“Humanity has always puzzled over our true origin. Our genesis. Were we created by God? Or are we a product of evolution? If we could somehow see yesterday and tomorrow at the same time, the origin and the end, if we could feel the entire universe in a single moment, then we might finally find answers to the biggest questions of all. What is humanity? Where do we come from? What is it that drives us? And what, ultimately, is our purpose?” -HG Tannhaus
In this episode of Dark, Everything Is Now, the Clockmaker’s opening voiceover suggests that the initial time travelers were exploring the mysteries of the universe and using reality as their laboratory. Humans are not particularly willing lab rats, so later time travelers have been trying to fix the timeline which was broken by earlier experiments, whether they want to get themselves home or to right wrongs committed by people outside their normal time. So far, their efforts seem to either have a neutral effect, or to help create what they’re trying to prevent.
Episode 9 brings us as close as possible to seeing the entire universe in a moment, by showing what’s happening simultaneously in all three time periods (1953, 1986 and 2019) and allowing the cause and effect loop play out between the three. After the Clockmaker and Stranger expressed their beliefs about the nature of time and the universe in episode 8, Noah finally has the chance to speak for himself, as he shares his worldview with Helge. And we reach the point in the timeline where several of the events that have been referred to, but so far left unseen, now occur on screen.
It’s a great episode for finding the answers to the show’s mysteries, but as in real life, the larger mysteries remain unsolved.
Recap
During the voiceover, the screen flashes on all of the versions of the characters, in ultra close up, starting with Jonas and ending with Stranger, then Noah. There is only one version of Noah.
It’s the morning after Ulrich beat young Helge and locked him in the bunker. Bernd and Greta are distraught. Greta wonders if he’s been kidnapped and murdered, like the dead boys found at the power plant construction site. Or maybe he ran away because she was too tough on him about his dirty clothing.
You think?
Bernd leaves to report Helge’s disappearance to the police. Ulrich is still sitting outside the bunker, staring at the door.
When Egon reports to the station, the police chief, Daniel Kahnwald, tells him about Helge’s disappearance. Egon relates his interaction with Ulrich from the day before to Daniel. Daniel tells Egon to start a search for Ulrich, then talk to Bernd, but not to mention Ulrich to Helge’s father yet.
Bernd tells Egon that Helge went missing at about 3:00 PM. Then he charges Egon with finding Helge, whatever it takes, no matter the cost. He says that nothing else matters to him, not even the power plant. He just wants his son back.
As Tronte and Claudia search the woods for Gretchen, Claudia tells him that his haircut makes him look like James Dean. She predicts he’ll be popular with the middle school ladies of Winden. Then she asks why they left their last home. Are they bank robbers? Tronte claims that Agnes just wanted a change of scenery. Claudia says that Agnes is the most elegant woman she’s ever seen.
1953 Claudia is a hoot. Let’s keep her. Why did Tronte marry Jana instead? I love Jana, too, but these two are already taken with each other, and that doesn’t seem to have ever changed. (Plus there’s the unknown identity of Regina’s father.)
Agnes has switched to a blue dress today, signifying mystery. She’s trying to give Doris a stylish yellow-gold dress (selflessness, curiosity, reason- this color was created for Doris). Doris feels strange in the dress, which is too fancy for everyday wear in Winden. Agnes tries to convince her that she looks amazing and should take it.
Doris asks about Agnes’ marriage. She was married for 15 years to a pastor who didn’t believe in God and wasn’t a good person. “Sometimes I think it’s good that he’s dead and I’m free.” Doris has been married to Egon for 10 years. He’s changed and pays more attention to his work than to her.
Agnes is a little too tactile as she gets Doris completely settled into the outfit. Doris decides she’s not comfortable with the dress and had better take it off, before Agnes’ freedom rubs off on her.
Greta confides in Noah.
Greta: “I prayed to God to rid me of that child before it was ever born. And after I had him, I prayed every day that something would happen to him, because perhaps he’s not Bernd’s child. I feel like he’s not a being that was born into love. That’s what’s in my mind. Every day I think that. I can’t escape it. It’s all my fault.”
Father Noah: “We are all full of sin. No pure human even exists. But no matter what we do, we never fall any lower than into God’s hands.”
Greta: “And what it they aren’t God’s hands? What if they are the hands of the devil?”
