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A dead body (Gert Franke) is found in a waggon of a freight train, while most of the waggon's cargo is gone. However, when homicide inspector Keller (Erik Ode) and his assistangs Heines (Reinhard Glemnitz), Harry (Fritz Wepper) and Helga (Emily Reuer) arrive on the scene, the body's gone. Heines and Harry manage to follow the trail of the body to a nearby apartment building, but the body snatchers manage to take off by car, all but Rauke (Ralf Schermuly), who actually has to knock out Harry to make good his escape - which though means that the police have at least his description if nothing else.

Now Rauke, like the dead man, Werner, is part of a gang of young waggon jumpers that their boss Graffe (Erik Schumann) has hand-picked from an orphanage. Their m.o. is to jump onto certain waggons of freight trains on the trains' slow passages, throw out what's easily fenceable then jump off again. However at their last heist, Werner got badly injured, had to at first be left behind until his accomplices could fetch him back at the terminal station - that he died from his injuries was only just bad luck. Graffe has Werner's body dropped at a trash heap where nobody is to find it, but that pretty much breaks the youngest of the bunch, Pasche.

Meanwhile, Keller and company find a lead to one of Graffe's fences, von Pöhler (Thomas Astan), and Harry and Helga manage to track him down in a night club where Helga acts as bait and lets him take her back to his apartment, where some of the stolen goods are found. Judging from them alone, our heroes get a pretty good idea when and where Graffe and gang will strike next.

Graffe meanwhile gets increasingly worried as after Harry's run-in with Rauke, the police have Rauke's description, so he decides to make the next waggon jump himself together with Rauke, with the express idea of killing Rauke while on the job. But fortunately for Rauke, the police are already on the gang's trail, and Harry manages to jump onto the waggon Graffe intended for the heist from the other side to save Rauke's life.

Of course, the stilted dialogue and the often overdrawn characters that permeate the whole series are also prevalent here, but this is actually one of the better episodes of Der Kommissar, especially since it leaves the traditional murder mystery structure behind for a change and tells its story on two planes, one of the police investigating, the other of the gang of trainjumpers trying to stay ahead of the police, with none of the sides really knowing all that much about the other. And a directorial effort that manages to maintain the story's tension pretty much throughout really helps making this one work as a pretty cool thriller.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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