'Dark' season 2 might answer the question posed by season 1: Does Helge hold the key to the answers?
Netflix is all set to release the second season of the German trilogy 'Dark' on June 21, 2019.
The trailer for the second season shows the sinister cycle still in motion from when the Stranger (played by Andreas Pietschmann) apparently created the time loop in an attempt to close it.
The trailer gives us an insight into how the second season explores creepy interpersonal relationships and a desperate protagonist in Jonas Kahnwald (played by Louis Hofmann) struggling to figure out where, and most importantly, how he got here in the first place.
According to the official synopsis for the second season, Jonas finds himself trapped in the future and desperately tries to return to 2020. Meanwhile, his friends Martha, Magnus and Franziska are trying to uncover how Bartosz Tiedemann is involved in the mysterious incidents occurring in their small hometown of Winden.
More and more people are drawn into the events orchestrated by an obscure figure who seemingly controls everything that is connected throughout different time zones.
At the end of the first season, we see Jonas leaving the bunker to walk into what looks like a dystopian setting - 33 years into the future (since everything on 'Dark' moves in 33-year-cycles) in the year 2052. A woman welcomes him to the future before knocking him out with the butt of her rifle.
We are left with several unanswered questions about how does the gang know that Jonas is from the past and why does she hit him cold?
In an interview, creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese explained their philosophy for the second season after the release of the first one - it was to fill out the several complex family trees without rehashing the events that viewers had already seen.
"We've done our thinking, and the second season would put more light on other people in the character structures we haven't been through that much, while not losing some of the ones that you kind of came closer to. But also introducing new ones, while maybe killing some other ones. We actually have a lot of ideas where to take it," Friese said at the time.
We can only hope that the second season will answer questions about one of the most important character arcs in the story: Helge Doppler (played by Peter Schneider in the 1986 timeline and by Hermann Beyer in the 2019 timeline).
Helge is Charlotte's father-in-law and Peter's father. He also owns the time-travel cellar, where Noah (played Mark Waschke) conducts his (failed) time travel experiments and ends up killing the children. Helge works with Noah to abduct and then cover up the killings of the children.
It is Helge's timeline in 'Dark' that is the most complicated of all.
In 2019, Ulrich Nielsen (played by Oliver Masucci) goes back in 1953, when Helge is a child, and tries to kill him by hitting him multiple times with a rock. But he doesn't die.
The Stranger, who is also Jonas from the future in 2052, sets off the machine in an attempt to close the wormhole, instead, he creates a link between a teenage Jonas and a young Helge who are both in the time-travel cellar: Helge in 1953 and Jonas in 1986.
Simultaneously in 2019, Helge is suffering through dementia and begins to get attacks of conscience. At the point, he thinks he can go back in time and undo everything he has done. He claims he can change the past and the future and goes back in 1986, where he attempts to talk to middle-aged Helge to not trust Noah - "He's not the chosen one," he says.
But middle-aged Helge doesn't care and goes back to working with Noah. This prompts old-Helge to try and kill middle-aged Helge in a car crash.
But he ends up killing his older self and only injuring the middle-aged Helge.
He misses the consecutive meeting with the police which might have possibly led them to the realisation that he is involved in the disappearance of the children and maybe put a stop to the whole thing.
All of 'Dark' is filled with paradoxes - where one time travelling actually ends up putting things into motion. The Stranger creates the time loop in an attempt to destroy it. He has only been able to build the machine with the help of the clockmaker HG Tannhaus, who in turn knows how to make the machine because the Stranger brings him a broken yet completed version back from the future.
This implies that fate plays a prominent role in 'Dark' - that things are happening just as they are supposed to happen and it's impossible to change the past or the future by tampering with it.