Noah assures her that God guided her to him for a reason, we meet the people we meet because of destiny and touch each others’ lives because of fate. God’s hands are everywhere touching guiding us. We need to stop fighting and let it happen.
What I’m getting from this is that Helge is at the very least a child of rape and is probably Rosemary’s Baby. And Noah is as creepy as expected. He’s much more interested in Helge than Greta, so, though he’s the Antichrist, he doesn’t appear to be the devil who raped her.
Or was Greta in love with Helge’s father and forced into a loveless marriage with Bernd? Maybe she didn’t want to bring a child conceived in love into a house where she hated living.
Noah reads the 23rd Psalm (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…) aloud to Greta as a prayer of comfort, while Ulrich walks back to town on the side of the road. Egon finds him when he drives by. Ulrich runs away from Egon, into the woods. Egon gives chase and catches up just as Ulrich is about to duck inside the caves. Egon questions Ulrich, asking what he did to the dead boys and to Helge. Ulrich is confused, because killing Helge was supposed to alter the course of time so that Helge couldn’t kill anyone. He thought no one would remember the dead boys anymore, since the murders would be erased. Egon arrests Ulrich, who mutters, “But I changed it, but I changed it…”
Helge lies unconscious on the bunker floor, artfully arranged as a martyr (or a bird falling from the sky, his innocence gone). With a gasping breath, he snaps awake.
A young man runs through the forest wearing a ski mask and leather jacket, carrying a bag. He’s being hunted by dogs, who are barking in the distance. When he’s sure he’s lost them, he sits down next to a tree and checks a bleeding wound in his shoulder.
This must be the bank robber Claudia could see coming.
Teenage Katharina sits outside school and smokes. Hannah approaches and asks if Ulrich’s still in jail. Katharina tries to get rid of her, but does tell her that the police have to release him today. Hannah asks if Katharina knows who turned him in. When she discovers Katharina doesn’t know, Hannah makes up a story suggesting Regina was the one.
Egon goes to let Ulrich out of his cell, but first he warns Ulrich that he knows the teenager is an extra evil member of the Evil League of Evil and he’ll prove it somehow, someway, someday. Wherever Ulrich goes, whatever he does, Egon will be there, watching, waiting for him to slip up.
Not really, that last was part of Egon’s alcoholic haze and his dreams of becoming Javert, but he was thinking it at Ulrich, trying to drill it into Ulrich’s skull with laser beams.
Jana slaps Egon and tells him to stay away from her family. She’s having him removed from Mads’ case. Ulrich smirks at him as they walk away.
Egon just stands there silently.
Claudia rappels down into the cave with the yellow barrels again, this time with a geiger counter. The barrels are radioactive, but not off the scale. All of a sudden, Gretchen the dog, who disappeared into the cave in 1953, runs out of the shadows, unchanged from 33 years ago. Claudia is happy to see her, but very confused.
Thank goodness, Gretchen is safe. Aside from Mikkel, and Martha and Jonas, she was the real tragedy of this series.
Katharina and Ulrich share a cigarette out by the watchtower. Ulrich says that Egon thinks he’s the AntiChrist. Regina walks through the field and Katharina goes on the attack, accusing Regina of turning Ulrich in for rape. For all that Hannah is generally despicable, this time, all she did was suggest that it could be Regina. The rest is on Katharina.
Katharina points to her black eye and tells Regina that she got it from her own mother because Ulrich was arrested, so it’s Regina’s fault. Katharina looks as though she’s using the moves she learned from her mother on Regina. The guy in the leather jacket comes out of the woods and stops them, defending Regina. When Kathrina and Ulrich don’t take him seriously, he pulls out a gun and threatens them until they leave.
He tells Regina it’ll be okay now, then collapses from blood loss. Regina wants to take him to the hospital, but he says no doctors. Regina offers to take him to her house, since her mother’s not home and she has the TV medical cure all, bandages, maybe even a needle and thread. Aleksander agrees to go with her.
Claudia goes to Bernd, who still lives in the mansion, to get some answers about the barrels. She asks what happened last summer. He tells her there was an incident in the volume control system. She needs more detail. Bernd says that the incident was set off by corrosion to the connections to the chemical feed-in system. That must have caused hydrogen gas to collect in a crowded supply line, which then exploded.
