Dresden | Scary truth: Dresden’s new “crime scene”.

Dresden (dpa) – A gray day. Two women and two men in uniform are standing on a country road. A tow truck approaches and stops. “Hands on the wheel,” one of the officers orders the young driver. His response: a shot through the closed window to the officer’s head. After an exchange of gunfire breaks the silence, the other police officer is also lying on the ground. The perpetrator goes out into the smoke over the haunted landscape – after shooting the first victim again at close range.

A bloody beginning

This is how brutal the crime thriller “Tatort” “Under Fire” from Dresden begins, which will be shown on Das Erste this Sunday at 8:15 p.m. While the police race away in fear in one of the patrol cars, Senior Detective Leonie Winkler (Cornelia Gröschel) hears about the crime on the radio. “I’m close and I’m going there,” she reports to headquarters. Not the only unusual thing. At the scene of the crime, it is not just her partner, Chief Inspector Karin Gorniak (Karin Hanczewski), who notices Leonie’s condition: nervous, panicked, shocked. Is she into him?

The third episode for the Dresden team, written by screenwriter Christoph Busche, introduces us to the inner workings of the police. Internal investigations are nothing new in the “crime scene”. But Busch weaves this together with a web of lies, old scores, professional competition, cover-ups, fake friends and real love affairs that are difficult for outsiders to understand. And in the middle of everything are three familiar people: Peter Michael Schnabel (Martin Brambach), Winkler’s retired father (Uwe Preuss) and Schnabel’s former colleague – as well as the girl, who is caught between personal frustrations and professional challenges.

Is everything connected to everything?

The story goes back years to a similar case that still affects Leonie Winkler emotionally and psychologically to this day: the death of her brother during an operation. While Schnabel resists investigations within her own ranks, the experienced investigator is motivated by the suspicion that everything is connected to everything else.

When she digs up her father’s past and accuses him, he avoids her. The complex relationship between father and daughter and the previously untold story of her brother’s death appealed to screenwriter Busche. “Blanks like that in a character’s backstory are always a gift, an opportunity to go even deeper into a character, to understand them even better,” he said.

There aren’t many laughs

“Internal investigation, Leonie, are you looking for trouble,” a young colleague at the police station bangs his head. Leonie tells Karin, who stands by her and covers to go alone. During their research in the affected station, where their brother also served years ago, the two receive silence and resentment from their colleagues.

The story takes place in autumn, in cloudy weather, and takes place for long stretches in dull light, there is melancholy everywhere, beautiful pictures of Dresden are rare. There aren’t many laughs, even Schnabel largely avoids any biting comments and finding the shooter is another way to shed light on the darkness. With all the gloom, however, there is surprisingly a private ray of hope – before the search for the shooter turns into a fiasco.