place...”

So basically it’s like your grandfather stopped you from ever traveling back in time to kill him?

What do you think about this, and if it you don’t agree, how did you understand the ending not being a paradox?

How come Katharina magically keeps her name even though realistically there's no way Helen would have gotten to the same conclusion without Hannah to give it to her, but Boris can't have the same lenience and meet Regina and marry her in the origin timeline?

I loved seasons 1 and 2. Great characters and great mystery. I enjoy time travel stories and Dark is the best time travel story I have ever encountered... That is until the very last scene of season 2, when it abruptly becomes a lazy sci-fi. Moreover, new characters from season 3 are less interesting and there is a lot of boring filler, like long takes of just Marta2 freaking out or characters having obscure discussions about their secret plans. In the first two seasons, every scene was giving me something to think about or it was emotional (or both), but large parts of season 3 you can just skip and lose nothing.

Some scenes of season 3 are still great, but I did not like the introduction of an alternative universe and the super pocket-sized time machine. I hate that it does not have the restriction of travelling back or forward in time of exactly 33 years, as that rule made all the epochs feel interconnected in a very interesting way. I quickly lost interest in the main plot.

I stopped watching when I had about 3 more episodes to go, because I completely stopped caring. That was about 6 months ago. I started thinking about Dark again today and I was wondering if I should at least read a summary of the ending?

I just rewatched Dark. For some reason I strongly remember a scene from old times (1888 or older) where some workers are building the railroad at the entrance of the cave. Am I just misremembering or did I somehow miss it?",

I’ve seen mixed responses for why Noah couldn’t kill Adam. One side argues that he was nervous and jammed the gun and or that he has had no experience with a gun of that nature. The other side believes that fate, as said by Adam in that scene is the sole reason for the gun not firing.

Is this situation just like the Jonas scene when he tries to unalive himself with a gun but it doesn’t fire due to fate intervening due to his future self existing? (+ younger Noah interrupts)

Could it also be a little bit of both? As in, fate drove Noah to mishandle the gun?

∆ a tribute video i made for the show ∆ ends with the darkest scene of god of war ∆ song ∆ bicep ∆ opal ∆ four tet ∆

I've been thinking about this since I finished the show and I'm curious if anyone has read it this way before.

What if there never was a repeating loop in the first place? At least not in the Groundhog Day sense. What if the characters just believe it repeats, but it actually only ever happened once?

Here's how I got there. Nobody in Dark ever experiences a classic reset in any sense. There's no moment where time jumps back and someone wakes up remembering the last round. Every character lives their life exactly once, from young to old. And when you look closely, everything they know about previous iterations comes from an older version of themselves. Old Eva tells her younger self what has to happen because it happened every time. But she only knows that because she once was young Martha and an old Eva told her the exact same thing. She tells her younger self what her younger self will one day tell herself. From the inside that feels exactly like repetition, but it doesn't have to be one.

Same with Claudia. She doesn't need countless cycles to find the way out. She remembers her older self promising that Regina will live if everything goes right, and from there she figures out there has to be a third option. That's the same kind of handing things down as with Eva. So she didn't figure it out "this time". She always figured it out.

The show kind of hints at this itself. S2E6 is literally called An Endless Cycle, and it opens with Adam asking if beginning and end are just different words for one and the same moment. A circle has no end, but it's still just one circle. Same with the ouroboros, it's one snake and not infinitely many in a row.

The obvious counter is that Claudia and Eva both talk about it happening countless times before. But I think the older ones just explain their world to themselves that way, because from where they stand it's the explanation that makes the most sense. As far as I can tell nobody in the show actually has proof that it repeats. It's basically the characters' own theory. And the characters in this show are wrong about how time works all the time. Jonas thought he could bring Mikkel back. Ulrich thought he could stop everything by killing Helge. Claudia tried to save Egon and caused his death. Adam spent his whole life believing the origin was Jonas and Martha's child and was completely wrong. So one more mistake, even a really fundamental one, doesn't seem that far fetched to me.

I see two weak spots myself. Claudia is the one character who actually gets it right in the end, so "they're often wrong" is hardest to apply to her. Though being right about the origin doesn't mean she's right about everything, and calling a circle endless is still true even if there's only one. The other one is that whenever characters are wrong in Dark, the show usually lets us know at some point. This one it never corrects. Then again, it never confirms it either.

If this holds, a few things fall into place. Nothing really changed in the end. Adam not killing Eva is just how it always went, and "supposed to" was only what the characters believed. And the two worlds never existed and always did at the same time, which honestly fits the whole show pretty well.

Has anyone read it like this before? Or is there a scene that actually shows an earlier iteration that I'm missing?

I'm trying to put together an interpretation of the ending, and am stuck on some of the finer points on what rules this show operates on in regards to superpositioning of characters, i.e. when character split due the apocalypse loophope.

The schrodinger's cat thought experiment works well because the cat is entire sealed inside its box and does not effect the world outside the box. However in Dark, there is more explaining to do. The main question I ask myself for this is - when there's a superpositioning event, does that affect just the character(s) involved at that immediate moment, or does it essentially create a new parallel universe?

