‘Kleo’ Review: Spy vs. a Lot of Other Spies

And it is less of a self-contained hall of mirrors than the earlier show; it benefits from being about something real, even if its relationship to history is stretched to the breaking point. Season 2 returns to the fraught period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, with Kleo, the former off-the-books Stasi hit woman, still pursuing a personal mission of revenge that is somehow mixed up with the fate of the two Germanys.

The jokes, the suspense, the melodrama and the violent action of “Kleo” are all contained within a vivid portrait of post-fall Berlin. Everyone is quick to take advantage of the moral and political vacuum, from Thilo (Julius Feldmeier), the spectral techno-music junkie who becomes Kleo’s roommate and confidant, to all the Russian, American and East and West German spymasters who use her for their own purposes. The settings, in Berlin and other Central and Eastern European locales, are always visually absorbing, simultaneously candy colored and brutalist drab.

Against that backdrop, Kleo carries on with her blood-soaked journey of self-awareness. Season 1 was structured around her systematic headhunting of the Stasi officers who had betrayed her and sent her to prison, and around her search to uncover their reasons (which involved an unending, slapstick pursuit of a highly symbolic red suitcase); thematically, it was her revenge against the political system that had lied to her and pretended to give her freedom while holding her hostage.

In Season 2, as her search for the suitcase continues, she and Sven carry on a season-long argument over methods, priorities and belief systems, pitting her Eastern certainty against his Western ambivalence. Despite everything she has gone through, Kleo is still not ready to give in to self-indulgence, or to accept any of the deals she is offered to call off her search. “Just because I’m done with the Stasi,” she tells an unctuously smiling C.I.A. officer, “do you really think I’d fight on your side for capitalism?”

The show’s ability to have a cogent political-historical point of view and also be infectiously entertaining has everything to do with its complement of engagingly off-kilter characters. Schaad gives a sly, disarming performance as the always underestimated, innately squeamish Sven, who unfailingly rushes in to save Kleo when her fearlessness puts her in danger. And Feldmeier steals all of his moments onscreen as the solemnly whacked-out Thilo, whose belief that he was sent to Earth from Sirius B helps him in his accidental conquest of the Berlin club scene. (Also notable is Vincent Redetzki as the twitchy, possibly psychopathic Uwe, Kleo’s old classmate from assassin school.)