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Review: Dark (Season 1) (2017)
I am watching all three seasons of Dark together. I wasn't sure whether to write one review or a review for each season, but I'll go for the latter, since this show was supposed to be consumed in seasons. I'll try to keep it short though.
I like where this show is going, and I'm definitely interested to see how it plays out. The strengths of this show are definitely the direction style. Technically, the story is complex, but the way it's presented on screen is very slowly and carefully so it doesn't feel that fast and complicated until you actually sit down and think about it.
Spoilers.
Story
As I mentioned, the story was slow paced on screen, but is actually quite complex. Within the first few episodes, my mind was already spinning as we were introduced to not only four complete multigenerational families, but different versions of each character at different ages. There is definitely a lot to keep track of in this show, so I liked that the direction style tended towards something that moved a bit more slowly.
I also liked that there was minimal dialogue for two reasons. One is that in general, I'm just a fan of less wordy scripts. It forces the directors to do more with what they're showing on screen as opposed to info dumping on the audience. The second reason is that science fiction stories always get the treatment of info dumps and if that happened in this season, it would be a lot less memorable. Right now, all we need to know is that people go to different time periods through wormholes or through the cave.
I found that most of the adult characters were more interesting as people. What I mean by that is that if you took away the time travel aspect of the story, there was still quite a bit of "meat" to each of the adult characters. The teenage and child characters were a little bit harder to characterize, likely because they had less back story and fewer lines. Another reason that made me feel that the adults were more fleshed out was because all of them had faults.
This season ended with Noah teaming up with Bartosz and Jonas getting thrown into the future. Those are just the main story lines though. There's a ton going on with Charlotte, Helge, Claudia, and even Ulrich that will undoubtedly be important in the future.
Production
Filmography
The town of Winden is super gray and dull, and that was fully expressed in the direction style. We'd get vast landscapes of very foggy days. There was never a single good day in Winden lol. But a lot of these landscape scene would be taken from very far away angles so we'd see these dreary days and landscapes over a really large area.
Generally, the direction style was very professional. Zero complaints. No weird angles, everything was clear and shot in an interesting way.
Music
The music reminded me of the music in Chernobyl. What I mean by music is really the background noise. As I mentioned, Winden is a very dreary town. Instead of actual music, we often got soundtracks that were just noises, and they helped drum up the atmosphere, whether it was a sense of dread, fear, terror, etc.
Episodes
Each episode would end with a kind of musical montage which would set the stage for the next episode. I kind of liked this, because it would sort of break down the findings of the current episode, and prepare us for what we might expect to see next.
Characters
There are A LOT of characters, so I'm going to try to keep it short, though that doesn't seem likely lol.
Ulrich Nielsen
Ulrich's main motivation in this season was to find Mikkel. He was mildly concerned about any other boys being killed or kidnapped, but it was all because his main mission was to save Mikkel. Ulrich travelled to 1953 to try to kill Helge, but was unsuccessful. At the end of the season, he was stuck in prison, suspected of killing the boys at the construction site and Helge.
Charlotte was browsing old newspaper clippings and saw a photo of Ulrich as an accused, which was probably what finally made her understand Ulrich's voice message questioning when the boys were kidnapped, and understand that this was related to time.
Katharina Nielsen
Admittedly at first I thought Katharina was just a normal woman but then we saw that as a teen, she was a school bully. Not saying that she shouldn't be forgiven for things she did as a youngster, but her mistreatment of others was what fuelled some of the resentment against her, both by Regina and probably Hannah too. By the end of the season, she was in 2019 missing her husband and her son.
Magnus Nielsen
Not much was revealed about Magnus in this season, just that he was sleeping with Franziska Doppler. He was also sort of the mediator between his mom and sister. Ever since Mikkel disappeared, a lot of tension among the family members finally surfaced.
Martha Nielsen
Martha was dating Bartosz but apparently had a fling with Jonas a previous summer. Though Jonas was still in love with her, he realized that he couldn't date her as he was biologically her nephew.
Mikkel Nielsen/Michael Kahnwald
Michael barely showed up in this season so all we know of Mikkel was of him as a child. He honestly took the entire situation in a fairly relaxed manner. He figured out pretty soon that he was stuck in the past, and perhaps that was why he didn't really open up to anybody other than Ines.
