Testaments to the Boom Times to Come

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Babylon Berlin, Second Pass: Episode 16 [S2, E8]

I am absolutely gazeboed off a bunch of cheap of wine I had at a work function, so let’s rewatch Babylon Berlin’s GONZO SECOND SEASON FINALE that never saw a twist it didn’t want to take!!!

SPOILERS but a list of the twists in just this one episode, any two of which would have been plenty enough for a finale:

- Charlotte comes back to life!
- Edgar’s gang takes out like half the Black Reichswehr operatives!
- the Sorokin’s gold is FAKE!
- Bruno dies!
- Edgar doesn’t kill Gereon when it really seems like he should!
- Bruno isn’t dead yet after all!
- Okay now Bruno is dead in an explosion!
- Scarcheek is the new Benda? gross
- Charlotte becomes the first female detective in Berlin!
- the gold is THE TRAINCAR ITSELF!!
- Svetlana is now in France
- Alexei is alive OBVS! and still in love with her, DOUBLE obvs!
- Gereon almost gets assassinated but Edgar saves his life AGAIN wtf
- Gereon left his brother to die!
- DR. SCHMIDT IS ANNO FUCKNG RATH!!!!!!!???!!!??

wellntruly: The only TV critic I’ve seen talk about Babylon Berlin in the yearly roundups is Emily Nussbaum at the New Yorker, and she put it in her “Great But It Went Off the Rails” category, but then in her little blurb was like “actually I don’t know if *did* go off the rails…” But it for sure has that rails-jumping VIBE, especially at the end, it’s just all so MUCH
@memory-for-trifles: I mean I’d posit that it did stay on the rails, it just also drove a train car made of gold through a poison gas explosion on the rails 🚂
wellntruly: Haaaaahahaahaha, but all STILL ON THE RAILS!

Let’s get on ‘em!!

Notizen 16

love this Bisher Bei, like “hey remember the hypnopening from the first episode like a mILLION years ago that we’ve never came back to? guess the fuck what!”

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[elithewho]

Me? Go steady? Spare me.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[elithewho]

“…a chasm opened in the earth and out of it coal-black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look of dark splendor, majestic and beautiful and terrible. He caught her to him and held her close. The next moment she was being borne away from the radiance of earth in springtime to the world of the dead by the king who rules it.”
― Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

@akahypotheticals

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

pineapple-split replied to your post “Babylon Berlin, Second Pass: Episode 15 [S2, Ep 7]”

What’s so heartbreaking and stressful about Greta on re-watch is that if just ONE element were different - a little less gaslighting, a little more self-confidence from her, a little more people in her life happening to be there at the precise moment - I really think she wouldn’t have done it. Like.. this was a hell of a con to pull off? ALLL the variables just compounded to create the exact darkest timeline, and then lit up neon to really shove it in her face. :(

“Heartbreaking and stressful” is IT, so many ways the plot should have fallen apart but it doesn’t. It’s like watching one of those pre-determined tragedies, where no matter what you do it just keeps maarrching on its course

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Babylon Berlin, Second Pass: Episode 15 [S2, Ep. 7]

The first time I watched this episode I ended up in such a state of numb shocked grief that I was genuinely these gifs of Tahani for the rest of the evening. Someone sent me a message talking about how they had just started the show and were so excited, and I was just grabbing their shoulders like BEWARE, CHILD, oH GOD.

What I remember most is the nerve-fraying duration, how they make us spend over HALF this episode begging people not to die. Please make it out, sweethearts, please please make it out okay. And then another five minutes, another five minutes. Please. Please oh my god, please I can’t lose you too! Another five. [choked] O-h god—

So yeah let’s do that again!!

Notizen 15

I think I always notice more German words in the ‘Bisher bei’ because I just saw it recently so am paying basically no attention to the English along the bottom. anyway Charlotte also used that ‘doch’ I just started picking up! here it was translated as “there is” instead of “yes” — it’s a sorta…contrary affirmative? ? we don’t have something with this usage in English! rather a loss, this seems useful as heck.

this wordless, brooding shot of Greta sitting in the kitchen being the whole cold open is SO GOOD though!! way to SET THE TONE: we’re just gonna take our time with being anxiety-inducing.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Babylon Berlin, Second Pass: Episode 14 [S2, Ep 6]

This episode is about two things.

