Series / Rojst

Rojst: welcome to the Polish dumpsterfire

Rojst (sometimes advertised to the foreign audiences as "The Mire") is a 2018, ongoing Polish-language television series directed for Showmax, and subsequently moved to Netflix for the production of the second season.

The series is a story of two journalists – older, emotionally scarred by the Second World War Witek Wanycz, and young, idealistic, newlywed Piotr Zarzycki. Each season, they inadvertently mix themselves into a murder mystery that quickly becomes both impossible to leave be and mortally dangerous. The plot intertwines with the story of coming of age as a professsional and how chasing the truth might not take a journalist where they think they will arrive.

• The first season tells a story of crime committed in communist Poland and forcibly covered up by the state.
• The second season tackles the systemic and economic changes of the country that has been freshly reacquainted with capitalism and how it changes the dynamics between the characters we already met.
• The third season, subtitled "Millennium", both follows the second season and delves into a series of flashbacks into the Sixties, showing how things changed and yet in many ways stayed all the same.

The cast of the both seasons is star-studded, featuring such names as Dawid Ogrodnik, Andrzej Seweryn, Zofia Wichłacz, Anna Dereszowska, Magdalena Walach, Łukasz Simlat, Magdalena Różczka, Piotr Fronczewski, Tomasz Schimscheiner or Zdzisław Wardejn.

This Series Provides Examples Of:

In General

• Artistic License – History: Rojst is a series that heavily relies on the nostalgia of the Polish viewer, showcasing the beloved sights, memories, and tropes that would be common knowledge to the majority of the audience. For a foreign viewer it is a tour de force through the skills of set masters, costumologists and sound technicians, albeit the achronological presentation of certain items, music pieces and locations makes the whole a mix of mid-and-late 1980's and mid 1990's, especially in the second season, which sugarcoates many of the tropes it utilises.
• Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop: The town's cops are either one, the other, or both at the same time.
• Black-and-Gray Morality:
  • Season one contrasts the dark, cold, ruthless system of the communist government and the idealistic will for survival and truthfulness of Piotr, who is a devoted husband, but a flawed human nonetheless. Victims of the governmental surveillance and repression are portrayed as clearly wronged, yet willing to utilize whatever little power they have to get back at the agents of the system, no matter if they actually are the culprits.
  • Season two features new, capitalist society, corrupt and full to the brim with joyful nouveau riche and burgeoning middle class, who take advantage of their new-found status (such as Dobrowolskis, to a much lesser extent Zarzyckis). On the other hand, the police force and the local government are still full of people who served the old regime and gain profit from having connections, and they make the lives of the journalists and good cops very, very hard.
  • The flashback scenes show that once the war-time tables have turned on the Germans, the local Poles and the Soviet soldiers were all too willing to engage in petty revenge or worse, whether or not the German in question was ever in the slightest responsible for anything.
• City with No Name: The town the story portrays has no name and is located in some unspecified part of Silesia.
  • Given the destruction shown in season two due to Flood of the Millenium, it's clearly intended to be somewhere inbetween Legnica, Częstochowa and Katowice in southern Poland.
  • Third season heavily implies it's located just a short drive away from German border.
• The '40s: Both seasons feature callbacks to the Second World War and how it affected Witek Wanycz and the town he lives in.
• Intrepid Reporter: Piotr falls into this role in both seasons, together with rather reluctant Witek. On both occasions the authorities aren't too keen on them getting to the heart of the matter.
• Local Angle: The Kurier Wieczorny ('Evening News') caters to the local population of the unnamed town in the southwestern Poland. In the second season the paper features heavily the kidnapping of the son of the local bonzo.
• The Masochism Tango: Piotr and Teresa as husband and wife. They love each other, but butt heads about pretty much everything.
• Nothing but Hits: The diegetic music (and non-diegetic sometimes as well) tends to be the hits of the era, getting more pronounced with each season.
• One-Word Title: The word "rojst" denotes a community of plant wetlands occurring mainly in Lithuania; a wet, low and marshy place. The titular rojst is the whole world shown in the series. For various reasons, the characters get stuck in the system that paralyses their lives. The gray reality is like a swampy quagmire – the more ill-considered movements you make, the deeper you can sink.
• Period Piece: The series takes care to provide lots of small setting-establishing details, some of which don't even make any particular sense on their own, but in tandem with other such details only enhance the effect.
• Small-Town Tyrant: Basically, every season has one or two people who serve this role, although the plot usually twists right as it would seem they are the primary villain.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: During the war, teenage Witek fell in love with a German girl. When she is repatriated to Germany and he chooses to stay behind, she becomes The One That Got Away to him, and he sees it as My Greatest Failure.
• Town with a Dark Secret: The unnamed town the story goes down in has a secret that nobody wants to talk about: a wild cemetery in the forest, where Germans were interred during the Soviet liberation of the area.