Bernd continues, saying that this was an accident, not a test. They changed out the “tubes” after the incident. They were lucky that only a small amount of radioactive material leaked. They had the floor removed and stored the material in a safe place. Claudia questions whether the cave is stable and safe. Bernd insists it’s as stable and safe as other interim storage facilities.
Claudia asks who else knows about the accident. Bernd says it happened during the night shift, so only the skeleton crew who were working that night, including Helge. He paid them all off with a large sum of money to keep quiet.
He asks her not to make this a bigger deal than it has to be. Claudia pauses for a moment, then asks if anything else unusual happened that night in the cave. She starts to ask if the explosion could have… When Bernd interrupts her and asks what it is she thinks happened, it’s a clear challenge to say the crazy thing, whatever it is, and get shot down.
Right now, it looks like they chose a female director because they thought they could push her around more easily.
Bernd: “There are no real truths, just stories. The story of the entire town is in your hands. Is our power plant safe? Could something like Chernobyl happen in our plant? You alone decide what story you want to tell.”
2019 Helge watches 1986 Helge emerge from the bunker and head into the cabin. 1986 Helge has been cleaning up blood. He settles down in the cabin to work on his nature crafts, when Egon pulls up. Helge hides from Egon and watches until he gives up and leaves.
“Aleksander” returns to the forest and finds a spot to bury a plastic bag holding his handgun and original passport, which read “Boris Neiwald” He checks a second passport, for Aleksander Köhler, born January 21, 1965 and decides that this who he is from now on. Hannah hides nearby and watches him.
Later on, Claudia is back in her office, with Gretchen resting on her desk. Aleksander is shown in. In order to get in, he said he’s a friend of Regina’s. He’s new in town and looking for work. He’s willing to do anything, but has experience in metalworking. Claudia turns him down. He says he’ll keep trying.
At home, Regina brushes her hair, then looks at the hair in the brush.
We’re shown the bunker door as an establishing shot, then Helge and Noah in the torture room, working on the kill chair, which is actually a failed time machine. This is the first time the torture room has been firmly located in the bunker, after hints all season. Helge stops tinkering and asks Noah why it doesn’t work. Noah assures him it will, they just need to have faith and persistence, like Einstein.
Unlike Einstein, they also need a steady supply of boys to kill.
Which is why Helge refuses to continue. He’s holding a long screwdriver out in front of him which he could easily use to stab Noah. He asks why God would want any of this. Noah agrees, why? He moves forward, using his magnetic stare on Helge, crowding into his space, pressing against the screwdriver and daring Helge to stab him.
He says that after looking into H**l the way Helge has, part of you stays there, leaving you lost and hoping to cling to God. But there is no God, there is no light, there is no plan. There never has been a plan. Only chaos is real and eternal. “Pain and chaos.”
Now that he’s wound Helge up, Noah hugs him. “People are bad, malicious, evil. Life is nothing but a huge spiral of pain. And the world is doomed to be destroyed. But this is our Ark [the kill chair]. And I’m Noah. If we can harness this energy, we can change everything. Then we decide the world’s fate removed from all evil and from all pain. We’ll create a time machine. We’ll reorder everything anew, the beginning and the end.”
Okay, then.
Hannah still has Aleksander’s original passport and the gun, stored in the plastic bag where she found them, in a high kitchen cupboard. Now she takes them out.
Charlotte listens to Ulrich’s phone message, telling her that it’s not a question of who kidnapped the boys, but when. He’s confirmed that it was Helge in 1986. When the message ends, Katharina storms in, demanding to know where Ulrich is. Charlotte thought he was with the family. She’s been trying to call him, but he isn’t picking up.
Katharina asks if he was at the station last night. Charlotte tells her she suspended him so he could spend time with the family. Katharina assumes he’s with Hannah, and storms out again.
Franziska and Magnus kiss in bed after having sex, until she says that she has to leave. Magnus gives her the bird necklace that he found under the bridge. Franziska tells him he doesn’t get to know all of her secrets. Magnus says he wants to know who she really is, not to hurt her. She tells him she’s not up for it today.
After she leaves, Magnus goes downstairs and joins Martha on the couch. Martha has been calling Jonas, who is ignoring her. Martha asks Magnus why they all keep so many secrets. Magnus says, “Some things are just private.”
