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queer_scribbling) wrote2024-04-16 02:30 am
queer_scribbling) wrote2024-04-16 02:30 am
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Vienna Blood (S1)
My family decided to work through some of our DVR backlog, so we watched Vienna Blood. I'm not familiar with the books that the show is based on, but it's a police procedural combined with a period piece that's not too far off from when we gave The Alienist a try. (Important difference: The Alienist was in the 1890s in New York City, and this is set in Vienna in 1906. Austria is still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, pre-WWI, and all that jazz.)
Considering that we weren't familiar with the source material, I was pleasantly surprised that Max went home to Shabbat dinner – his mother complaining he was late, the two candles already lit on the table, his father saying Hamotzi [blessing over bread] for the challah, Max only wearing his kippah during that. Given the time period, I was not surprised when there was antisemitism, even for the relatively well off and relatively assimilated Liebermann family. Mr Liebermann owns an emporium, and he was invited to what I think was the equivalent of a campaign dinner where he admitted that he didn't recognise anyone else there because they didn't do business in the Jewish Quarter. Max is interested in Sigmund Freud's new stuff compared to his supervisor doing old, 'torturous' methods, and his supervisor says that they're "not going to change everything every time a Jew puts out a book" (I'm unsure if he was aware of Max being Jewish during that conversation). I think the Liebermanns were invited to some sort of concert by Clara, a friend of the family, and they were the only ones who clapped for a Jewish singer who was going to perform.
(You know how some Tumblr users use 'hatecrime' as a verb?) After a particularly unsubtle line about Max's 'cunning, sly race', he almost gets hatecrimed by the killer of this first case. I mean, everything turns out alright in the end, but for a split second there... Narratively speaking, Max Liebermann has to live in order to fill the psychological profiler role in this police/consultant duo, so there will likely be close calls, but I also can't say that I'm always 100% confident that a Jewish character already facing varying degrees of antisemitism will always prevail. (As long as Max doesn't travel elsewhere in Austria-Hungary during any pogroms, he'll probably be okay.)
[After writing that, I did a quick DuckDuckGo search, and I don't think the Liebermanns are placed where that's a concern. As far as I can tell, Galician Jews faced that between 1918 and WWII, but I'm not really getting anything focused on Vienna pre-WWI. Galicia was a region in the northeast of Austria-Hungary that includes parts of modern Poland and Ukraine; depending on the history one looks into, Galicia is brought up in talking about Hasidim and a certain wave of Galitzianer emigration to Brazil, Canada, and the US.]
Men are wearing kippot, including Max and his father, and it looked like there were two cups of wine on the table. At first, I was trying to remember if the two cups of wine that's often part of the modern [Jewish] wedding ceremony were historically split into an earlier ceremony, but I pretty sure it was just an engagement party. Blessings over wine are just A Thing, and it didn't necessarily have to signal anything. Clara didn't put up enough of a fuss to stop Max from heading off to a case after a certain point (if she was really bothered by him leaving), so we didn't really stay at the engagement party very long anyways.
There's been that smidge of progress for Oskar to not immediately jump to physical violence during an interrogation, but it's not like that's limited to just Inspector Rheinhardt. A disabled [1] man, Viktor Krull, who was initially arrested got a visit from the unsettling 'officer' man who said something along the lines of "I'm a father with daughters myself, and if only I could have a few minutes alone with him" [physical violence heavily implied]. He left two men who were supposedly arrested for something and needed to be held in the cell with Viktor until there was a free cell, and they killed him. The two men clearly knew about the alleged crimes, and they beat Viktor to death while a test was being done to see if his blood covered shirt had human or animal blood. It was animal blood, which wasn't surprising since he worked in an abattoir [an unexpectedly fancy word for a slaughterhouse], and he actually hadn't done the crime.
