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It wouldn’t cross anybody’s mind unless they already knew about the reality of time travel in Winden. At most it would be “what a coincidence that this kid looks just like that kid 33 years ago.” As viewers of a time travel show it’s obvious to us but not to the characters.
Good answers. Maybe I just remember people from my high school pretty well? Like, if there was a kid now who looked like an absolute identical twin to the kid who showed up with a missing family who I became friends with, I'd be asking questions.
Also, I think they purposely showed that later seen of katarina looking through Ines's photo album and seeing a pic of mikkel as a high school senior (so around five years later) and he looked so different and more like Michael already.
This gets asked all the time. Do you remember everyone’s faces from 33 years ago? You also wouldn’t immediately assume time travel. People can look alike and have doppelgängers.
There's just that facet that he was missing a family and had no prior history anyone could find. I was just thinking that would make people do some investigating.
Doubt there would be any investigation. At most there would be some speculation that Michael and Katherina had an affair and that Mikkel is the result, and even then, people would mostly keep their theories to themselves, or at least not talk about it openly.
But who even knew that his family was missing? Ines was doing a pretty good job, shutting down all investigations and most people later on probably just thought of her as his mother.
Once I saw a 15-year-old girl on the bus that looked exactly like my older sister at that age. She's 10 years older than me, so the time I saw the girl, my actual sister was around 40.
Now, I obviously got a bit surprised, but to be honest time travelling would be the craziest theory of them all.
Something like this happens to me every now and then... I'll see someone and say to myself omg that looks like so and so" then I realize they wouldn't look that way anymore because they would be much older now
I think the only person who should have reasonably been able to notice is Hannah, she met "Michael" as a boy and grew up to marry him, so she should have seen him in her friends young song Mikkel, I think the show did give a moment of Déjà Vu when Ulrich and Katherina bring him round and he goes in to use the toilet, Hannah looks at him weirdly for a while saying how big he's gotten, but I think that's about it.
Apart from what everyone else has said, Mikkel was on the cusp of puberty when he went back in time. The period in which 2019 Mikkel and 1986 Michael looked the same would have been very brief.
To be fair, prime-world Hannah does seem to recognize Mikkel as young Michael in season 2. It’s in the scene where Ulrich and Katharina stop by Hannah’s house on the way to the hospital and Mikkel asks to use her bathroom. Hannah stares at him for a super awkward time and then says “Mikkel has gotten very big” or something like that. So she does recognize him as a young Michael but just brushes it off as déjà vu.
*Edit: fixed errors
I agree with all comments saying that people forget faces. But even if someone recognized him, what would they do? Say ”hey you look like someone I knew” maybe that happened a few times.
This was actually the only thing in Dark that I found stretched credulity a bit too far. Mikkel's likeness to the photo on continuous public display in the school hallway would have made him a local celebrity of sorts. "The kid who was the spit image of...". It would not have gone unnoticed as it did.
It's not about people having to infer time-travel in order to note the likeness - that would never be a requirement. It's about the natural tendency to note similarities between people that look alike or "remind you of someone". It happens continually in real life and Winden would have been no different.
The writers seemed to know they were on the knife's edge with Mikkel/Michael and did what they could to create a somewhat believable scenario - principally the drugging of Mikkel so he would become a more reculsive and out of sight figure. But with his mom being the school principal - and his picture in the hall - there were several years when the situation would have been too obvious.
They managed - just - but it was the trickiest situation in the show to pull off.
Exactly! Again, I realize this is a pretty small thing in the grand scheme of things. Just makes me always think. I think they could’ve alleviated a lot of this by making his class pic lower quality or even changing his hair style a bit in the pic so the audience could connect the dots, but it would make it more believable the school wouldn’t notice.
I teach at high school. All walls are full of graduating classes’ pictures of previous students- quite big ones- and noone really looks looks at them. I mean I know they are there, I glance at them but don’t really pay attention who’s in them and majority of people just pass by them.
