Tatort (TV Series) Das Nest (2019) User Reviews

Hitchcock Caliber Suspense - A True Thriller!

[thursdaysrecords · 10/10 · 3 May 2019]

As a life-long fan and follower of the Tatort series, I have rarely seen a better story or cast performance than offered in this episode. Although it is not very long into the action that the viewer knows "who dunnit", the suspense in smoking out a serial killer builds steadily right up to the very satisfying conclusion.

A noteworthy side-plot shows how a young newcomer to the team is rejected by her father as a disappointment. When the top-of-her class police woman is asked by an experienced peer whether she was following in her father's footsteps, she responds "I make my own footsteps". No matter how well she does in her career, the father continues to put her down, insisting "she will never amount to anything". An important scene near the end addresses that conflict, likely to leave the audience cheering!

If you get to watch just ONE Tatort episode this year...make it THIS ONE!

Incompentent police chases incompetent criminal

[Stoolli · 4/10 · 2 August 2019]

Usually in a exciting crime thriller we would watch the police and the villain in a suspense-packed chase, and the winner would be whoever is the smartest and the one being one step ahead than the other. But not in the Tatort episode "Das Nest". Here the police and the criminal surpass each other with blunders and careless decisions. So the winner would be the one who is the least incompetent. I did not find that to be exciting at all. Here some examples which let me roll my eyes:

• At the beginning the police decides to wait at the crimescene for the murderer to return. Good idea. But instead of placing 30 special forces in this gigantic labyrinth of a villa, only two (!) police women wait somewhere in the upper level of the villa, while the special forces wait somewhere outside of the villa. So the moment the criminal enters the building, the police already lost control over where he is in this gigantic house. In the search for him, the two policewomen finally separate, similar to a bad horror movie. Due to this amateurish plan, the villain escapes, of course. The special forces are of no use at all, as their job is to follow passively and arrive when it is too late. This "chase" was almost funny in an embarrassing way. The only thing missing was the police slipping on a banana peel.

• The villain has now escaped. The police has no trace at first, but then finds out that the murderer sutured the bodies together incorrectly on purpose. From that they deduce that the killer works in the medical field. And suddenly only five suspects are left. How come? Because allegedly all the victims were treated by these five doctors. That is all the viewer is told ... If all the victims would have had two doctors in common I already would have been puzzled by that great coincidence, but five? The victims could only have such a high number of common doctors if they had all been treated in the same hospital. But if so, then this is such an obvious trace that should have been noticed immediately by the investigators. But they did not despite supposedly "perfect" research and work. They have no clue at all and need a slide projector to finally find this bizarre trace with the sutures.

• Later the Tatort tells us, that the murderer is an intelligent and meticulous surgeon. And then we see how he does not behave intelligently and meticulously at all. We see him, the murderer with allegedly years of experience, potter around at home in bright daylight, the bloody corpse in the open trunk of his car. His daughter and wife talk to him and have no clue, the corpse just two meters away. If the murderer was so dilettantish and negligent, he should have been caught red-handed years ago.

• Later, the serial killer buries the same corpse in the forest. He seems to have planned everything carefully. But in a later scene we see how one arm of the buried corpse protrudes from the ground and is found by a hunter and his dog. I assumed the serial killer was clever enough to bury a dead body, but I was wrong.

And these were just a few moments where the suspense and story of this Tatort episode was supposed be generated with the help of doltish mistakes made by the characters.