Jana Nielsen
Jana was Ulrich and Mads' mother. She didn't have a big role in this season. We did see that she still covered for Tronte when Ulrich questioned where he was the night that Mikkel disappeared. We don't know if Jana was just showing loyalty or if she really knew more than it seemed.
Tronte Nielsen
Tronte was Ulrich and Mads' father. As a kid, he was friendly with Claudia, and later on, they had an affair. The night that Mikkel disappeared, he was called by Peter who'd found Mads' corpse. Then they were instructed by Claudia to move the body to somewhere it could be found.
Mads Nielsen
I guess Mads Nielsen will become a bigger character in later seasons when we find out more about the kidnappers' actions.
Agnes Nielsen
Agnes was Tronte's mother, who moved to Winden in 1953. Her husband had died, so she was a single mom. But of course, we will still wonder about who Tronte's real dad is, if it's anybody we already know.
Agnes seemed a very independent and daring woman, and became close with Doris Tiedemann. I wonder if we're supposed to pay attention to this friendship, whether it will become an important plot point.
Hannah Kahnwald
Hannah had been in love with Ulrich from a young age. She'd falsified a rape accusation (claiming that Ulrich had raped Katharina) to have them break up and pinned the accusation on Regina, but Ulrich and Katharina still did not break up. In adulthood, Hannah had an affair with Ulrich. For how long, we don't really know, but obviously the love ran deep for her to love him even after all those years. Ulrich wanted to break off the affair as he was more focused on finding Mikkel. Hannah took this poorly and lied to Katharina, saying that Ulrich wanted to leave the family for her but that she was the one to break it off. She also blackmailed Aleksander into helping her to ruin Ulrich's life.
Hannah had met Mikkel as kids, and that's likely how they befriended each other. However, it's unclear whether she ever had feelings for Michael, or whether he was just her plan B.
As a mother, she's kind of absent as we mostly see Jonas doing his own thing. I think they'll continue doing their separate thing in the next season, seeing as how Jonas is stuck in the future, and Hannah is more focused on getting revenge on her lover.
Jonas Kahnwald
I do think that Jonas was the most fleshed out of the teenage/children characters. He was the only one who actively explored the wormhole.
When Jonas confronted his grandma Ines, he broke down, saying how he was the only thing that was wrong. What he meant by that was that if he didn't exist, then the relations in the town wouldn't be so complicated. If he didn't exist, then his grandfather (Ulrich) and mother (Hannah) wouldn't be having an affair, because they'd just be two unrelated people.
Ines advised him that maybe it didn't matter, but obviously that's hard to take to heart for Jonas, especially because his dad was the one true link.
Jonas met his older self, who was going around the different time lines trying to patch things up and to stop the time-hopping. However, Noah revealed that older Jonas had inadvertently started the time-hopping through being manipulated by Claudia. We'll likely see this being explored more in future seasons.
Ines Kahnwald
Ines was just a kindly lady who bonded with a troubled boy. That's all. She never showed any signs of malice. Even when Jonas was super upset, Ines tried her best to comfort him, to encourage him just to live his life without worrying about things such as time travel.
Charlotte Doppler
Charlotte was the police chief in 2019. Though she had her share of family troubles (estranged with husband who came out of the closet), she seemed like a relatively reasonable and level-headed police officer.
Teenage Charlotte didn't have a bit role in the story. We saw her drawing dead birds, but she was more curious about them than anything.
Charlotte approached Mikkel's disappearance in a very logical and professional manner, and that is how she independently came to the realization that something was not quite right with regards to the boys' disappearances. I was quite interested in Charlotte's character, and I hope to see her solving more mysteries in the future seasons with her more traditional police methods.
Peter Doppler
Doppler's main role with regards to the story was going to the underground chamber and finding Mads' body. However, that implies that he would've heard an explanation from Claudia. How much he knows is the question.
Otherwise, Peter was only relevant to the story in his relationship to his family, in which he and his wife fell out as he realized he was gay.
Franziska Doppler
What I realized is that we never really found out what Franziska was doing with the money from the forest. I think we're supposed to believe that she might've taken up drug dealing after Erik's disappearance left a void in the school's underground drug dealing economy.