I'm not unaware of how things haven't been great, historically speaking, for disabled people, but — Man. The way the music ramped up during the blood test, and cutting back to Viktor's body [not showing the beating itself]. The audience was not supposed to be on the officer's side in arranging for this to happen, and we definitely were not. Anyways, it turns out that the concerning flier with a call to arms to, I think, 'clean the blood of the nation' tied into the case. Von Whatshisface had tried to casually give Mr Liebermann the flier to explain his suggestion to not hire any more Czechs and Slovaks at the store, and Max did not like finding it at home. The Brotherhood of Primal Fire commissioned the artwork, which Mr Liebermann knew would be signed somewhere, and yeah, being led to the painter was important.
Thinking a soldier in this Brotherhood of Primal Fire did all these murders isn't unimportant. It's the reason why Clara came up with a plan to be alone with him in an attempt to talk him into a confession, which is literally why she invited the soldier to her home and he had the opportunity to try to rape her. The soldier was horrible, and his offense at the duel from merely being accused of being the murderer provided the last clue that the painter was the culprit. (I'm not pretending to know about duelling etiquette, but when Max stopped the soldier from ripping Clara's clothes off, he decided that a duel to the death was his way of responding to that. Given the soldier's reaction to Max's last name, I can't rule out that a duel to the death seemed more attractive as a way to legitimately kill this particular Jew.)
The painter, A. Olbricht, was a nationalistic supporter of this Aryan commission, but he was also having some issues. When he was young, he heard an immigrant soldier rape his mother while The Magic Flute was playing [at least the music], and working on the set of the just opened show had set off persistent flashbacks to the event. He was dressing up as a soldier and killing people, often immigrants or non-Aryans, who corresponded to the characters in The Magic Flute in an attempt to break the mental cycle. I don't know if the doctor at the hospital who's fond of electroshock therapy and just wiping out relatively recent memories would even help Olbricht, but someone needs to help him enough to stop him from ever doing this again. (My apologies for the snake fans out there, but there's some sort of python that's stolen from the local zoo and killed, which corresponds to the serpent monster at the start of the opera.)
Also: Clara calls off the engagement, Mrs Liebermann sometimes comes across as if she's being sheltered from negative things, and I figured out which rune the Brother of Primal Fire used that was incorporated into the crime scenes – ᚢ (Ur). The actual rune isn't really important, but with the Nazi interest in runes, I did recognise that this wasn't some random choice of lines.
[1: Given the time, I think Viktor was called feeble-minded. He was non-verbal, 'slow', and as his mother described him, had 'a child's mind' (complete with some childish looking drawings in his room and only communicating with Oskar and Max via a drawing).]
Narratively, it's absolutely unavoidable that Max hasn't been able to stop thinking about a former patient from the hospital, has run into her at the museum, gotten her assistance on two cases now, and has admitted that he loves her to her face. I can't say that I blame Amelia for associating him with a painful and still rather recent hospitalization, and personally, I'd rather post-ship them as friendly acquaintances and co-workers on cases than actually ship them. (I've heard that future seasons will have both Amelia and Clara be 'just friends' with Max because he's fitting the 'Married to the Job' trope, but I don't know what shenanigans have to happen before we get to that point.)
Also: Oskar's estranged wife returned and dismantled the quasi-shrine of their dead daughter's things that Oskar had left in place (more in the realm of someone not touching someone's bedroom in the modern sense than a literal shrine). He apologized for how his grief and pouring himself into his work to escape it was the relationship ending factor. After Max showed up in the middle of the night with a sudden realisation for their case, she left her ring on the kitchen table (and left him again).
Episode One: The Last Seance (Parts I and II, corresponding to S1E1 and E2).