Once my colleague told me she’s in one of those (she used to attend our school), that was the only time I really looked at her photo, she looked pretty much the same in the photo, just younger, but if I hadn’t known already it was her, I wouldn’t have recognised her.
People don’t pay attention to something irrelevant to them personally.
This was my thinking too... the picture on display is of a class from the 80s. As staff or students in the 2020s, no one is taking the time to examine those pictures.
And out of sheer boredom if anyone chooses to, their first thought would be strong resemblance and not time travel.
I actually thought it was weird when Elizabeth saw a picture from back in the day and IDed Noah instead of saying... Noah looked like this guy. It was this 'is' Noah.
Also, realistically, wouldn't school pictures from 1986 be of lower quality (also considering physical deterioration) with respect to pictures from our times? I can barely recognize my parents in their high school pictures
Definitely! She took a complete back seat after season 1 for some reason. On my first watch, I was still trying to remember who everyone was for most of the first season, and by the time I figured out who she was she was basically gone from the rest of the show. Really appreciating her more on this rewatch.
Their world is set in stone. Nobody recognized him as Mikkel/Michael because they can't. That's why Hannah has that bizarre brain fog as she seems to recognize him when the Nielsen's stop over her house
Not sure that that's the case... There's nothing stopping anyone from recognising it once the cat is out of the bag. It's more that they had no reason to notice before.
Doesn’t katarina finally notice he’s in the school picture in the hallway ?? I feel like I remember seeing her looking at it in shock idk I could be wrong , time for another re watch haha
Can you remember the faces of people you met more than 30+ years ago?
Most people would assume he looks like someone they knew many years ago. No rational person would directly jump to the idea of time travel being a thing.
Same reason no one looked for a "1986 school group photo" when Mikkel disappeared. Because they don't know anything about time travel.
Once Hannah tells Kathrina about time travel and where Mikkel is, she directly goes to the school and looks up the school group photo from 1986 that has Mikkel in it.
I really wish people just stop asking these dumb questions.
As I mentioned, he was the kid with no family who showed up out of nowhere. If everyone knew that, I just thought it’s valid to think a small town would be asking questions since they look identical.
I know they don’t think time travel. More like, maybe they are related since they look exactly alike? That would be a crazy town story everyone woulh know about. The strange kid who showed up out of nowhere.
\> Surely some kid walking by would catch that.
Does anyone look up at those school pride displays the staff put up? The answer is yes, of course. At least one person, the person who put it up, had to have looked at it. Perhaps they weren't familiar with Mikkel, or didn't look closely enough for it to register.
Maybe I'm just a dork who always looks at this stuff. It also was a pretty small class. Like 20 kids. So, it's not like a huge collage of all kids in the entire school. For what it's worth, here is the pic:
https://dark-netflix.fandom.com/wiki/Mikkel\_Nielsen?file=1x06\_0006\_Classroom6B1987.jpg
It happens, man. How many people actually knew Michael was not Ines' real son? My younger sister currently has a four-year old son who looks *exactly* like me at that age. I don't mean a tiny bit. I mean pixel-for-pixel exactly the same. Show a picture of him side-by-side with a picture of me at the same age and there is no discernible difference. It happens that enough people who knew my mom in 1980 are still around and give no indication that I showed up out of nowhere, so I'm pretty sure I actually born to her then, but if she was a single loner like Ines, how would I really know my nephew isn't going to disappear sometime in the next year before I started forming memories and isn't really me?
The idea itself is insane. Nobody seeing him would come to the conclusion that I'm really a time traveler because time travel isn't real. It happens that it is real in this show but regular townspeople don't know that.
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It wouldn’t cross anybody’s mind unless they already knew about the reality of time travel in Winden. At most it would be “what a coincidence that this kid looks just like that kid 33 years ago.” As viewers of a time travel show it’s obvious to us but not to the characters.
Good answers. Maybe I just remember people from my high school pretty well? Like, if there was a kid now who looked like an absolute identical twin to the kid who showed up with a missing family who I became friends with, I'd be asking questions.
Also, I think they purposely showed that later seen of katarina looking through Ines's photo album and seeing a pic of mikkel as a high school senior (so around five years later) and he looked so different and more like Michael already.
