Der gelbe Tod, 1. Teil

A virulent ochre plague slithers through the crooked alleys of a nameless Baltic port, tinting sailcloth, skin, and conscience the color of sulphurous sin; beneath the livid sky, bacteriologist Dr. Alfons Römer returns from Sumatran exile clutching a crate of antiserum that nobody wants, while his estranged wife Cläre—now the louche consort of Syndic Van der Straaten—presides over a velvet-and-velour salon where gossip is traded like venom. Dockworker Klaus Brock, lungs already flecked with canary specks, bargains for one more week of life so he may spirit his consumptive daughter Erna aboard a phantom freighter bound for the horizonless north; yet the harbourmaster has sealed the gates, the quarantine flag snaps in the gale, and the city’s garrison fires artillery flares that hiss into the tide like dying comets. Through fog-throttled night cinematography that melts nitrate into molten topaz, Part One follows four converging vectors of desperation: Römer stalks the spiral staircases of the cholera hospital searching for a single uncontaminated vein; Cläre, draped in canary chiffon, performs a danse macabre on a mahogany bar, infecting every flute of champagne with her tear-tainted breath; anarchist pamphleteer Tine Krause (Rosa Valetti) incites dockers to storm the stock exchange, believing the fever to be a capitalist hoax; and little Erna, clutching a moth-eaten teddy, wanders the lava-stone sewers whispering lullabies to the rats. The episode ends on a freeze-frame of the city’s astronomical clock as its gilded hand strikes XIII—time outside time—while a crate of glass vials shatters on the pier, releasing cobalt clouds that swirl into the shape of a skull before dissolving into the ink-black water, leaving the spectator poisoned with dreadful anticipation.