This is now available on public broadcast in Germany, and so I watched it. As with the first two seasons, I was charmed, overall liked it a lot and appreciate the timeliness of its themes, but I also at some point rolled my eyes and went "really?" or "but hang on, why is there no follow up to X?"

One general observation of the Doylist versus Watsonian nature: within the show narrative, only a few months have passed between seasons 2 and 3. This is a problem not just because Babylon Berlin, like Lost, Heroes, The Americans, has some young actors who are still growing and thus visibly a year or two older at least, but also because the characters behave as if a year has passed. I did wonder why they bothered with the "only two months" thing at all instead of making the real time equal the show time more, and then I realised that it's probably because Black Friday is a major plot point,and that's a fixed in history 1929 date. Ah well.

Looks wise: the Fritz Lang cinematic influence is still going strong (now with Metropolis in addition to Dr. Mabuse). (Though Esther Kasabian is more sympathetic than Thea von Harbou.) By making the early sound movie in production a musical, the series finds an excuse to keep the singing sequences despite the relative lack of night club scenes (due to the criminal case of the season dealing with a film set and the political threads being night club free as well). There's also a blatant homage to Dr. Caligari thrown in from the silent movie days this time.

The secret rearmament and the chumminess between traditional conservative circles and the Nazis (whose presence keeps increasing) are continuing plot threads from the earlier seasons, and very well done: I can't think of a popular tv series which keeps pointing the finger so relentlessly at the way conservatives (and big industrialists, frequently overlapping groups) thought they could use the Nazis and were willing to do so while thus selling out the republic and democracy they didn't believe in. While Katelbach the journalist was already a character last season, this season puts much more emphasis on the role of the press (which in rl broke the secret rearmament story) and the way reporters and newspaper offices were getting increasingly threatened (and vandalized). Simutanously, the show tries not to idealize the press - the chief editor of the newspaper "Tempo", here standing in for a an amalgan of rl editors like Carl von Ossietzky or Siegried Jacobsohn for many an episode keeps prioritizing the sensational "Serial murder at the movies!" story over the important political "secret illegal rearming by the army" story, but also when his office gets vandalized is courageous (and thereafter gets his priorities straight) and protects his sources. That the conservatives and Nazis keep using the term "Lügenpresse" is both historically accurate and a direct allusion to our current day right wring extremists using that very term in Germany. (You don't have an orange painted creature screaming "Fake News" to find a transatlantic equvivalent, but I think none is necessary.)

In fact, this particular plot to me felt like the most successful of the season. Babylon Berlin in general is good as an ensemble story, with supporting characters being given their own lives, but Katelbach, his and formerly Gereon's landlady Frau Behnke (an excellent Fritzi Haberlandt) and new character Malu Seegers becoming the reporter-whistleblower triad outwitting bullies and soon to be murderous thugs was especially satisfying to watch. (Speaking of the press, I also liked our new m/m couple, Katelbach's reporter colleague and Gereon's police photographer.) (Oh, and it wasn't lost on me that the negative review said reporter writes of the movie that is being produced in the course of the season is a spoof of the more negative reviews Babylon Berlin itself has received among the positive ones. Talk about lampshading.)

I was also thrilled the season introduced one of the rl heroes of the time who I only learned about seven years ago, Hans Litten, for more see here, aka the lawyer who in 1931 would manage to put Hitler himself on the stand. (Not his fault that Hitler wasn't condemned before ever becoming chancellor. Litten gave it his best, and it doomed him, because no prizes for guessing what happened in 1933 when Hitler took office.) By making Charlotte become a part time volunteer in Litten's office, I suspect the show prepares ground to give her another job once 1933 arrives, because I can't see Charlotte sticking around once the Berlin police gets united with the Gestapo. (Err, another job in the sense she now will learn some relevant skills, I mean - Litten himself won't be around to work for anymore, see above.) Meanwhile, it is also good to watch her carve out a place for herself among the Berlin cops and become more and more respected for her investigative skills. There's the obligatory sexist ass, but through the course of the season we also watch the other cops treat her more and more as a colleague (as opposed to a typing girl). On that note, we also see far more than in the first two seasons of Gennat (nicknamed "Buddha" by his team), the legendary Berlin reformer of police investigative methods who was the original for Lang's Kommissar Lomann in M.

And while we're rounding off historical characters, while Gennat and Litten appear as themselves, a character who is evidently Horst Wessel shows up as Horst Kessler. (Though they keep even the first name of his girlfriend/prostitute, Erna.) At at a guess, the name change is for the same reason real life Bernhard Weiss was replaced by fictional character Benda in seasons 1 and 2 - the involvement in a fictional murder plot thread.

On the downside: when it comes to Gereon Rath himself, who gets as close to a main character as the show has, the series repeatedly commits the sin of not following up. Gereon finished last season with a cliffhanger discovery. He starts this season in a state where you're never quite sure how much of his actions are meant to be his own, and how much the result of hypnotizing by this series' homage to Dr. Mabuse, because we do not see him deal with the cliffhanger reveal. Similarly, about two thirds in, ( something spoilery happens ) But either way, it means for most of the season you have no idea what the hell is going on inside the main character. Which is just frustrating.

Deep unanswered question of the season: why is there only one therapist (with more than questionable credentials) in all of Berlin? Fritz Lang homages only allow for so much suspension of disbelief.

