Stories from the set

A significant portion of the forest scenes were filmed at a former East German army training ground near Berlin.

The tattoo on the back of the character played by Mark Waschke and on the image of the local hospital is the so-called "Emerald Tablet" (according to one of the common versions, it contains the recipe for obtaining the philosopher's stone).

On the book of Tannhaus, played by Christian Steyer, there is a Penrose triangle (one of the main impossible figures, also known as the "impossible triangle" and the "tribar"). The figure gained wide fame after the publication in 1958 of an article in the British Journal of Psychology by the English psychiatrist Lionel Penrose (1898-1972), co-authored with his son, mathematician Roger Penrose, a Nobel Prize laureate in physics. In an article for Discover magazine in 2005, Roger Penrose outlined his own interpretation of quantum mechanics, which Tannhaus talks about in a lecture in season 3. (An impossible figure is a figure that is depicted on a plane and creates a 3D effect, but it cannot be recreated in reality, because the figure is geometrically incorrect and is not perceived by the human brain as a possible reality.)

Initially, Netflix approached showrunners Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese with a proposal to make a series based on their own sci-fi thriller "Who Am I" (2014). They did not find this proposal interesting, and they proposed something completely new – a project based on the series "The Missing" (2014-2016) and films about time travel. As a result of the merger of these two concepts, the series "Dark" (2017-2020) was created.

The scenes near the cave were filmed near the village of Saarmund in the state of Brandenburg in Germany. Moraines, or glacial deposits, are common in that area, and there are no natural caves there, so the cave for filming had to be dug. It was made only a little over 9 meters deep.