Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Murder Series Commentary

ARD (Channel One for the non-German crowd, state-run of course).....ran the traditional Sunday night show of Tatort.  Tatort, translated means Crime Scene.  It's a ninety-minute crime drama which has various cities and police detectives plotted into a murder case, which usually gets solved by the last minute of the show.

From an American prospective....it's an interesting series, which has been on since 1970.  Some detectives get cycled in, then cycled out.  I'd generally say that half the shows are marginal.  From the remaining half.....you have a few that really pick up your interest and tell a story of fair proportion.  Some of the murders are pretty cryptic in nature....some involve a long trail of tips to lead you around to the actual murderer.

This past Sunday night....came the Wiesbaden team and an episode called "Born in Pain".  It was probably the most artistically done murder series that I've seen in my life.  The story?  A very finely crafted tale of some guy seeking revenge against a former friend, who is now a cop in Wiesbaden.  The shocker?  By the time they were done.....there were around forty-seven-odd people dead, on the streets of Wiesbaden, in a matter of seventy-two hours.

Yeah, it was a hefty number and way beyond your imagination.  The bulk of the dead (90-percent)?  They were all bad guys and you got the opinion that the guy was cleaning the streets of Wiesbaden more than anything else.

Stupidity written?  Well....yeah.  There were probably twenty occasions that I just sat there and noted....that's not how the cops work in Germany, or that's illogical for this to occur, or some political folks would have stepped all over this to prevent escalation.

That's the problem with an artistic script.  You might come to really enjoy the story told, even if it's extremely bogus in nature.

The bigger moment of the show came near the end, when some team of bad guys were rushing into the casino of Wiesbaden, in some plan to rob it.  From all the possible banks in town that would have been more fruitful.....instead, they decide to hit the casino, which probably had a quarter of the money that they speculated.  But it was a great scene, with the actual real casino of Wiesbaden in the background.

There are roughly 970-odd Tatort episodes out there.  And this one from Sunday night probably now ranks in the top three ever made.....at least from an artistic view and the script itself.  Bogus factor?  Well.....yeah, it was the most unbelievable Tatort episode ever.

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