Enlarge image
A break from the Middle Ages: Vaddern and his son Thiel (Claus D. Clausnitzer and Axel Prahl) fishing
Photo: Thomas Kost / WDR
This text was published in its original version for the first broadcast of "Tatort" on December 13, 2020.
The scenario:
Wooden dialogues in iron armor.
A family of showmen want to stage the “Anabaptist Experience” in a castle – an open-air event at which the horrific regime of the Anabaptists in 16th-century Minster is to be presented as a hands-on spectacle.
But before the actors can sing lamentations and cut off each other's artificial limbs, the head of the family is found dead in knight's armor in the moat.
During the investigations, Commissioner Thiel (Axel Prahl) and Professor Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers) try to outdo each other with their knowledge of the Anabaptists.
The highlight:
Adult education center meets medieval market.
Against the crooked backdrop of the knight's castle, the investigators report, well, fun facts and historical data about the radical Protestant movement that plunged Münster into gloomy excess by 1534.
But unfortunately this gloomy excess is not embellished at all.
The team at the Münster »crime scene«, which is otherwise so inclined towards morbidity, leaves all the templates for a black humorous unleashing of the torture and pious terror of the Anabaptists unused.
The picture:
A skull in the hands of Professor Boerne.
It's a plastic dummy used by the theater company in a beheading scene.
The professor complains that the rags on the neck don't look like the head was actually severed.
He is right.
The dialogue:
Inspector Thiel comes back from the castle, where he had questioned the surviving relatives of the deceased head of the family, and is received by his new assistant Schrader:
Schrader: "How was the family?"
Thiel: »Headless. Decapitated."
The song:
"Bad" by Michael Jackson: Runs when Professor Boerne puts on the iron armor in which the victim died for investigative reasons.
The inevitable "moonwalk" that he performs with armor comes across as very rusty.
The review:
4 out of 10 points.
This Münster episode was shot as one of the first Corona "crime scenes" after the first lockdown under strict hygiene conditions - maybe that's why the spectacle about the bloodthirsty Anabaptist times seems so aseptic.
The analysis:
Please read on here!
»Crime scene: long live the king!«,
Sunday, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste