‘Vienna Blood’ Season 2 Episode 1 recap: What happened in ‘The Melancholy Countess’?

The second season of Vienna Blood began in the UK tonight!

Based on the best-selling Liebermann novels by Frank Tallis, BBC Two’s period crime drama is adapted by Sherlock writer Steve Thompson.

Vienna Blood is back with three brand new feature-length 90-minute episodes, following the success of the first season.

Season 2 is expected to air in the US on PBS in 2022.

Matthew Beard (The Imitation Game) and Austrian actor Juergen Maurer are reprising their roles as Max Liebermann and Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt.

The pair are joined by Conleth Hill (Game of Thrones), Charlene McKenna (Peaky Blinders), Amelia Bullmore (Gentleman Jack), Lucy Griffiths (True Blood), and Luise von Finckh (Schlechte Zeiten).

Vienna Blood is set in 1900s Vienna – a hot bed of philosophy, science and art, where a clash of cultures and ideas play out in the city’s grand cafes and opera houses.

Here’s a plot recap for ‘The Melancholy Countess’, which aired on BBC Two at 9pm on Friday 10th December 2021:

Autumn, 1907. When a depressed Hungarian Countess is found drowned in the bath of her lavish hotel suite, it looks like suicide.

Intense scrutiny falls on her psychoanalyst, Max Liebermann, who asked the Countess to stop taking her prescribed medicine and start taking a course of Freud’s talking cure with himself.

Investigating Officer Oskar Rheinhardt teams up with the disgraced doctor to solve the riddle of the Countess’ death and clear Max’s professional reputation.

A post-mortem reveals that the Countess was poisoned, which turns Max and Oskar’s attention to Oktav Hauke, a young Second Lieutenant with a reputation for dubious relationships with rich, older women.

When Max’s private practice is vandalised and transcripts of his meetings with the Countess are stolen, it seems that Max knows more than he realises.

Max searches for clues to the identity of the murderer, but it will take more than understanding the source of the Countess’ melancholic dreams to unlock this case.

Vienna Blood is available on DVD on Amazon.