History Series / Dark2017

* SanDimasTime: The time portals have a constant distance to each other, so someone spending a day in the past is gone for a day in the present.

** Tannhaus' initials, H.G., are a reference to Creator/HGWells, the author of one of the most famous time travel stories, ''Literature/TheTimeMachine''. In addition, his last name might be a nod to the TannhauserGate, which originated in ''Film/BladeRunner''.

* ArtisticLicenseLaw: German police are the responsibility of the [[UsefulNotes/TheSixteenLandsOfDeutschland Land]], not individual municipalities. While people may call the local police the "Winden Police", the uniforms would still show the Land's coat of arms, not Winden's.

Welcome to the beautiful, quiet town of Winden, Germany, circa 2019. There's a 98% chance of rain in the forecast. The nearby nuclear power plant is still in operation. Children are disappearing. Again. The police have no leads. Again. [[TheLastOfTheseIsNotLikeTheOthers And the birds are falling from the sky]]. Again.

* IdiosyncraticWipes: The warp/pinch [[SignatureTransition scene transition effect]] used from season 2 on when [[spoilers:transitioning from one world in the knot to the other]].

* DimensionalTraveler: If all the TimeTravel stuff wasn't complicated enough, it turns out that there are [[spoiler:two different universes, each with their own slightly different chronology. Small spherical devices allow people to hop between the two dimensions. It's ultimately revealed that they're both offshoots of a third, original universe that can only be accessed through special circumstances]].

* MissingChildren: The series begins with the disappearance of one boy, but it becomes apparent that Winden has a long, gruesome history of dead or missing kids. By the end of the first season, [[spoiler: six children across time have vanished, though Erik, Mads, and Yasin are murdered, whilst Helge, Jonas, and Mikkel were displaced.]]

** Season 2 [[moves everything about half a year forward, so June of 1954, 1987 and 2020, confirms the future as 2053 and features scenes in 1921.

** Mikkel [[spoiler:never returns to the present after ending in 1986 due to an not-so-accidental time travel caused by Jonas. The only person he ever reunites with is his father, and only for a very short time.]]
** Jonas, who is grieving for his dead father in the beginning, [[spoiler:has to endure a lot over the course of the series. Being Trapped in the Past and the future more than once, barely surviving being hung and having to watch Martha die made him slowly turning into the Stranger and later Adam, who are determined to finally break the Stable Time Loop to end their suffering.]]
** Ulrich [[spoiler:attempts to prevent the death of his brother and the two other boys by killing young Helge in 1953, which is not only completely in vain, but also causes him to end up in a mental asylum for the next 33 years.]]
** Noah appears as the Big Bad of Season 1, until it's later revealed that [[spoiler:everything he did only because his daughter Charlotte disappeared, and believes that following Adam's orders can lead him to her. After shooting Claudia, he learns the truth about Charlotte and attempts to stop Adam, but is fatally shot by his own sister.]]
** After the disappearance of her son and husband, Katharina [[spoiler:learns about time travel and is determined to bring both of them back. Mikkel is missing without a trace, but she at least meets Ulrich and pkans to break him out. This never happens, as she is Bludgeoned to Death with a stone by her own mother in the end.]]
** Claudia in 1987 [[spoiler:finds out about the imminent death of her father and her terminally ill adult daughter in 2020, whose deaths she will both cause. Later, she succesfully deceives Adam, Noah and Eva and is the one who actually manages to find out how to break the knot.]]
** In Season 3, Bartosz [[spoiler:can't adjust to living in 1888 unlike adult Jonas, Franziska and Magnus, who escaped from the apocalypse with him, loses all hope after learning about is Jonas turning into the one who will murder Martha one day, and is eventually murdered by his own son.]]
** Martha, [[spoiler:the one from the other world, who has to watch her new boyfriend die, and is manipulated by her older selves who slowly turn her into them, as well as Adam, whose plan is to brutally wipe her and her unborn child out. This is succesful with one version of her, but changes nothing.]]
** Finally, the Season 3 finale shows that [[spoiler:H.G. Tannhaus in a third world attempted to construct a time machine. He finished it in 1986 and it destroyed his world and created the two entangled worlds instead.]]