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Presently, inspector Derrick (Horst Tappert) investigates against young Ludenke (Hans Georg Panczak), who has been accused of killing his wife, but he hits one wall after the next as Ludenke's father (Traugott Buhre), a prominent nightclub owner, has his own way to silence the witnesses. Then one night Derrick receives an anonymous call to meet a witness at a certain pub, but at that pub the witness never shows up. The next morning, Derrick finds his car damaged, and there's undeniable evidence that Derrick's car has hit and killed a man on a bicycle on the exact route Derrick took on his way home from above pub. Derrick is accused of a case of hit and run with lethal consequences and immediately suspended from duty - and nobody enjoys that more than young Ludenke. Thing is, Derrick insists on never having hit a man on a bicycle, insisting his car was stolen to do the deed and then returned, and his assistant Harry Klein (Fritz Wepper) believes him, even if he's the only one. Soon, Derrick and Klein pick up investigations and before long zero in on the daughter of the killed bicyclist, Maria (Cornelia Froboess), and before long learn that while her father was an alcoholic, he didn't even own a bicycle. So the focus is turned as to where the deceased spent his last night, and it turns out to be a pub owned by old Ludenke and run by Mrs Mommsen (Inge Birkmann) and her son (Walter Doppler), and after a little persuasion it turns out that the bicycle in the accident was actually the pubowner's borrowed by old man Ludenke to kill the poor old drunkard, blame it on Derrick and this way get him off the case.

Now the idea to have the series' lead as suspect in a murder case is a spirited one, even if after 8 years nobody would even believe Derrick could come out as guilty - which is the first problem with this episode, that the lead suspect of the story is pretty much proven innocent to the audience from step one. The second problem is that despite the unusual premise, the story soon turns into a very routine investigation differing little from the investigations in the 90 prior episodes. The third problem is of course the incredibly ill-constructed plot by the villain to get our hero out of the way that ultimately doesn't come across as "real". And apart from that there's of course also the usual problems with crime shows written by Herbert Reinecker, including stilted dialogues and characters acting and reacting in unnatural ways. So in all, not good but fun nostalgia at least. One thing though is that when Horst Tappert lets Derrick's usual self-assuredness slip even for a few moments in this episode, he actually shows actual acting skills, so much so that one wishes he'd get into this sort of trouble more often in the series.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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