Dortmund.
Martina Bönisch is dead, the Dortmund commissioners continue to investigate as a trio. Can this work? The new case provides the answer.
The parka was ripped off, the pants and shoes were dingy. Shaggy beard, shaggy hair. There’s no question that the man who wipes the window of the car he slept in early in the morning somewhere in a wooded area has seen better days. He is neither homeless nor destitute. He’s from the police, Kripo even. His name is Peter Faber (Jörg Hartmann), but he is currently on sick leave because his colleague was shot dead in front of his eyes.
“You stay here” (ARD, 8:15 p.m.) is what the dying Martina Bönisch (Anna Schudt) told him, knowing how often Faber was about to say goodbye to life. And Faber said. “I promise.” So he’s trying to somehow deal with the situation. Worn out on the outside, torn up on the inside.
Lead actor as screenwriter
Hartmann developed the screenplay for the first crime scene in Dortmund after Schudt’s departure, supported by experienced co-author Jürgen Werner, for the most part himself. He took up the TV death of his colleague and worked it into a story that he “had had in his head for years”. Hartmann says it was particularly important for him to “give enough space to the mourning for Mrs. Bönisch, this painful void, the loss”. He succeeded. At the same time, however, he has written an entire episode specifically for the character he has been playing for over ten years.
All this is embedded in a new case that has puzzled the Dortmund investigators Jan Pawlak (Rick Okon) and Rosa Herzog (Stefanie Reinsperger) for a long time. A large, fresh pool of blood has been discovered in West Park. But there is no matching corpse. However, Andreas Richter, head of a Dortmund real estate company, is missing. He has bought up houses around the park in recent years in order to turn rental apartments into luxury apartments. That didn’t make him any more popular in Dortmund. And he’s not the only one missing. A dealer from the park has also disappeared from the face of the earth for a few weeks.
trip to the past
One who knew them both and didn’t like them is Josef “Jupp” Faber (Wolfgang Rüter) – the inspector’s father. Contact between the two has been broken for decades because the son blames the father for the mother’s early accidental death. But is he really wearing it? And is he maybe even a murderer? To find out, Faber embarks on a journey into the past that is often painful for him. He dives into his old quarter and visits places and people from his childhood. Which, in the case of a hairdressing salon and its female perm customers, already bears parodic traits.
Faber investigates in parallel with his team and is usually faster than Herzog and Pawlak until the somewhat lengthy finale in the Dortmund underworld. Nevertheless, there is still room for a church scene in which he and Boenisch say their final goodbyes in their very own way. Something like that can quickly become kitschy, but it’s touching here. “You stay here” shows all facets of Peter Faber. A man between anger and sadness, helplessness and a flash of inspiration, just barely calm to the edge of unconsciousness, seconds later a bubbling and raging volcano.
A man between anger and sadness
At the end of this largely grandiose one-man show by Hartmann, not only is the case solved. “You stay here” is a successful new beginning. But it’s one that doesn’t reset everything to zero. Many of the characters’ old problems are taken up again, but at the same time – especially for Faber – the first threads of completely new storylines are rolled out. The Dortmund crime scene is facing interesting times.
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