‘Babylon Berlin’ Is Just as Good as You Remember in Season 4

Babylon Berlin is back, and in its fourth season – available exclusively on foreign language specialist streamer MHz Choice – continues to ascend ever more dizzying heights of storytelling about the inevitably crumbling Weimar Republic and the people who are, variously, living the high life barely scraping by, just getting on with life, and staring down the encroaching forces of fascism and Nazism that would soon engulf the world in another war. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? Despite the heavy themes and often violent plot developments, Babylon Berlin really is fun to watch.

Let’s pause for a minute for those intrepid readers who have never watched Babylon Berlin and clicked on this review headline, anyway. To bring you, soon-to-be viewers of the show up to speed, here’s a succinct and enticing description from Ani Bundel’s piece on a fifth and final season being greenlit:

[Babylon Berlin] was something unlike anything on television, like an HBO experiment that had gotten loose and wound up on German TV by accident. One part interwar period piece set in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, one part musical, one part police procedural, it captured all the anxiety of the growing fascist rhetoric of the 2020 election, the sense of helplessness in the face of unstoppable history, and the hope that maybe a few good guys can make a difference, or at least survive.

You could throw richly layered entertainment caution to the wind and just start watching Season 4 completely fresh – I’m not the boss of you, and might even salute such low-stakes daring – but it’s a far better experience. The multi-stranded braid of plot will make so much more sense if you start at the very beginning (famously, a very good place to start).