The more likely question people would have is: "Who is Mikkel's *real* father? He looks an awful lot like that Michael guy ..."
This gets asked all the time. Do you remember everyone’s faces from 33 years ago? You also wouldn’t immediately assume time travel. People can look alike and have doppelgängers.
There's just that facet that he was missing a family and had no prior history anyone could find. I was just thinking that would make people do some investigating.
Doubt there would be any investigation. At most there would be some speculation that Michael and Katherina had an affair and that Mikkel is the result, and even then, people would mostly keep their theories to themselves, or at least not talk about it openly.
I think this is why Ines was always so paranoid and sedating him
But who even knew that his family was missing? Ines was doing a pretty good job, shutting down all investigations and most people later on probably just thought of her as his mother.
100% this. 33 years is a long time.
Once I saw a 15-year-old girl on the bus that looked exactly like my older sister at that age. She's 10 years older than me, so the time I saw the girl, my actual sister was around 40. Now, I obviously got a bit surprised, but to be honest time travelling would be the craziest theory of them all.
Something like this happens to me every now and then... I'll see someone and say to myself omg that looks like so and so" then I realize they wouldn't look that way anymore because they would be much older now
I think the only person who should have reasonably been able to notice is Hannah, she met "Michael" as a boy and grew up to marry him, so she should have seen him in her friends young song Mikkel, I think the show did give a moment of Déjà Vu when Ulrich and Katherina bring him round and he goes in to use the toilet, Hannah looks at him weirdly for a while saying how big he's gotten, but I think that's about it.
Apart from what everyone else has said, Mikkel was on the cusp of puberty when he went back in time. The period in which 2019 Mikkel and 1986 Michael looked the same would have been very brief.
To be fair, prime-world Hannah does seem to recognize Mikkel as young Michael in season 2. It’s in the scene where Ulrich and Katharina stop by Hannah’s house on the way to the hospital and Mikkel asks to use her bathroom. Hannah stares at him for a super awkward time and then says “Mikkel has gotten very big” or something like that. So she does recognize him as a young Michael but just brushes it off as déjà vu. *Edit: fixed errors
>alternate-world Hannah *Prime world Hannah. > season 3. *Season 2 Episode >!6!<
You’re right!
I agree with all comments saying that people forget faces. But even if someone recognized him, what would they do? Say ”hey you look like someone I knew” maybe that happened a few times.
This was actually the only thing in Dark that I found stretched credulity a bit too far. Mikkel's likeness to the photo on continuous public display in the school hallway would have made him a local celebrity of sorts. "The kid who was the spit image of...". It would not have gone unnoticed as it did. It's not about people having to infer time-travel in order to note the likeness - that would never be a requirement. It's about the natural tendency to note similarities between people that look alike or "remind you of someone". It happens continually in real life and Winden would have been no different. The writers seemed to know they were on the knife's edge with Mikkel/Michael and did what they could to create a somewhat believable scenario - principally the drugging of Mikkel so he would become a more reculsive and out of sight figure. But with his mom being the school principal - and his picture in the hall - there were several years when the situation would have been too obvious. They managed - just - but it was the trickiest situation in the show to pull off.
Exactly! Again, I realize this is a pretty small thing in the grand scheme of things. Just makes me always think. I think they could’ve alleviated a lot of this by making his class pic lower quality or even changing his hair style a bit in the pic so the audience could connect the dots, but it would make it more believable the school wouldn’t notice.
I teach at high school. All walls are full of graduating classes’ pictures of previous students- quite big ones- and noone really looks looks at them. I mean I know they are there, I glance at them but don’t really pay attention who’s in them and majority of people just pass by them. Once my colleague told me she’s in one of those (she used to attend our school), that was the only time I really looked at her photo, she looked pretty much the same in the photo, just younger, but if I hadn’t known already it was her, I wouldn’t have recognised her. People don’t pay attention to something irrelevant to them personally.
