History Series / Dark2017

** The exterior of the cave looks different in each time period: [[spoiler:In 2019 there is a chair. In 1986 there is no chair. In 1953 there is a gate half-blocking the entrance. In 1921 the tunnel system is still under construction.]]

** A ticking sound effect is often used to indicate a switch in time period (though not always, for example not during the frequent montages which already have audio from either music or narration).

** Various teens at the local high school, including Magnus (the principal's son) and Franziska (the daughter of the local chief of police), are consuming and/or peddling drugs, although they are much more decent and caring than the other children.

* InSpiteOfANail: Zigzagged to hell and back in season 3 [[spoiler: without Mikkel going back in time many details change, Helge loses an eye instead of an ear, Wöller loses an arm instead of an eye, Ulrich cheats on Hannah with Charlotte instead of cheating on Katharina with Hannah etc. However, many things remain the same, including all the time loops that enable the existence of characters, and of course the apocalypse, although it happens later than in Jonas's universe.]]

* PlotArmor: It's explicitly stated in season 3 that [[spoiler: since Adam exists, Jonas cannot die. Any attempt on his life, even from himself, will inevitably fail. It simply cannot be done]].

* INeedAFreakingDrink: In season 3, Katharina's mother has to take a sip from a bottle after she [[spoiler:killed Katharina's older version and [[DisposalOfABody sank her body in the lake]]]]. She then [[TheseHandsHaveKilled looks at her hands in horror]] and frantically tries to [[OutDamnedSpot wash the bloodstains off them]].

* OutDamnedSpot: Claudia desperately tries to wash off the blood from her hands after the [[MurderByInaction not-so-accidental]] death of [[spoiler:her father.]] Also, in season 3, [[spoiler:after Jonas gets killed, Martha desperately tries to wash his blood off her hands]]. It leads to her cutting her blood-stained hair as well.

* AmbiguousEnding: The third and final season ends on the same note as the whole show: [[BittersweetEnding bittersweet]] ambiguity. [[spoiler:Jonas and Martha sacrifice themselves and their whole realities to break the temporal cycle of misery they live in and save Tanhaus's family, seemingly successfully. In the final scene we see some of the characters who weren't RetGone (Katharina, Wöller, Peter, Hannah, Regina, and Bernadette) leading seemingly much more adjusted and happy lives and having a cordial dinner together, with Hannah being pregnant. During the dinner, the lights go out (malfunctioning electric equipment being a common sign of time travel) and Hannah stares at a yellow raincoat exactly like Jonas's while talking about her dream of the end of the world. After the lights come back, Hannah states she wants to name her unborn son "Jonas". Were the lights going out sign of further time travel or just a power outage? Were the name "Jonas" and the dreams of the end of the world signs that the cycle has not been broken or just echoes of dead realities? Will Jonas get another chance or is the unborn baby a different person with the same name?]]

* DeadGuyJunior: In the finale [[spoiler: Hannah from the Origin World]] is pregnant and while experiencing some sort of resonance from [[spoiler: the erased universes]] muses that she likes the name [[spoiler: Jonas.]]

* DeliberateValuesDissonance: The scenes set in the 1950s contain some of them: Besides great amounts of smoking, Egon Tiedemann and Daniel Kahnwald being casually sexist, there's the way the police discovers [[spoiler:the bodies of 2019 timeline kids, one of them of Middle Eastern descent, and both wearing clothes labeled as "Made In China".]] The cops look like the only way they can wrap their heads around these details is to conclude it must be some sort of BadFuture. Additionally, the coroner's description of one of the corpses is worded in a way that would let him appear like a hardcore racist in contemporary German.

Not to be confused with the video game VideoGame/{{Dark}}.

* CorpseTemperatureTampering: DiscussedTrope. On the 5th of November 2019, the police found the corpse of a teenage boy who died around 10 hours ago. [[spoiler: The policeman Ulrich Nielsen then begins to theorize that this might be his own brother, who has been missing since October 1986, and that the corpse was somehow conserved for 33 years. When he ask the coroner about how something could be possible, she shoots the idea down. As it turns out,it indeed was Ulrich's brother but little they knew that there was TimeTravel involved, too. And as season 3 shows, the same thing happened in the alternate world too.]]

