The beginning of the end of the Münster "crime scene"

There are days when you would like to be Karl-Friedrich Boerne. professor dr H. c. mult Karl-Friedrich Boerne so much time must be, so much time we have today.

As a rule, of course, you don't want to wake up one morning in Münster, wear an impossible beard and ramble on about that blasé stuff that some "Tatort" screenwriter put into your mouth. But what the WDR Auto-Scout made available to the Münster pathologist this time - perhaps it was an anniversary present, the Münster "Tatort" is turning twenty this year - makes you seriously consider an exception to the rule, at least for an hour and a half .

A completely rust-free, incredibly clean sparkling silver Karmann Ghia. That was the most Italian thing ever built on the chassis of a VW Beetle. Flat, two seats, tailor-made in Turin, screwed together in Osnabrück.

Nowhere were the years of the German economic miracle more elegant. At least not on four wheels. Speaking of wheels – Professor Boerne’s mobile also has white wall tyres. A dream. One would like to listen to him and his queasy boxer bubbling in an endless loop. What makes him very different from the upscale nonsense blubbering of his driver.

But now we have to pull ourselves together a bit. After all, we're not here to dream. Even though.

One can dream a little. Perhaps also from the fact that those responsible at WDR manage to save Don Camillo Boerne and Commissioner Thiel, his Peppone, from tipping over into pleasant boredom and not, of all things, the two years of service anniversaries as the beginning of the decline in the history of the consistently most successful "crime scene ” duos of all time.

Auto-Caster from WDR probably didn't spare any expense or effort to build us a mnemonic bridge to "A friend, a good friend". But what Benjamin Hessler wrote and Janis Rebecca Rattenni directed is about the mafia. As well.

Illuminated in green, it starts. Nino Agostini, Münster's picture-perfect provincial Corleone, visits his no less sleazy lawyer. He must have just messed up a process. First a metal ball flies into the lawyer's aquarium. At some point later, a pistol ball flies into the legal central organ.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the legal exploitation chain, the farewell to star lawyer Friedhelm Fabian is taking place. He is Boerne's best friend and says goodbye to Central America with pomp and circumstance.

Fabian and "KF" (Boerne) have known each other since the Westphalian sandbox. Boerne gives a highly embarrassing speech, which mainly has the content that he would have liked to have had something with Veronika. But Veronika became Friedhelm's wife.

If Boerne had it with Beethoven and with a real level more than with Wagner and sultry jokes, he would have also accommodated the immortal beloved in his ramblings. Now let's start dreaming again.

There is a lot of drinking. It's raining lightly. A pianist is playing. Why the entire core team of the Münster "Tatort" - apart from Thiel's smoking father - is invited can only be found out with some brain acrobatics (after all, we see Thiel in an extraordinarily tasteful suit with a black shirt). The buddies jump into the pool of top lawyers.

Speaking of brain acrobatics: Boerne is no better the next day than we are on Monday, he has a terrible hangover. Then the lawyer lies on the pathologist's table. And Friedhelm Fabian suddenly has a gun on his neck and finds himself chained in a barren container a few of the too many split-screen gimmicks later, with which Rattenni tries to prettify her fawn-colored case.

Now the two people from Münster are doing what they can usually do. Determine two sides against each other towards each other. Thiel, who doesn't find out anything about Fabian's kidnapping at first, cycles after the lawyer's killer and straight into Don Agostini's villa, in front of which stands a tasteless yellow Lamborghini that makes you very sad. Boerne throws himself into his Karmann Ghia and tries to help his immortal lover.

The figures – particularly grotesque, as Jan Georg Schütte outrates against the hair piece that someone put on his head – hardly look out of the cliché pot from which they were drawn. What happens to them is none of your business.

The story could easily have been told in the length of an episode of Rosenheim Cops. But you weren't allowed to, because a "crime scene" has 88 minutes. And in Münster you have to accommodate dialogues like the one after Thiel asked whether the drug-addicted lawyer was also coked up at the time of his death. "Like the young Sigmund Freud," replies Boerne. "Can't you just say 'yes' just once," asks Thiel. "No," says Boerne.

The frosting made of bittersweet teasing, which Benjamin Hessler skillfully poured over his Boerne-Thiel birthday cake, can only very threadbarely cover up the fact that his pastry turned out to be too full-grain and thin and he also had it in the oven for a little long .

Especially since what Boerne and Thiel are doing in terms of routine mutual banter increasingly seems like the loriot-ripe bickering of grandma and grandpa on the back seat of the family vehicle. You've known it for years, you know what's coming next, you could write them down, the sentences before they're spoken. At some point, usually hardly that you usually with the two in the rear, you wish you had a Karmann Ghia. It only has two seats.