Katharina forces her way into Hannah’s house, still feeling aggressive. Hannah denies knowing anything about Ulrich. Katharina spews terrible things at her, asking if it turns her on to destroy her friends’ lives.
Sadly, I think it does. Hannah is one of those people who thinks she deserves what other people have, no matter how good her life already is. She’ll always want more and she’ll always want to steal it from others, because in her mind they’ve injured her by getting it first and withholding it from her. (It doesn’t matter whether it’s a person or an appliance. That’s the way possessive people like her think. The world owes them everything. If she doesn’t have to take it from someone else, there’s little value.)
Unfortunately, Katharina is a bully, but she’s honest. Hannah learned how to manipulate her a long time ago. She tells Katharina that her affair with Ulrich is over.
She and Katharina sit down at the kitchen table, and Hannah spins a fantasy, saying she ended the affair. She’d never wanted it in the first place, but Ulrich pressured her into it. He supposedly told Hannah that he loved her and not Katharina, and wanted to leave Katharina for her, but she wouldn’t let him.
Katharina puts her head on the table and cries. Her husband and son are missing, Ulrich was having an affair, now Hannah is telling her these lies. Hannah goes over to comfort her.
She has no shame.
Bartosz is at home playing a video game when his grandmother, Claudia, comes to the door. He’s confused, because his parents told him she was dead. Claudia says that Regina probably wishes Claudia was dead, because of the mistakes she made.
Bartosz asks where she’s been. She says it’s a long story. She has things to do today, so she can’t stay. She asks him to give Regina a photo of the two of them, which she says was taken before that summer and everything else that happened later. She would do things differently if if she could change the past.
Hannah gives Aleksander a massage, but stops to get something out of her pack. It’s the plastic bag she found with Aleksander’s stuff. She puts it where he can see it, and lets him know that she knows its significance. She wants a favor from Aleksander- he’s to destroy Ulrich’s life. She doesn’t care how he does it.
Jonas comes home in the pouring rain and finds Martha waiting for him. He tries to avoid talking to her, even though she’s standing in front of him. She insists on talking about what happened between them at the play, when they made out. She feels used, since he’s ignored her since then. He just looks at her for a while and doesn’t say anything. She shoves at him to make him talk.
He finally says that it was wrong between them. She asks if he means because of Bartosz. Jonas tells her that he means them, they’re not a good match. It just wouldn’t work. Martha is confused. Jonas tries to walk past her. She kisses him. The rain starts to steam on the sidewalks. Is it chemistry, or Noah Lucifer coming to get them? Does it matter? Winden is its own punishment.
Jonas doesn’t want to stop. Martha asks again if it’s wrong for them to be together. He tells her he’s sorry and goes inside.
The men in the Nielsen-Kahnwald family had better start sharing the truth with Katharina and Martha, stat, because I’m about done with watching them think they are the problem. We need their common sense, brains and hearts involved. (Plus, I might want to see 2019 Katharina take on 1953 Egon in a cage match.)
Aleksander calls Torben Wöller and tells him to search the police records for anything they can use against Ulrich Nielsen. Torben asks what he wants to do about the truck. Aleksander says that they’ll put the barrels back in the cave when things calm down again in a few days. Aleksander looks tired and worried. Everything is snowballing in his life.
When she cleans the hotel, Regina goes into the Stranger’s room for the first time and gets a look at exactly what he’s done with the place.
What will she do with the information that he’s researching the missing boys, ancient symbols, physics and astronomy? Will she assume he’s the murderer? Call the police? Show Aleksander? Show Claudia? The best choices are Claudia and Charlotte, with Aleksander probably a given. Let’s hope Regina and Aleksander’s stress and anger levels don’t lead them to do something we’ll all regret.
That night, Bartosz meets Noah on their usual back road. Bartosz tells Noah that everything he’s predicted has come true. Noah asks if Bartosz has thought about his offer.
In 1986, Claudia hires Aleksander to weld the metal door to the cave with the barrels shut.
In 2019, Benni services a trucker, then makes an offer to a hooded figure standing in the shadows. He doesn’t answer, so she shouts an insult and gets out of the rain. Once she’s in her trailer, he goes to a truck parked on the edge of the lot and breaks into the trailer. The radioactive barrels are inside. It’s the Stranger. He opens up a barrel.
