queer_scribbling | Vienna Blood (S2) (Reply)

Episode One: The Melancholy Countess (corresponding to S2E1 and E2).

Amelia was recast between seasons, which initially tripped us up a bit. It's still 1907, but it wasn't until Max started going over his client notes and referencing dates in September that we really got a clue about how much time has passed since the end of last season. It's been long enough that Clara is engaged to someone else, Mr Liebermann brought up someone for Max to consider going to dinner with, and it's been two months since Amelia responded to Max's last letter. Or since he tried to send the last one? (I just really wish we could narratively move on.)

I'm not entirely clear on whether Max is required to put in a minimum amount of hours at the hospital, but the supervisor doctor still doesn't like him and blames his Freudian ways for his client's death. (He advised her to not take the opium that supervisory doctor prescribed for her melancholia, and she's a widowed Hungarian Countess so she's slightly important.) Max's reputation for his fledgling private practice tanks, which forces him to help Inspector Rheinhardt (since he apparently had gone on break from consulting). [Narratively this is accomplishing things, but it feels like trying to get me to re-invest in Oskar and Max as collaborating on solving murder, which almost feels like a waste of narrative space when I'm going directly from S1 to S2.]

I feel like I ought to have a play-by-play laying out of the case. Melancholia wasn't related to the Countess' death [not a suicide], and she was poisoned. The younger man who was a fellow guest in the hotel wasn't a gold-digger, but it would eventually be revealed that he flirted with her in a beard-style cover up of his homosexuality. The Countess' kinda weird dream being brought up in her talk therapy sessions with Max revealing her guilt over putting a son in a sanitarium/hospital was a way for Max to be necessary to the case (and her now-adult son finding her was a red herring because he wasn't the killer). One of the young men who was a doorman might have been forced to wear a particular dress and whip guests by request.

Pictorial cards showed what we'd interpret as kinky but not sex-acts-interaction, which were a way for brothels to get around language barriers. This young man therefore never had to talk to the Not A Gold-Digger Guest, who liked being hit with a crop and gagging himself with a horse harness. The lady who worked at the hotel somehow, who we saw long enough to hear her say her son died as an officer, actually was the killer. She thought she was poisoning Mr Not A Gold-Digger, but she accidentally got the wrong cup of tea at the dinner table and got the Countess. Her son and the man were caught together, but I think the outcome was worse for her son based on his higher rank [Mr Not A Gold-Digger was technically a soldier at the time]. He killed himself, if I remember correctly, and she blamed the other man for that. So, she shot him in the head and then shot herself in the head.

It's... Just a bit much with the suicide depictions this week. The killer in the S1 finale didn't want his daughter to face the shame of his reputation as a decorated officer being tarnished by him killing someone [in his position as teacher at the school], so he jumped off the ledge of the bell tower. And it was definitely high enough to kill him. [I feel like I ought to note the funny moments of how everyone reacted to Max's black eye from a mugger, how the man who accosted him at his private practice was the husband of one of his clients and not the killer, or the schadenfreude of the supervisory doctor being questioned (he was a junior doctor when the Countess' son was institutionalised). Mostly, I keep returning to the comfort of recognising Mr Liebermann's tallit gadol in the fever-hazy memory of a young Max who was sick, as it related to the intro sequence.]

We didn't have the complete "Episode Two" on the DVR, and in the course of trying to just watch the first half we were missing [on a piracy site on the computer], we ended up watching the episode in its entirety. It seems to just be a quirk of the Masterpiece airing on tv to split each episode into Part I and Part II. So, tonight we went onto the last of S2 on the DVR, hence all the episodes here.

Episode Two: The Devil's Kiss" (S2E3 and E4) and "Episode Three: Darkness Rising" (S2E5 and E6).

The Devil's Kiss: Sometimes it's interesting to get a note of the times in a piece that's based on a certain time period. [While the actual date of annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina was in October 1908, I'm not entirely sure that this was set that far into 1908 due to it being historical fiction.]

