Sunday evening thriller: Meret Becker’s farewell to the “crime scene”

Sunday night crime thriller
Meret Becker’s farewell to the “crime scene”

Nina Rubin (Meret Becker) in a scene from the ARD thriller “Tatort – The girl who goes home alone”. Photo: Hans Joachim Pfeiffer/rbb/ARD/dpa

© dpa-infocom GmbH

Meret Becker stops at the Berlin “Tatort” and says goodbye with a dramatic finale. German crime fans have often seen inspectors die. Sometimes the ending is weird.

When an actor retires from a role after a long time, screenwriters often tinker: What can the farewell look like? With actress Meret Becker it was final.

She said goodbye on Sunday evening with a dramatic finale as commissioner Nina Rubin from Berlin’s crime scene “Tatort” in the first.

At the end of the episode “The Girl Who Walks Home Alone”, she is shot dead by a Russian mafioso after a showdown at the airport. Her colleague Robert Karow (Mark Waschke) carries her in his arms across the airfield and desperately calls: “Nina, don’t fall asleep!” In vain. In the last scene, the police colleagues can be seen pausing in front of a photo of Rubin with crape.

era is coming to an end

With Becker’s farewell, a “crime scene” era at Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) that began with “Das Muli” in 2015 is coming to an end. It has been known since 2019 that she will stop. In the next episode (“The Victim”), Waschke will investigate solo. Corinna Harfouch will be Becker’s successor.

When inspectors die in a serial death: crime fans know that. In February, the Dortmund chief inspector Martina Bönisch fell victim to targeted shots in the “Tatort” episode “Love Me” in the dramatic finale of a tragic case. Actress Anna Schudt said goodbye to the investigative team from the Ruhr area after a total of 22 missions.

Fans of the ARD Sunday evening thriller recently had to cope with a few farewells. Only Daniel Kossik (Stefan Konarske) was transferred from the four-man Dortmund team, then Nora Dalay (Aylin Tezel) quit the service. In the Rostock “Polizeiruf 110” – also to be seen in the first – the commissioner Sascha Bukow, played by Charly Hübner, gave up the police job at the beginning of the year. The year before, Maria Simon left the “police call” as Olga Lenski – after ten years as an investigator in Brandenburg.

Dramatic farewells are not uncommon

The farewells to the “crime scene” have been more dramatic recently: In the eleventh episode of the Weimar “crime scene”, first broadcast on New Year’s Day 2021, Commissioner Lessing (Christian Ulmen) dies in action – even if his wife and colleague Kira Dorn (Nora Tschirner) initially imagines him still at her side. Nadeshda Krusenstern (Friederike Kempter) was part of the Münster team of Frank Thiel (Axel Prahl) and Karl-Friedrich Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers) for 17 years before she appeared in the WDR production “Das Team” in 2020 – a series with investigators from different locations and without a fixed script – was killed.

The departure of a TV inspector from a crime series has seen many variants on German television. The fatal shooting of ZDF commissioner Erwin Köster (Siegfried Lowitz) in 1986 was a bit of a shock for the audience. Incidentally, the shooter in the thriller was the later James Bond villain Christoph Waltz. ZDF commissioner Lisa Wagner, on the other hand, had a rather strange finale as Winnie Heller in 2021 – she was struck by lightning.

But it often happens without bloodshed. The “Tatort” commissioners Paul Stoever (Manfred Krug) and Peter Brockmöller (Charles Brauer) said goodbye in 2001 with a swing insert and cheerleaders.

dpa

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