The latter option doesn't seem to work, because both branches are often needed for the timeline to function. For example, when Jonas splits the first time (basement | alt-world), one version goes on to become Adam, and the other goes on to sire Unknown. If either of those things were missing for a given reality at any point in the show, it would fall apart.

So that implies that the characters split, but continue to operate in the same universe from that point onwards. I can't figure out how to align that with schrodinger, as both Jonas's certainly go on to be observed and influence the world around them without resolving back into a single state. But I'm willing to give the show a little latitude on that and see where it takes us.

Martha killing Jonas is an interesting scene to keep in mind for this, as it includes a pre-split Martha, multiple post-split Marthas, and a post-split Jonas, all interacting together in the same physical space.

This mostly works, but there are a few scenes I can't seem to resolve into this model. One is the scene where Adam and Eva are together, and Adam is "supposed to" kill Eva for the loop to continue, but doesn't. I realize Adam has split again at this point, but (1) Eva has not and (2) they are in the same physical space where Adam would be killing Eva. This could be explained if there was a whole other version of the universe for this split timeline, but based on earlier points, that is ruled out. Another example is when Magnus and Franzisca are picking up Martha, and the final Jonas steals her away.

On possible explanation is that something really did change for the next (final) iteration of the loop, and those other outcomes are now NOT happening. That's not my interpretation of how the loop works though for many other reasons, so I'm hoping for an explanation that could be consistent without requiring a "change" like that.

These are the DNA percentages (in theory, I’m not a genealogist) (assuming my sleep-deprived brain did all the math right) for every character in the main part of the Knot.

(I left out Charlotte’s family tree loop for the sake of my own time, and also because I think it’s already been discussed before that Charlotte is 2/3 Noah, 1/3 Peter, and Elizabeth is 2/3 Peter, 1/3 Noah.)

I spent 11 hours working out math calculations for this damn family wreath tree in Sketchbook, so here you go.

I speak good enough German (my second language; English is my first) that I could understand 95% of the show, but that other 5% was pretty damn important for me to understand what was going on, so I threw on the English subtitles. They are really good. Typically, if I'm seeing/hearing English and German in juxtaposition, at least some of the translations will confuse my brain or downright annoy me, but that almost never happened while watching Dark.

There is, rightfully, a ton of praise on this subreddit for the casting, direction, acting, etc. (basically everything about the show) so I just wanted to point out that, for all my fellow English speakers, we were spoiled by these subtitles. Incredible work by Nathan Fritz.

Do you think Hannah somewhat cared for Katharina in a way? Yes I know she cheated with her husband, but I always found it interesting how she felt the need to tell Katharina about the time travel and what happened to her son, eventhough she had no benefit from that. And then in the 50s she gives the St Christopher necklace to her mum and looked quite emotional when talking to her. Or maybe she was horrified by the fact that a young girl had to get an abortion and giving the necklace was an act of kindness towards her.

Might be a dumb question, but has anyone ever compiled and/or identified the footage we see in the intro of each season? I'm aware they are taken from different episodes, but I'm curious as to what each individual footage shows: from my knowledge, I know there's one in the season 1 intro that shows Ines bandaging Mikkel's hand.

Sorry if this writing is a mess and im terrible at this stuff

Its still amazing as ever and very sad, one of the best tv shows ive ever seen, nothing can top it besides attack on titan, thats on the same level but its amazing, its perfect to me, nothing wrong with the show, the story and ending is perfect and this time i understood it more, last time i was very confused and i still am but not as much as last time, i understand it more and ive never seen a story like this, the time travel stuff is so cool, the acting and actors/actresses are amazing, the castings are perfect for the older and younger versions, ive never seen anything like it, i know jonas and martha are related but i love them together but this will be an exception from what happened and claudia is the mvp, amazing character everything is perfect, 10/10+

I watched the show 2 years ago, i kept delaying rewatching the show, idk why, i usually wait a year to rewatch shows to forget stuff and since its been 2 years i forgot so much about the show which im happy i did, before watching the show, i was going to watch a recap of it by man of recaps and halfway through the season 1 recap i thought it was awesome so i went to watch it and i didnt realise it was in german, so i contemplated not watching it the show but it had a english dub so i watched it in english but this time i watched the show in german and its so much better in german, i switched to english every once and a while and it sounded so weird and didn't sound right lol

This show is also close to my heart because it helped me discover im asexual, this may sound weird, before watching the show i was questioning if i was or not until martha came up with bangs, i thought she was the prettiest woman ive ever seen and i realised i never found her sexually attractive and that made me realise I never found any else sexually attractive and I became obsessed with bangs and that made me confident somehow, so yeah it has a very special place in my heart (i apologise if thats inappropriate)

I just cannot find a series with such historical complexity and great cast as dark. ANY RECOMENDATIONS are welcome.