* DeliberateValuesDissonance: The scenes set in the 1950s contain some of them: Besides great amounts of smoking, Egon Tiedemann and Daniel Kahnwald being casually sexist, there's the way the police discovers [[spoiler:the bodies of 2019 timeline kids, one of them of Middle Eastern descent, and both wearing clothes labeled as "Made In China".]] The cops look like the only way they can wrap their heads around these details is to conclude it must be some sort of BadFuture. Additionally, the coroner's description of one of the corpses is worded in a way that would let him appear like a hardcore racist in contemporate German.

* TookAThirdOption: Fittingly in season three of a show obsessed with three, the endgame involves [[spoiler:Claudia informing Adam that the solution to breaking the endless loop cannot be achieved destroying the two worlds but only by saving a third. To that end Adam sends Jonas and Martha to stop Tannhaus ever creating the origin of the loop.]]

** Episode 6 of Season 3, "Light and Shadow" [[spoiler: reveals the Apocalypse fractured Jonas's world into alternate realities, in where he's ''not'' saved by Martha and he grew up as Adam, and another where he is saved by Martha and died in Eva's World. It is self-contained, meaning the alternate realities don't conflict with each other, meaning Jonas died in Eva's World after siring the Unknown, yet exists as an adult self, not meeting Martha at all till he travels to 1888. It's implied a similar event occurs in Eva's World as well, given as ''Adam kills alternate-Martha'' in the end of the episode, yet Martha grows into Eva. However, these two branches of reality are ultimately interdependent and part of the larger causal loop - effectively, Jonas and Martha are basically split into 2 realities, with both pairs playing a key role in maintaining the StableTimeLoop.]]

** Michael's suicide note in Episode 5: "The truth is a strange thing. You can try to suppress it, but it will always find its way back to the surface. We make a lie into our truth in order to survive. We try to forget, until we can't anymore. We don't know even half of the mysteries of the world. We are wanderers in the darkness. This is my truth. [[spoiler: On November 4, 2019, I travelled through time to the year 1986. The boy from the future stayed, and in time he became a man. Mikkel became Michael, who never knew where he belonged."]]

** And, still Season 3 Episode 4, [[spoiler:shows that Hannah, who travelled from 2020 to 1954, had an affair with Egon Tiedemann resulting in her becoming pregnant. She decides against aborting and]] in the seventh episode of the season, [[spoiler:shows that her child is Silja.]]
** The same epidode shows how [[spoiler: Silja, after staying in the 2040s and 2050s as Elisabeth's second-in-command, she arrives in 1890 and starts a relationship with fellow time traveller Bartosz Tiedemann, who came from 2020, and have two children: Noah and Agnes.]]

* TimeTravelersBaby:
** The very first is [[spoiler:Jonas Kahnwald]], who learns about it in the fifth episode of season 1. [[spoiler:His father, Michael Kahnwald, is actually Mikkel Nielsen, who travelled from 2019 to 1986, later married Hannah. Their son Jonas was born in 2003.]]
** Episode 4 of season 3 [[spoiler:reveals that Jonas, who now has travelled not only between timelines, but also to another world, and the Martha of the alternate world are the parents of [[NoNameGiven the Unknown]], the mysterious time-traveller who always appears as a child, adult, and old man.]]
** The same episode [[spoiler:shows that Hannah, who travelled from 2020 to 1954, had an affair with Egon Tiedemann resulting in her becoming pregnant. She decides against aborting and]] in the seventh episode of the season, [[spoiler:shows that her child is Silja.]]
** Speaking of Silja, [[spoiler:after staying in the 2040s and 2050s as Elisabeth's second-in-command, she arrives in 1890 and starts a relationship with fellow time traveller Bartosz Tiedemann, who came from 2020, and have two children: Noah and Agnes.]]
** [[spoiler:Agnes and the above mentioned Unknown, both already the result of time travels, are the parents of Tronte Nielsen.]]
** And then, the probably most complex one, concerns [[spoiler:Elisabeth and Charlotte Doppler]], who are revealed in the final episode of season 2 to be [[spoiler:mother and daughter to [[MyOwnGrandpa each other]]. Charlotte is born in the 2040s to Elisabeth and Noah -- who travelled from 1921 to 2020 -- only to be stolen as a child and brought to 1971 to be raised there. She later has two children with Peter Doppler -- Franziska and Elisabeth -- who will later give birth to Charlotte -- and so on.]]