Overall, though, I enjoyed watching, and am looking forward to season 4.

You know, during the last two years or thereabouts I more than once had the experience that a tv show was available on Netflix (or Amazon Prime) outside the US and thus to me while US viewers either had to pay or be attached to a particular channel to watch it. Well, with Babylon Berlin the reverse was true; while mostly a German production (with international money), it has been available on US Netflix for eons while it only became available (and not on Netflix) in Germany now that it’s been broadcast at one of our major tv broacasting channels, the ARD (which also serves as coproducer).

What it is about: it’s a noir series set in Berlin, 1929, based on a series of mystery novels by Volker Kutscher which I haven’t read but am planning to, not least because I’m going to meet the author next year. Anyway, I can’t compare the source material to the tv show yet, and thus am reporting on tv only impressions. One of the driving forces behind the tv version is Tom Twyker, known to overseas folk mainly for Run Lola Run and also, if you’re a Sense 8 fan, for his involvement with the later. The main actors and their characters: Volker Bruch as Gereon Rath, our main detective, originally from Cologne but newly transferred to Berlin, as befits a noir cop traumatized by his past (he’s a WWI veteran with PTSD and a secret beyond that), self-medicating with morphine and generally a repressed emotional mess; Liv Lisa Fries as Charlotte Ritter, certainly deserving to be the show’s breakout character, trying to make a living as a police typist by day and dancer with a sideline in occasional prostitution by night but harboring the burning ambition to become the first female detective in the Berlin police force; Peter Kurth as Bruno Wolter, whom Batman afficianados might be tempted to regard as the Harvey Bullock of Berlin (i.e. corrupt cop but with a good core due to his jovial, cheerful attitude towards our two heroes), which would be a mistake. These, however, are but three of a big ensemble, which doesn’t get confusing (at least imo), and it’s to the show’s credit that supporting characters, like Stefan Jänicke (temporary sidekick of Gereon and good friend to Lotte) and his two deaf parents (btw: said parents being deaf and Stefan talking to them in sign language (and vice versa) throughout without this being made a big deal of strikes me as a great way to include characters with a physical handicap without falling into a „very special episode“ attitude) or Lotte’s friend Greta feel real and fleshed out.

Occasionally, there’s a bit of „Weimar Republic Clichés Check List“ feeling (of course there’s an androgynous singer, Svetlana Sorokina, played by Severija Janušauskaitė, who performs in drag, and before you can say Doctor Mabuse, there’s a hypnotist doctor, too), but not in a way that irritated me. You can tell this wasn’t written by a Brit or US American by the fact that the Nazis, while present, actually aren’t the main villains (yet), and that the fact the army is full of disgruntled monarchists with no loyalty to the new republic, going all the way up to the time’s most prominent ex-soldier, President Paul von Hindenburg, is the far more immediate menace. The show also uses the infamous „Blood May“ incident where over 30 civilians died when the police went down mercilessly on a May 1st demonstration, and the Stalinists versus exile Trotzkytes rivalries to paint a far more diverse political picture than you get from, say, just about any story set in the same era where the pov is a British or US visitor.

The various plot threads start out separately but turn out to be connected, as befits a good mystery. Some pot holes and/or illogical circumstances (such as why on earth the main underworld boss doesn’t kill Gereon Rath on at least two occasions when it would make sense for him to) later turn out to have an explanation, but it’s not always spelled out. (Such as Greta’s final realization in episode 16 when she sees a certain someone; it’s obvious what this implies but no one tells us the audience this in dialogue.) The extreme poverty of most people (except for a few) in the era is always present. (Lotte can’t afford to actually own the party dresses she wears; they’re a loan in the night club and part of why she’s expected to indulge the occasional customer. There are no hot, or for that matter cold showers for Lotte and her family; she and Greta go to a public bath. When someone dies, the obvious option is to donate the body to the Charité, the famous Berlin hospital, because that way you don’t have to pay for a coffin and funeral. And so forth.

Another great thing to this German viewer is that the accents are right. Meaning: Lotte Ritter and the other Berlin (and surrounding area) based characters speak with a strong Berlin accent, whereas Gereon-from-Cologne decidedly does not, while a lone Bavarian exile (an apothocary) talks with a Bavarian accent, and so forth. (As opposed to everyone speaking Hochdeutsch and/or speaking English with a fake German accent.) But really,the show’s greatest charm is Lotte dancing the night away when she’s not doggedly investigating and either charming or tricking or badgering people into telling her what she needs to know, and her brittle, slowly forming team-up with Gereon Rath who definitely did not come to Berlin looking for a partner in crime solving, least of all a typist who keeps surprising him.

Nitpick: I’m not really sold on the *spoiler* having their secret headquarters in *spoiler*, but that’s just unlikely enough to have been a historical truth (a superficial search won’t say one way or the other).

Not a nitpick: since the actual Berlin head of police, Zörgiebel, appears under his own name, I was a bit confused for much of the show why a character obviously meant to be Bernhard Weiß, one of the few really sympathetic Weimar era police figures (and the actor even made to look like him), the vice president the Berlin police force, appears under the nome de plume of August Benda, but then when a certain subplot came to its head I realized the reason was that Weiß‘ fate is historically certain, and the series needed to go into another direction with Benda.

Trigger: well, let’s see. It’s a story set in a besieged republic with loud extremists hijacking public attention. I don’t know, could this remind you of anything?