Sleeping Dog (Season 1): ‘Sleeping Dog’, currently streaming on Netflix, is a crime drama. We follow Mike Atlas, an ex-KDD officer of Germany, as he tries to find out more about himself from the scraps of memory that he is left with after an incident that he cannot recall. He is joined by Jule Andregaste, a young attorney who has to be continuously pressured to be on nodding terms with her late mother’s prestige.
Apart from Atlas and Jule, this world is populated with other characters who either try to build or break their efforts to find themselves.
Sleeping Dog (Season 1) Recap:
Episode 1: Startled
A certain Mussa Basher is found dead in prison. He is convicted of killing Judge Herres. Mike Atlas is an ex-KDD police officer who lives in a caravan. Following Mussa’s death, Abou Basher, his brother, physically assaults Atlas and sets fire to his caravan. Atlas goes to Klaus Hartloff, and he reveals that Mussa’s conviction has something to do with Atlas. However, Atlas cannot seem to recall the specificities of the case. Meanwhile, a young and inexperienced prosecutor, Jule Andregaste, is tasked with the case of the apparent suicide of Mussa. Atlas sneaks into his house in the absence of his daughter, but the next morning his daughter, Tinka, finds him. He leaves his house with only a backpack.
Atlas’ friends and partners at the police department, Luca Zaric, and Roland Sokowski, are asked to pay a visit to an apartment where blood is seeping through the leaked roof. Joined by newcomer Britney Adebayo, they go to search for the source of the blood in the apartment just above. However, an uncautious Adebayo breaks open the door to the apartment without warning and ends up hurting the little daughter of the dead woman. Adebayo is filled with a great sense of remorse. Atlas, who has been living the life of a homeless person, reaches the district attorney’s office. He asks her to reopen the Herres murder file for him and expresses his concerns over the actual culpability of Mussa. When he reveals that he cannot remember what actually went wrong with the case, the DA, Corinna Steck, advises him to seek professional therapy.
Adebayo, on the other hand, goes back to the building and confronts the neighbor for withholding information about the little girl’s presence at the crime site. Tom Schlefski, an LKA officer who has now joined the Homicide division, arrives at the DA’s office. When Jule attempts to probe further into the mysterious conditions under which Mussa died, Corinna shuns her, stating that the case is cut and dry, and asks her to look for the suicide triggers instead. At lunch, Jule comes across Atlas. Jule arrives at the prison and manages to get her hands on the list of people who visited Musa just before his death. Back at the office, Tom gets acquainted and sympathizes with her for the mistreatment she faces at the hands of Corinna.
The same night when Jule has to stay back at the DA’s office, working on her case, Atlas tiptoes into the office in search of the Herres case file. Corinna finds Jule’s card beside the photocopy machine and asks Jule if she is involved with Atlas in stealing information regarding the Herres case. But Atlas got access to the office as he stole the ID card when Jule left her bag unattended during lunch. Atlas asks Hartloff to reconsider the case. He asks Hartloff to interrogate Idris Kouri, who was to serve as Mussa’s alibi but left the country before the trial. Hartloff reveals to Atlas that since the latter’s findings, namely small strands of Mussa’s hair at the crime site, gave Mussa away as a convict, there was no need for Idris Kouri anymore. Atlas sets out to find Idris and turns up at his father’s fish shop.
Jule, on the other hand, is still bent on solving the mystery of the death of Mussa. She shows the video footage of the prison to Tom, where Idris can be seen meeting Mussa. In the video, Idris can be seen showing Mussa a tattoo written in Arabic, which matches the carving that was found on Mussa’s chest after his death. In addition to that, one footage also shows Mussa meeting a private detective, Joachim Jürgens. The meeting with Jürgens, however, was extremely strained, following which Mussa was found dead.
This time, Jule visits Idris’s father’s shop, but she too is turned away. She then goes looking for Jürgens and leaves him a note to call her back. At this time, she gets a secretive call from an employee of the fish shop. The employee, Niam, reveals the true meaning of the tattoos of Idris and Mussa. He tells Jule that Idris and Mussa were lovers and carved each other’s names just above their hearts. In fact, they were together the night Herres was murdered. However, Idris was incessantly harassed by a cop who threatened to reveal the secret of his sexuality to his father. The employee fixes a meeting between Idris and Jule at a park. However, they find Idris dead inside a treehouse.
Episode 2: Surprise!