1. Gereon Rath just throwing himself headlong at a whole theatre’s worth of fascist malefactors, and @memory-for-trifles’ commentary on this & More

2. @akahypotheticals & A German Friend’s ideas on Edgar’s backstory, which have utterly compelled and captivated me and is MY NEW GOING THEORY

All of this to come! In these! Der Notizen 16:

guys….I still do not know what happened with this SWIFTLY cut off plot line. lol I just don’t know! I actually sort of dragged the show for this to Jen back when I was first watching the series, because this plot is basically over as soon as it begins and it feels mmmm a little underdone, scripting wise. but Jen was like ja that’s the point, to make you feel like you can’t keep track of everything and at any moment someone might get shot on a sidewalk. and she has a point! this scene DOES make me feel like I’m going out of my mind! and that’s exactly where the show wants me to be, so instead of getting sloppy, it’s doing its job very well.

anyway whatever the heck is supposed to have happened with Katelbach and the engineer, Gereon appears to have just told all of it to Benda immediately, and that is at least the emotional plot line rendered clear: Gereon+Benda 4eva

Seegers, revealing a psychopath’s knack for collecting personal details to later use as weapons: “Ah, the little brother.”

Gereon sitting down AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE with his staring prey eyes, which is half why this screenshot, the other is please love Benda’s modern art in his office. he’s so stylish, his home? gosh.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[rathxritter]

Sodom und Gomorrha waren zusammen nur halb so elend wie ich!

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

akahypotheticals replied to your post: akahypotheticals replied to your post “Babylon…

lol nope, not at all. when he talks to the booze guy in episode one he reportedly sounds a little LESS berliner, “vaguely eastern european” I think she said, but at all other times he reportedly sounds 1000% berliner. I believe her since she’s from hamburg and her sister lives in berlin and she’s down there a lot. the russians supposedly sound VERY russian but idr if she said in an accurate way or in a “rocky and bullwinkle” way.

AHH. Well this is where this also gets independently interesting, in the vein of “what would an Armenian German accent even sound like”, because I may have delved yesterday and ARMENIAN is a funky little independent branch of the Indo-European family tree, and doesn’t actually sound like a ton of other languages at all. But even then it bears more in common with Greek and Iranian than anything in Eastern Europe. Oh lordy what happened here!

Lol, or like “Armie Hammer in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” Which is deliberately supposed to be a comedy accent so that’s actually fine. Oh or Alison Brie as Zoya in GLOW, god bless

ANYWAY, we got more on the Russians BELOW:

standuptragicomedy replied to your post: akahypotheticals replied to your post “Babylon…

I don’t know if it’s like, accurate German-with-a-Russian-accent, but Kardakov and Sveta both have distinctively Russian pronunciation and sentence structure even when speaking German; it’s especially pronounced in Sveta’s speech.

SWEET, SWEET. Yeah and I believe it! It really was not until this far into my second watch that it even occurred to me to wonder if Edgar has an accent to the native Germans, whereas the Russians have just always sounded Russian to me. Conceivably this could have contributed to how at first I wouldn’t immediately register that they’d switched between German and Russian, besides of course the primary fact that I am a monolingual foooool

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

pineapple-split replied to your post “Babylon Berlin, Second Pass: Episode 13 [S2, Ep 5]”

SHUT THE F - how did I miss the Nikoros palindrome!?

OH BELIEVE ME, I KNOW THE FEELING!!!

She even stylizes it with the S biggest! Svetlana your verve

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

akahypotheticals replied to your post “Babylon Berlin, Second Pass: Episode 13 [S2, Ep 5]”

According to my German friend, Edgar has a born-and-bred Berlin accent. Like “there’s no way he moved there” pure.

WHAT. I mean that’s true of the actor so that makes sense that that’s his voice, but they didn’t have him try to do an Armenian accent at all?? Not even a “[hand-wave] vaguely foreign” cadence or something? For the character all of Berlin just calls The Armenian!

OKAY FOLLOW UP QUESTION: do the Russians speak German with Russian accents?