Berlin Babylon (final note)

I have written about Berlin Babylon before.  Unfortunately, my reviews are entered into the Blog last-in first-out for the reader.  Therefore, those readers who have an interest in my earlier comments on this German TV series (Tom Tykwer director) streaming on Netflix should look below.

Berlin Babylon's 16 episodes divides into two parts.  The first eight episodes involve a Cologne detective imported into the Berlin police force and his efforts to track down the source of an illusive image used to blackmail a prominent politician from the hero's hometown.  The first half of the show is used to establish the characters and milieu, something that is done effectively and with great nuance.  The protagonist is Geryon Rath, a shell-shocked war veteran, his police partner, the heavy-set and menacing Wolter, Lotte, a girl from the slums who dabbles in prostitution but desires to be a detective on the Homicide Squad (the German is more blunt -- she wants to work in Mord), Benda, the Jewish chief of police and his maid, Grete, a girl from the country who is friends with Lotte.  All of these characters are interesting and Lotte, in particular, is very engaging -- she looks vulnerable but is fantastically tough and stoic.  I thought the solution and climax to the first part of the show a bit underwhelming.  This is not the case with the second part, or the last 8 episodes that end the program.  If anything, the last few episodes are too emphatic and suffer a bit from grandiosity. 

In the last half of the series, Rath is involved in an intrigue circling around a shipment of gold from a wealthy family in Russia to Berlin.  The gold, a vast fortune, is hidden in a train car.  The other cars in the train contain illegal phosgene, a weapon of mass destruction.  The plot is complicated but involves right-wing nationalists attempting to circumspectly re-arm the Reich.  (The irony in the film is that the covert efforts to re-arm the German Wehrmacht, visualized as a group of superannuated generals, war-cripples, and misguided cops and military men, is foiled by our hero but to what ultimate effect? Of course, we all know that Corporal Hitler is somewhere nearby and that he will occupy the vacuum created by the defeat of the right-wing military conspirators.  In effect, the Germans are being saved by a leap from the fire into the much hotter, and more lethal, frying pan.)  The show's last half has a couple slow episodes but it gains in emotional force and becomes exceptionally powerful, if occasionally absurd, during its last three or so hours.  The climax is packed with remarkable stuff including a terrifyingly suspenseful terrorist bombing, a near-drowning with a car sunk in a deep green-blue lake, and a sequence that derives from Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew too Much, a coup orchestrated to occur by the assassinations of key politicians at a Berlin theater where Brecht and Weil's Dreigroschenoper (Three-Penny Opera) is performed.  The show ends with a spectacular sequence on the train laden with gold, the locomotive roaring across low, flat country under a morbidly stormy-looking sky.  This part of the film is choreographed in homage to a great predecessor film, Konchalovsky's Runaway Train, and is exceptionally well-made and beautifully designed.  There are a number of absurdities in the operatic ending to the series but it delivers the goods in terms of excitement and emotional impact.