Anyone reading this? I've done a cursory read and there's some good stuff here: my favorite chapter was probably the one about the costume design: it made me perceive the look and feel of the show in a new way. I also liked the chapter about "toxic nostalgia," and the one about what "heimat" means, and the chapter about auteur TV will be helpful in analyzing how the show succeeded on an industry level. There's a quite a bit of repetition of the basics, and I am not sure we need the names of the actors in parentheses all the time, but on the whole I'd say there's a lot to sink your teeth into here.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-18950-9

So I finally finished Dark yesterday evening and I'm still sorting my thoughts, so here goes. Sorry in advance, this got long.

First of all, Season 1 was honestly hard to get through for me. Not because of the story but because of the whole mood. Everything grey, everything raining, almost no color at all. Season 2 changed that quite a bit. Suddenly there were scenes with actual color in them, sometimes even independent of what was going on in the scene. Whether that was supposed to mean something or not, I don't know, but I really appreciated it.

What hooked me from the start was the time travel concept itself. I can't think of any other movie or show that follows the Novikov self consistency idea this stubbornly and actually sticks with it. One timeline. Everything that happens in 1986 always happens in 1986, all at the same time. The characters don't know about it and it's not even really the topic, but it's always there. That was by far the most fascinating part for me. And the Schopenhauer line, that you can do what you want but you can't want what you want, pretty much sums up the whole show.

That's exactly why the second world bugged me so much when it showed up. Around S3E5 I was pretty annoyed. Not because it was too complicated, I had no trouble following it. It reminded me of that thing where shows add some new gimmick in the final season just to squeeze out a bit more fascination. I kept thinking of The Man in the High Castle (I only know it roughly, never finished it), where the parallel world idea started out great and then they kind of got lost in it. It felt like Dark was throwing away the one thing that made it special to me.

Having seen the ending now, I have to take a lot of that back. I'm actually a fan of the two worlds now, because they actually knew what to do with it in the end.

What still bothers me is the exit itself. For most of the show everything is pure determinism, action follows reaction, no exceptions. And then at the very end there's a way out of the loop. I know the moment where time stands still during the apocalypse was technically always there and Eva used it the whole time to keep the knot alive. But we only learn about it in the very last episode, so it still feels a bit like they built themselves an emergency exit. Personally I would have found it more interesting if the resolution itself had been deterministic too. Like a loop within the loop, on a level so high none of the characters could ever guess it. Tease it, and then reveal at the end that nobody ever did anything on their own.

The way I ended up reading it is kind of like a gearbox. The origin world is the drive shaft. The two worlds are gears that turn a fixed number of times, every round slightly different, so knowledge can build up until someone finally understands the zero point, breaks out and moves the next tooth in the real world. Yes, that's not 100% Novikov anymore. But I like a concept that allows the exit from the beginning way more than one that needs a break to be resolved.

And Tannhaus's machine actually did exactly what he built it for. He wanted to save his son and his family, and in the end that's what happened. Through a ridiculously complicated chain of events, but it happened. And once its purpose was fulfilled, it erased itself.

Also the Tannhaus family thing, this one kept me up a bit. Season 3 shows that the lodge goes back to the Tannhaus family before 1888, and the show never goes further back than that. So that part of history was never touched by any travelers. If all three worlds share the same history up to the first interference (Napoleon, the war of 1870/71, all of it), then the lodge should exist in the origin world too. Which means H.G. Tannhaus in the origin world wasn't some random clockmaker who came up with a time machine out of nowhere. He comes from a family that was obsessed with time for generations, and as far as I understood it started with grief there too. The show never says this outright, but it fits so well that I'd almost bet the writers had it in mind.

Same reason I don't see the ending as absolute. The knot is untied, the loop is gone, the two worlds never existed and somehow always did. The origin world just goes on, linear again. But nothing in the show says some future Tannhaus or anyone else won't build a machine again at some point. There's no clear answer, more like a grey maybe. And the dinner scene kind of supports that. Hannah's dream, the déjà vu, the yellow raincoat, and then she says she thinks Jonas is a nice name. Something stays behind.

I still can't really put the ending into happy end or bad end. The people at that dinner table got their happy end. Jonas and Martha got nothing, not even being remembered. And if you look at the war against time purely by the goals, Adam actually won. Both worlds are gone, which is what he wanted, and Eva lost. Just not with his methods, since his whole plan was based on being wrong about the origin. Right now the character I find the saddest is Martha. But the show did a surprisingly good job at making sure nobody is really good/pure. Everyone has their tragedy, but everyone also has their dirt.

The scene where Jonas and Martha fade out with that cover of What a Wonderful World was beautiful. I just wished it was longer. When everyone dissolves, only the people disappear and the world around them just stays. We get like four people plus Jonas and Martha and that's it. We spent so much time with these places over three seasons, I would have loved to see the cave, the power plant or the spruce forest disappear too. All those trees dissolving into light could have been a really nice visual. Two entire worlds are gone and we only basically see a handful of people fade out.

And then Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann over the credits. Both songs were perfect choices.

Still, it's probably the best time travel story I know. I can't think of a book or movie in this niche that's better written or better thought through. And yet I feel a bit strange about it. It's extremely confusing, and I think that's both necessity and intention, it plays with you on purpose. Great ending that closes everything, even if the way out of the Novikov idea feels like a bit of a back door depending on how you read it. But still very okay.