* TimeTravelersBaby: Quite a number of them:
** The very first is [[spoiler:Jonas Kahnwald]], who learns about it in the fifth episode of season 1. [[spoiler:His father, Michael Kahnwald, is actually Mikkel Nielsen, who travelled from 2019 to 1986 and later married Hannah. Their son Jonas was born in 2003.]]
** Episode 4 of season 3 [[spoiler:reveals that Jonas, who now has travelled not only between timelines, but also to another world, and the Martha of the alternate world are the parents of [[NoNameGiven the Unknown]]]]
** In the same episode, we learn that [[spoiler:Agnes and the above mentioned Unknown, both already the result of time travels, are the parents of Tronte Nielsen.]]
** And, still Season 3 Episode 4, [[spoiler:shows that Hannah, who travelled from 2020 to 1954, had an affair with Egon Tiedemann resulting in her becoming pregnant. She decides against aborting and]] in the seventh episode of the season, [[spoiler:shows that her child is Silja.]]
** The same epidode shows how [[spoiler: Silja, after staying in the 2040s and 2050s as Elisabeth's second-in-command, she arrives in 1890 and starts a relationship with fellow time traveller Bartosz Tiedemann, who came from 2020, and have two children: Noah and Agnes.]]
** And then, the probably most complex one, concerns [[spoiler:Elisabeth and Charlotte Doppler]], who are revealed in the final episode of season 2 to be [[spoiler:mother and daughter to [[MyOwnGrandpa each other]].]] As the final episodes of the third season depict, [[spoiler: Charlotte is born in the 2040s to Elisabeth and Noah -- who travelled from 1921 to 2020 -- only to be stolen as a child and brought to 1971 to be raised there. She later has two children with Peter Doppler -- Franziska and Elisabeth -- who will later give birth to Charlotte -- and so on.]]

* TimeTravellersBaby: Quite a number of them:

* TimeTravellersChild: Quite a number of them:

* NeverARunaway: The series begins with the teenager Erik Obendorf being missing without a trace for weeks. Ulrich Nielsen, the local police chief, seriously doubts that actually a crime happened and Erik just ran away, as he has already done that a few times before. Only after Ulrich's own son is missing too and the corpse of another boy is found, he and the police in general starts investigating seriously. As it turns out, while Ulrich's son is still alive, but travelled to 1986, Erik actually was abducted and died in a failed time travel experiment.

* SequelGoesForeign: Season 3 adds an AlternateUniverse (and additional timelines) to spice things up.

** In episode 6 of season 3 likewise, [[spoiler: Erit Lux rescues Bartosz and Hannah that way from the apocalypse of their world, combined with the ExtradimensionalEmergencyExit that the golden orb time machines allow.

* MostWritersAreAdults: The kids and teens in the series talk too eloquently for their age. Some of their lines are stilted as you would expect from a ClassicallyTrainedExtra in a Shakespeare drama. (Ironically enough, the school seems to have a robust students' theater programme to provide the Classical training.) E.g., this is Franziska in the gym's changing room lamenting about her parents being DeadSparks:

** However, episode 6 of season 3 reveals [[spoiler: that Jonas, who was previously shown to be saved by ExtradimensionalEmergencyExit has been duplicated and another Jonas exists.]] This unfortunate character isn't saved by anyone else, therefore he has to find refuge anywhere he can and is forced to run for the basement of the house he is in.

** [[spoiler:Adam attempts to do this to his past self, Jonas. Jonas doesn't take it.]] [[spoiler: [[StableTimeLoop Not at first]], though.]]
** [[spoiler:Noah's past self as well, but only because Noah is killed by Agnes after [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness he's fulfilled his purpose]]]].

** There are three [[spoiler: photos of characters that will appear in the series shown ''in the opening scene'' (except some those haven't been revealed yet, like Adam and Stranger!Jonas or Old!Ulrich), and there are 2 (or only one) photographs for a few characters. Turns out there's a [[CharacterDeath reason for that]]...]]

** However, episode 6 of season 3 reveals that [[spoiler: that Jonas, who was previously shown to be saved by ExtradimensionalEmergencyExit has been duplicated and another Jonas exists.]] This unfortunate character isn't saved by anyone else, so he has to find refuge anywhere he can, so he's forced to run for the basement of the house he is in.

* AllThereInTheManual : Following the final season's conclusion, [[https://darknetflix.io/en Netflix updated the show's website]] into [[spoiler:the entangled family tree connecting the four families together]]. The website provides some additional information on the characters not fully given in the show, and also names some characters who are {{Unknown Character}}s in the show, those being Ulla Schmidt (Helge's wife and Peter's mother) and Leopold Tannhaus (H.G. Tannhaus' father).

{{