Otherwise, she was sleeping with Magnus and that's all we know.
Elisabeth Doppler
Elisabeth was Charlotte and Peter's younger daughter, and Franziska's younger sister. She was also deaf. I wonder if she becomes a more important charcter later on.
Helge Doppler
Helge was Peter's dad. In 2019, he was pretty much immobile, but he'd kept saying nonsensical stuff, about how he could change things.
In 1986, Helge was a timid man, working at the nuclear plant where his dad was the director. It appears he was being manipulated by Noah into kidnapping the boys. Old Helge had approached adult Helge in 1986 to try to stop him but adult Helge didn't heed his words. Old Helge then got into a car accident with adult Helge to try to stop him, dying in the process.
In 1953, child Helge was beaten by Ulrich in an attempt to stop Helge from kidnapping the boys (and Mikkel). Helge survived, but became disfigured. Notably, he had a scar on his face and his ear was deformed. Child Helge was sucked into a wormhole and ended up in Noah's time travel room. However, he clearly existed in 1986 in adult form, so I wonder if that's just temporary.
Helge will most definitely be an important character in the upcoming seasons. He was not bright, but doing a lot of the legwork, so depending on whehther others can manipulate him, he might be able to change the course of time.
Bernd Doppler
Bernd Doppler because the head of the nuclear plant. By 1986, he was retiring, but Claudia discovered that he'd not appropriately taken care of tons of radioactive waste.
Greta Doppler
Greta Doppler was Bernd's wife and Helge's mother. She was a very strict mother. Later, in her confessions with Noah, she expressed her fears that Helge might not have been her son. So of course, we have to wonder whether Helge's real father was someone else, someone that we already know.
Regina Tiedemann
Regina was the boss of the local motel. At the beginning of the show, we saw she was visibly frustrated because her business was suffering.
As a teenager, she was often bullied, especially by Ulrich and Katharina. However, a lot of her timid behaviour was gone by the time she was an adult, perhaps due to influence by Aleksander. She revealed to Ulrich that Hannah was the one to make the false rape accusation and not her, as Ulrich had assumed.
Regina had a poor relationship with her mother, likely due to her mother's focus on her career.
Bartosz Tiedemann
It's a bit curious that Bartosz took his mother's surname, but perhaps it was because Aleksander suggested it for personal reasons (he didn't want to draw attention to himself).
Bartosz was in a relationship with Martha, but Martha also had a fling with his best friend Jonas, and that drove a wedge between the two boys. Originally, Bartosz had met with Noah believing that he was Erik's drug dealer, but later on, it became clear that Noah was suggesting something else to him entirely. My guess is that Noah wanted to recruit Bartosz to help him, using the motivation that he'd screw over Jonas.
Aleksander Kohler Tiedemann/Boris Niewald
Aleksander's origins are a question mark as he appeared out of nowhere in 1986 with a gun to protect Regina. In any case, they fell in love and had a kid, and it's clear that even in adulthood, he cared for Regina, comforting her when they found out she had cancer.
Aleksander was contracted by Claudia to weld shut a door of an area in the cave that contained the radioactive material.
In 1986, Hannah had caught Aleksander stashing his fake passports, and she used that blackmail material in 2019 to have him help her ruin Ulrich's life. However, I'm not totally sure how he can do that, seeing as he's the director of the nuclear plant and not a cop.
Claudia Tiedemann
Claudia will also be a very important figure in upcoming seasons. Like older Jonas, Claudia was like a rover, travelling between various timelines to patch things up. However, Noah insisted that Claudia was the mastermind using others as her pawns.
She was very focused on the radioactive waste, and she also got to reading H.G. Tannhaus' book in 1986, and that likely affected how she interpreted time travel.
Egon Tiedemann
Egon was Claudia's father, a police officer, and was investigating the boys' disappearances in 1953. In 1986, he also helped to investigate Mads' disappearance (shortly before his retirement) and that's when he wrote a note in his notebook questioning why Helge took a certain road to go home.