Season 1

• And Now You Must Marry Me: The coach of the local girls' swimming team married one of his wards. Years later, it's considered a quaint little story of Meet Cute, but once Piotr talks to the wife it becomes obvious it was anything but.
• The Butler Did It: The reason why a teenage girl committed suicide. The local well-connected pervert did not rape her, he only paid her for letting him ogle her. She didn't feel particularly ashamed, either. But then, her female classmate (who didn't even really feature in the story so far, but had a crush on the girl's new boyfriend) raped her with a foreign object, and that's what drove the poor girl over the edge. The boyfriend accompanied her on the way down.
• Death of a Child: On top of a double murder, the town struggles with the death of two teenagers, apparently by suicide.
• Disposable Sex Worker: The first season's murder mystery involves a killed sex worker, and many sex workers in the series are, according to the society portrayed, very easy to mock. Many are shown being physically or verbally abused.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Turns out Helena, the unwilling wife of the local pervert, masterminded almost everything with the help of the local prosecutor who was her adulterous lover. When the girl committed suicide, she thought her husband finally went too far and had to be removed by force.
• The '80s: First season starts in the 1984, sometime around Martial Law being called off and the Polish Round Table Agreement.
• Good Adultery, Bad Adultery:
  • Helena is a good adulteress. Her husband is abusive and refuses to divorce her.
  • Piotr is a cheating bastard. His pregnant wife waits for him at home while he has sex with Helena.
• I Am Not My Father: Piotr moves to a remote small town because he doesn't want to remain in the shadow of his father, an important big-city Party member.
• Impersonating an Officer: Witek pretends to be a school inspector to get a schoolgirl to talk. The girl, while a delinquent, is afraid enough of the consequences to spill the beans.
• Mysterious Past: Piotr's wife, Teresa, is shown to have some unspecified but apparently glamorous or romantic past she quietly pines for. Season 2 casts some light on it.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: The local pervert preyed on girls for decades with impunity, because he was well-established with the local formal and informal authorities and they saw what he did as beneath their notice. Turns out he's not guilty of the recent deaths, except in a very indirect sense.
• Shame If Something Happened:
  • Piotr's father is a Party bigwig who isn't above threatening Witek with consequences to keep Piotr out of any politically inconvenient mess he might get into.
  • A secret police thug visits Teresa under a false identity, dropping increasingly obvious threats to get her to get Piotr off the case.
• A Sinister Clue: Witek figures out a potential suspect when he notices his left-handedness. It's a red herring.

