In this crime scene from Cologne, two dangerous grandpas face each other, each of them has a lot at stake. One is called Viktor Raschke, works in the delicatessen and protection money business and, as godfather, controls the entire district, which used to be called “multicultural”, even if it is entirely Cologne.
The other controls the district as well, but differently. It is the chief inspector Freddy Schenk (or the great Dietmar Bär) who is supposed to ensure order and solve a crime here – the New Year’scrime scene is a personal case for both of them. Because in the episode “Protective Measures” everything is related to Schenk’s daughter, Sonja Schenk. At night, demonstrators march through the street in torchlight and shout “We are the people”, then it burns in the Persian restaurant Wunderlampe, which Sonja built with her partner Karim Farooq (Timur Isik), and when a charred dead man is found there, comes a dynamic in motion, in the course of which for Schenk the protective instinct counts more than any service regulations. And Raschke (Manfred Zapatka with a devilish Heinrich Breloer beard) pulls the strings in such a way that sooner or later it has to come down to a decision between the two.
Family affair: Sonja Schenk (Natalie Spinell) and Schenk (Dietmar Bär).
(Photo: Martin Valentin Menke/WDR/Bavaria Fiction GmbH)
Based on the screenplay by Paul Salisbury and with Julia Jalnasow’s remarkably competent camera work, Nina Vukovic has staged a classic cop-versus-gangster crime thriller, in which the old Brooklyn cinema sometimes beckons. However, it suffers somewhat from the fact that the decisive twist recently appeared in a similar way in a Sunday thriller. And also including that Sonja Schenk (Natalie Spinell), who of crime scene had lost sight of for more than twenty years, now brings with him a vaguely indicated, harsh life story, including an almost grown-up daughter, but is almost cutely fixed on dad. After all, she is allowed to lie to him in between, that the beams are bending.
In the last Berlincrime scene Robert Karow was sent on vacation in no time because of bias, only to then of course really get started. Schenk’s colleague Max Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt), on the other hand, takes an incredibly long time before he realizes what’s actually going on. Here it is evident that no one really cares about the likelihood of an investigator being entrusted with solving murders in the family environment. What matters: How the godfather of Cologne sits in his warehouse and cracks walnuts in an incredibly friendly manner.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
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