Netflix's 'Dark' Creators Preview Third and Final Season, Unveil Cast Additions

"The beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning,” say the creators of the German time-travel drama, promising to provide answers to fans' questions and "untangle the story through time."

Netflix's spooky German drama Dark has begun production on its third and final season, with creators unveiling cast additions and promising a fitting end to the existential thriller about four estranged families and a time-travel conspiracy that spans three generations.

“We will offer answers to the questions that our viewers have been asking and help untangle the story through time,” said Dark co-creators and showrunners Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, who originally conceived of the show as a trilogy. “It will be hard for us to walk away from those characters we have really grown fond of, but the beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning.”

The final eight-episode third season of Dark will be shot in and around Berlin through December.

Dark premiered on Netflix on Dec. 1, 2017 as the streamer's first German-language original series.

Set in the fictional German town of Winden, the series begins in 2019 and follows four estranged families whose only connection appears to be tragedy. But slowly, their links to each other, and to a child's mysterious disappearance 33 years earlier, become apparent and the lives of the Kahnwald, Nielsen, Doppler and Tiedemann families begin to crumble. The series is given a sci-fi twist thanks to a time-travel plot, involving a wormhole in a cave beneath the local nuclear power plant, operated by the influential Tiedemann family.

Dark was a critical smash out of the gate and became one of Netflix's most successful non-English language productions. Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar were signed up to a multi-year overall production deal with Netflix, the first foreign producers to clinch such an arrangement.

"Starting the production of the last season of Dark is much more than just the beginning of the production of the third installment," said Kelly Luegenbiehl, vp international originals at Netflix. "We are literally going full circle with our first German original series and cannot wait for Jantje and Bo to fulfill their vision and reveal the final secrets to the audiences and fans around the globe that have embraced Dark from the start."

As with the previous two seasons of Dark, Jantje Friese wrote all eight episodes of season three, with Baran bo Odar directing and Nikolaus Summerer as cinematographer. W&B Television returns as the producer on Dark, with W&B's Quirin Berg and Max Wiedemann as executive producers alongside Friese and Odar.

Series regulars Louis Hofmann, Jordis Triebel, Lisa Vicari, Mark Waschke, Andreas Pietschmann and Lea van Acken return for season three, joined by newcomers Barbara Nusse, Hans Diehl, Jakob Diehl, Nina Kronjager, Sammy Scheuritzel and Axel Werner.

Friese and Odar's first post-Dark project for Netflix will be the historical horror series 1899. The drama follows a motley crew of European migrants who have booked passage on a steamship heading west to New York, dreaming of a future in the new world. But when they discover another migrant ship adrift on the open sea, their journey takes an unexpected, and horrific, turn.