The inspector charms a witness, men are toxic, it’s toxic waste anyway. All leads lead to the Russian mafia – in one case, as clear as vodka.
Meret Becker as commissioner Nina Rubin (left) asks the Russian witness (Bella Dayne) to dance.
Something with brutal Russians: Is that just right? Or, on the contrary, does this «crime scene» appear at a particularly inopportune time? In any case, the episode from Berlin brings with it a contemporary reference, it tells a story of Russian rioters who display toxic masculinity. And dealing with toxic waste: In her last assignment as commissioner Nina Rubin, the actress Meret Becker is confronted with toxic waste pushers from the clan milieu.
One might suspect a rusted bicycle that the police fished out of the Spree. But what is dripping there is a real water corpse. In a particularly bad condition, especially since: “Hematomas,” says Karow (Mark Waschke) into the dictaphone, “large areas of skin are missing.” Rubin’s colleague also recognizes open lacerations and rib fractures. “A crime is to be assumed. Ah yes, and the head is missing.”
You can also look for fingerprints for a long time. “In order to get usable ones, we would have to send the hands to Geneva,” explains the investigator. What should Geneva do with it? Well, it sounds international, probably because of this: The screenwriter Günter Schütter and the director Ngo The Chau, that much is immediately clear, like to make things big.
Russians with boats
The corpse could not have been driven far, “the Spree is warm,” Rubin knows. Karow lets a dead pig swim down the current – and ends up in Neu-Venedig, near the Müggelsee. Where rich Russians reside. The dead man must have been thrown into the water there. The Spree, Karow reports, forms a small delta at this point, almost every property has its own boathouse (by the way, lines that are almost identical in the Wikipedia entry on New Venice).
Meanwhile, a young woman surnamed Bolshakov (Bella Dayne) sneaks up on Inspector Rubin. She wants to be included in the witness protection program. Because her husband (Oleg Tikhomirov) is a boss of the «Bratwa», the Russian brotherhood. And the Spree corpse, it turns out, is an undercover investigator who wanted to persuade Ms. Bolshakov to testify against organized crime.
No waste separation
After perestroika, 600 clans and 4,300 gangs “fought for a place in the sun,” explains a man from the department. Today, one in four organized crime cases is against members of the Russian mafia. “Welcome to capitalism.” A fortune can be made with improper waste disposal, we learn, different clans want to cash in, the search for the murderer doesn’t take long, the case is as clear as vodka.
Whereby director Ngo The Chau is less concerned with rubbish and more with trash. He stages the “crime scene” as a B-movie, sensational to the point of tasteless: in the dance hall for lesbians, Rubin looks at the décolleté of the Russian witness (“Was expensive?”, she asks, looking at her breasts), in the background Rosenstolz whispers “Leave it love be . . .» But wasn’t there something between Rubin and Karow? “No one wanted to be naked,” explains the inspector of her bad luck. “I would fight for you,” says the Russian. “You have a pure heart.”
Meret Becker is looking for a new challenge, she has her last appearance as Rubin. The actress, who recently starred in Dominik Graf’s great “Fabian” film, is allowed to say a real Kästner sentence when saying goodbye: “I’ve lost the compass, hope doesn’t suit me, I have no talent for luck, I just long for it .» It’s good! But otherwise much is so superfluous and wrong as the apostrophe in the title of the episode “The girl who goes home alone”.
“Tatort” from Berlin: “The girl who goes home alone”. Sunday, 8.05/8.15 p.m., SRF 1 / ARD.