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Police chief inspector Elisabeth "Bessie" Eyckhoff (Verena Altenberger): Miez-Miez-Krimiplot
Photo: Hendrik Heiden / Geißendörfer Pictures / BR
In this crime thriller, the characters talk shop a lot about elementary particle and quantum physics.
Some of the dialogues sound like the nerds from "Big Bang Theory" imagine a romantic date.
In a restaurant, the investigator gets into conversation with a scientist whom she previously smiled at a traffic light when she hung up a note with the picture of a missing cat.
Now it crackles over the dining tables.
You and? Are you at least getting on? "
He: "No, I'm looking for something too."
You: "What are you looking for?"
He: “Uh, the place where quark-antiquark pairs stay in proton-antiproton collisions. The problem is that the pair of particles we are looking for decays after an extremely short ten twenty-fourth of a second. "
She: "But according to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, it is not at all possible to determine the exact location of an elementary particle."
He: "You know your way around quantum physics?"
She: »I find theoretical particle physics very exciting. But I am much more passionate about observing and analyzing human behavior. For example, I wonder how two complete strangers meet at the traffic lights, go to the same restaurant and then sit across from each other. "
The split-up exchange of blows leads to the main problem of this "police call": The dialogues are so ambitious that the modest plot appears as if it had only been made up in order to bridge the time between these dialogues.
The focus is on a cat that ran away from an old lady named Frau Schrödinger and becomes the central factor in a hit-and-run case.
Police chief inspector Elisabeth "Bessie" Eyckhoff (Verena Altenberger) is involved in the process in two ways: she tries to find the person responsible for the death of the accident victim, and she helps Mrs. Schrödinger track down the missing pet.
At the beginning only the audience knows that one has to do with the other, and they should feel as if they were watching a sophisticated experimental set-up in this crime thriller.
Anyone who observes also influences
The episode title "Frau Schrödinger's cat" refers to both the Miez-Miez crime plot and a thought experiment by the researcher Erwin Schrödinger, the founder of quantum mechanics. With the experiment he wanted to prove how humans help shape events through their thoughts. This is what is happening to police officer Eyckhoff: By helping the old woman to find the runaway cat through posters, she sets a mechanism in motion that later leads to the fatal accident. Heisenberg connoisseur Eyckhoff could have known in advance that anyone who only observes influences what he observes.
That might sound exciting on paper, but in the finished »Polizeiruf« (director: Oliver Haffner) the idea doesn't work. The fact that the previous "Police Call" episode from Munich was an intoxicating act of unleashing may also have an unfavorable effect on the perception of the crime thriller: Director Dominik Graf let the team drink and sing, cheat and riot and dismantled the Revier's core team. At that time it was shown again what a sensational actress Verena Altenberger is, because she let her "Bessie" Eyckhoff stroll through all the abysses with feather-light grandeur.
Altenberger still plays with this ease two years later, but ultimately it also fails because of the dialogues that pull it down like heavy chains.
The screenwriter Clemens Maria Schönborn had previously presented a sovereign thriller grotesque with "Hit Mom", for which he brought the escalation mechanics known from "Fargo" into German prime-time television films.
“Ms. Schrödinger's cat” now looks like a narrow-gauge “Fargo” over long distances with far too much swell ballast.
Then rather 20 minutes of "Big Bang Theory".
And so we drag ourselves easily exhausted into the big summer break.
The next new ARD Sunday thriller will run at the end of August.
Rating:
3 out of 10 points
"Police call 110: Frau Schrödinger's cat",
Sunday, 8:15 pm, Das Erste