Noah
Noah said that when he was young, he had a boarder live with his family. While he was telling this story to Helge, the frame would switch back to Jonas. So I think we're meant to believe that Jonas at some point boarded with Noah. Perhaps Noah is from the future, seeing as how Jonas is currently in 2052. Of course, there's also room to speculate who Noah's parents are, or whether he appears in the story at another age.
H.G. Tannhaus
H.G. Tannhaus was really only in contact with Jonas and Claudia during this season. He was a watchmaker, who was asked by Claudia to build th time machine. He was also the author of the time travel book that Claudia read. Was this the extent of his involvemnt though? I have to think that he's related to the story in another way too.
Themes
History repeating itself, inaction as an action
One of the theoeries of time travel in Dark is that every 33 years is another cycle, and that is why every 33 years, similar things happen, and also why the characters can only time travel in increments of 33 years.
In terms of history repeating itself, however, there's also the topic of characters making the same mistake despite knowing what will happen. Adult Jonas tells teenage Jonas that a decision for something is also a decision against something. By doing nothing, he is actively making the same choice.
So as mentioned above, doing nothing is also a choice to do something, whether one knows it or not. We mostly pay attention when characters try to change the past, such as Ulrich trying to kill Helge to save his son, or Old Helge trying to stop adult Helge from helping Noah. But knowing about a choice and actively making the same choice may not necessarily be maintaining the status quo, but rather a decision to do something.
The issue is that characters try to change the past but inadvertently make the same mistake. Ulrich tried to kill Helge but only disfigured him, and we see the results of that (Helge's disfigurement, Ulrich's arrest). Jonas and Clauda are trying to close off the wormhole but Noah says that their actions have actually inadvertently started it.
Playing God
Noah as a man of God is actively trying to play God by building a time machine and trying to control beginning and end. Currently it seems he's the only character who believes that there is no problem in what he does.
I mean, we have Ulrich trying to save his boy by changing the past, which is technically trying to play God as he cannot accept his son's fate.
And we also have Old Helge trying to influence adult Helge's actions, though his situation is different because he actively helped Noah in his quest to control all timelines.
Overall
This has been a pretty interesting first season. The pacing took a bit of getting used to, but I like how the slow and dreary tone of the show goes with a very active story. Looking forward to the next two seasons, which I will watch immediately after.
I like where this show is going, and I'm definitely interested to see how it plays out. The strengths of this show are definitely the direction style. Technically, the story is complex, but the way it's presented on screen is very slowly and carefully so it doesn't feel that fast and complicated until you actually sit down and think about it.
Spoilers.
Story
As I mentioned, the story was slow paced on screen, but is actually quite complex. Within the first few episodes, my mind was already spinning as we were introduced to not only four complete multigenerational families, but different versions of each character at different ages. There is definitely a lot to keep track of in this show, so I liked that the direction style tended towards something that moved a bit more slowly.
I also liked that there was minimal dialogue for two reasons. One is that in general, I'm just a fan of less wordy scripts. It forces the directors to do more with what they're showing on screen as opposed to info dumping on the audience. The second reason is that science fiction stories always get the treatment of info dumps and if that happened in this season, it would be a lot less memorable. Right now, all we need to know is that people go to different time periods through wormholes or through the cave.
I found that most of the adult characters were more interesting as people. What I mean by that is that if you took away the time travel aspect of the story, there was still quite a bit of "meat" to each of the adult characters. The teenage and child characters were a little bit harder to characterize, likely because they had less back story and fewer lines. Another reason that made me feel that the adults were more fleshed out was because all of them had faults.
This season ended with Noah teaming up with Bartosz and Jonas getting thrown into the future. Those are just the main story lines though. There's a ton going on with Charlotte, Helge, Claudia, and even Ulrich that will undoubtedly be important in the future.
Production
Filmography
The town of Winden is super gray and dull, and that was fully expressed in the direction style. We'd get vast landscapes of very foggy days. There was never a single good day in Winden lol. But a lot of these landscape scene would be taken from very far away angles so we'd see these dreary days and landscapes over a really large area.
Generally, the direction style was very professional. Zero complaints. No weird angles, everything was clear and shot in an interesting way.
