Streaming series review - Pagan Peak: Season Three

Pagan Peak: Season Three ** (out of 5) Below is a link to my review of this German/Austrian crime drama covering the first two seasons, which are essential to understanding this concluding one, due to the carryover of main characters and key issues shaping their current actions and attitudes:

https://patch.com/missouri/clayton-richmondheights/streaming-series-review-pagan-peak-der-pass-season-two

Now that you’re up to speed, be prepared for a radical tone shift from suspenseful dark procedural into something much creepier. More Lovecraft and Lynch (David, not Jane) than Marple or Sherlock in this finale. The drastic change caused me to check the creators’ credits, and sure enough there was a huge behind-the-cameras overhaul with completely new writers, directors, cinematographer, composer and others. The contrast is jolting. The prior episodes seemed a bit slow. This year’s action unfolds at a glacial pace filled with foggy exteriors and long contemplative stares into the void.

There’s a new serial killer, again with border-spanning elements to the crimes, requiring the joint efforts of cops from both countries. Ellie (Julia Jentsch) and Gedeon (Nicholas Ofczarek) are back, but far from working in tandem. She believes he hid evidence from the previous murder of their colleague, Yela Franziska von Harsdorf), and works hard to prove his complicity while working tenuously with him on the new cases. Both are viewed as damaged goods by their superiors, with Gedeon’s declining health looming large.

One of the returning baddies is a family of wealthy local developers, trying to build luxury homes in a conservation area over the protests of environmentalists. They may also be involved in this new round of killings, many of which have particularly gory, ritualistic methods that may be due to a resurgent cult of Satanists. And for kickers, a neo-Nazi and child molester of yore add even more suspects and subplots to the package. It seems as if the new writers had stacks of rejected pilot scripts for a variety of productions and agreed to toss all of them into this one, leaving it to the editors to merge them coherently.

That adds up to more territory than eight hourlong episodes should have to cover, especially while spending so much time on maintaining mystical, menacing mood rather than plot advancement. Beyond that, the tale unfolds in a non-linear format, including many scenes that could be real, memories or hallucinations without much distinction among those possibilities. Bingeing is recommended as an aid to retaining who’s who, who did what, and why they did it. Far more concentration is required for Season Three than the first two. The good news is that viewers get closure on all matters with nothing of import dangling that calls for more episodes or a telefilm.

(Pagan Peak: Season Three, mostly in German with subtitles, streams on Topic as of 10/26/23).