Season 1, Episode 2
Date of release: February 26, 2025 (Apple TV+)
Written by: Lisa van Brakel, Paulina Loreny, Samuel Jefferson
Directed by: Fabian Möhrke
”I screw you, but seriously, I'm not your therapist.”
Well, it only took this show two episodes for some form of non-working relationship between two characters to be established. Just like in GREY'S ANATOMY, doctors still take every chance they get for a little sexy fling in some dark storage room, where it's quiet and isolated enough to spend time in and not be found by other people who are looking for you. And because the writers didn't just want to create a full-blown medical drama, they created a mystery storyline, in which the death of a teacher during a shift on May 1st (International Worker's Day/Labor Day, a federal holiday in Germany, used for demonstrations that mostly ended up in chaos and violence, with police involvement, especially in Berlin, between the late 1980s and late 2000s) is being investigated by Dr. Parker because the hospital administration would like to see someone hang for the teacher's death. This medical drama didn't just want to be a medical drama, there also needed to be a medical-themed conspiracy to be investigated.
This episode forced me to care about Dr. Parker's investigation, because it was used as a plot device to get deeper into what makes Ben tick, and what his issues are – and he certainly has a bunch of them, considering he likes to take stimulants to keep himself awake, and generally looks like he just woke up from a days-long bender. The writers want us to believe that Ben had something to do with the teacher's death, but because the story was handled like a murder mystery at times, it felt like it was supposed to be an ongoing mystery, with the culprit soon to be found, and with Ben just being the first suspect. And if it were up to me, this entire story would have been cut from this episode, as it does nothing for me.
What was doing things to me were the medical storylines – the story of the little girl faking an illness and then swallowing a button battery, the birth of the twins, and even the junkie who felt like he was about to go up in flames. Three stories that are just like this in any other medical drama that wants to be considered one of the best of its genre, and the first two stories were dramatic enough to showcase KRANK BERLIN being a show that wants to take itself seriously. Although when I think of the girl and the button battery, I think back to the 1996 ER episode “A Shift in the Night,” where a kid did the same, and all the doctors were doing there was to check with a portable metal detector where the battery was in the kid (below the diaphragm), followed by telling the concerned parent to just wait and check the kid's stool.
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