Yesterday I was at a new friend’s birthday barbecue where I met a bunch of her college pals, and serendipitously discovered that one of them has ALSO watched Babylon Berlin MULTIPLE TIMES, and we instantly set about trying to convince everyone else to watch it in STEREO now, twice as convincing.
And anyway we also came up with our dream Season 3 opener it goes like this:
You know that fun thing the old shows with large ensemble casts would do every once in a while where they’d break form and exclusively stick with a secondary character as they went about their life, usually accompanied by a Rashomon-esque tone shift to reflect this new perspective? So it’s that with Edgar, started a day spinning through his one thousand absurd appointments running Moka Efti. It is, and I cannot express this enough, NOT scored with ‘Gotta Get Up’ from Russian Doll. It is scored with whatever Bryan Ferry wants to do with that vibe. It is BLITHE, it is BOUNCY, it is endearing and alarming in equal measures—the moment where he pauses in a back hallway to savor a sip of a demitasse of espresso he’s plucked up from the kitchen, the moment where he casually directs an enemy dragged before him to be thrown in some oubliette or other with just a gesture and moves on because there’s just More To Do, sorry can’t stay I gotta run run ye-ah. He moves through the architecture of the place like he’s on well-oiled ball bearings. He picks one of two swatches of brocade. He jokingly frowns at the Widow over her expenses, then smiles as he signs them off and she grabs the paper back with a grin. He signs a bill for champagne coups, a bill for bullets. He steps out on the mezzanine to catch a second of the sound check for his new act after Nikoros vanished (it’s Janelle Monáe in full Metropolis-inspired Cindi Mayweather performing a period-reworked ArchAndroid track with the Bryan Ferry Orchestra—we’ll get the full act at the end of the premiere just hold tight), nods satisfied and keeps moving on. He opens the door to his own rooms and—Dr. Schmidt is sitting there, posed, you know how people do when they make a picture with their bodies of tension: his eyes closed in a posture of abjectness, a hand cantilevered to his temple. The song cuts on a breath. Edgar’s like “Ah,” a nod down, and steps into the room closing the door behind him. But we stay outside and it’s on the face of the door that the title card comes up, and the theme starts playing. WE’RE BACK IN BERLIN.
And there you go there’s your cold open.