Jule tells Tom that Idris has returned to the country to confirm Mussa’s innocence. Since Tom is looking into the murder of Idris, she asks him to keep her name out of this case. Jürgens is seen lurking around Atlas’s house. After Jule presents Corinna with her reports on Jürgens, Corinna suggests she go after him. Jürgens, meanwhile, presents himself to Tinka as a friend of Atlas– who goes by the name Paul– in order to find out more about his whereabouts. Abou is picked up by Tom as a suspect in Idris’s murder. Jule reaches Jürgens’s office but encounters a mysterious, hoodied man. Jule faces constant curveballs from Corinna, who is condescending and frustrating enough to work with. She ridicules her reports and does not assign due importance to them. Atlas visits the DA’s office, and Jule eavesdrops on the conversation Atlas has with Corinna about Mussa’s innocence.
On the other hand, Britney, who is still harboring feelings of guilt, visits the injured child at the hospital. Atlas contacts Tinka, and Tinka further contacts Jürgens to drop him Atlas’s phone number. Corinna too passes the information on Atlas’s whereabouts to Zaric. Jule and Atlas join forces to work together on Mussa’s case. While Jule is updating Atlas on the case, he receives a phone call from Jürgens. Suspecting that the call was meant to track him down, Atlas immediately leaves the place and dumps his phone in a nearby garbage bin.
Zaric, Socke, and Britney move on to a case concerning a man named Kaminski. In an attempt to search for Kaminski, Locke tries to climb up a wall and lands himself on the badly decomposed dead body of Kaminski. Tom arrives at the site looking for Zaric and questions him about his physical confrontation with Abou. Atlas reaches out to Tinka and asks her to help him get to his friend, Karina. Tinka, in turn, calls up Jürgens and says she can help him meet Atlas. Atlas and Jule turn up at Karina’s place, who has consented to help read Jürgens’ lips and decode his utterances. The episode ends with Jürgens threatening Atlas over the phone. He asks Atlas to meet him at a parking lot alone as he is holding his daughter hostage.
Episode 3: Connecting
Atlas is unable to reach Tinka over the phone, so he calls his wife, Lenni. Lenni is taken aback, but her surprise is quickly replaced with apprehension when Atlas asks her about Tinka. Atlas’ phone call leaves Lenni anxious, and she calls Zaric for help. Zaric tracks down Tinka’s number on his GPS device. At the parking lot, Jürgens confronts Atlas and accuses him of falsely framing Mussa. Jürgens threatens him with a gun and demands the names of people who are involved in it. When Jürgens realizes that Atlas suffers from partial memory loss, he offers to jog his memory.
However, Zaric drives in, and Jürgens flees with Tinka. After driving for a while, Jürgens drops Tinka and hands her a king piece from a chessboard, which she is supposed to give to only her father. Zaric catches up with Tinka, but she pretends that nothing has happened. She feigns nonchalance and asks Lenni not to worry as she is with Paul, Atlas’s friend. When Lenni asks Atlas about Paul, Atlas obviously fails to recognize him. This disturbs Lenni further. On the other hand, the closeness between Lenni and Zaric does not seem to go well with Tinka.
Jürgens is seen leaving his place in a hurry. From the notes taken while Karina decodes the prison footage, Jule gets the hint of finding out more about the chief judge of the appellate court. From her boss Corinna, she finds out that Judge Herres was actually in the run for being the chief judge of the appellate court. Britney is seen arriving at the hospital, where she is told that the little girl has been taken away by Child Protective Services. Skimming through the case file of Idris, Jule finds an uncanny similarity between the presence of a cigarette butt at the site of the crime and Jürgens’s mention of a cigarette butt.
Atlas goes to the playground to secure pieces of evidence, and Jule secures the case file of Herres to match it with Idris’ case. Jule gets phone calls from both Tinka and Jürgens, who are looking for Atlas, each with their own reasons since Atlas used her phone to contact them. Jule informs Tom about the progress that has been made in the intertwined death cases. Britney finds the little girl, Lotta, at a CPS home and gives her a stuffed bunny. A representative of the CPS informs her of the probable hardship that Lotta might face while looking for an adoptive family.
Jule informs Tom of her belief that both the murders – of Judge Herres and Idris – were committed by the same person, with Bashers serving only as scapegoats. In both the murders, she sees a pattern – they were killed with 9mm point-blank shots and DNA left to plant evidence. Her conviction is that Idris Kouri was killed to take the attention away from the real murderer and his motive. Herres was killed just when he was about to become the chief judge of the appellate court. However, Tom does not buy into her propositions, citing them as conspiracy theories.