I'm hoping that Inspector [Oskar] Rheinhardt doesn't hit anyone during an interrogation going forward, but we're hopefully seeing him realise that maybe the psychological stuff can be used more instead of a confession via force. Given the time period, I'm not going to hold my breath for a stringent level of psychiatric accuracy (considering the repeated electroshock therapy we see Dr [Max] Liebermann's supervisor at the hospital demonstrate), but you know, beating a confession out of someone clearly doesn't work. Smidgeon of progress on that front.Considering that we weren't familiar with the source material, I was pleasantly surprised that Max went home to Shabbat dinner – his mother complaining he was late, the two candles already lit on the table, his father saying Hamotzi [blessing over bread] for the challah, Max only wearing his kippah during that. Given the time period, I was not surprised when there was antisemitism, even for the relatively well off and relatively assimilated Liebermann family. Mr Liebermann owns an emporium, and he was invited to what I think was the equivalent of a campaign dinner where he admitted that he didn't recognise anyone else there because they didn't do business in the Jewish Quarter. Max is interested in Sigmund Freud's new stuff compared to his supervisor doing old, 'torturous' methods, and his supervisor says that they're "not going to change everything every time a Jew puts out a book" (I'm unsure if he was aware of Max being Jewish during that conversation). I think the Liebermanns were invited to some sort of concert by Clara, a friend of the family, and they were the only ones who clapped for a Jewish singer who was going to perform.
(You know how some Tumblr users use 'hatecrime' as a verb?) After a particularly unsubtle line about Max's 'cunning, sly race', he almost gets hatecrimed by the killer of this first case. I mean, everything turns out alright in the end, but for a split second there... Narratively speaking, Max Liebermann has to live in order to fill the psychological profiler role in this police/consultant duo, so there will likely be close calls, but I also can't say that I'm always 100% confident that a Jewish character already facing varying degrees of antisemitism will always prevail. (As long as Max doesn't travel elsewhere in Austria-Hungary during any pogroms, he'll probably be okay.)
[After writing that, I did a quick DuckDuckGo search, and I don't think the Liebermanns are placed where that's a concern. As far as I can tell, Galician Jews faced that between 1918 and WWII, but I'm not really getting anything focused on Vienna pre-WWI. Galicia was a region in the northeast of Austria-Hungary that includes parts of modern Poland and Ukraine; depending on the history one looks into, Galicia is brought up in talking about Hasidim and a certain wave of Galitzianer emigration to Brazil, Canada, and the US.]
Episode Two: Queen of the Night (Parts I and II, corresponding to S1E3 and E4).
Max is kind of like a Sherlock Holmes-esque role, in terms of crime procedural tropes, and I keep finding myself feeling uninterested in Max being in a relationship due to bringing along those associations. The narrative isn't really interested in him actually getting married to Clara either, but he panic-proposed in S1E2 when it was sometime in the winter [based on clothing]. S1E3 probably starts January 1907, since they planned on a wedding "in six months time" and "in June", at a party hosted by the Liebermann family.Men are wearing kippot, including Max and his father, and it looked like there were two cups of wine on the table. At first, I was trying to remember if the two cups of wine that's often part of the modern [Jewish] wedding ceremony were historically split into an earlier ceremony, but I pretty sure it was just an engagement party. Blessings over wine are just A Thing, and it didn't necessarily have to signal anything. Clara didn't put up enough of a fuss to stop Max from heading off to a case after a certain point (if she was really bothered by him leaving), so we didn't really stay at the engagement party very long anyways.
There's been that smidge of progress for Oskar to not immediately jump to physical violence during an interrogation, but it's not like that's limited to just Inspector Rheinhardt. A disabled [1] man, Viktor Krull, who was initially arrested got a visit from the unsettling 'officer' man who said something along the lines of "I'm a father with daughters myself, and if only I could have a few minutes alone with him" [physical violence heavily implied]. He left two men who were supposedly arrested for something and needed to be held in the cell with Viktor until there was a free cell, and they killed him. The two men clearly knew about the alleged crimes, and they beat Viktor to death while a test was being done to see if his blood covered shirt had human or animal blood. It was animal blood, which wasn't surprising since he worked in an abattoir [an unexpectedly fancy word for a slaughterhouse], and he actually hadn't done the crime.
