“How did you become what you are?” asks forensic pathologist Dr. Daniel Vogt (Jürgen Hartmann) in the finest philosopher Swabian language the head without a body that lies in front of him – and that’s actually the question that every crime thriller with a corpse is about. Vogt always looks like he’s secretly very afraid of the world. This time he still has to go and take care of Chief Inspector Thorsten Lannert (Richy Müller), who has been administered a lot of drugs. He sent his colleague Bootz (Felix Klare) a photo of a table with a lot of blood, then you can find him. In the pub “Der wilde Mann” (The Wild Man) he follows the rising air bubbles in a Plexiglas tube with a blissful smile.
“The Night of the Commissars” then quickly becomes the craziest and most wonderful piece crime scene. Bootz uses Lannert’s memory to put the bloody table, the disembodied head and more into context. But the drugged-up colleague Lannert has other plans, he magically falls out of character. And he’s having fun. Like a goblin, he pops up everywhere you don’t expect him, squats in the police car and turns on the siren, makes the others run around the bus shelter looking for him and sits on the roof himself (can he really fly?) . Richy Müller transforms this otherwise stiff Lannert into an unrestrained child and can’t stop telling Bootz: “I love you”. Up to now one would not have come up with that.
“If only she had lived to be as old as she looked when she was 50.”
The Stuttgarter crime scene is usually solid, in this one-night bash screenwriter Wolfgang Stauch and director Shirel Peleg enjoy themselves. It is actually about illegal trade on a large scale with all Swabian decency – what, you would never have thought of that. In any case, the Bechtle farm can hardly survive on pig breeding, and that’s where the farmer gets inventive; the new farm animal even craps a gold watch. Of course it’s all very bizarre, but also well balanced with the provincial drama that takes place here. It’s about people with scruples about taking money that doesn’t belong to them, about work and morals, and about what it does to you to castrate 20,000 piglets without anesthetic because anesthetic doesn’t pay.
There must be something else in life: the most determined person far and wide is farmer Beate Bechtle (Therese Hämer), who wants to leave the farm. When she was 40, her mother still had the same apron as she had when she was 20 and “if she had at least lived to be as old as she looked when she was 50”. If necessary, Beate Bechtle will shoot her way out of here, and that’s what’s really special about this one crime scene is that despite all the nonsense, not a single character ends up being ridiculous. They are all loved very delicately and carefully.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
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