“Pagan Peak: Season 3” – TV Review

The German/Austrian crime drama “Pagan Peak” is back for its third and final season, but it is fairly essential to understanding this final round to have seen the first two seasons, due to the substantial carryover of main characters and key issues shaping their current actions and attitudes. To help out, here is the link to my earlier review of “Pagan Peak”:

Once you read the review (or watch Seasons 1 and 2), you’ll be caught up. Now that you’re up to speed, be prepared for a radical tone shift from a suspenseful dark procedural into something much creepier. More Lovecraft and Lynch (that’s David, not Jane) than Dalgleish or Sherlock in this final season.

The drastic change caused me to check the creators’ credits. Sure enough there was a huge behind-the-cameras overhaul with completely new writers, directors, cinematographer, and composer, among others. The contrast is jarring. The prior episodes seemed a bit slow. This year’s action unfolds at a glacial pace, replete with a surfeit of 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 tries to prove his complicity with her usual degree of determination, even while working tenuously with him on the new cases. Both lead detectives are viewed as damaged goods by their superiors, with Gedeon’s declining health also 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 hour-long 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 3,” mostly in German with English subtitles, streams on Topic starting Thursday, Oct. 26.

RATING: 1.5 out of 4 stars