If there should be limbo, Europe’s largest bowling party in Münster has long been a prime candidate. Once a year, up to 40,000 people came from the surrounding area to dismantle the city. First we went to the train, then the taxis were thrown up. The elders remember. At some point, the break no longer paid off, but of course bowling in restaurants and bowling on arterial roads are still part of the city’s DNA.
So it is quite fitting that Professor Karl-Friedrich Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers) in propheteus first lies struck at a bowling alley and then rushes with Commissioner Frank Thiel (Axel Prahl) to a recreational athlete with a crushed skull. It’s in Münster, it’s a thriller. But that will remain the only certainty. As the story progresses, a butcher with an explosive belt will appear, a banana-eating Jack Russell terrier, and two intelligence officers named Muster and Mann, who are wearing slim black suits and spiky Vidal Sassoon hairstyles. Sounds like the usual Gaga TV from Munsterbut it is not.
Depicting the absurd is perfectly adequate
This time it’s about conspiracy tellers, each with a chip implanted behind their ear so they’ll know who’s with them when reptilian aliens take over the world. There are enough people beyond the television fiction who are convinced of the humbug. It’s easy to fabricate a lot of puns out of it. But in Münster, Astrid Ströher (script) and Sven Halfar (director) don’t do what is to be expected, they simply depict the absurd, which is perfectly adequate.
Are Boerne and Thiel now investigators in the case or perpetrators? Are those who believe in lizards under their leader Propheteus muddleheads or satirists? And are the strange guys from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution aliens after all? In the dystopian movie matrix it says: “Do you know that feeling when you don’t know whether you’re awake or still dreaming?” Even Boerne and Thiel no longer know for sure, they eye each other critically, and in the end it is the medical examiner Silke Haller (ChrisTine Ursprechen) who keeps track of things and unmasks Propheteus with a somewhat silly volte. But perhaps everything is not so pompous, but just as Thiel certifies to his hippie father: “Maybe you just smoked too much weed.”
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
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