This review was published when the crime scene was first broadcast on April 14, 2019. Now the first repeats the case, which is why we are republishing the text.
This story from Dortmund takes place in the hectic everyday life of a hospital, where an internist died, the head of the corpse was wrapped in a plastic bag. Sex accident, revenge crime, cover-up? Peter Faber (Jörg Hartmann) and Martina Bönisch (Anna Schudt) investigate, as one likes to say in such a case, in all directions, whereby the case takes a back seat as soon as Faber steps into the backdrop in his greasy parka. The parka seems to be a bit greasier than usual, and the crazy smile of the inspector at the very beginning suggests that the investigations actually only have one goal in all directions: Faber’s innermost being, his soul.
This commissioner’s wife and daughter died in a traffic accident years ago, and that was the break in his life. The loss of his family has made him who he is: it makes him extremely sensitive, sometimes particularly cynical; it makes him warm and cold; he explains his strengths as an investigator and his weaknesses as a person. Faber is constantly struggling to survive, in the thirteen episodes so far from Dortmund his brokenness was sometimes more, sometimes less evident, and in the end he seemed to be gradually being caught by the group in the police station. This with or against each other has always been told beautifully, and the Dortmunders have often managed to deal with relevant subjects in parallel: neo-Nazis, rocker gangs, terrorism. You need strong, multi-layered stories to counterbalance Faber’s madness.
In the episode “Inferno” now (book: Markus Busch; director: Richard Huber), however, there is an imbalance, because the story in the hospital is not a multi-layered story. It is about the overload of the clinic staff, which is then presented in a very striking way. A doctor throws herself pills for lack of sleep, a doctor recalls the classic, breathless hospital series sentence: “You can see what’s going on here.” (The station nurse Marta Hunková would have put it in a similar way, back then forty years ago in the Hospital on the outskirts of the city.) On the other hand: Faber is seized by hallucinations, hears voices, sleeps poorly, is no longer available, gets involved in games with LSD pills, and all of that is insane, but the madness here at most leads to the realization that somehow everyone is overwhelmed.
Only mediocre, this one crime scene, at least by Dortmund standards. And, a question emerges from the scene: how long will this constellation with a commissioner who is always on the brink of abyss last?
The first, Sunday, 8.15 p.m.