In 1953, the clockmaker creates a new battery pack for Ulrich’s phone. Aged Claudia comes into the shop. She’s brought the blueprints for the time machine the Stranger asked him to repair in 1986. He doesn’t recognize what the design is for. Claudia says, “It’s a machine that will completely alter the course of time.”
Commentary
Wikipedia’s article on Antichrists seems good. As a non Christian, my eyes glaze over when the whole false religion and false prophet thing gets going. Basically, when Christians start to lose the battle of the religions, it means the world is going to end in a fiery apocalypse and whoever is the leader of the winning religion is the devil or Antichrist. When the Bible’s authors were writing particularly dramatic passages, they threw in antichrists, pseudochrists, false prophets, horseman of the apocalypse, and the dead rising from their graves, then imagined they all had a wild party that trashed the neighborhood.
Dark is using this imagery to contrast Noah as an antichrist/devil with Tannhaus as the distant God and Stranger as the savior who wants God to interfere with the affairs of the living. Tannhaus/God has been distant from humanity for so long, he seems to be irrelevant (1986) or maybe even dead (2019), allowing Noah to become a false God. Stranger/Jesus would like to correct the timeline, thus performing Jesus miracles.
But in order to do that, he needs Tanhaus/God to become an active participant in the universe again. In order to make a deal with God/Tannhaus, Stranger will need to explain to Tannhaus who he really is. Some kind of adjustment will need to be made to the machine to deal with Jonas and any other major anomalies. Then Jonas will sacrifice himself to save the world, or at least Winden, from their sins.
We don’t find out in this episode who Helge’s father is or whether Greta was raped and assaulted, coerced, or had an affair. We do know that in 1986, Bernd still has Helge’s childhood and adult photos on his desk, but there’s no evidence of Greta (that I recall- correct me if I’m wrong!!). In 1986, Bernd is the retiring director. Helge is employed at the power plant and trusted by Bernd. He inherits the cabin and bunker.
This all suggests that Bernd didn’t care who Helge’s biological father was- Helge was his son either way, and he made sure Helge was taken care of. Bernd is one of the most devoted parents on the the show. Given his prominence in Winden and the fact that Helge likely doesn’t live up to his expectations, this is especially notable.
We also know very little about Aleksander/Boris Neiwald. He came to Winden in 1986 as a criminal on the run and cosied up to Regina and Claudia as a way of hiding and appearing legit. But he’s still a mobster with even more secrets in 2019. And now he has Claudia’s job and Bernd’s house. Claudia’s been run out of town and Helge has the cabin. My guess is that Aleksander figured out what Bernd and Claudia were hiding, and decided that his story was going to include blackmailing them for everything he could get out of them. Since Regina has had recurring cancers from their little secret with the yellow barrels (see below), she went along with Aleksander.
Bernd’s whole “decide what your story will be” speech to Claudia was utter nonsense. What he meant was, “I haven’t come up with a permanent cover story yet, so you can make up your own. Are you going to cooperate or are you going to make trouble for everyone?”
There are strong hints that Noah is Agnes’ husband and Tronte’s father. He practically admits he gave himself the name “Noah”. But it doesn’t make sense for Agnes and Tronte to follow him to Winden, unless she’s meant to be a demonic, seductive Lilith as a counterpart to his Lucifer.
All of the women featured in the 1953 section disappear from the story soon after. Greta, Doris and Agnes are all missing in 1986, though their husbands/loved ones continue in the story. Claudia makes it to 1986, but disappears sometime afterward and Regina leads her son, Bartosz, to believe her mother is dead.
That first arc showed us what their sins are and why either the Antichrist or the Christian God would want to dispose of them. Claudia is too intelligent, Doris is too curious, and Greta is damaged goods. And from a misogynist, conservative religious point of view, what isn’t wrong with Agnes? She’s ready to be a witches’ coven leader and gleefully dance naked under the moon, leading the women of the town into sin and freedom along with her.
33 years later, Regina is incredibly bitter and angry about what Katharina and Ulrich did to her the night Mads disappeared. It’s way out of proportion for that one incident. Was she tied up to the tree next to the cave the night of the “accident” at the power plant, when Mads disappeared and who knows what else happened? Did she receive a hazardous dose of radiation that night? Is her hair falling out in 1986 from the radiation she’s been exposed to? We know she develops aggressive breast cancer later. Did she have leukemia or another cancer earlier in life due to the radiation? Does she blame Claudia for the radiation exposure?