I'm not unaware of how things haven't been great, historically speaking, for disabled people, but — Man. The way the music ramped up during the blood test, and cutting back to Viktor's body [not showing the beating itself]. The audience was not supposed to be on the officer's side in arranging for this to happen, and we definitely were not. Anyways, it turns out that the concerning flier with a call to arms to, I think, 'clean the blood of the nation' tied into the case. Von Whatshisface had tried to casually give Mr Liebermann the flier to explain his suggestion to not hire any more Czechs and Slovaks at the store, and Max did not like finding it at home. The Brotherhood of Primal Fire commissioned the artwork, which Mr Liebermann knew would be signed somewhere, and yeah, being led to the painter was important.
Thinking a soldier in this Brotherhood of Primal Fire did all these murders isn't unimportant. It's the reason why Clara came up with a plan to be alone with him in an attempt to talk him into a confession, which is literally why she invited the soldier to her home and he had the opportunity to try to rape her. The soldier was horrible, and his offense at the duel from merely being accused of being the murderer provided the last clue that the painter was the culprit. (I'm not pretending to know about duelling etiquette, but when Max stopped the soldier from ripping Clara's clothes off, he decided that a duel to the death was his way of responding to that. Given the soldier's reaction to Max's last name, I can't rule out that a duel to the death seemed more attractive as a way to legitimately kill this particular Jew.)
The painter, A. Olbricht, was a nationalistic supporter of this Aryan commission, but he was also having some issues. When he was young, he heard an immigrant soldier rape his mother while The Magic Flute was playing [at least the music], and working on the set of the just opened show had set off persistent flashbacks to the event. He was dressing up as a soldier and killing people, often immigrants or non-Aryans, who corresponded to the characters in The Magic Flute in an attempt to break the mental cycle. I don't know if the doctor at the hospital who's fond of electroshock therapy and just wiping out relatively recent memories would even help Olbricht, but someone needs to help him enough to stop him from ever doing this again. (My apologies for the snake fans out there, but there's some sort of python that's stolen from the local zoo and killed, which corresponds to the serpent monster at the start of the opera.)
Also: Clara calls off the engagement, Mrs Liebermann sometimes comes across as if she's being sheltered from negative things, and I figured out which rune the Brother of Primal Fire used that was incorporated into the crime scenes – ᚢ (Ur). The actual rune isn't really important, but with the Nazi interest in runes, I did recognise that this wasn't some random choice of lines.
[1: Given the time, I think Viktor was called feeble-minded. He was non-verbal, 'slow', and as his mother described him, had 'a child's mind' (complete with some childish looking drawings in his room and only communicating with Oskar and Max via a drawing).]
Episode Three: The Lost Child (Parts I and II, corresponding to S1E5 and E6).
Max couldn't really maintain the facade of still being engaged to Clara, so he told his parents that they were no longer engaged. With how Mr Liebermann mentioned that he "signed the contract" already, I'm rethinking what I noted in the Episode Two notes about those two cups of wine being a signal of something. I don't know enough about Austria-Hungary wedding requirements to know if the actual wedding has to have Xtian elements, so the engagement party could have included Jewish elements that can't be saved for the official wedding. (While Max pushed back against 'the contract' and everything being business for his father, the ketubah is a marriage contract. You know, not easing my suspicions that the engagement party was a little more important than a mere party suggests.)Narratively, it's absolutely unavoidable that Max hasn't been able to stop thinking about a former patient from the hospital, has run into her at the museum, gotten her assistance on two cases now, and has admitted that he loves her to her face. I can't say that I blame Amelia for associating him with a painful and still rather recent hospitalization, and personally, I'd rather post-ship them as friendly acquaintances and co-workers on cases than actually ship them. (I've heard that future seasons will have both Amelia and Clara be 'just friends' with Max because he's fitting the 'Married to the Job' trope, but I don't know what shenanigans have to happen before we get to that point.)
Also: Oskar's estranged wife returned and dismantled the quasi-shrine of their dead daughter's things that Oskar had left in place (more in the realm of someone not touching someone's bedroom in the modern sense than a literal shrine). He apologized for how his grief and pouring himself into his work to escape it was the relationship ending factor. After Max showed up in the middle of the night with a sudden realisation for their case, she left her ring on the kitchen table (and left him again).