Zaric arrives at his boat house to find Atlas already waiting for him. Atlas asks Zaric about the identity of Paul, and Zaric states that he will find out more about this. Atlas asks Zaric to help him remember the reason for quitting the force. Atlas defends Mussa’s innocence, but Zaric does not believe his narrative. Atlas asks him if they had been paid by someone to frame Mussa to help hide something that lies underneath. At this, Zaric questions Atlas’s mental stability and offers to take him to Doctor Berners, who had helped Atlas before. Atlas asks Zaric to stay away from his family.
Zaric and Corinna have a conversation on the phone where both of them discuss the viability of getting professional help for Atlas. Atlas, meanwhile, arrives at Lenni’s travel agency office in order to reconcile. But Lenni is not open to having him back without therapy. Atlas arrives back at his shack and finds the girl who has been living with him passed out from an overdose. This reminds me of his past days when he would be passed out too.
Corinna informs Jule that the 49th has found the murder weapon in the Kouri case in Basher’s girlfriend’s apartment. Atlas has faint memories of the night when Herres was found dead. However, Zaric and Socke appear in his memory, and it seems that they know more than they are admitting. Atlas goes to Zaric’s boat house but finds Lenni sleeping in his bed. Jule manages to get hold of Jürgens, and he readily identifies her. However, when she mentions his running away from his apartment upon hearing her arrive, he says he was not in his apartment for days, which confuses Jule. Jürgens refuses to talk to her and informs Jule that he is being followed by some people, so they drive to a quiet parking lot.
In the parking lot, Jürgens tells Jule that he was hired by the wife of Judge Herres to find out about his affairs. However, Jürgens found his records to be clean. Shortly after that, Herres was found murdered. One day, after all this, Jürgens went to the Amis Club, a high-end brothel, for a different case. To his surprise, he saw the woman, Chiara, a prostitute, who introduced herself as Judge Herres’ wife to Jürgens and went to him with his case. Jürgens found out that all this was done to prevent Judge Herres from becoming the chief judge. First, an attempt was made to tarnish his image, and then, when nothing was found, he was killed. Jürgens went to the prison to help Mussa but could not as Mussa did not trust him. Jürgens believes Russia is involved in this, but Jule does not think so. Jürgens asks Jule to look at the photos which he sent to Atlas. However, someone arrives and kills Jürgens. Jule flees.
Episode 4: Chez Amis
With blood splattered all over her face, Jule runs. Tom arrives and picks her up. They drive back to the parking lot in search of the car and Jürgens. However, Jürgens is nowhere to be seen. Jule insists that the killer must have taken the car. On the other hand, Atlas is waiting for Zaric to arrive home. Atlas asks Zaric to reveal the name of the person who had actually found Mussa’s hair strands at the crime site. Zaric says it was actually Socke who found the strands. However, Socke did not testify, as that would highlight Atlas’s drug-induced state at the time. This, Zaric claims, was done to protect Atlas. Atlas is not convinced and promises to find out what really transpired during Judge Herres’s case. He also asks Zaric to stay away from his wife.
Jule and Tom discuss the matter at a bar. Tom says that they cannot claim that Jürgens was murdered, for there is no witness. Jule is drunk. She puts her guard down and starts talking about her relationships. She says that she has never experienced a loving and fulfilling relationship as the men always turn out to be engaged to someone else. Zaric reminisces about a past incident with Atlas where he is seen ridiculing Atlas. His sense of jealousy at Atlas’s relationship with Lenni back then is evident. Zaric and Lenni end up having sex. The girl who stays with Atlas charges Atlas for throwing away her drugs.
At the DA’s office, Tom and Jule join Corinna to discuss the reports. Corinna seems more interested in the indictment than the true investigation. After the meeting, Jule and Tom have a disagreement over Jürgens’s murder. While Jule insists on letting others know about Jürgens, Tom thinks this is a bad idea. Tom goes back to the playground, which has been turned into a crime site. His partner tells him that some people have seen a homeless man in the treehouse where Idris’s body was found.
Atlas contacts Jule looking for information on Jürgens. She tells him that Jürgens is dead. Jule tells him about the photographs that Jürgens left for him. Since Atlas has not come across any photographs, he denies it first. However, he realizes Tina might be having them. Atlas tells Jule that he has found out that he was not the one to find the hair strands from the crime scene as he was high. Atlas meets Tinka, and she hands over Jürgens’s chess piece to him, which is actually hiding a pen drive. They connect it to Tinka’s laptop and find photos that heighten Atlas’s suspicions towards Zaric. On the other hand, Tinka badmouths Zaric and tells her father about her suspicion concerning Lenni and Zaric. However, when she sees Atlas is not paying much attention, she leaves with her laptop. Atlas stops her. Tinka is angry at Atlas’s changed personality. She asks him to provide an explanation and so, Atlas begins his explanation.
