NB: SPOILERS INSIDE

This week’s penultimate episode was highly expositional, but welcomely so. We still didn’t know for real who Alfred Nyssen was, which secret organisation he represented, which side Sventlana was batting for and why, and why the crowd of war veterans were gathered in front of Der Armenier at the end of the last episode. And, lest we forget, who was the man in the photograph at the heart of the blackmail scam that brought Rath to Berlin in the first place. Many questions were answered in this seventh episode, but episode eight? It was a bit of a head-scratcher.

Lotte was fully on the case, this time pretending to be a member of the press corps and snooping around the railway station to try and find out what happened to the train from Russia. She found out enough and telephoned Rath who arrived at the same time as Councillor Benda. In the car back to town (Lotte was discarded without thanks, natürlich) out came the heavy exposition: Benda told Rath that the train signified one of an increasing number of contraband shipments from Russia, delivering weapons of all kinds, and now poisonous gas, to an organisation called the Black Reichswehr – an illegal, secret gang of paramilitaries who were livid at how the Treaty Of Versailles restricted the German army, and sought to create its own. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Nyssen – a powerful iron magnate, and seen often in the sack with Svetlana – had his name all over the train and therefore was part of the organisation.

So it all fell into place. Benda was particularly anxious to snuff out this menace because, we saw from religious paraphernalia in this home, that he was Jewish. And the Black Reichswehr hated the Jews.

No sooner had Rath been told all this, he found himself sitting with the Black Reichswehr top brass at a little soiré held by Wolter. It seems that his gruff partner was in on all this, too. As these moustachioed bad boys reminisced about the war, Rath – and us – were taken back to the trenches via flashback and saw what happened to his brother Appo.

One more thing about Rath. We saw in episode six that he had entered a confession box in a church, telling the priest about his love for his brother’s wife. In this episode, we saw the tattoed, hitman priest who got to König enter the same pharmacy where Rath procured his vials of morphine and quietly demand that the chemist switch up his medicine to Barbituric acid. It looked like the bad guys were onto Rath and were intent on exploiting his weakness.

How they were onto him remained unexplained. In fact, at the end of the perplexing, frustrating and curiously unsatisfying series finale, much was either brushed over or unexplained. Yes… we had another final episode that felt rushed and a bit empty.

Most of the series had been building up some enjoyable character arcs – Rath and his demons were being extinguished in a redemptive manner, Lotte’s rise from the poverty of the slums of Berlin to the corridors of the Berlin police force, and even Greta’s development from homeless urchin to Benda’s housekeeper were interesting and satisfying. But the final episode saw much of this development discarded. Lotte did not appear until the very last scene, and even then it was a fleeting appearance. Why? We got plenty of Greta early on, but she was not a main character and her story – however sweet and uplifting – just didn’t need that much time spent on it. We saw Nyssen incarcerated, and Svetlana paying a visit to him, telling him that she had betrayed him. How? Why? We were never told.

Instead, the middle part of the episode was all about a daring raid on Der Armenier’s safe to retrieve the incriminating film. Yes, this was a tense scene – with Rath shooting a livid gangster in the hand (his real name was Edgar… aw, sweet) and escaping with the film. He and Wolter settled down to watch the films and he found what he was looking for – the man in the film he was interested in, the one he was trying to erase on orders from Cologne, was his father. This was supposed to be a twist, but it didn’t feel like one. The series had started off with a singular mission for Rath, but the whole Russian train/Kardakov/Svetlana/Nyssen/Black Reichswehr side story took over. It wasn’t fully resolved, instead feeling like it was a distraction to a fun noir detective story.

It’s hard to get the balance right in these period crime dramas, especially one that’s set in such a febrile time. With so much going on Berlin in the 1920s – an economically broken country coming to terms with the trauma of war, with various angry factions jostling to gain control – the socio-political landscape provided a really interesting backdrop in which to base a crime story. However, Babylon Berlin sometimes meandered and was a bit too pleased with itself for indulging in as much of this socio-political stuff at the expense of the thriller element. Don’t get me wrong – there was some terrific period detail, everyone looked the part and some of the depictions of war-torn Berlin and the slums were engrossing. I just felt things could have been a bit tighter in terms of story: Rath’s investigation should’ve taken centre stage to really give it that narrative thrust. I was yearning for this storyline to be a bit meatier, and with more twists and turns. Instead, we knew Edgar had the tapes from quite an early stage so there was no real whodunit element.

Babylon Berlin ended with Edgar taking some sort of revenge on Rath – bundling a very drunk detective into his car and letting his mad doctor loose on him, pumping him full of drugs and messing with his mind, all the while licking his lips and steaming up his glasses (ie classic German baddie look). Rath emerged after a mind-bending, psychedelic trip through the streets of Berlin where his subconscious merged with his conscious mind, broken and slumped on his doorstep. Heavy night.

He then wrote to his lover, Helga, in Cologne telling her they were over for good and that he was staying in Berlin.

A curious ending, one that felt at once unsatisfying and rushed, but also one that set things up for a potential second series. At times brilliant, with very good performances all around, production design to die for and characters you believed in, Babylon Berlin turned out to be an enigma – it had the whiff of a classic, but delivered something a little hollow and unfocused.

Paul Hirons
@Son_Of_ray

For our episodes one and two review go here

For our episodes three and four reviews go here

For our episodes five and six review go here