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Dressed as a cop, small fry crook Formanek (Tilo Prückner) gains access to loan shark Mayringer's (Rudolf Buczolich) apartment, forces him to open his safe, empties it, and ... the next day, Mayringer is found dead, murdered. Police major Kottan (Lukas Resetarits) and his assistants Schremser (Walter Davy) and Schrammel (Curt A. Tichy) investigate, but at first they have little to go on, just a statement by Mayringer's employee Hruby (Toni Wagner), who has spotted Formanek dressed as a cop in the parking garage - but going through the police's rogue gallery, he claims he can't find Formanek among them. Actually though he has but has decided to blackmail Formanek. Erroneously, Formanek thinks he's blackmailed by Mayringer's neighbour Merkel (Hans-Georg Nenning) and tries to intimidate him - but Merkel only gets the police on Formanek's tail, and it's only thanks to his girlfriend (Maria Bill), who stalls the police long enough for him to hightail it to Lanzarote, a Canary Island that doesn't have an extradition treaty with Austria. So Kottan and Schrammel travel to Lanzarote, and while Schrammel plays the dumb cop, Kottan pretends to be another small fry crook on the run, and he and Formanek become fast friends, taking joy in playing cat-and-mouse with Schrammel. Formanek though soon runs out of money as he had to leave the loot behind, so Kottan promises to get him back to Vienna without running into the police - and of course sees to it that he runs right into the police. Being cornered like that, Formanek confesses to the theft - but not the murder. And he sounds believable, too, so Kottan calls on Hruby to use his (modest) blackmailing skills on Merkel to get a confession out of him ...

In a subplot, Kottan tries hard to become head of his department, since their old head Pilch (for the first time played by Kurt Weinzierl) has been promoted to Chief of Police, but ultimately loses out to his own assistant Schremser.

This episode also marks the first appearance of Kottan's Kapelle (though it's not called that yet), where Kottan, Schremser and Schrammel play in a band, lip-synching vintage rock and pop tunes, something that would gain more and more traction in later episodes of the series.

Good fun, as this episode revolves around an interesting mystery with quite a few unforseen twists - but at the same time the story is also riddled with comedy bits that seem at times disjointed and often fail to create genuine laughs, coming across more as whims of the writer and director than properly built up and built in comedy. And frankly, Lukas Resetarits' rather arsey attitude gets a bit annoying after not too long. That said, still a rather ok episode.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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