Music
The music reminded me of the music in Chernobyl. What I mean by music is really the background noise. As I mentioned, Winden is a very dreary town. Instead of actual music, we often got soundtracks that were just noises, and they helped drum up the atmosphere, whether it was a sense of dread, fear, terror, etc.
Episodes
Each episode would end with a kind of musical montage which would set the stage for the next episode. I kind of liked this, because it would sort of break down the findings of the current episode, and prepare us for what we might expect to see next.
Characters
There are A LOT of characters, so I'm going to try to keep it short, though that doesn't seem likely lol.
Ulrich Nielsen
Ulrich's main motivation in this season was to find Mikkel. He was mildly concerned about any other boys being killed or kidnapped, but it was all because his main mission was to save Mikkel. Ulrich travelled to 1953 to try to kill Helge, but was unsuccessful. At the end of the season, he was stuck in prison, suspected of killing the boys at the construction site and Helge.
Charlotte was browsing old newspaper clippings and saw a photo of Ulrich as an accused, which was probably what finally made her understand Ulrich's voice message questioning when the boys were kidnapped, and understand that this was related to time.
Katharina Nielsen
Admittedly at first I thought Katharina was just a normal woman but then we saw that as a teen, she was a school bully. Not saying that she shouldn't be forgiven for things she did as a youngster, but her mistreatment of others was what fuelled some of the resentment against her, both by Regina and probably Hannah too. By the end of the season, she was in 2019 missing her husband and her son.
Magnus Nielsen
Not much was revealed about Magnus in this season, just that he was sleeping with Franziska Doppler. He was also sort of the mediator between his mom and sister. Ever since Mikkel disappeared, a lot of tension among the family members finally surfaced.
Martha Nielsen
Martha was dating Bartosz but apparently had a fling with Jonas a previous summer. Though Jonas was still in love with her, he realized that he couldn't date her as he was biologically her nephew.
Mikkel Nielsen/Michael Kahnwald
Michael barely showed up in this season so all we know of Mikkel was of him as a child. He honestly took the entire situation in a fairly relaxed manner. He figured out pretty soon that he was stuck in the past, and perhaps that was why he didn't really open up to anybody other than Ines.
Jana Nielsen
Jana was Ulrich and Mads' mother. She didn't have a big role in this season. We did see that she still covered for Tronte when Ulrich questioned where he was the night that Mikkel disappeared. We don't know if Jana was just showing loyalty or if she really knew more than it seemed.
Tronte Nielsen
Tronte was Ulrich and Mads' father. As a kid, he was friendly with Claudia, and later on, they had an affair. The night that Mikkel disappeared, he was called by Peter who'd found Mads' corpse. Then they were instructed by Claudia to move the body to somewhere it could be found.
Mads Nielsen
I guess Mads Nielsen will become a bigger character in later seasons when we find out more about the kidnappers' actions.
Agnes Nielsen
Agnes was Tronte's mother, who moved to Winden in 1953. Her husband had died, so she was a single mom. But of course, we will still wonder about who Tronte's real dad is, if it's anybody we already know.
Agnes seemed a very independent and daring woman, and became close with Doris Tiedemann. I wonder if we're supposed to pay attention to this friendship, whether it will become an important plot point.
Hannah Kahnwald
Hannah had been in love with Ulrich from a young age. She'd falsified a rape accusation (claiming that Ulrich had raped Katharina) to have them break up and pinned the accusation on Regina, but Ulrich and Katharina still did not break up. In adulthood, Hannah had an affair with Ulrich. For how long, we don't really know, but obviously the love ran deep for her to love him even after all those years. Ulrich wanted to break off the affair as he was more focused on finding Mikkel. Hannah took this poorly and lied to Katharina, saying that Ulrich wanted to leave the family for her but that she was the one to break it off. She also blackmailed Aleksander into helping her to ruin Ulrich's life.
Hannah had met Mikkel as kids, and that's likely how they befriended each other. However, it's unclear whether she ever had feelings for Michael, or whether he was just her plan B.
As a mother, she's kind of absent as we mostly see Jonas doing his own thing. I think they'll continue doing their separate thing in the next season, seeing as how Jonas is stuck in the future, and Hannah is more focused on getting revenge on her lover.