Are the women in Winden disappearing due to radiation exposure and the boys are taken by Noah? How many people who should be in Winden are missing or were never born?
We’ve never met Katharina’s mother. We know that she was/is angry and extremely physically abusive. Katharina has avoided that trap. Katharina’s mother would have been a young woman in 1953. Out of the women we’ve seen, it could have been Claudia, Ines, Greta or Doris. Any of them could have gotten pregnant in high school or their early twenties and given the baby up for adoption. I really like the idea of Katharina being Ines’ baby, who given up at birth and adopted by another family. That way, Mikkel ended up with his grandmother, even though he didn’t know it.
Greta could also be Katharina’s mother. She could have been conceived when Greta was older, after she and Bernd divorced. A Greta who had lost everything important to her in life might take out her frustrations and anger on her child. Especially if Greta conceived Katharina through an affair.
Odds that Noah is Ulrich’s grandfather through Tronte and Katharina’s father, but there are too many secrets in town for anyone to have put it together?
In that case, Jonas and Martha are just continuing the family tradition. Their chemistry is killing me. So Romeo and Juliet. Just run away together already. There’s life outside of Winden and wormholes. They can go live in Riverdale, and their kids can marry into the Blossom family.
Peter and Katharina also share a mild resemblance. Peter’s existence has never been explained either. Where did Peter come from, in 1987? Was he a Lost Boy who Helge rescued? Is he Helge’s biological child? Where is his mother?
Charlotte has a connection to the clockmaker (the watch Elizabeth got from Noah, she told someone that her grandfather believed in the 33 year cycle, the eternal recurrence and the Big Crunch- that’s clearly Tannhaus). But who were her parents?
The show has given us the philosophical/religious/scientific duality of Noah vs HG Tannhaus, Nihilist vs Clockmaker. Tannhaus is complacent to the point of inertia, while Noah forces an atmosphere of rapid entropy, the spiral of doom he mentions to Helge.
Noah doesn’t believe there is a God or an order to the universe. He does believe in free will and even man’s ability to take control amidst the pain and chaos of the universe’s random spiral toward destruction and decay.
But he believes the universe is so random and chaotic that there’s no way to bring goodness and order to it without destroying most of it first. Rather than accepting the parts of Creation that he can’t understand or control, Noah wants to eliminate them. This would leave only his handpicked elements, making him the new AntiChrist God of a new Creation.
He forgets that the biblical God made the decision to destroy most of the earth, according to God’s plan, and assigned the biblical Noah to be the caretaker for the living beings God decided should survive. Noah did not make the major decisions. He stayed a human being, and didn’t take on the role of God, as Dark’s Noah wants to do. Religions tend to punish those who attempt to become gods by acquiring power and control, with good reason.
Meanwhile, Tannhaus believes humans are like the gears in a clock. We each have our part to play in the mechanism of the universe and can take comfort that everything will work out as it should, even though the mechanism is too complex for us to ever fully understand. Time is part of a repeating cycle within a universe of cycles, from the 33 year solar-lunar cycle to the Big Crunch. He sees the universe, and time, as orderly and predictable. We can all sit back and allow it too unfold, secure in the knowledge that as a European white man, he’s taken care of everything is fine, even when it doesn’t seem like it.
Characters
New characters will be added as they’re introduced.
Cast from the Episode 1/Secrets murder board:
Charlotte Doppler in 1986 and 2019. Married to Peter, mother to Franziska and Elisabeth, daughter-in-law to Helge. Police Chief.
Hannah Kahnwald, in 2019 and 1986. Mother to Jonas, widow of Michael, daughter-in-law of Ines, having an affair with Ulrich. Massage therapist.
Helge Doppler, in 2019, 1986, and 1953. Son of Bernd and Greta, father of Peter, father-in-law to Charlotte. Nuclear power plant guard.
Ines Kahnwald, in 2019, 1986 and 1953. Daughter to Daniel, adoptive mother to Michael, mother-in-law to Hannah, grandmother to Jonas. Hospital nurse.
Jana Nielsen, in 1953, 1986 and 2019. Tronte’s wife, mother of Ulrich and Mads.
Jonas Kahnwald in 2019. Son of Hannah and Michael, grandson of Ines. High school student.
