One of the biggest shocks in Dark Season 2 was the reveal Adam is the older version of Louis Hofmann's Jonas. Adam was disfigured from years of time-traveling, making the twist a hard one to predict. However, showing Jonas the noose marks he got in 2053, the youngster was convinced Adam's claims were true.

This led to a lot of tragedy. While Adam seemingly sent Jonas back to the present to stop Winden's nuclear meltdown, it was all a trick, as he was seemingly setting the teen up to become his future self and a villain. However, because the show loves sleight of hand, Adam might not be Jonas, but instead Mikkel, Jonas' dad.

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Mikkel's story is complicated and heartbreaking, as he got lost in Winden's caves in 2019, only to be taken to 1986 where he grew up to become Michael Kahnwald, Jonas' dad. When he killed himself, the show was kickstarted, and his death was seemingly the result of a time-hopping Jonas trying to break Winden's time loop. Now, as Season 3 looks at Jonas trying to untie this knot once and for all, given Mikkel's nature and the bootstrap paradox that governs the series, he could easily be Adam because things in the future can influence the past. In fact, something or someone in the future can exist before their younger selves, so that creates room for Mikkel's deception.

There are a few clues to this in the show. Adam told Jonas he's using his society, the Travelers, to manipulate events in the timestream every 33 years from 1920 onwards so that they can wage war against time, which they believe to be God. Adam is a scientist and atheist, and it harkens back to Mikkel in the past. He grows to be hateful of God for being stuck in the '80s, especially after his dealings with Adam's pawn, the priest Noah. Mikkel tells the nurse who adopts him, Ines Kahnwald, that the world is cruel for the hand it dealt him. It also speaks to why he allows Ines to gaslight (and drug) him into staying and why he stayed silent when his dad, Ulrich, got trapped in the '50s and tried to free him three decades later.

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But one has to wonder, why didn't he admit who Ulrich was or use the cave himself to go home over the ensuing years? There must be some reason why he stayed, and it could be Adam came back at some point to instruct him to do so. The noose mark may not be from when rebels almost hung Jonas; instead, they could be from Michael's suicide. Dark usually shows dead bodies, but we never saw Michael's so it could be that he survived or was plucked from that timeline by his future self. With Dark now using alternate realities and new worlds, tech could have revived Michael too, so the possibilities are endless.

This would also fit into Mikkel's character as an aspiring magician and Houdini fan. The question of his disappearance was when, not where, is Mikkel, so that can be applied to Michael too. Mikkel, after all, was always about distraction and misdirection to fool the audience, so his greatest trick as he got older could be for us to think he died, or for him to be dead yet existing in the past and future. And the prestige of that trick would be him fooling Jonas so the teen, his son, could do his bidding and become the middle-aged Stranger. The latter, as well as other pawns like Claudia, would convince young Jonas to leave Mikkel in the '80s, and Adam's design, with all these dominoes knocking over, would lead to young Jonas being the one to place Mikkel in the cave in the first place.

Ultimately, Adam is puppeteering them all so that Mikkel's disappearance and Michael's suicide put Jonas on a path of tampering with time, all so he could turn into a tyrant that wants to break the timestream. And while we thought young Mikkel was the starting point, the big twist may just be that the origin point was Adam all along. He could have been working backwards and been the first Mikkel, rather than the kid that got lost in a cave.

Created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, Dark stars Oliver Masucci, Karoline Eichhorn and Jördis Triebel. Season 3 premieres June 27 on Netflix.

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