This time they bounce between Berlin, Austria and Bangkok, where Joseph has some very useless 'friends', to use the term loosely. There are also two rival gangs there who are engaged in mortal combat over a black idol. Back in Vienna, poor, damaged Rio is hopelessly in love with Tamara (of the bright red hair). Rio is trying to get his hands on THE COIN so he can pay off his gambling debts. Mr. A., some kind of Russian mobster, who might be the rightful owner of THE COIN, wants it back. Chaos, including fist fights, kick boxing, stabbings and at least a couple of massive gun fights. We are also treated to Charly picking numerous locks and cracking open at least one safe. It all ends happily enough, with Mr. A. even reconciling with his daughter, who has become the lead in the Bolshoi ballet company.
The Empress: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
We watched part 1 two years ago. On the political side, Italy is in ferment. Right now it's cut up into half a dozen pieces and Garibaldi wants to make them all one country. The old guard wants to quash the rebels, the new kids want to change things.
The bigger portion of the show is about having kids and the risks that come from being alive. i.e. sometimes people, including kids, die.
The cast is German and includes no one I have heard of. I took the data from Wikipedia and put it in a spreadsheet. It's complicated. We've got names, nicknames, titles, relations, affiliations and former roles.
Woman of the Dead: Season 2 - Official Trailer (2025)
IGN Movie Trailers
Blum, the lady undertaker in an Austrian ski resort, gets caught up in murder and mayhem, again. This time it's a ring of snuff-film aficionados who believe she has a nasty-ass video. She doesn't, but they are willing to use extreme measures like murder and kidnapping to get it back. The show doesn't dwell on the snuff-film business, they just give you enough to show you that these people are some sick fucks. Most of the show has her running around, trying to solve the case while not getting arrested by the police, some of whom are rotten.
Crooks is a well done crime caper. There's some lock picking and safe cracking and we get to watch the inside of a couple of locks while our hero he is oepning them. The first one is an office safe which has some kind of fancy lock. Never mind fancy, Charly pulls out his drill and endoscope and gets to work. Will he get it open before they are discovered? Dum, de dum dum. Here's a video of a similar operation, sans suspense.
Opening a 4 disc combination safe lock looking with a endoscope
jord knaap
Towards the end of the show they make a copy of a key that helps them escape using the same technique as our beloved Lock Picking Lawyer uses in this video:
[1591] The Replicant: Pocket Key Casting Perfected!
LockPickingLawyer
Once the ersatz key is finished we get to see it in operation, kind of like this video, but with a great deal more suspense.
Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria (1837 – 1898), nicknamed Sisi, was Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary from her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1854 until her assassination in 1898. . . .
In 1897, her sister, Sophie, died in an accidental fire at the Bazar de la Charité charity event in Paris. While travelling in Geneva in 1898, Elisabeth was stabbed in the heart by an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. Her tenure of 44 years was the longest of any Austrian empress. - Wikipedia
Fabulous wealth, fabulous palaces, fabulous clothes, rigid social protocol, simmering unrest, neighbors threatening war, all the stuff we got in Game of Thronesbut this time for real.
When the royal doctor conducts the royal purity test he finds Elisabeth's hymen is broken. Now it comes out that this can happen to a girl from horseback riding. Huh, the things nobody ever tells me. Google is no help, some pages say it's true, others say not.
Robert Stephenson, British railway engineer, has an oddly clandestine meeting with Franz Joseph about building a railroad in Austria. It actually did get built:
The Semmering Railway, built over 41 km of high mountains between 1848 and 1854, is one of the greatest feats of civil engineering from this pioneering phase of railway building. The high standard of the tunnels, viaducts and other works has ensured the continuous use of the line up to the present day. - UNESCO
Woman mortician operating in a ski resort town in the Austrian Alps, happily married to a policeman. They have two children and life seems good until the day the husband is run down and killed by a speeding SUV. Now the worms start crawling out of the woodwork. Turns out the town is rotten to the core, greed and perversion run wild. Our grief stricken heroine is pissed and proceeds to exact revenge on all and sundry. We're four episodes in and there are five bodies already, not counting all the every day dead people that show up on her operating table. She talks to them.
I sort of remembered the story. I don't actually remember seeing the film, but I have seen enough bits and pieces of it over the years and now I have a pretty good grasp of it. In the show the story seems to take place over a matter of days. In reality, because there is a real-life basis to this story, it took twelve years.
Timeline - Paraphrased from Central City Opera Festival Blog
1880 - Georg von Trapp born
1905 - Maria Augusta Kutschera born
1924 - Maria enters convent
1926 - Maria is sent to von Trapps, she 21, just four years older than eldest son
1927 March - Princess Yvonne arrives (a distant relative of Georg’s first wife)
1927 May - von Trapp calls off proposal to Yvonne; proposes to Maria
1927 November 26, - Wedding
1933 - von Trapps lose money investing in Austrian banks, began to take in boarders
1935 - Father Wasner comes to villa, becomes choral manager
1936 - von Trapp family begin performing concerts
1937 - First European tour
1938 March - Anschluss, the Nazi occupation of Austria
1938 May - Nazis notice they’re not hanging flags
1938 June - Decline Germans three times in one week, Escape in broad daylight on train to Italy
1956 - The Trapp Family, a West German film is released
1958 - Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika, the sequel
1959 - original Broadway production of this musical
1961 - musical opens in London
1965 - The Sound of Music movie is released
There is one scene where the family is giving a concert and the backdrop is four enormous red Nazi banners. Captain von Trapp has already made known his opposition to the Nazis, so this is not the happiest moment, but the kids are troopers and they sing their song.
As a bonus, because I wondered what the Anschluss was, I found out where the Sudetenland is. Turns out it is not one place, it is scattered all over. Which is probably why I never knew, no one else did either.
The percentage of the German population in Czechoslovakia according to the census of 1930
The Sudetenland is the name for areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans.