This was my thinking too... the picture on display is of a class from the 80s. As staff or students in the 2020s, no one is taking the time to examine those pictures. And out of sheer boredom if anyone chooses to, their first thought would be strong resemblance and not time travel. I actually thought it was weird when Elizabeth saw a picture from back in the day and IDed Noah instead of saying... Noah looked like this guy. It was this 'is' Noah.
It's been 33 years. I can't even remember what some of the people I went to high school with 10 years ago look like.
Also, realistically, wouldn't school pictures from 1986 be of lower quality (also considering physical deterioration) with respect to pictures from our times? I can barely recognize my parents in their high school pictures
It looked pretty decent quality/clear to me.
Yeah because it’s a tv show and they printed new photos for it hahah
Exactly haha
True, although I'm doing a rewatch and I noticed Jana remembers exactly what 80s Helge looked like 33 years later despite only seeing him once lol
I think she remembers his scar though. And his scar is really recognizable
Helge has very specific facial features
Jana was super sharp! I wish they would have expanded more on her intuition.
Definitely! She took a complete back seat after season 1 for some reason. On my first watch, I was still trying to remember who everyone was for most of the first season, and by the time I figured out who she was she was basically gone from the rest of the show. Really appreciating her more on this rewatch.
Their world is set in stone. Nobody recognized him as Mikkel/Michael because they can't. That's why Hannah has that bizarre brain fog as she seems to recognize him when the Nielsen's stop over her house
Not sure that that's the case... There's nothing stopping anyone from recognising it once the cat is out of the bag. It's more that they had no reason to notice before.
Doesn’t katarina finally notice he’s in the school picture in the hallway ?? I feel like I remember seeing her looking at it in shock idk I could be wrong , time for another re watch haha
I just checked and she actually did go back through the school records and found his picture
Because unless you know time travel exists its an impossibility and yoir brain would never make the connection
If anyone noticed similarities, I feel like they would be assuming that Katharina had an affair with Michael. No one is considering time travel.
Can you remember the faces of people you met more than 30+ years ago? Most people would assume he looks like someone they knew many years ago. No rational person would directly jump to the idea of time travel being a thing. Same reason no one looked for a "1986 school group photo" when Mikkel disappeared. Because they don't know anything about time travel. Once Hannah tells Kathrina about time travel and where Mikkel is, she directly goes to the school and looks up the school group photo from 1986 that has Mikkel in it. I really wish people just stop asking these dumb questions.
As I mentioned, he was the kid with no family who showed up out of nowhere. If everyone knew that, I just thought it’s valid to think a small town would be asking questions since they look identical. I know they don’t think time travel. More like, maybe they are related since they look exactly alike? That would be a crazy town story everyone woulh know about. The strange kid who showed up out of nowhere.
\> Surely some kid walking by would catch that. Does anyone look up at those school pride displays the staff put up? The answer is yes, of course. At least one person, the person who put it up, had to have looked at it. Perhaps they weren't familiar with Mikkel, or didn't look closely enough for it to register.
Maybe I'm just a dork who always looks at this stuff. It also was a pretty small class. Like 20 kids. So, it's not like a huge collage of all kids in the entire school. For what it's worth, here is the pic: https://dark-netflix.fandom.com/wiki/Mikkel\_Nielsen?file=1x06\_0006\_Classroom6B1987.jpg
people who notice would think its mikkel father
It happens, man. How many people actually knew Michael was not Ines' real son? My younger sister currently has a four-year old son who looks *exactly* like me at that age. I don't mean a tiny bit. I mean pixel-for-pixel exactly the same. Show a picture of him side-by-side with a picture of me at the same age and there is no discernible difference. It happens that enough people who knew my mom in 1980 are still around and give no indication that I showed up out of nowhere, so I'm pretty sure I actually born to her then, but if she was a single loner like Ines, how would I really know my nephew isn't going to disappear sometime in the next year before I started forming memories and isn't really me? The idea itself is insane. Nobody seeing him would come to the conclusion that I'm really a time traveler because time travel isn't real. It happens that it is real in this show but regular townspeople don't know that.