Woman of the Dead – Season 1 Episode 3 Recap & Review

Death by Air and Fire

Episode 3 of Woman of the Dead begins with Blum putting an unconscious Edwin Schönborn into a coffin-sized metal casing. She uses her car to drive him to her funeral home. Reza sees her as she brings it out but Blum makes up an excuse about loading up zinc for the next day. She then invites him for dinner and tells him to go inside the house and wait while she finishes up. Blum rushes through dinner, constantly checking the clock. Meanwhile, Edwin shouts for help but nobody can hear him.

By the time Blum opens the casing up, Edwin dies. She tries CPR but it doesn’t work. Once she recovers from the shock she tries to use the face to unlock his phone. After doing up his face with a little makeup, the phone gets unlocked. She sees a message from his mother regarding their plan to meet at a café the next morning at 8.30. Blum also finds a mark on his leg and takes a photograph of it. She then proceeds to cut up his body into pieces and put them into different coffins.

The next morning Blum’s father-in-law, Karl, notices that she hasn’t slept. She makes up an excuse about paperwork. Tim says he’s sad because his father isn’t around to study math with him anymore. Meanwhile, Nela gets a friend request from Alex Schönborn and declines it.

Blum takes breakfast to Dunja and asks about her family. Her parents are dead and her surviving grandmother doesn’t want to see her. She planned to work in Austria, get better at German and begin working as an interpreter. The other two girls who were with her had their own dreams too. When Blum shows her the photo of the mark on Edwin’s leg, Dunja gets angry and tells her to stop searching for the men.

Later, Blum remembers that Edwin’s camera has photographs of her on it. She sneaks back into his place to collect it but Mrs. Schönborn enters before she can leave. Blum hides, listening in on Schönborn’s conversation about Edwin causing delays in their plan to link up ski areas. She also mentions how Mr. Theile has been sabotaging them.

Blum gets back to the funeral home to see Reza showing coffin options to the old Mr. Theile. She finds out that he has a terminal illness and was looking for a coffin for himself. Reza then tells Blum how he has been covering for her lack of work and asks her to focus and keep the business afloat.

Later, when Reza and another man load up a coffin into a van, the man points out how heavy it is.

Mrs. Schönborn calls her son and leaves him a message, asking him to call back. She looks worried.

Dunja tells Blum she’s noticed a grey car outside their house and it could be one of the men watching them. Blum says it’s nothing and tells Dunja she’s safe. Dunja says her husband said the same thing.

While deleting her photographs from the camera’s memory card, Blum finds portraits of Mrs. Schönborn as well as Father Jaunig. She shows Dunja his photo but she doesn’t recognise him. Then she calls Father Jaunig, allowing Dunja to listen to his voice. She says that he could be the man in the rabbit mask.

Blum and Nela go to visit Father Jaunig at school. Nela apologises for her behaviour. Jaunig talks about how with confession all sins are forgiven. Blum asks if even the very bad ones are forgiven. He says yes. When she says she can never forgive her husband’s murderer, Jaunig assures her that the driver will be punished.

Blum reads out a story to her son about a man flying a rocket. As she talks about the man not being able to turn back, we see her take one of Edwin’s black cars and park it in front of Father Jaunig’s house.

Jaunig is surprised to see it in the morning and messages Edwin’s number, asking what it is all about. Blum replies from Edwin’s phone, telling Jaunig to schedule a meeting with everyone after mass that day.

After mass, Blum hides in the church and sees Bertl Puch arrive and meet with Jaunig. Puch is annoyed about Edwin not being there and leaves. Blum watches everything.

Later, Blum goes to Jaunig’s house and asks him to listen to her confession. He admits her inside. She confesses to murder and then accuses him of doing the same. When he gets up to leave she uses the taser on him. When he wakes up he realises Blum has tied him to the chair. She tries getting him to talk about abusing young girls along with Edwin and Puch. She asks him who killed her husband. He keeps denying it. When he tells Blum her parents weren’t sure about the adoption and he was the one who convinced them to keep her, she gets increasingly frustrated and ends up pouring gasoline on him and burning him alive.

Blum sits at a bar, drinking. Massimo sees her there and they have another drink. Both are a little drunk when they get into Massimo’s police van and end up kissing but Blum soon puts a stop to it.

Meanwhile, Alex texts Nela that she’s ignoring him. She replies saying he deserves it. Blum, still drunk, checks on her kids. Karl confronts her and says she is destroying herself and becoming distant from her own family. He reveals that Dunja left earlier that day after borrowing money from Reza. She confronts Reza about it but he just wanted to help her.

The next morning, Blum sees the grey car still outside her house and takes a photo of it as it leaves. They go to Jaunig’s funeral where she spots a photograph of some boys with the symbol that was on both, Edwin’s leg and Jaunig’s arm. She asks someone and finds out that it is the symbol of the boy scouts. As her anxiety builds, Blum goes outside and throws up on the side of the road. Massimo comes to check on her. She asks him to run the plates of the grey car that was outside her house.

When the family comes home they realise someone has broken in and searched through the house. Karl saw a grey car leaving the house when he arrived. Blum refuses to tell the police.

Blum talks to the corpse of a lady saying that she might have killed the wrong person. The corpse replies that not killing anyone would have been better. Blum gets a text from Massimo saying that the car belongs to the Schönborn’s company.

The Episode Review

A lot happened in this episode, including two deaths (murders). And yet the pace feels a bit sluggish with too many seconds wasted on transitions. But more importantly, why does Blum seem so relaxed about killing someone? When Edwin dies, Blum sits down in shock for about 3 seconds before she gets back to work. It’s almost comical.

This show isn’t really stopping to let the characters feel their emotions. It’s putting the plot above everything else. The result is very matter-of-fact plodding through a mystery just to get to the end. Which would have been okay if the mystery was a gripping one. Unfortunately, it’s just the standard issue of powerful people being involved in nefarious activities at the expense of young girls.

Unless Blum’s truly unhinged behaviour (setting a priest on fire in broad daylight?!) is a sign of something more significant. Father Jaunig’s comments on her parents thinking there was something wrong with her could be more than just a throwaway insult. The scene with Blum on the boat where her parents drowned also comes to mind. Could there be something more sinister in Blum’s story?