Berlin Station 2.7, first impressions [spoilers!] #richardarmitage

Continued from here. These posts contain spoilers. PLEASE do not read them if you are not watching concurrently with the U.S. broadcast but still want a fresh look at them when the show is available in your region.

***

The TL;DR summary tonight: the script asks the watcher to accept implausibility after implausibility. Since I didn’t believe most of what I’d been asked to believe so far anyway, this didn’t help me at all. The way the episode ended is also stupid. If you want to suggest that there are moral dilemmas involved in spying (surely a surprise to no one), you can’t just plop them in at the end.

But Richard Armitage really looked good in this outfit!

The episode was only 44 minutes. Not sure if I should be annoyed or relieved about that. This is going to be a fairly monotonous recap. Oh, yeah: you may still need CC to understand what is being said.

***

I guess this was the “now we get to know April” episode. We pick up with her in the club, still listening to Hector and Lena.

Keke Palmer as April Lewis in Berlin Station 2.7.

It turns out she’s in the club because that’s where the NSA geek is who installed the malware for her. His name is Tim. When she tells him what’s going on, he informs her that they’ve broken a lot of laws. I guess he’s mad because he didn’t get into her pants yet? Anyway, it turns out April’s confused since they spent the last month trying to take Gerhardt down and now she wonders if they should try to save her life.

Hector (Rhys Ifans) and Lena (Emilia Schüle) scoping out the assassination scene at Berlin Messe, in Berlin Station 2.7.

At Messe, Hector and Lena are discussing the best place to set up to kill Gerhardt.

April leaves the club and goes to Messe, where she is still listening to Hector and Lena. They’re at the apartment of his transgender friend (who’s black, incidentally), and putting makeup on Lena to protect her from digital face identification. Lena does not treat the black friend very well. Hector reminds her that she needs to cooperate in order to accomplish her objective.

April is still listening while she takes a shower. (I.e., suddenly she’s at home.) She’s also listening to the news, which is supposed to heighten the viewer’s worry.

Message to the scriptwriters — after seven hours of this topic, now, I’m still not convinced that you really understand how a German election works. There are regular references in the script to “Gerhardt winning” that seem to imply that it’s a winner take all system and if the PfD makes significant gains, she will take over Germany. That isn’t how it works. I don’t think anyone writing this show knows that a party has to have 5 percent representation to get any seats in the Bundestag. Here, for example, we have “PfD wins its first ever seat in the Bundestag.” That’s kind of not the point. The point is the number of seats, i.e., the size of the parliamentary fraction. An actual newscaster would say “PfD exceeds the 5 percent boundary to take its first seats in the Bundestag.”

OK, end of politics lesson. Robert comes back to work and sees the Casablanca DVD (is there anything in there, or is it just a reference to his sloppy pickup line?) and a memo on his desk appointing him acting chief. He goes to Yates’ office for a moment of sad and desperate reflection.

Hanes, meanwhile, is taking his dogs out to play when Frost shows up — in his rumpled Norway excursion outfit — to surprise him. Hanes says Fischer “went rogue” and Frost essentially says “cut the bullshit,” as he already knows that the money is coming from Washington. Would that he had said that an episode earlier. But I guess they wanted to shoot in Norway.

Frost (Richard Jenkins) tells Hanes he has enough dirt in hand to bury everyone involved, in Berlin Station 2.7.

Another opportunity for some weirdly whiny emotionality from Jenkins. Hanes says he’ll explain the whole thing after he reigns in his dogs. Who are really fast. Rescue greyhounds? LOL. Not.

Next, Daniel wakes up in Esther’s bed.