Jonas Kahnwald
I do think that Jonas was the most fleshed out of the teenage/children characters. He was the only one who actively explored the wormhole.
When Jonas confronted his grandma Ines, he broke down, saying how he was the only thing that was wrong. What he meant by that was that if he didn't exist, then the relations in the town wouldn't be so complicated. If he didn't exist, then his grandfather (Ulrich) and mother (Hannah) wouldn't be having an affair, because they'd just be two unrelated people.
Ines advised him that maybe it didn't matter, but obviously that's hard to take to heart for Jonas, especially because his dad was the one true link.
Jonas met his older self, who was going around the different time lines trying to patch things up and to stop the time-hopping. However, Noah revealed that older Jonas had inadvertently started the time-hopping through being manipulated by Claudia. We'll likely see this being explored more in future seasons.
Ines Kahnwald
Ines was just a kindly lady who bonded with a troubled boy. That's all. She never showed any signs of malice. Even when Jonas was super upset, Ines tried her best to comfort him, to encourage him just to live his life without worrying about things such as time travel.
Charlotte Doppler
Charlotte was the police chief in 2019. Though she had her share of family troubles (estranged with husband who came out of the closet), she seemed like a relatively reasonable and level-headed police officer.
Teenage Charlotte didn't have a bit role in the story. We saw her drawing dead birds, but she was more curious about them than anything.
Charlotte approached Mikkel's disappearance in a very logical and professional manner, and that is how she independently came to the realization that something was not quite right with regards to the boys' disappearances. I was quite interested in Charlotte's character, and I hope to see her solving more mysteries in the future seasons with her more traditional police methods.
Peter Doppler
Doppler's main role with regards to the story was going to the underground chamber and finding Mads' body. However, that implies that he would've heard an explanation from Claudia. How much he knows is the question.
Otherwise, Peter was only relevant to the story in his relationship to his family, in which he and his wife fell out as he realized he was gay.
Franziska Doppler
What I realized is that we never really found out what Franziska was doing with the money from the forest. I think we're supposed to believe that she might've taken up drug dealing after Erik's disappearance left a void in the school's underground drug dealing economy.
Otherwise, she was sleeping with Magnus and that's all we know.
Elisabeth Doppler
Elisabeth was Charlotte and Peter's younger daughter, and Franziska's younger sister. She was also deaf. I wonder if she becomes a more important charcter later on.
Helge Doppler
Helge was Peter's dad. In 2019, he was pretty much immobile, but he'd kept saying nonsensical stuff, about how he could change things.
In 1986, Helge was a timid man, working at the nuclear plant where his dad was the director. It appears he was being manipulated by Noah into kidnapping the boys. Old Helge had approached adult Helge in 1986 to try to stop him but adult Helge didn't heed his words. Old Helge then got into a car accident with adult Helge to try to stop him, dying in the process.
In 1953, child Helge was beaten by Ulrich in an attempt to stop Helge from kidnapping the boys (and Mikkel). Helge survived, but became disfigured. Notably, he had a scar on his face and his ear was deformed. Child Helge was sucked into a wormhole and ended up in Noah's time travel room. However, he clearly existed in 1986 in adult form, so I wonder if that's just temporary.
Helge will most definitely be an important character in the upcoming seasons. He was not bright, but doing a lot of the legwork, so depending on whehther others can manipulate him, he might be able to change the course of time.
Bernd Doppler
Bernd Doppler because the head of the nuclear plant. By 1986, he was retiring, but Claudia discovered that he'd not appropriately taken care of tons of radioactive waste.
Greta Doppler
Greta Doppler was Bernd's wife and Helge's mother. She was a very strict mother. Later, in her confessions with Noah, she expressed her fears that Helge might not have been her son. So of course, we have to wonder whether Helge's real father was someone else, someone that we already know.
Regina Tiedemann
Regina was the boss of the local motel. At the beginning of the show, we saw she was visibly frustrated because her business was suffering.
As a teenager, she was often bullied, especially by Ulrich and Katharina. However, a lot of her timid behaviour was gone by the time she was an adult, perhaps due to influence by Aleksander. She revealed to Ulrich that Hannah was the one to make the false rape accusation and not her, as Ulrich had assumed.
