It’s time to visit the German city of Passau as German crime show Dark Rivers returns to Walter Presents. The second season brings with it three feature-length episodes as former police detective Frederike Bader (Marie Leuenberger) hides out in the city under witness protection, and assists the local cops who are protecting her with their cases. The box set will stream on Walter Presents from 23 May.
Some time back, Frederike helped bring a case against the notorious Bahderi clan – now she’s being hunted and there’s a price on her head. Way out in south east Germany near the border with Austria lies the sleepy city of Passau, but even there she could be in danger, along with her adult daughter Mia (Nadja Sabersky). However, like so many detectives, she lives to solve cases and bring justice to the innocent. As well as helping Passau police detective Jochen Mohn (Stefan Rudolf), Frederike also works with her friend, the quirky private detective Ferdinand Zankl (Michael Ostrowski) who is babysitting her dog. Her current flat has a no pets policy.
Lying low is Frederike’s game, so Mohn asks her to do a bit of evidence gathering on his ex-wife’s boyfriend, a lawyer with a shoe fetish called Jürgen Ritter. Unbeknownst to Mohn and Frederike, Ritter has a hold over the board at his former law firm. He knows their dirty secrets and has warned them that if anything happens to him a letter will go to the Passau police.
He’s carrying some kind of weight and no amount of shoe purchases will lift it, so Ritter signs up for a wellness retreat at a monastery and Frederike joins too, in order to surveil the nervous advocate. However, she’s not the only one spying on him, another woman is there at the retreat planting bugs and while all this is going on a man breaks into Ritter’s house.
You can just tell it’s going to go sideways – for Ritter and for Frederike. And that’s just the first 90-minute episode.
The title Dark Rivers sounds ominous and it plays on the city’s location. Passau is where the Danube meets the rivers Inn and Ilz, their waters mixing and quickening to create a darker hue. It’s a place with a dark history and bit of a gothic feel, juxtaposed with some fascinating Bauhaus architecture – such as Ritter’s fancy glass house. Even the monastery is a bit modernist. The ideal setting for a bit of ‘resilience through mindfulness’?
Not so mindful is the motorcycle gang with organised crime connections that menaces the streets. As the series progresses you’ll see these thugs breaking people’s hands, collecting debts. In episode three, they’re suspected of stabbing a florist.
Frederike and her daughter Mia are trying to blend in and stay low key. This is hard for Mia who wants a life and a career. She writes for the local newspaper and has ambitions to perform on stage as a singer. Someone is watching her and it seems as though she might be the mechanism by which the Bahderi clan catch up with Frederike.
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Meanwhile, Mia’s boyfriend is the son of the local bakery owner. An article Mia has written about their family history has brought an American to Passau. Dave Hennigan’s father was stationed there after World War II and there’s a connection between him and pastry chef Roswitha Hertel. Where might this little storyline lead?
Dark Rivers is a well-made show full of intrigue and twists, with great characterisation by the actors – a mainstream crime thriller that time and again proves very popular in Germany. The great rivers and the medieval streets of the city are used to great effect, automatically giving the show a sense of realism. Written by Michael Vershinin, the programme’s German title Ein krimi aus Passau and the episodes collected together to form Dark Rivers season two had over 5.5 million viewers each. They aired in Germany and Austria earlier this year.
Season one consisted of four episodes, which you can watch here.
