True to the Andrew Roberts rule that the only bearable series on TV these days are ones with subtitles, I’ve started watching Der Pass (Sky Atlantic). Not unlike The Bridge and The Tunnel, it starts with a dead body exactly straddling a border, thus requiring the intervention of detectives from two national jurisdictions. This time, it’s a shambolic male Austrian and a perky blonde German.
It’s fascinating to see what quirks foreign authors choose to give their detective characters. Ellie Stocker (Julia Jentsch), the German, is sunny and eager with special hunting and animal-gutting skills learned from her hunter dad; Gedeon Winter (Nicholas Ofczarek), the Austrian, looks and dresses like Oscar Wilde, has some sort of opiate addiction and appears to have a double life as a kind of Winston Wolfe from Pulp Fiction, cleaning up inconvenient bodies in the criminal underworld.
This random Hunnish quirkiness is all very promising, as is the picturesque yet sinister Alpine setting (though it’s a bugger to read the white subtitles whenever there’s a snow scene, as there quite often is). What I’m a bit concerned about, though, two episodes in, is that there appears to be some kind of serial killer on the loose and that he’s into dark pagan forest rituals, so far conjured up in the form of mutilated deer carcasses and fleeting glimpses of symbolic wolves.
While I’m certainly not averse to all that Wicker Man stuff, it can all too easily descend into confusing, unsatisfying drivel. This is what happened to Dublin Murders: it strung you along for eight episodes with its various intriguing, psychologically damaged characters and its convoluted plot, only to leave you at the end, dangling and frustrated with a conclusion that half asked you to believe that it was the Alder King (aka Goethe’s Erlkönig) whodunit.
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