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Alex (Aylin Tezel) is overwhelmed, stunned and kidnapped on a shopping trip in his own car.
When she wakes up, her unborn child has disappeared
Photo: Frank Dicks / ZDF
Isn't it wonderful what coincidences the Anglo-Saxon city has in store?
A single mother named Louise, played by Simona Brown, finally wants to have fun in a bar again and almost starts an affair with a handsome guy named David (Tom Bateman) after a nice evening and a bit of smooching.
The next morning it turns out that the man is her new employer: a married psychiatrist, in whose practice Louise in the series "She knows about you" serves as an antechamber - and soon also as David's lover.
Isn't it dreadful what abysses open up in a German supermarket parking lot?
Pregnant detective inspector Alex, played by Aylin Tezel, cursed her fear of having children in the office on the last working day before the birth when she was overwhelmed, stunned and kidnapped on a shopping trip in her own car.
When she comes to after days in a forest, Alex's body is smeared with blood - and the child she was carrying in her stomach has been born and has disappeared.
In the series “Unbroken”, Alex soon begins to investigate himself because: “My child is alive.
I know that!"
The six-part series »She knows about you« runs on Netflix, the six-part series »Unbroken« on ZDFneo (and in the ZDF media library).
Both are currently attracting a large number of viewers.
Both seem to follow Albert Hitchcock's motto: "A look into the world proves that horror is nothing but reality."
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Actress Eve Hewson as Adele in "She Knows About You"
Photo: Mark Mainz / Netflix
Part of the success of the series genre is that screenwriters in the pursuit of maximum audience amazement unhinge the laws of probability.
Whether "Breaking Bad", "House of Cards" or "Babylon Berlin": Series watchers are now so practiced in marveling at startling, daring, outrageous plot changes that, paradoxically, one can speak of getting used to the greatest possible surprise.
That even resurrection miracles in series are possible and the dead can suddenly be brought back to life was already proven by the makers of the TV saga "Dallas" when they suddenly removed the figure of Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy), long previously declared dead, in 1986 take a shower at home - with the lax justification that the 31 episodes since his death were just a bad dream.
In »She knows about you«, the heroine Louise, who was conveniently freed from her motherly duties for a while, soon fell under the spell of a double enchantment.
While she regularly has sex with her psychiatrist boss David after work, she gets to know his wife Adele (Eve Hewson) without David's knowledge and becomes friends with her.
The viewers see dream flashbacks and, together with Louise, listen to the apparently by no means reliable reports by the couple about previous mysterious events.
In the picturesque wilderness of madness, where blood and nonsense flow, a drug-ill friend (Robert Aramayo) and a deep well in the forest play important roles.
And dreams are always dark and deceptive
In »Unbroken«, the severely traumatized detective Alex soon stumbles into a murder case involving a surrogate mother who apparently comes from Romania.
Alex is fearfully eyed by her husband (Sebastian Zimmler) as a nerve wreck plagued by flashback, meets a very evil mafia villain (Aleksandar Tesla) and is allowed to discuss her neuroses with a police psychologist (Leslie Malton).
The condition of her demented father (André Jung) can also be interpreted as an indication of the possible unreliability of Alex's memories of the kidnapping act, of the hallucination character of her dark dream visions.
Basically, large parts of the series appear as if someone had written "secret" in capital letters on every page of the script.
Of course, I will not reveal here how the fog lifts and things clear up in "She knows about you" and "Unbroken" in an undoubtedly amazing way at the end;
in the first case based on a novel by Sarah Pinborough, in the second based on a book by Mark O. Seng and Andreas Linke.
But I want to hold on: I have blatantly bizarre plot
turns
,
twists
, at the end of a series rather bad mood (and apparently many others too: A discussion is raging on the internet about the question of whether the resolution at the end of "She knows about you" is a brilliant one Trick or just a lame exit strategy).
As an enthusiastic consumer of films and series, I ask myself whether the series makers sometimes overstrain their will to be crazy - for example in these two productions.
How crazy, bizarre, beyond the rules of plausibility, can stories develop that an audience willingly allows them to be served up?
Of course, the space for every kind of screenplay fantasy is infinitely large, presumably it even expands steadily like our universe.
But if you run the business of fantasy, perhaps you shouldn't lose sight of the disgraceful laws of reality - at least that's what an old storyteller rule from Walt Disney demands.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it a bit more polemically: "There is nothing more terrible than imagination without taste."
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