No, it's not our fault that we have to confront you again with murderers in Saarland.

After the inspectors Judith Mohn and Freddy Breyer from Saarlouis, who belong to the ZDF series "In Echter" (In Truth), this time the pithy cowboys from "Tatort" in Saarbrücken, who jumped out of jeans advertising into the realm of crime, are investigating.

With every look they exchanged, Adam Schürk (Daniel Sträßer) and Leo Bäumer (Vladimir Burlakov) grew closer to your heart in the first three episodes - not to mention their shared history, which dates back to their youth.

It hasn't been told to the end.

However, the story is at a point where the commissioners, who could one day hand over the first homosexual investigator couple of the "crime scene", have to find their way more into everyday business.

The screenplay for the fourth episode "The Cold of the Earth" is no longer by Hendrik Hölzemann, but by the young screenwriter Melanie Waelde, whose feature film debut "Naked Animals" attracted attention at the Berlinale 2020.

At that time, the focus was on a young martial artist and her friends, and the "Spiegel" praised the "rough, intense physicality" of the production, which the author herself took care of.

A life on the fringes of society

You should remember this wording.

Waelde's "Tatort" also includes a woman who tries to beat everything out of herself: the one played by Bineta Hansen ("Loving Her", Wir") with blue hair, caustic stubbornness, overflowing aggressiveness and disarming wit ("Gurkchen?"). , worker Alina Barthel, who lives together with her brother Bastian (Lorris Andre Blazejewski) in an unshaven terraced house.

It is undoubtedly the life that made Alina this: a life on the fringes of society.

But it also gave her an outlet.

Alina belongs to a group of Saarbrücken hooligans who, at the beginning of the action, have arranged to meet with hooligans from Kaiserslautern for the "third half".

They stalk each other like the Sharks and the Jets once did, only without dancing and singing, and when the fists fly, an acquaintance of Alina falls to the ground, bleeding.

He just manages to drag himself into a hospital, where he gets stuck in the automatic door and breathes his last at the perplexed looks of the doctor on duty, Friedemann Lech (Till Butterbach), who is annoyed by the hooligan appearance in the emergency room.

Fortunately, not everything is shown, because the director (Kerstin Polte) switches over to the inspectors Schürk and Holzer for a moment, who are surrounded by peaceful football fans elsewhere, the perpetrator and cause of death are not as clear in this case as it is when looking at a one-eyed thug (Tamer Tahan) just seemed.

Homoerotic crackle

This "crime scene" suffers a little from the program flag that he holds in the viewer's face when introducing his characters: Waelde and Polte want a story that is as diverse as possible and breaks with traditional patterns.

It starts with the slightly stocky young mother Alina, who verbally and non-verbally lashes out, continues with the investigations in the fan milieu, in which, of course, a woman, inspector Esther Baumann (Brigitte Urhausen), knows her way around very well and a social worker with Asian roots appears ( Jing Xiang), and leads to a gay couple.

If you notice such things, it is probably too much of a good thing, since the core of the new Saarbrücken "crime scene" also includes the homoerotic crackle between Schürk and Bäumer.

On the other hand, it is nice that after three cases in which the men of the four-person investigative team were in the foreground, Esther Baumann and Pia Heinrich (Ines Marie Westernströer) are finally getting more profile - without the special relationship between Schürk and Bäumer receding as a result.

"If you were a couple," says Heinrich zu Holzer, "then you would say you have a toxic relationship."

Waelde's dialogues are spot on, and Christiane Buchmann's camera work is also worth seeing.

She brings us very close to the characters with the hand-held camera, blinking in the low light like in a western.

Director Kerstin Polte wanted to shoot an "industrial western" "in which we dive under smooth surfaces and track down the raw, hidden, imperfect, vulnerable in people and landscapes".

The football bar of innkeeper Manuela Baron (Ursula Berlinghof) becomes a dusty saloon.

Everything is sandy yellow.

Brownfield sites look like rock faces on the Rio Sarre.

And this tough crime scene from the wild west of Germany even has horsepower to offer, a region where everyone seems to carry a lot of anger around with them.

Not least Adam Schürk.

He seems to be really waiting to finally be allowed to use his fists again.

The scene of the crime: The cold of the earth runs on Sunday at 8:15 p.m. in the first.