“It looks like a turd dipped in jizz.” “That’s nice. But Valerie disagrees - strong woman alert! Michelle Forbes is really using her energy in these scenes, to pursue a line of investigation she’s been told to leave alone. This made me smile, because it’s so true - I found that living in Germany really made me take on the German viewpoint. Next, a scene at Berlin Station HQ where Steven, Robert and Valerie are talking with Washington, who wants results on the ISIL plot line. It’s a bit hard to hear, but the transit worker speaks to Daniel in the informal (“Du”), probably out of comradeship over their soccer affinities. Union has an interesting history - it was dissolved in 1945 by the occupation authorities and refounded in East Germany by its membership (and ended up in opposition to state-sponsored soccer teams like Dynamo Berlin, which had Stasi ties). I have to say: I have NEVER met a BVG worker that is quite this friendly they are more known for their “ Berliner Schnauze” (I wrote about it earlier, here). FC Union Berlin soccer stadium (story here, if you’re interested). He also states that he helped build the 1. This is accurate and reflects the working-class fabric of the city before 1945, which lives on. One thing you notice in this scene is that the transit worker has a light tinge of Berlin dialect (there’s a verb for this in German, “berlinern,” literally “to Berlin”). His pronunciation and intonation are solid every now and then you can tell he’s concentrating more on the pronunciation than the thought he’s conveying, but it’s better in the later scenes in this episode. I’ll have more to say about that eventually, but he’s pretty good better than he was in the bar the previous time we saw him and convincing enough much of the time to believe that he could be the son of a native speaker. And it’s remarkable insofar as Armitage is speaking German. This is one of the scenes I liked best from this episode - another scene where it is as much observed as acted (there’s a point where the actors’ dialogue crosses over each other that I really like). He’s observed by someone we don’t know, entering an S-Bahn terminal. I think the product placement ratio on this show must be extremely high. Next, we see Daniel - wearing Nikes Americans and their tennis shoes, an old joke. The act of replaying media of deceased friends has become a kind of cultural trope recently, but for various reasons I still find it moving - perhaps because my father kept my mother’s voice on his answering machine for about eighteen months. Next, Ingrid (“Griddie”) is listening to phone messages from Claudia - all she has left of her friend. It’s also interesting to see that the agents at Berlin Station are not really a team - they don’t seem to care much about working together and they seem actively involved in trying to hurt each other at points.Īnd then I am including this, because I can. I found myself wondering at the end how the personal betrayals will work out for him. What’s interesting in this episode is not so much the inevitable betrayals themselves, but the personal betrayals that every character experiences and the implication at the end that Daniel is a CIA agent as an attempt to repair the world - something that does quite a bit to explain the tensions in his own character. I continue to be interested in the way that the story develops new perspectives on the central problem of spy drama: betrayals. TL DR summary: Not as frenzied or visually impactful as the previous episode, due to a beginning with a much slower tempo, but still dramatically very strong. So these aren’t first impressions anymore. So - I’m not as young as I used to be and I had to go to bed last night, but all night I dreamed of Berlin Station.
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