Babylon Berlin
Sky Atlantic | ★★★✩✩
Watching this fourth season opener of Babylon Berlin is a bit like arriving late to a party where you don’t know anyone, you’re still sober whilst everyone else is in the swing of things, but it looks cool and fun so you make an effort to join in. And then the Nazis turn up.
Set at the tail end of the Weimar Republic I’m guessing the grim opening sequence of a man in a flotation tank being force-fed drugs and having violent visions is some kind of allegory for Germany’s impending fate, because otherwise I have no idea how it’s meant to connect with the rest of the characters who are subsequently introduced thick and fast.
Police, politicians, teenage robbers, gangsters, rich business people, and then yes, Nazis, indiscriminately swirl about each other, making it difficult for a new viewer to identify exactly who’s just setting the scene, and who’s meant to be driving the story.
Obviously jumping straight into a dense narrative based on a series of novels isn’t ideal, but the background is in itself rewarding.
This episode on the last day of the 1920s and first of the 30s is clearly a pivot point, and the show’s creators have talked about how their intention was to shine a light an overlooked period in history.
It’s almost as if a time of poverty and inequality leading to the rise of both the far-left and far-right and destruction of the middle might be worth examining for its present day implications, but still, what do you get here that you wouldn’t from a documentary?
Well for one thing, style. A budget of €55 million wouldn’t even pay for the pointy ears in Lord of the Rings, but it made the first series the most expensive in German TV.
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Max Ivanir as Jewish gangster Abe Gold
Utilised to impressive effect by show runners Tom Tykwer and Achim von Borries, respectively responsible for seminal German hits Run Lola Run and Good Bye Lenin!, you can see the Bauhaus and Lang visual influences at play over the contradictions of opulence and hardship in the streets.
However, with the most obvious cultural cousins being Peaky Blinders and Cabaret when it comes to flair, anything else is always going to suffer somewhat in comparison. Which brings us back to the story.
Supposedly Hitler was hardly mentioned in previous seasons, and with plans to finish the series upon his ascension to power in 1933, I assume the ground has previously been laid for the conditions that made this possible.
What’s apparent though is that this isn’t meant to be a straight historical recreation of those events, rather than a telling of what those events meant for the various characters..
Essentially what I’m saying is, if you want any hope of emotional investment you’re going to have to go back to the very beginning on Sky. But even then you’ll eventually get back to this point of Nazi thugs rioting, and you might find yourself thinking maybe I’ve got somewhere else better to be.
