Reviews & Ratings for
"Off the Map" On the Mean Streets of San Miguel (2011)

not to mention..., 14 August 2011
Author: Andreas Zeller from Germany

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

...that the whole plot of each and every episode of this show is bad enough and very 'female', this one is my personal favorite.

It is unnecessarily bloody, like every episode. Not looking for realism here, but this is just not serving any purpose. The whole point of that thing is the drama and of course the message that this episode is supposed to send. And honestly, I have no idea what it is supposed to tell us.

At some point, the (bad) plot reveals, that one of the elderly residents of a village is a German ex Nazis who fled to south America. Judging by the score and the characters' reactions, it seems like they figured out that there is a horrible contagious disease amongst them and it has been for the past 75 years. First of all, the guy is not old enough to have actually been in WW2, but let's just skip that and pretend that he looks somewhat like 95 years old.

Still: What the writing geniuses are trying to tell us, is that the deserted 18-year-old officer (however he acquired that rank at this age anyways, but let's just ignore that, too) is still to blame for his crimes in the past, as a Nazi. So. I'm not saying that he is not to blame or that guilt wears off after 40 years or anything like that. But it's not that 'having been in the war and being German' does necessarily make you an evil person.

Blond girl gives us a disgusted and surprised look, when she reveals the horror (!) to everyone: 'He's a Nazi...', almost looking like she's about to start crying any second. Cut. Commercial.

So... End of the story: She keeps the almost dead guy alive and tries to get him to pay for his crimes (which they just imply he did because he used to be a German soldier). In the end, the kids he has been taking care of in south America for the past 75 years, ask what's wrong with him, and instead of telling them the truth (whatever that is anyways), Dr. Blond Girl just tells them some story, to keep his memory intact.

So what the hell is that supposed to tell us? All Nazis are bad and always will be, period. Every German is a Nazi by default, if he's older than 80 years. Those guys are plain evil. They didn't follow orders or get manipulated at all, that's just the way Germans at that time were wired.

Seriously, you might as well put a black guy in there and make everybody believe he's a violent gang-member. You know why? Yupp. Because he's black. They're all like that, you know...

Whoever wrote that, didn't do their homework. Those are very sensible subjects, and all the women who watch this pretentious crap are naive enough to believe it to be true, so I just had to write a very bad review about this episode.

Bad writing, again. Predictable plot, again.

Keep this woman (Jenna Bans) off television. I don't know what it is about her dull easy-to-sell little-girls dreams of bad-ass guys that are actually nice guys under their shell, that the women who watch that stuff like so much.

No matter, what this show tells you:

- Not every tough guy is a nice guy waiting to be saved by a naive girl

- Not every tough guy is secretly looking for the love of his life.

- Not every black guy is a gang member

- Not every bad guy has lost the love of his life and turned into a bad guy because of that

- Not every problem can be solved by a relationship

- OR by running away to Venezuela, or wherever the hell this is supposed to be

That's true for naive 14-year-old girls (no matter how old they actually are) and for Nazis running away from punishment

That's just not how the world works. I'm not looking for realism, don't get me wrong. I'm just not agreeing with the image they convey of the world and especially of an entire generation of Germans, that nobody really seems to honestly care about, unless it's about a very dark part of their history.

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