I just found this whole scene bizarre. I admit that it’s cute to see Armitage in shirt and skivvies. But I just don’t buy any of it. I don’t buy that Daniel is especially moved by what turns out to be his own presumption that Esther wants to cook for him. (This is, incidentally, a fairly offensive cliché. Who writes this crap?) I don’t find the affectionate cuddling convincing, given that we know that they are fuckbuddies. The way the script weaves the future of their relationship with the future of Germany is obnoxious. The notion that German politics will end if the PfD wins a parliamentary fraction is silly; the only way you would believe this would be if you thought for some reason that Gerhardt/PfD has a chance of winning the largest segment of the popular vote. Oh, wait, right — the writers don’t understand that.

But the relationship piece of it is worse — it is scripted in a way that suggests that we didn’t watch season 1. “Are we really going to do this again, we know how it ends,” Daniel says. I wonder if the writers and I have the same idea of what they were doing last time. It was pretty clear that last season Daniel thought he was having sex with Esther and trying to outspy her. She was having sex with him, trying to outspy him, and possibly feeling a little bit affectionate toward him. So how would that have ended any differently? Why is he giving her a little affectionate kiss on the eyebrow? “Is it really such a bad thing to know exactly where we stand?” she asks. Was there any confusion about that? Apparently (so the script) he now wants to avoid judgments and secrets. How will that be possible? They are spies. “We just agree to be who we are,” he says. Is that something new in their relationship? The whole scene is point-blank flummoxing, to the extent that I wondered if there were somehow scenes in their relationship that got cut out that would explain their sudden emotional connection. I hope he’s trying to honeytrap her.

And then she goes off on this thing about how people in her department are lining up to serve Gerhardt. Sorry, that’s also not how the BfV works. Leaders of minority parties that are not in a coalition do not make intelligence policy. Anyway, she insists she needs to clean house so that no one who wants to get rid of her can make her vulnerable. Hector’s presence is a problem. They make a deal — Esther will find Hector a way out of Germany although she can’t restore his general travel privileges. Daniel wants a deal for Lena — whom Esther, at least, is in a position to see clearly: “she’s a neo-Nazi, not a charity case.” Daniel lays it out — he will get Hector to cooperate, Esther will let Lena go.

And they kiss on the deal. You really can’t say that Armitage doesn’t sell it every single time. He sure looks like he’s enjoying himself.

here’s a solid edit of that cap:

 

Love his facial expression in this scene but their relationship is still too vague. #RichardArmitage #BerlinStation #DanielMiller #MinaTander #EstherKrug pic.twitter.com/ZEp4Iqt7U0

— Veloce (@uVeloce) November 20, 2017

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

 

So, back to April. She’s photographing a weapons buy — Hector is buying a Swiss rifle for Lena. Transition to the conversation, which she can also hear via her phone bug thingie. Next implausibility: in Berlin, you can just call up an illegal arms dealer in the morning and there he’ll be, ready to sell you a military grade rifle. Are they sure he doesn’t work for the CIA?

Cut back to Frost and Hanes. Hanes admits that the U.S. administration was funding Gerhardt — but insists that the terrorist attack itself was Katherina working “without our consent or our knowledge.” (This is a patently stupid explanation — why would she need money if not for some big moment? — but Frost apparently accepts it.) When Frost accuses Hanes of tipping Gerhardt off, Hanes says if Yates had told him earlier what was going on, maybe things could have been different. Anyway, despite all the PfD xenophobic rhetoric, Hanes insists it’s not about all this racist / terrorist stuff, it’s about protecting U.S. national security interests. They get out at a factory building and walk in.

Hanes leads Frost (Richard Jenkins) into a mysterious computer facility, in Berlin Station 2.7.

According to Hanes, the U.S. was funding Gerhardt because if she got into power she would be more sympathetic to U.S. security interests, particularly the location of a U.S. intelligence / big data processing center on German soil. It’s the Bradford Winters et al. conspiracy Cambridge Analytica plot line, in other words.