Katharina Nielsen in 1986 and 2019. Wife to Ulrich, mother of Magnus, Martha and Mikkel. High school principal.
Mads Nielsen, 1986, age 12. Missing since then. Ulrich Nielsen, 1986 and 2019. Son of Tronte and Jana, husband of Katharina, father of Martha, Magnus and Mikkel, lover to Hannah. Police officer.
Michael Kahnwald, 2019, husband to Hannah, father to Jonas, adoptive son to Ines. Deceased artist.
Regina Tiedemann, 1986 and 2019. Wife to Alexander, mother to Bartosz, daughter of Claudia, granddaughter of Egon. Hotelier.
Magnus and Martha Nielsen, 2019, children of Ulrich and Katharina, siblings of Mikkel. High school students. Franziska Doppler, 2019, daughter of Peter and Charlotte. High school student. Aleksander Tiedemann, 1986 and 2019, husband of Regina, father of Bartosz, son-in-law of Claudia. Director of Nuclear Power Plant in 2019. Bartosz Tiedemann, 2019. Son of Regina and Aleksander. High school student, aspiring drug dealer.
Tronte Nielsen in 1953, 1986 and 2019. Son to Agnes, husband to Jana, father to Ulrich and Mads.
Claudia Tiedemann, 1953, 1986 and 2019(?). Director of Winden Power Plant in 1986. Daughter of Egon. Mother of Regina and mother in law of Aleksander. Grandmother of Bartosz. Had extramarital affair with Tronte Nielsen in the 1980s. Appears to be a survivalist at some point in the future.
Egon Tiedemann, 1953 & 1986. Winden police officer. Husband to Doris. Claudia’s father and Regina’s grandfather. Aleksander’s grandfather in law. Bartosz’s great grandfather. Teenage Ulrich’s nemesis. Alcoholic.
HG Tannhaus, 1953 & 1986. Clockmaker, inventor, amateur physicist and author of the book A Journey Through Time. Advisor to the Stranger.
Murder Board:
Jürgen Obendorf, maintenance worker at the nuclear power plant, and Erik Obendorf’s father. And Erik Obendorf, high schooler and drug dealer, missing for 2 weeks. Both pictured in 2019.
Peter Doppler in 2019, therapist, married to Charlotte Doppler (police chief), son of Helge Doppler, father of Franziska and Elizabeth Doppler.
Bernd Doppler, 1953 & 1986, founder and first director of the Winden Nuclear Power Plant, husband of Greta, father of Helge, grandfather of Peter.
The Stranger, a time traveler who appeared in 2019 and is living in the Tiedemann’s hotel. He is investigating the Winden wormhole and time travel, hoping to correct the timeline.
Elisabeth Doppler, 2019, daughter of Peter and Charlotte, granddaughter of Helge, sister of Franziska. Yasin Friese, 2019, best friend and classmate of Elisabeth. Missing. Both communicate using sign language.
Torben Wöller, 2109, detective who works under Charlotte. Benni, 2019, prostitute who works out of a trailer parked on the edge of Winden and who Peter has frequented in the past.
Sebastian Krüger, 1986, Hannah’s father, drives van for dry cleaning business.
Noah, 1953, murder suspect. Noah, 1986, parish priest at St Christopher’s Church, Winden. Noah, 2019, priest and Erik Obendorf’s drug supplier.
Agnes Nielsen, 1953, Tronte’s mother, widow, new in town, boarder in the Tiedemann home.
Doris Teidemann, 1953. Egon’s wife, Claudia’s mother, Regina’s grandmother, Bartosz’s great grandmother.
Greta Doppler, 1953. Bernd’s wife, Helge’s mother, Peter’s grandmother, Franziska and Elizabeth’s great grandmother.
Gretchen the Dog Tiedemann, 1953. Claudia’s dog. Lost in the caves in 1953, returned to her through the caves, apparently unchanged, in 1986.
Daniel Kahnwald, 1953. Ines’s father, Michael’s adopted grandfather, Jonas’ great grandfather. Chief of police in 1953.
Mikkel Nielsen, 2019 (and 1986). Michael Kahnwald, 2019. Mikkel Nielsen changed his name to Michael Kahnwald when he was adopted by Ines Kahnwald in 1986.
Images courtesy of Netflix.
Metawitches 
So beautiful! Love it!
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