Regina had a poor relationship with her mother, likely due to her mother's focus on her career.
Bartosz Tiedemann
It's a bit curious that Bartosz took his mother's surname, but perhaps it was because Aleksander suggested it for personal reasons (he didn't want to draw attention to himself).
Bartosz was in a relationship with Martha, but Martha also had a fling with his best friend Jonas, and that drove a wedge between the two boys. Originally, Bartosz had met with Noah believing that he was Erik's drug dealer, but later on, it became clear that Noah was suggesting something else to him entirely. My guess is that Noah wanted to recruit Bartosz to help him, using the motivation that he'd screw over Jonas.
Aleksander Kohler Tiedemann/Boris Niewald
Aleksander's origins are a question mark as he appeared out of nowhere in 1986 with a gun to protect Regina. In any case, they fell in love and had a kid, and it's clear that even in adulthood, he cared for Regina, comforting her when they found out she had cancer.
Aleksander was contracted by Claudia to weld shut a door of an area in the cave that contained the radioactive material.
In 1986, Hannah had caught Aleksander stashing his fake passports, and she used that blackmail material in 2019 to have him help her ruin Ulrich's life. However, I'm not totally sure how he can do that, seeing as he's the director of the nuclear plant and not a cop.
Claudia Tiedemann
Claudia will also be a very important figure in upcoming seasons. Like older Jonas, Claudia was like a rover, travelling between various timelines to patch things up. However, Noah insisted that Claudia was the mastermind using others as her pawns.
She was very focused on the radioactive waste, and she also got to reading H.G. Tannhaus' book in 1986, and that likely affected how she interpreted time travel.
Egon Tiedemann
Egon was Claudia's father, a police officer, and was investigating the boys' disappearances in 1953. In 1986, he also helped to investigate Mads' disappearance (shortly before his retirement) and that's when he wrote a note in his notebook questioning why Helge took a certain road to go home.
Noah
Noah said that when he was young, he had a boarder live with his family. While he was telling this story to Helge, the frame would switch back to Jonas. So I think we're meant to believe that Jonas at some point boarded with Noah. Perhaps Noah is from the future, seeing as how Jonas is currently in 2052. Of course, there's also room to speculate who Noah's parents are, or whether he appears in the story at another age.
H.G. Tannhaus
H.G. Tannhaus was really only in contact with Jonas and Claudia during this season. He was a watchmaker, who was asked by Claudia to build th time machine. He was also the author of the time travel book that Claudia read. Was this the extent of his involvemnt though? I have to think that he's related to the story in another way too.
Themes
History repeating itself, inaction as an action
One of the theoeries of time travel in Dark is that every 33 years is another cycle, and that is why every 33 years, similar things happen, and also why the characters can only time travel in increments of 33 years.
In terms of history repeating itself, however, there's also the topic of characters making the same mistake despite knowing what will happen. Adult Jonas tells teenage Jonas that a decision for something is also a decision against something. By doing nothing, he is actively making the same choice.
So as mentioned above, doing nothing is also a choice to do something, whether one knows it or not. We mostly pay attention when characters try to change the past, such as Ulrich trying to kill Helge to save his son, or Old Helge trying to stop adult Helge from helping Noah. But knowing about a choice and actively making the same choice may not necessarily be maintaining the status quo, but rather a decision to do something.
The issue is that characters try to change the past but inadvertently make the same mistake. Ulrich tried to kill Helge but only disfigured him, and we see the results of that (Helge's disfigurement, Ulrich's arrest). Jonas and Clauda are trying to close off the wormhole but Noah says that their actions have actually inadvertently started it.
Playing God
Noah as a man of God is actively trying to play God by building a time machine and trying to control beginning and end. Currently it seems he's the only character who believes that there is no problem in what he does.
I mean, we have Ulrich trying to save his boy by changing the past, which is technically trying to play God as he cannot accept his son's fate.
And we also have Old Helge trying to influence adult Helge's actions, though his situation is different because he actively helped Noah in his quest to control all timelines.
Overall
This has been a pretty interesting first season. The pacing took a bit of getting used to, but I like how the slow and dreary tone of the show goes with a very active story. Looking forward to the next two seasons, which I will watch immediately after.