If you saw my tweets, this was the point at which I pointed out that the Berlin Station writers apparently know nothing about German domestic politics or international politics. First of all — it’s not up as a possibility that Gerhardt would have taken over the entire German government. This election was about the entry of a parliamentary fragment into the Bundestag. Even if the PfD won big, there would be no chance that they would get to make foreign policy. (In the real life election this series supposedly predicted, choke, vomit, cough, all of the other German parties announced ahead of time they would not coalition with AfD.) Second, if this kind of computer listening station exists, there’s no question that the CIA has one and it’s already in operation at the behest of the U.S. government. No way the CIA would wait for a friendlier German government to start doing this kind of thing, no way a station chief would not have known about it.

And finally, this is once again the script writers deciding that a U.S. election scandal was somehow directly transferable to Germany.

So, whatever. I was annoyed insofar as I was expecting something big as the machine behind Hanes chasing Frost all over the place, and it was a big nothingburger, to transfer a metaphor directly from a U.S. election scandal. Anyway, Hanes suggests that the reason he’s been torturing Frost is that he wanted to offer Frost supervision of this data facility. A way back in, so to speak. This is the “parallel intelligence operation.” “No one ever wanted to see you leave, Steven,” Hanes said. Om, yes, they did. That was why he resigned ahead of being fired. Everyone wanted to see him leave. Me most of all.

Back in Emmerich’s apartment, Valerie (Michelle Forbes) brings him some Splitterbrötchen for breakfast.

This is a Berlin thing — the butter is added to the dough while it’s still cold so you can see in the roll where the butter was. It has the approximate texture of a Danish, but without all the fruit and frosting. You can get them anywhere in Berlin but I associate the name “Splitterbrötchen” with East Berlin in particular. Anyway, this was a bit sketchy. Most Germans I know make their coffee at home and pick up their breakfast rolls. Picking up your coffee as well is more a U.S. thing.

This is one of the better scenes of the episode. I’ve always thought that Emmerich was playing a game for Valerie’s benefit; now it seems clear that Valerie is doing the same, or rather, vice versa.

Emmerich (Heino Ferch) and Valerie (Michelle Forbes) contemplate what will happen after the election, in Berlin Station 2.7.

So there’s a pleasant, but subtle tension in this scene that has been rare in this series — they’re both acting and wondering if the other person knows they’re acting and concluding that they don’t. Emmerich wants Valerie to come to the post-election rally that night as he will have composed the words himself. She says she will and she’s rooting for him, but not for what he’s saying.

But, my lord, this awful blouse. Did a friend of the costume designer pay for product placement? No wonder Valerie looks so sad.

At the factory, Hanes explains the computer system’s capacity to Frost. Frost objects to the manipulative, invasive qualities of this kind of intelligence practice, and Hanes says “it’s pretty damn effective” and then seduces him with the argument that he could shape its usage if he took over the project. (Rhetorical question: what must it be like to realize that everyone in your professional and personal life thinks you are a total idiot?)

Next, April’s at work, wondering what to do. She is able to overhear Hector and Lena practicing their assassination plans on watermelons. Tim comes to her office and reveals that — surprise — April hasn’t told anyone about Hector and Lena’s plans.

Here’s Tim, played by Matthew Leonhart, a mixed race actor born and raised in Hong Kong. It’s just a coincidence that he’s of Asian descent, right? I swear this show could not get along without at least one ethnic stereotype per episode.

This is another serious “jump the shark” moment when it comes to the script. Tim is concerned that April hasn’t informed the office of what’s happening because “we’re talking about a woman’s life.” That’s actually not the main ethical issue that a CIA operative should be concerned about in a situation like this. But it gets worse. Next April compares the situation of letting Gerhardt be assassinated with the counterfactual hypothetical of assassinating Adolf Hitler. This isn’t how history works, either, but OMFG GODWIN’S LAW ANYONE? Does anyone except drunken bros think she’s discussing a real dilemma? Next, it turns out, April thinks that letting Gerhardt be assassinated will save Germany from a situation like in the U.S. (not sure what that even means).

