Alter Ego

Let me preface by saying that I watched the English subtitled version. At the outset we are presented with a familiar old, bad-attitude detective, his hottie sidekick and the semi-genius criminal profiler that everyone resents. Sound familiar? It should, it's been done 100 times before...

What's good are the location shots of a huge, lively and colorful Carnival celebration in some picturesque town somewhere in Switzerland where the serial murders take place. Unfortunately that's the only interesting thing about this series. The story telling just seems to lack energy, too slow in development with clumsy plot misdirections. I had to bail after episode 3. I just didn't care about these characters.

There was so much hifalutin prepublicity about this that one willed the series to live up to it. Unfortunately it didn't.

I don't care about clichés as long as the story is convincing and the cast can carry it off. This failed here and we were left with a story that was difficult to invest one's time into.

The actual donkey work of detection was often overtaken by insider knowledge of one or the other of the characters, leading to flashes of intuition that were a shortcut to solving the riddle of the murders. This was especially blatant in the last episode when the final crime was prevented by one of the characters knowing where to look from a cryptic utterance of the perp.

I watched it all but without great enthusiasm. I wouldn't discourage people from watching, but would warn them to lower expectations.