I’m sure you’ve heard about the four-season German TV series streaming on MhZ (the service on which I’ve been watching it). And I’ve just, today, been delighted to learn there will be a fifth season. Which is good because the end of the fourth season was…either promising or menacing but, hey, that’s Babylon Berlin.
Set in the Weimar Republic in 1928 through 1933 (the last season), it’s complex in plot, in history (quite a lot of it), in characters (some of whom were actual people), in political and gangster groups, and in mood, shifting as in real life through all the human and historical possibilities of that time and place. Or any time and place. Oh, and cabaret, big time. Maybe they resurrected Busby Berkeley for some of the numbers. (CGI, actual locations and stunning production values which must have cost a fortune.)
Sometime it gets freaky and nightmarish (morphine enters the story, as well as PTSD from World War I, which also enters the story). (I attribute the wildly imaginative stuff to Tom Twyker, whose work I’ve followed since Run, Lola, Run, but maybe I’m wrong and if so apologize to the wild imaginations of anyone else connected to Babylon Berlin.
But here’s the thing. There are some personages who seem to be take-offs on Trump-world. F’r’instance, Alfred Nyssen, a madman industrialist who keeps changing his hair color (platinum is favored), dresses in golden suits, jumps up onto platforms as he holds his arms up in triumph, lives in a ridiculously ornate castle where he is building a rocket in which he intends to ride to the moon…well, guess who?
But Babylon Berlin started filming in 2016, before Trump’s improbable White House venture, and the upcoming fifth season was filmed before Trump’s second improbable and horrible White House venture.
So did Musk see Babylon Berlin and think, yeah, this is me, why not?