Apart from that: I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT A NOVICE CIA AGENT WOULD DECIDE TO GO OUT A LIMB BY HERSELF LIKE THIS. Sorry. Not plausible. But three quarters of the plot of this episode depends on it. Sigh.

Tim can’t believe they’re having the conversation, and neither can I, albeit for different reasons. He tells her he will shut up for now, but “you’re not taking me down with you.” Dude, I think it’s too late for that.

Hector and Lena are now at Messe with the rifle, sighting it in.

At the CIA, Kirsch, April and Daniel are having a meeting. Richard Armitage is really nicely dressed here.

 

See what I mean? Richard Armitage as Daniel Miller in Berlin Station 2.7.

Kirsch refuses the necessary papers for Hector to leave on the grounds that he kidnapped Lena. April learns Yates is gone without a word of goodbye. Kirsch tells them what he learned in Norway with Frost — that the Gerhardt money came from the U.S. Department of State.

Daniel is unhappy to learn this.

So upset that he has to take off his jacket. Richard Armitage as Daniel Miller in Berlin Station 2.7.

There’s a mild agreement that there’s nothing they can do, as the U.S. will look worse than the Russians if they leak the story.

Daniel (Richard Armitage) is not pleased by that prospect either.

April is concerned that they plan to let Gerhardt win; Daniel response is really lame and not entirely credible (if they gamble and lose now, they forfeit all chance to change things in the future). So April — who has the bugging device in her hand at the meeting — decides to continue taking things into her own hands. She implies she wants to see Gerhardt assassinated and Kirsch says that the CIA doesn’t do this anymore. So yeah, next implausibility: they actually do teach beginning CIA agents things about U.S. foreign policy. Yes, the CIA has tried to assassinate foreign leaders — but they were all in developing countries. Not major industrialized powers and huge historic allies.

So the script is nonsense, a sort of unbaked liberal nightmare fantasy. But it’s important to say: Keke Palmer is really effective in this role. She captures perfectly the diction and the vibe of the know-it-all youngster.

Back, across from Messe, Hector and Lena continue to prepare for the assassination. Lena says things that suggest she might be losing her resolve.

April tunes back in on her phone and hears: Daniel talking to Hector! Daniel — who, let us remember, doesn’t know anything about the assassination plan — wants Hector and Lena out of Berlin that night. I’m not sure why the rush — only to keep Esther happy? Hector is skeptical that Daniel can help him, and won’t go without “what he’s owed.” They agree to meet at the Hauptbahnhof in 30 minutes. (OK, I get that it’s easy to get there — but would you really choose such a conspicuous place, where there are dozens of security cameras and numerous surrounding government offices with police protection, for a meeting like this? Shades of Frost trying to flee Berlin via this location last season. I get that it must be fun to shoot here, though.) Hector tells Lena to “sit tight” while he prepares their exit strategy.

Cut to Valerie, in a car, tailing Emmerich. He gets in and out of a black car. It’s not clear whose. [ETA: I think we’re expected to think it’s Gerhardt’s car.] Valerie lets a call from April go to voicemail. The car Emmerich got out of takes off.

And we see Frost (Richard Jenkins) admiring himself in the mirror again. Not clear why. I suppose this is better — and shorter — than dreams about water. But he calls Kirsch and Kirsch also sends him to voicemail.

Cut to the Hauptbahnhof, where Daniel and Esther are awaiting Hector, sitting in front of a storefront next to Vapiano on the [German] first floor.

Richard Armitage, Mina Tander and Rhys Ifans in Berlin Station 2.7.

All she has for him are some quickly created German passports, and he wants more — especially his bank account access. Daniel tells him he will get it (this is a lie, assuming what Kirsch said earlier is true). Meanwhile, we see that April is in the train station, listening, and also that the BfV guy who Hector clobbered last week in the gas station bathroom is back on his feet and in the station as well.

Esther chooses this moment to ask where Lena is. Hector is really unhappy.

