Sebastian Bootz is among the guests at a film premiere in Stuttgart when the screen suddenly goes black and a man and a woman threaten the audience with guns. Panic breaks out, several people manage to flee, shots are fired - and a security guard lies dead on the ground. When Sebastian Bootz grabs his gun to stop the hostage takers, he is threatened and shoots the man. But the perpetrators are not deterred. Bootz is disarmed and, along with the remaining guests, becomes hostage of the two unknown men. Because he managed to contact Thorsten Lannert unnoticed, he is one of the first to start work in the operations center. He and the members of the crisis team are working feverishly to find out who the hostage takers are, how they can be stopped and further deaths prevented. Much depends on the cooperation between the two inspectors and this must now prove itself from a distance.
In the Black Forest, Detective Friedemann Berg discovers a frightened nine-year-old girl (Eliza) hiding in a clock case. Shortly afterward, her father's body, weighed down with stones, is found in a forest lake. His colleague Franziska Tobler and a child psychologist investigate, while Berg tries to help the selectively mute child overcome her trauma and find the missing mother.
Tobias Benzinger is shot dead, a young lawyer in a law firm with a considerable number of rather shady clients and a high success rate in criminal cases. Franziska Tobler and Friedemann Berg suspect that his death could have something to do with the law firm's cases. The head of the law firm, Rainer Benzinger, is extremely negative towards this theory. He retreats entirely into attorney-client confidentiality, refuses to allow any insight into his clients' affairs, and is not swayed by the fact that Tobias was his stepson. Friedemann Berg is outraged by this behavior, especially since he has learned that the two Benzingers had different opinions about the direction of the law firm.
"Episode 1" is the best rated episode directed by Rudi Gaul. It scored 9/10 based on 2 votes. It was written by N/A. It aired on 1/1/2022 and is rated 1.3 points higher than their second-best episode, "Episode 4".