Britney expresses her desire to adopt Lotta to her girlfriend, However, she is not happy with her idea and suggests she should adopt a cat instead. Jule reaches the Amis Club to find Chiara. Tom goes to the parking lot to retrieve the footage. He finds a man in a hoodie, presumably the same man who was spotted by Jule running away from Jürgens’ office. Chiara tells Jule that one of her regular clients begged her to partake in this make-believe game. Chiara says she does not know the man’s real name as all the guests of the Amis take up a different name while they are in the club. This client, despite being a German, chose a Russian name, Sergei. This is perhaps why Jürgens was wary of a Russian connection.
In a series of flashbacks, it is given out hiw Atlas slowly recalls that it was Zaric who introduced him to the drugs which he had found in his neighbor’s bag. Jule finds out that Ulf, the judge of the district court with whom she has an affair, is actually Sergei. Ulf tried to dig up dirt on Herres because he did not get along well with him. Jule understands that she has been played with. She breaks off her relationship with Ulf. Outside, the man in the hoodie is monitoring every step she takes.
Atlas goes to meet the actual wife of Judge Herres and gets to know that her husband was a supporting member of the Benedictus Homeless Charity. But when Atlas defends Mussa and confesses that he was on drugs that night, Mrs Herres starts questioning his credibility. She lets Atlas check Herres’s files on Benedictus Charity, but she utilizes that period to call the police. Finally, Atlas gets the letter he is looking for. The letter mentions a case on Polyphemus for which no proceedings were launched. The photo that he finds in the letter vividly matches one of his memories. Zaric arrives with Dr. Berners to take him away. Outside, Atlas has an altercation with Zaric. Zaric says that he met Judge Herres because the latter was after him, but Atlas refuses to believe it since he has no recollection of anything being mentioned. In the end, the paramedics coop Atlas up in an ambulance and leave.
Episode 5: Digging Deep
Atlas opens his eyes and finds himself in a hospital. In the DA’s office, Corinna indicates that since the evidence turned out to be positive, even if compromised, it is better if they wrap up the indictment. Corinna is putting more emphasis on the 49th’s success than anything else. Corinna later hints that instead of Tom, the 49th will now take over the Kouri murder case. Jule tells Tom that Atlas was not the person who had found the evidence at Herres’s murder site.
Dr. Berners starts talking to Atlas about the Christmas market attack. Lenni tells Tinka that since Atlas would only be allowed if he went for therapy, it was Zaric who sent him to the clinic. Corinna asks Zaric to procure more evidence against Abou before Tom manages to find them. Tom says he has recently been promoted to the LKA. Dr. Berners lets Atlas use the computer of the medical facility. Atlas skims through the photographs again to jog his memory. In the photographs, he also spots the man in a hoodie. As memories start flooding back, Atlas escapes the facility.
Tom and Jule wait for Atlas on the riverside. Tom reveals that Atlas has a fairly sound record with nothing to incriminate him. If drugs were involved, it was very carefully removed from his records by Corinna. The question then is what else was removed by Corinna and the 49th regarding all the cases? In a completely different context, Tom asks whether Jule is free for dinner.
Tinka runs into Atlas in a subway, but Atlas deliberately avoids her. Britney goes to the Youth Welfare Office of Berlin to submit her adoption request for Lotta. Briteny and Zaric celebrate Socke’s birthday party. They talk about Socke’s drinking habits. Zaric asks Britney not to inform Socke about his promotion as he wants him to join in too. Zaric meets Corinna, and they end up having sex. Jule and Tom, on the other hand, arrive at Jule’s apartment. They talk and then make love. Atlas goes to the Benedictus charity and finds out that Herres was working on Polyphemus’s death case. One of the witnesses to the murder saw Polyphemus being run over by a car. However, surprisingly, his body was recovered from the site of the terrorist attack at the Christmas market.
Jürgens’ missing car is recovered from a waterbody by Tom. He shows Jürgens’s body, boxed up in the trunk, to Zaric. Zaric lies, stating he had never heard of Jürgens. It does not take long for Tom to find out that Zaric is lying, as his partner says Zaric lodged an ownership query at the registration office for the car. Atlas finds Aldi, Polyphemus’s friend, and eyewitness, and his memory seems to be stronger than before. He recalls that he, along with Zaric and Socke, had stuffed Polyphemus’s dead body in the trunk after hitting him with the car.
Corinna asks Jule to visit Abou in the jail and to propose to him an offer. She suggests that if the prosecution can prove that Abou acted in the heat of the moment, his punishment can be brought down by five years. But in order to do that, Abou has to make the confession. Corinna is hellbent on extracting this confession and promises more responsibilities to Jule if she manages to carry it out successfully. Jule pretends that she agrees. When Corinna leaves, she calls Tom.
