7. Helge Doppler
As Noah’s henchman, Helge shares responsibility for dropping dead children helter-skelter all over the timeline. However, as the mindless goon to Noah’s brains of the operation role, Helge earns more lenient judgment. He’s still really damn messy, though.
A lonely, awkward child fascinated with dead birds, he’s scarred for life both physically and psychologically after time-traveling Ulrich attempts to brain him with a rock in retribution for crimes he hasn’t yet committed. But Ulrich half-asses it in typical Ulrich fashion, meaning young Helge survives, accidentally gets sent to 1986, and meets Noah, who zaps him back to the 1950s and earns his undying loyalty in the process.
Back in his original timeline, Helge grows up under Noah’s wing. By day he works as a security guard at the power plant and by night he does Noah’s dirty work, kidnapping children to serve as lab rats and haphazardly disposing of their corpses. Somehow he manages to meet a woman from out of town and father Peter somewhere along the way.
In old age, Helge develops dementia. Peter and Charlotte take him in, where he spends most of his time mumbling vaguely ominous prophecies in a Nostradamus-like fashion. Eventually, he’s moved to a care facility. Feeling last-minute guilt over his various crimes, he breaks out and travels back to 1986 to warn himself. His younger self isn’t interested in hearing it, though, so Helge attempts to murder his 1986 self through a head-on car collision. Younger Helge survives the accident, but older Helge doesn’t, proving that once you get a time machine involved it is, in fact, possible to simultaneously both succeed and fail at a suicide attempt.
Eva’s world’s Helge gets brained by a time-traveling Ulrich in 1986 instead of 1953 and loses an eye instead of an ear. Instead of time-traveling to try and stop himself, he goes back to seek vengeance against Ulrich and succeeds in demonstrating the proper way to bash someone’s skull in with a blunt object. The details differ, but ultimately he still remains a bit of a stooge and one hell of a mess.
8. The Unknown / Cleft Lip Trio
This weird-ass motherfucker who always keeps his own company in the creepiest way possible is the offspring of the king and queen of mess. It’s hardly surprising that he ranks high on the list. It’s worth noting that while he is a terrifying menace, he is also, technically, rather neat in the sense that he has really mastered the art of strangulation by cheese wire.
Considering we never see the circumstances of his actual birth and early rearing, it’s unclear why/how Martha never got around to naming him. Regardless, name-giving is something one can really do for oneself after developing the capacity for speech. That this dude decides not to, forcing everyone to refer to him with an infinity symbol — or, in the case of viewers pausing ever fifteen minutes to confer over what’s just happened, “cleft lip guy” — embodies top-tier pettiness and mess-loving energy.
9. Claudia Tiedemann
Like Adam and Eva, Claudia goes above and beyond to make sure every convoluted thing continues on in the same chaotic loop it always has, becoming infamous enough to earn the moniker “the White Devil.”
However, unlike Adam and Eva, Claudia’s strategy actually checks out, and she’s ultimately able to figure out how to fix Winden’s Gordian knot of a time loop. Sure, Martha and Jonas are the ones who actually travel to the origin world and prevent the fateful car accident that would inspire Tannhaus’ big mad scientist moment, but there’s no way in a million years those two would have figured out what to do on their own.
Ultimately, while Claudia has plenty of skeletons in her very messy closet — particularly from her years as the director of Winden’s nuclear power plant — she wins serious props for being the one who figures out how to clean up the biggest mess.
10. Elisabeth Doppler
When we first meet young Elisabeth, she’s obstinately ignoring her mother’s instructions against walking home from school, in light of the multiple children who had recently vanished. She also steals older sister Fransizka’s lipstick and then repeatedly denies the theft once confronted. While some characters’ messy tendencies only truly show themselves once time travel gets involved, Elisabeth’s chaotic energy is evident from the get-go.
After surviving the nuclear apocalypse, Elisabeth makes the acquaintance of young Noah, whom she marries. They have a daughter, Charlotte, who disappears one night as an infant. Noah leaves, promising to recover their daughter, and never returns. From there, Elisabeth becomes a post-apocalyptic leader, taking young Silja under her wing after Adam sends her to the future. Eventually, Elisabeth joins Adam’s cause, realizes that her daughter Charlotte and mother Charlotte are one and the same, and travels back in time to participate in her own daughter’s kidnapping to ensure the loop repeats.
11. Charlotte Doppler
Charlotte Doppler is the daughter of her daughter Elisabeth. She is her own mother’s mother. In other words, my brain is melting, please make it stop. Winden’s last police chief before the nuclear apocalypse, Charlotte commendably starts to put the pieces of the time travel puzzle together without requiring any time travelers to sit her down and spell it out. She does come to the situation with a slight advantage considering her adoptive father H. G. Tannhaus literally wrote the book on the subject, but still.
Overall, her attention to detail in police work definitely tops that of her predecessors, but considering the competition, it’s basically a win by default. While giving birth to her own mother is a mess Charlotte gets into unknowingly, the same cannot be said for her affair with Ulrich in Eva’s world. Seriously, what is it about Ulrich? I get that the man has commendable cheekbones, and his jawline is pretty damn fine, but is the dating pool of Winden really that abysmal? There has to be someone else out there with halfway decent physical attributes who is even just a bit less of a walking disaster.
12. Agnes Nielsen
Daughter of Bartosz and Silja, Agnes at some point meets and marries the Cleft Lip Trio, producing Tronte. One imagines some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff happened to convince her said coupling was necessary for the good of the timeline because “nameless creep who hangs out with older and younger versions of himself in matching outfits” is literally no one’s type. When Agnes returns to Winden in 1953 with young Tronte, she rents a room at the Tiedemann’s home and strikes up a romance with Doris.
It’s not clear how Agnes first becomes affiliated with old Claudia Tiedemann. What is clear is that Agnes sharing information about Claudia with Noah leads directly to the other woman’s death. From there, Agnes seems to be a Sic Mundus devotee. She ditches teen Tronte with the Tiedemanns in the 1950s to go on various time-traveling missions, even shooting brother Noah to demonstrate her allegiance after he attempts to kill Adam. Agnes does her fair share of messy things, but much of her story and motivation remain quite obscure, inspiring some leniency in judging her overall messiness.
