“Police call 110: Only ghosts”: Familial demons of the past

“Police call 110: only ghosts”
Familial demons of the past

The third joint case between Commissioners Katrin König (Anneke Kim Sarnau, 51) and Melly Böwe (Lina Beckmann, 42) not only leads you into the Rostock stoner and sado-maso scene, but also into the depths of a broken family.

That’s what “Police Call 110: Only Ghosts” is about

King and Böwe have to rush to an extraordinary crime scene: The doctor and plastic surgeon Kai Wülker was found tied up and gagged in his own blood in his glamorous home. As an initial examination of the body shows, before his murder he was subjected to “torture of the very finest” in which the perpetrator, among other things, pulled out his fingernails and inflicted burns on him. At first glance, the bloodthirsty atrocity is a highly emotional act of revenge. However, since a whole arsenal of sado-maso toys is found in the victim’s apartment, there is for a moment the theory that the crime could have been a sado-maso session that got out of hand.

While König and Böwe investigate the plastic surgeon’s environment and a local sado-maso club, the case takes a completely new turn: DNA analysis was used to identify hairs found at the crime scene that belonged to a teenager named Jessica who disappeared 15 years ago and has now been officially declared dead assigned to Sunday. Since it is proven to be fresh DNA, the cold case stored in the archive suddenly becomes a hot case again. Apparently the missing woman is still alive – and may have returned from the past for a mysterious vendetta.

The investigation is now focusing on Jessica Sonntag’s family, which has been thoroughly dismantled since her disappearance. The mother, Evelyn Sonntag (Judith Engel, 54), a plain and inconspicuous woman who tries to fill her lonely life with voluntary work in telephone counseling, has never given up hope that her daughter will return and has made this hope the central content of her existence.

In this survival mode, there was obviously so little space and maternal emotion available for her son Henrik (Adrian Grünewald, 24) that she coldly pushed him away to his aunt in Munich after her daughter’s disappearance. Father Robert Sonntag (Holger Daemgen, 54), who runs a car repair shop for vintage cars, would like to put the whole story behind him for good and approaches the renewed investigation with some nervousness and demonstrative skepticism.

The fact that Mother Sonntag initially does not mention to the investigators the calls her daughter, who she believed to be dead, made to the telephone counseling center makes the woman appear in a new light and raises the suspicion that she has something to hide. Michelle Carstensen (Senita Huskić, 27), Jessica’s former childhood friend, is also initially reluctant to provide any information. She has continued to spend the past 15 years in the rancid, alternative drug environment in which the disappeared woman also took refuge from her family at the time.

Only after several visits to Michelle’s strange stoner shared apartment do the detectives manage to get a crucial clue out of her, which turns the investigation on its head again and turns it into a nerve-wracking criminal hunt in which life and death are at stake.

To make matters worse, Commissioner König has to fight on two emotionally charged fronts at the same time: after many decades, her own father suddenly reappears, who simply left her alone as a child when her parents fled the former GDR.

Is it worth turning on?

Yes. However, the interesting aspects of this police call episode do not arise primarily from the murder case story, which initially opens with maximum spectacularity, but which later becomes all too exhausted in static investigative dialogues between the detectives and the various members of the broken Sonntag family and other suspects.

It is much more exciting to watch the newly formed team since the departure of Chief Detective Alexander Bukow (Charly Hübner, 51) and the arrival of Inspector Melly Böwe as they slowly come to terms with each other, with some crunch.

Even in the third case together, alongside her colleague Katrin König, Böwe, with her seemingly naive and overly empathetic nature, does not have an easy time of it in the constellation found. The fact that she utters sentences like “Yes, sometimes it’s not that easy to kill” at the blood-soaked murder scene and dreamily strums the melody of the Deep Purple song “Smoke on the Water” on the grand piano next to the corpse worries her colleagues and colleagues regularly for rolling eyes. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that at least Katrin König and Chief Detective Anton Pöschel (Andreas Guenther, 50) are slowly warming up to the new girl and learning to appreciate her special qualities.

Only colleague Volker Thiesler (Josef Heynert, 47), deeply offended at not having been promoted to Böwe’s position himself, continues to miss every opportunity to make caustic comments to signal to him that he still doesn’t respect her as his new superior. He continues his brazen game until Melly Böwe finally feels compelled to make a clear announcement to him: “I’m your superior now – whether you like it or not. And if the tone doesn’t change, that’s totally fine here become unpleasant. But not for me.” It is foreseeable that Thiesler will not be able to avoid these clear words in the further consequences of the Rostock police call.

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