This episode is about someone associated with Black Hand wanting to do something at a treaty signing between Russia and Austria-Hungary for the formal annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Vrana or Crow [L. Kiss] is an internationally wanted figure – due to being suspected in the Serbian May Coup – and this is a different level of security clearance in a manner of speaking compared to Vienna based crime solving for Oskar. Kiss actually was the actor in the Serbian theatre (interviewed by Oskar and Max), he was surveying the police as much as they were trying to survey him (incorporating his wife undercover), and the shooting risk from finding a gun wasn't the actual plot (it was actually a bomb under the table). Even though Kiss wasn't caught himself, the assassination attempt was stopped, and there's an air of the world just being bigger than what's happening in Vienna that was a nice palate cleanser.

Darkness Rising: One of the first scenes has a young boy being hit and kicked on the ground, and the other boys scrawl [translated later into English] 'demon' on the wall because he's Jewish. Mr Liebermann, Max, and Amelia attend a lecture hosted by the Historical Society, and there's a fuss over Brother Stanislav being the speaker (he's going to talk about some sort of art piece, maybe?). Isaak Korngold, the brother of Clara's new fiancé, is upset enough about Brother Stanislav to interrupt before the lecture begins; when he quotes some sort of verse or Catholic writing to back up his antisemitism, Isaak pulls out a quote from the Torah relating to stoning and throws something at the glass covered piece that Brother Stanislav was going to talk about. About a week later, Oskar is called out to the monastery because that particular monk is dead, and it looks an awful lot like he was stoned.

Isaak is taken in to be held in a cell, since it really doesn't look good for him, and Clara asks Max to try to help somehow. Max doesn't think Isaak killed the monk, but it's not until another monk sees Oskar against the abbot's instruction that there's an inkling that something else might be going on. Max goes undercover as Brother Maxwell, who is passing through on a pilgrimage from Oxford, and he investigates inside the monastery while passing info to Oskar during confession. (He figures out that Brother David found the body and moved it, and there is a secret 'watching room' for the place of expensive artifacts providing a path from the murder location to the body found location. Someone had also written to Stanislav, and all there was left of the paper after being burned was the crest in the letterhead.)

Unfortunately for Brother David, he is killed for being a witness, but fortunately for Oskar, another dead person in the monastery means the abbot has to let the police in. It turns out that something is missing from all the artifacts, and the abbott didn't want the news of Stanislav thinking the Holy Lance miraculously cured him of an illness to get out. (The abbott didn't want the monastery to 'turn into a circus' from people wanting to see it. Understandable, but also, a rather time period appropriate response compared to the encouragement of pilgrimages to churches to see holy relics more in the Medieval-ish era.) This also clearly meant that Isaak couldn't have been the killer, since he was still in the holding cell.

The historian guy who arranged for the lecture actually had the missing lance [just the end stabbing part], and the crest was actually for Amelia's museum. She actually found it, was briefly tied up and threatened, and the guy was stopped by Max walking in to see her. While he thought he had accidentally killed Stanislav while fighting for the Holy Lance case, it was probably just an injury at that point. His friend – the rich guy who conveniently took over the Korngold bank after everyone wanted to close their accounts – probably delivered the actual killing blow while making the death look like a stoning. He also killed David, coincidentally found the Jewish Curse among private bank papers [by planting it there], and added 'enemy' in Hebrew at each murder scene. I think the explanation of blood libel was a little optimistic in making it sound like just a Medieval Xtian accusation, but it wasn't half bad.

It was also definite proof that Isaak was being set up for these murders, and Inspector von Bülow was regrettably very willing to buy into the set up. He definitely thought Isaak was the killer from the beginning, he opposed Max being sent undercover because he was a Jew entering a monastery, and he thought Max could have killed David because 'Jews all stick together'. Quite frankly, it seemed like ample evidence of religious belief or lack thereof not meaning much when it comes to antisemitism, or the rationalist, not very religious Max Liebermann wouldn't still face as much antisemitism as he does. [It's not surprising knowing that this time is part of the transition from religious belief/differences based antisemitism to a more so-called scientific race based antisemitism; in that light, Max Liebermann is a Jew regardless of his actual beliefs.]

Unfortunately there was also this whole thing with Clara stopping by Max's private practice to thank him for his help in getting Isaak out which led to a kiss. Clara is supposed to be marrying Jonas Korngold in a few weeks, after all. Amelia just happened to see them through the window, since she was arriving to go out to dinner with Max. I dunno when he's supposedly going to be "just friends" with both of them, but I want that stage, like, yesterday. (Post-shipping. So much post-shipping.)