Daniel (Richard Armitage) is kind of pissed off, too.

And then it’s the camera shooting us from glance to glance. April sees Hector. Hector sees Lena, who apparently didn’t understand the U.S. idiom “to sit tight” and is wandering aimlessly around the train station. He texts her to leave. Then Esther sees Lena, too, and tells her BfV guy to keep an eye on her.

Daniel is still not happy. “Just when I started to trust you again!” This is the final proof that he’s playing her, right? Except why does she believe him?

April does a neatly choreographed move where she tells Hector where the BfV guys are waiting to get him. April sabotages the escalator to slow down the BfV, then catches up with Lena: “Hector sent me.” They exit the station while Hector gets on a train headed west, toward Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe, beats up a BfV guy, then gets off it again. Too bad they didn’t go to Wilhelmshöhe, that’s another station with a fascinating architectural structure for filming. Huge, long tracks. Anyway, Hector also escapes and the BfV guy loses everyone.

Daniel is mad. So, so mad.

Emo Daniel (Richard Armitage) is full of reproaches for Esther (Mina Tander), in Berlin Station 2.7.

He says the worst part was that he actually felt badly for her. (I assume, about Germany? I thought he felt badly about that for himself.) She points out, reasonably, that they agreed to be who they are and this is who they are.

Really, at this point, we have to conclude that he is playing her, and it’s just scripted really badly, in ways that don’t leave Armitage much room to maneuver in terms of acting. That’s the only scenario that could explain how horribly executed this plot line is. Daniel stalks off, with Esther yelling after him that he’d have done the same.

Meanwhile, Lena and April are escaping. If I were them I’d have gotten a taxi, I think. It wouldn’t have been safe to take the U-Bahn away, but on foot — there are a ton of government agencies around there, including the Interior Ministry. Well, anyway, they decided to walk.

They’re about as friendly as you’d think an African-American and a German neo-Nazi would be.

Lena is mistrustful; April pointed out that she’s risking herself to save Lena from the BfV and give her another shot at Gerhardt. Yes, this is strangely surreal. No, it is not remotely credible.

Totally inexplicably — we are now suddenly at Kirsch’s apartment. He’s making scrambled eggs for dinner, which his son doesn’t like. His son picks a fight with him.

No wonder Kirsch is upset — he’s drinking a beer that doesn’t really exist. This is one of a series of fake consumer items developed for German tv. According to this article, German broadcasters find it more difficult to sell advertising time if there is product placement in a show.

This seems like more than just normal teenage idiocy — the point seems to be to show that Kirsch is suffering because he can’t admit to his son what he really does, but the scene just isn’t — ceterum censeo — believable in the way it is executed. (Kirsch is mystified, too.) And it heavily obstructs the flow of the episode as it relates thematically to nothing else in it.

April takes Lena to her apartment where they find: Hector. Lena and Hector have it out: was he selling her out to the BfV? (om, yes, although he denies it — and he told her so last week, so I don’t know why she is surprised). Hector has figured out that his phone was bugged. He points out that April’s silence at work about what she knew amounts to an endorsement — why would she do this? April informs him that the State Department was funding Gerhardt. (I think that anyone who was top of her class at Langley would not just blurt out this information, either — is this baby boomer animus against millennials at work here? ) Lena realizes she’s being manipulated to CIA ends, and points out that for her this is only about avenging her father. She storms off. April asks Hector if he’s going to do it anyway. Hector asks April if she would stop him.

ETA:

Then: Esther gets home from work and Daniel’s in her apartment.

Like, what? And why is he drinking Riesling? Was this part of the production’s agreement with the Berlin Brandenburg Medienboard?

so, it’s a really strange scene. It’s like the show wants us to think they are — defying all probability — going to try to get together again.

???

Then there’s this outfit.

