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Thiel (Axel Prahl, left) and Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers): One plays the diabolical clerk who prepares the other for the way to purgatory

Photo: Martin Valentin Menke / WDR

This text was published in its original version for the first broadcast in November 2020.

The scenario:

Hell is a liver sausage bread. A diabolical revenant of Inspector Thiel (Axel Prahl) sits as a sausagey clerk in the forecourt of hell and receives Professor Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers), who hovers between life and death after a car accident. While the nightmare Thiel distributes long forms and devours sausage sandwiches, Boerne from the intermediate realm haunts the real Thiel's investigations. A man injected the professor with a substance shortly before the car ride, causing him to lose control on the road. Now the assassin pretends to be a doctor and takes over Boerne's job - and as a ghost, he has no choice but to watch the fraudster try to cover up the attempted murder of him.

The highlight:

Off to purgatory or back to life? This near-death thriller takes up motifs from Frank Capra's Zwischenreich classic »Isn't Life Beautiful?«, in which James Stewart, as a desperate family man after a suicide attempt, realizes how sad the lives of his loved ones would have been if he hadn't existed.

The picture:

My Killer and I: While Boerne's comatose physical shell is in the intensive care unit, the con man who got his job tries to kill him. Crazy, but good: As if from the perspective of a third party, the victim observes the attempted murder of himself.

The dialogue:

The professor, hovering between life and death, looks at his life with the Hell Thiel.

Boerne: "I didn't realize how much all this meant to me. Work, Alberich, life."

Höllen-Thiel: "Supply and demand. The value of life increases the less time we have left.«

Boerne: "I'm not ready yet. There's still so much to do, to say."

The song:

»American Woman« by The Who. The chest hair blues rock is playing when Thiel's hippie father (Claus D. Clausnitzer) passes a lightning system in a taxi at a drastically increased speed. A catastrophe, because as the Vadder says: "I have more points than a Dalmatian."

The rating:

8 out of 10 points. Emo trip with an egomaniac: the »Tatort« as a tearjerker. Allowed to be.

The analysis:

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"Crime Scene: Limbo", Sunday, 20.15 p.m., Das Erste