'Vienna Blood' Sees Max Lose "A Winning Hand"

Longtime Vienna Blood viewers will recall that PBS tends to split each season’s feature-length episodes, giving the show a longer run. This time around, those breaks – which have in the past tended strongly towards the clunky – work pretty well. The break between “Mephisto Waltz” and “A Winning Hand” is particularly strong, ending the former on Max and Oscar’s undercover operation planning for their trip to Riegers Palace Casino and opening the latter with an extended scene revisiting Oskar’s digs and his relationship with Therese, who he’d bumped into at the police station a day or so earlier.

I’d hoped that this interaction would lead to more clarity in their relationship (I should know by now that that’s not how a tortured, murder-solving sad man’s potential romantic storyline works). However, it only leaves things murkier than before. Therese wants Oskar to intervene in her current domestic arrangements, and who could blame her? Her husband is often drunk and often violent. She’s confident that he’s planning some caper that the law would frown on, and she and her daughter just aren’t safe with him around, sooooo... could Oskar maybe, y’know, arrest him? Well, no. If no crime has been committed, he must leave it alone. I feel strongly that Oskar’s peak moment of Mr. Billowy Coat King of Pain Guy-ness is yet to come, and we have to be patient as we wait for it to emerge organically.

Thankfully, things are going much better on the undercover operation front. Mendel is in his element, kitting Oskar out in a sharp suit with a colorful brocade waistcoat and luxurious oyster-gray silk ascot. Max looks very sharp in his dinner jacket, Leah is beautiful in her sparkly black frock, and Clara is utterly lovely in shimmery ice blue. This lively scene reminds me of the scene in Little Women where the March sisters vote Laurie into their theatre troupe. It’s much less giddy, but Oskar shares Laurie’s wistful yearning to belong to a more boisterous, warm household like the Liebermanns’.