Anyway, she wants to know why he’s there, and he says he didn’t want to fight. He’d opened a bottle of wine. She thinks drinking affects his judgment. He stands to go — short fuse much? — and she asks him to stay. Daniel’s giving off all Armitage’s canonical distress signals — hand to face, clenching fingers / fists — so we are clearly meant to believe that something meaningful is happening for him. He concedes that he might have done the same thing.

Jump in weirdness level: she says, “would it help if I say I’m sorry?” [Well, you’re not, so why would you say that?]. His answer is “not if you’re right.”

“The thing is, you and I, we’re very alike,” Daniel (Richard Armitage) says to Esther in Berlin Station 2.7. Servetus interjects — yes you are, which is part of what makes this relationship so inherently uninteresting. What either of you will do in any situation should be entirely predictable to the other. No spark.

She thinks that’s a good thing, he thinks it’s a problem. (I would say that I agree with him, except that it’s really hard for me to believe that he’s sincere here, despite Armitage using all of his canonical sincerity language.) Again, they’re talking like they have some kind of longstanding, deeply emotional relationship that we have seen no evidence of. But her dialogue doesn’t make a lot of sense — he’s talking about whether they’re compatible given their careers and their likelihood to behave in certain ways, and she says neither of them are perfect.

OK.

So, he asks if they can start again.

I don’t find this plausible, at all.

But here’s the picture of his face just before he asks her to restart their “relationship.” I couldn’t get a good cap of this but it’s also one of the better moments in the episode.

Time for the plot wrap up. April detaches her bugging device and flushes it down the toilet. Hector returns to the location from which he and Lena had planned to shoot, without Lena. The news is showing the leadup to her rally and Kirsch and Frost are watching it from Kirsch’s apartment. Frost tells Kirsch that Hanes’ motives are not far-Right but rather security based, and tells him about the computer facility. He’s going to take the job and run the computers. Kirsch points out that Hanes has done nothing but lie to Frost. And I want to scream — and it’s not like Frost has ever noticed that! Frost says he has to do it to protect Berlin Station: “we gotta get on the inside of this!”

From the TV back to Messe, where the rally is starting. Hector is unpacking his gun. Gerhardt is rousing the crowds, with Emmerich at her side. April is watching, and so is Valerie. They have a fight; April is mad that the operation failed and thinks it was because of Emmerich; Valerie doesn’t think the operation failed and thinks April admires Gerhardt. This segues into Valerie telling April that things could be worse; April questions that they are doing nothing; Valerie then accuses April of having stuff in her head from “the Farm” about how the world is binary, but the world is not that way and “we are not the arbiters of right and wrong.” (This is also implausible to me — typically intelligence instruction seeks to detach people from moralistic interpretations of the world; it’s people on the ground who develop problematic emotional allegiances, as we see repeatedly in this show. I don’t believe April behaved this way because of something she learned in training, but then again I don’t believe that someone in April’s situation would behave as she did.) It’s also not a very convincing speech from Valerie, insofar as the decision not to make a decision is also a decision, as every American who attends a university learns when reading “The Trial of Socrates” in the first six weeks. At the latest.

April Lewis (Keke Palmer) tries to call Hector off, in Berlin Station 2.7.

But this isn’t really an actual ethical or moral dilemma they’re plumbing here — it’s an occasion for Valerie to tell April that she has to “go with her instinct” and “hope she can live with it.” So April, now suddenly (!) aware that assassinating Gerhardt is not a good idea, tries to call Hector to find out where he is and call him off. It’s implausible to me that she would think he would not be somewhere on the grounds of Messe. Nothing about his need to get out of Germany or get his passport back and and his bank accounts unfrozen would have changed.

We see Hector dithering about the shot — there’s a false alarm as a firecracker goes off in front of Gerhardt — then the screen goes black and we hear a gunshot through a silencer.

***

Of course, all suspense created by this ending is immediately relativized / erased by the “scenes from next week.” WTF.

Continues here.

~ by Servetus on November 20, 2017.