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Ranking the Characters of Netflix’s ‘Dark’ from Most to Least Messy

What fools these mortals be.
Dark Netflix Characters
By  · Published on July 21st, 2020

26. Daniel Kahnwald

Dark Daniel

Father to Ines and employed as Winden’s chief of police in the 1950s, Daniel is never able to solve the case of the two mysterious dead boys who appear at the nuclear power plant construction site with no ID inexplicably wearing clothes made in China. Considering the time travel element involved, his failure to put the pieces together is decidedly excusable.

While comments made elsewhere indicate questionable judgment regarding personal matters — when Egon opens up about his marital frustrations, Daniel basically tells him to find a mistress — we see little of his own affairs, suggesting he kept his personal life relatively neat and tidy.

Daniel, overall, seems slightly more put together than his successors, but this really says very little. He does score some messiness points for considering bludgeoning a suspect with batons a valid interrogation technique. Also, he presumably names Egon his successor. Were there no other options?


27. Doris Tiedemann

Dark Doris

Unhappy housewife Doris clearly has no particular affection for husband Egon. She briefly finds real happiness in an affair with lodger Agnes until the other woman vanishes. Whether Doris bats exclusively for the other team or is bisexual and simply opposed to the specimen of man that is Egon is unclear. Sure, cheating is definitely on the messy side but especially considering the 1950s timing, her decision to maintain a closeted romance is deeply understandable.

After Agnes disappears, Doris sticks around in her unhappy marriage until the CLT, dressed as a clergyman, rats out Egon for his affair with “Katharina” (time-traveling Hannah going by her rival’s name, because everything wasn’t confusing enough already). Although upset by the news, deep down she’s probably thrilled to get the final push she needed to leave Egon. Considering this is the last we see or hear of her, one imagines she got the hell out of dodge. An A-plus decision. Good for you, Doris.


28. Jana Nielsen

Dark Jana Collage

Thanks to her taste in men and the resulting offspring, Jana is pretty close to the center of the clusterfuck storm that is Winden. Still, she herself is overwhelmingly innocent of any wrongdoing or mess-making. Becoming a bit of an agoraphobe after the disappearance of her son Mads in 1986 presents an unfortunate but understandable life trajectory.

Her messiest moment comes in the form of calling out husband Tronte’s affair with Claudia in the middle of Mads’ memorial service. While Tronte deserves the embarrassment, the blow-up does suggest the usually mild-manned Jana has at least some small spark of latent messiness buried deep down.


29. Bernadette Wöller

Dark Bernadette Collage

Sex worker Bernadette mostly minds her own business and only gets dragged into the tangled knot of Winden through her affiliation with client Peter Doppler, who also supplies her with hormone therapy prescriptions. When things fall apart, she ends up getting the needed prescriptions under the table with help from Peter’s teenage daughter Franziska, which is admittedly a little messy but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. In the finale’s coda, origin-world Bernadette gets her man without all the mess, so all’s well that ends well.


30. Regina Tiedemann

Dark Regina Collage

Talk about drawing the short straw. Sure, Regina gets the last laugh in the sense that she’s one of the lucky few not erased out of existence once Martha and Jonas fix the timeline, but before we get there’s it’s a seriously rough road for poor Regina. While Claudia claims everything she does is for Regina, she’s still not winning any Mother of the Year awards any time soon.

An incredibly lonely and insecure girl, she gets targeted by Ulrich and Katharina for special torture after Hannah blames her for falsely accusing Ulrich of rape. The actual culprit was none other than Hannah herself, but Ulrich and Katharina are proponents of the “bully first, ask questions never” school of thought.

Regina eventually finds a knight-in-shining-leather jacket in Aleksander, whom she later marries. They have one son, Bartosz, and it seems like all was relatively well for quite a while until she gets diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2019. Time-traveling Claudia ensures she survives the nuclear apocalypse — and then decides her daughter’s quality of life isn’t worth living, actually, and enlists Tronte to smother her with a pillow. Regina really can’t catch a break.

She doesn’t have any truly messy moments, but she does commit one pretty major act of questionable judgment in opening a hotel in Winden. Why try to lure people into that disaster trap? Come on, Regina, you of all people should know better.


31. Torben Wöller

Dark Woller Collage

Winden’s most obvious mystery — what happened to Wöller’s eye (or arm, in Eva’s world) — ends up being one that remains unsolved when Dark comes to an end. Still, Detective Wöller is the goodest bean the town has to offer. By simply keeping it in his pants and avoiding time travel, he steers clear of the tangled knot that makes a mess of both Adam and Eva’s worlds. And you always know exactly what world you’re in the second you see him, which is incredibly handy. The hero we deserve and the one we need right now.

Woller is always a delight to behold because he does not induce a stress headache on sight. He’s just a detective, doing necessary but uncomplicated plot things here and there. Sure, he’s a bit of a mole for nuclear power plant director Aleksander Tiedemann, but Winden’s police department is kind of a joke anyway. And when push comes to shove, Wöller doesn’t interfere with external investigator Clausen focusing his investigation on Tiedemann.

That said, the finale does reveal Wöller as the father of mess queen Hannah’s unborn child in the origin world. A child whom she wants to name Jonas. But free of Ulrich’s influence, perhaps origin-world Hannah walks a cleaner path than her counterparts. Hope springs eternal.

Coincidental naming aside, with any luck Jonas 2.0 will be a totally different individual with a hefty dose of common sense inherited from his Wöller side and not just a rehash of the ultimate trash king. And even if new Jonas remains a total Jonas, he presumably no longer has any similarly-aged aunts to fall hopelessly in love with, so at least there’s that.

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Ciara Wardlow is a human being who writes about movies and other things. Sometimes she tries to be funny on Twitter.