Tom and Jule meet outside and kiss. When Top interrupts and says he has not been honest with her, Jule thinks Tom is already involved with someone else. However, Tom says that his main aim has been to inspect Corinna Speck and the 49th. Herres was his investigating judge and mentor. The quickly ascending upward curve of the 49th made Herres suspicious, so he asked Tom to investigate the matter further. But he has not been able to find anything substantial. He knows that something is gravely wrong, as Herres was murdered shortly after. He got himself a transfer to monitor Speck more closely. The idea is to keep the city clean from the Clan, and by convicting and murdering the Bashers and Kouri, they are acting on their xenophobia. Tom advises Jule to follow Corinna’s order to deflect suspicion, as she is clearly involved in the cover-ups of three murders. Atlas now remembers that Herres was after all of them, and not just him. He calls Zaric to tell him about this. He tells Zaric that it was, in fact, the latter who killed Herres.
Episode 6: Confessions
Atlas remembers his mistake and makes his confession to Tinka. On a Christmas day, after work, Zaric asked Atlas to drive since he was the only one who was not drunk. Atlas, who was indeed not drunk, was, however, high on a drug called Ponnexzin, meant for trauma patients. The drug is used to numb all senses. While driving, Zaric started talking to Atlas, which distracted him, and he ran over Polyphemus with his car. Atlas was too intoxicated to fully comprehend the aftermath. The three, actually only Zaric and Socke, decided to dump the body at the Christmas market where the terror attack took place.
While Jule is on a call with Tom, she hears Tom getting shot by someone. Before this, Tom had told Jule that he was waiting for Atlas. He also said he could see Atlas coming. Zaric asks Lenni about Atlas and says that he wants to meet him to explain everything. When he disconnects the call, he finds Tinka and Atlas waiting at the door. Jule calls Atlas and asks if Zaric was there when he was drugged. Corinna goes through the files and finds out that it was Zaric who had found the murder weapons first in both murder cases. Zaric, who is unaware of all this, gets himself high on the Ponnexzin and starts recording a confession.
Atlas rebuilds his relationship with Lenni after they confess their guilt to each other. Atlas goes to Zaric’s boat but finds him passed out from taking Ponnexzin. Atlas tries to flush the drugs out of his stomach. Later, in the hospital, Atlas listens to Zaric’s recorded confession. Zaric reveals that the Christmas market cover-up was required as his eyes were set on graduating to LKA, and the incident would hinder it. He further reveals that he was envious of the loving relationship between Atlas and Lenni. He killed Herres because he had a witness. In Hartloff’s presence, Jule lets Abou know about the large conspiracy that has been cooked up by Corinna to frame him and his late brother. Hartloff does not believe her, but Abou agrees to join in.
Sleeping Dog (Season 1) Ending Explained:
Who is behind the murders?
Zaric killed Herres, but all the others were Socke’s victims. Atlas takes the hair samples that he collected from the crime site to Gerry, his friend in forensics. Both of them find out that the hair strands are actually of a groundhog. This points to Socke as he is the one who is in possession of a stuffed groundhog, as has been shown multiple times throughout the series. Jule arrives at the 49th office looking for Zaric, but Socke informs that he has called in sick. When she prepares to leave, Socke refers to her as Ms. Andregast, which baffles Jule as Socke should not be knowing her name. Socke goes to his locker and looks at the visiting card of Jule. This is probably the one she left at Jürgens’s place. Socke starts following Jule.
Jule is well aware that she is being followed. She puts pepper spray in Socke’s eyes before Socke breaks into her apartment and assaults her physically. By the time he washes his eyes with milk, Atlas arrives. Zaric, too, arrives as he spots Atlas parking a cycle outside the apartment. Atlas tries to win back Socke’s trust, who says he killed all three people – Mussa, Idris, and Jürgens – so that Atlas can get back to work without worry. Socke wants to get rid of Jule, but Zaric talks him out of it. Zaric and Atlas have forged an unsaid understanding between them to tackle Socke. The two embrace Socke and try to cease the gun from him but fail. They try to take a selfie and allow Jule to use that time to arm herself with a wine bottle. Jule hits Socke on his head, and he passes out.
Mussa is let go of the from the prison. Corinna is now paying the price for her xenophobic tendencies. Jule, who is tired of Corinna, leaves her job. Atlas leaves his job at the 49th and gets actively involved with Benedictus Homeless Charity along with Lenni and Tinka. Zaric and Corinna are seen sailing away towards the unknown.
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