Season 2

• Bait-and-Switch: When Teresa calls Anna up, we're led to believe it's an attempted hook-up. Turns out they just hang out together. And then it turns to be a Double Subversion because it really ends in a hook-up.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Anna is a maverick big city cop who just happens to honestly believe in soothsaying. Some other characters in the season might also see her lesbianism as this, too.
• Butch Lesbian: Anna Jass, the high-strung policewoman. She slicks her hair back, wears a bandage instead of a bra and exclusively masculine clothing, being clearly queer-coded.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: In a flashback, a German camp guard gives this explanation while administering a humiliating punishment to a forced labourer. He tries to pass it off as magnanimity, but it's clear that with the Red Army on the doorstep the Germans are too strapped for manpower to just execute people.
• The Constant: Despite the fall of communism and the restructuring of the whole society, the local hotel is still a local hot-spot of undercover dealings and prostitution. Although, as Witek notes, the interior design has been changed.
• Corrupt Cop: Anna's temporary partner is interested in the case pretty much only for the monetary reward for solving it. By which we mean, "finding someone to pin the blame on". Though he cleans up a bit in the end.
• Death by Childbirth: Helena from the first season, of which (and of whose pregnancy in the first place) Piotr is completely ignorant. The child is adopted and the only one who can connect the dots is Witek, who decides not to spill the secret.
• Frame-Up: Unlike Anna, a big city cop who tries to solve the case, the local cops just try to close it as soon as possible and get done with the mess. Since they already have one, they're not going to let a good suspect go to waste.
• Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: Teresa is a good adulteress. She is a lesbian (or a bi woman, YMMV) trapped in a passionless marriage, so when she meets a charming policewoman she has a connection with, the sparks fly.
• Hollywood Jehovah's Witness: Adoptive parents of the boy found in the Gronty forest are implied to be Jehovah's Witnesses: in one scene a Kingdom Hall is clearly shown and named as such, the rituals and idiosyncrasies are fitting, but the religion is not explicitly named, instead being called an “organization”.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: In flashback scenes set shortly after the war, Witek's family is shown relatively well-off largely thanks to his aunt, who is in a relationship with a Soviet officer. While she's affectionate towards him, it's heavily implied it's a survival tactic which her family would find rather shady if they were in a position to complain, that she's making the best of a situation which may not even have been consensual at first, and that she quietly finds them ungrateful for her providing for them.
• Insignia Rip-Off Ritual: In a flashback, Witek's girlfriend's father is shown burning his uniform and cutting a tattoo out of his skin, so when the Red Army arrived he wouldn't be recognized. Whatever his rank was, it's clear nothing good would come for him if he were.
• Lipstick Lesbian: Teresa, Piotr's wife is revealed to be a closeted lesbian (or possibly a lesbian-leaning bisexual, depending on your interpretation) who attempts to find joy in her passionless, straight marriage. In the end of season 2 she breaks up with Piotr and presumably gets together with Anna, the policewoman she met during the investigation. Also an example of Closet Gay.
• Magical Romani: Anna is quarter-Roma. Not only she knows her way around a Tarot deck, but also isn't really ever led astray by it.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: It is revealed Piotr unknowingly fathered a child whose disappearance and murder drives the plot of the second season. The mother has died in childbirth and the boy was adopted by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses.
• The '90s: Basically the entirety of the second season, which starts in 1997 during the Flood of the Millenium, although since the fashion trends trickled in slowly into the fresh-out-of-communism Poland the styles on screen resemble quite closely The '80s.
• Parents as People: The stresses of Piotr and Teresa's marriage weigh on their relationship with their daughter. As long as that's taken out of the account, then at least Piotr is shown to have a good, friendly relationship with her.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: It's part-implied, part-stated openly that Anna's superiors sent her on a mission to the ass-end of nowhere to keep her away.
• Revenge by Proxy: with a side order of Best Served Cold and in line with the season's theme of sins of the past. The kidnapping of a local businessman's son was orchestrated by a man he heavily beat some forty years earlier, when they were both teenagers. The man became infertile as a result of the beating, and now having risen to a position with enough resources to do it, he decided to take his assailant's son from him in revenge for having been deprived of a chance to have any.
• Sexual Karma: Averted. Piotr and Teresa, both clearly portrayed as good characters, are miserable lovers; they got married due to the fact that Teresa fell pregnant after they had sex, but it is revealed later that it was a part of college experimentation and Teresa is much more interested sexually in women.
• Shout-Out: To Jurassic Park, once somebody notices the town has one guy with the nickname "Reptile" and another known as "Raptor".
• Small Town, Big Hell: Nadia, sex worker turned hairdresser, says this to Anna when the policewoman goes to her salon for a makeover: it is indeed a small town and everybody knows about everything, including the exact information Anna is after.
• Tell Me About My Father: The dead kid's motivation. It wasn't as much a search for a father, but rather a wish to confront the one who put him in the mess his life was.
• Yuppie: Here in a Polish variety, an enthusiastic frontman of an urban development company, pitching a new suburb illegally built on a flood plain. He's also involved in a plot to demolish flood levees further away from the suburb so that the suburb itself won't suffer from flooding despite having been built on flood-prone land, and a murder on top of it.

Season 3

• Action Survivor: Piotr is an unathletic, nervous journalist, yet a threat to Wanda causes him to start channeling Liam Neeson in Taken.
• The Atoner: The junior attorney, Kinga. She was the girl who drove the girl from the first season into suicide, thus basically kick-starting the entire series.
• Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop: Of all cops in the season, the only decent ones are Jass (who is an outsider), Mika (who cleaned up since last season thanks to Jass, but is still a bit of an idiot and old-fashioned on matters like extracting confessions), and Dzidzia (who is an inexperienced dork).
• The Cameo: The flashback scenes contain a lot of characters, sometimes shown, sometimes only spoken of, who were only seen in the previous seasons in the show's current day.
• The Constant: It's lampshaded that every affair in the town seemingly must involve Witek in some way.
• Contrived Coincidence: Jass gets shot during a sting operation and ends up in the town's hospital, which apparently was conveniently nearby. Once she wakes and realizes where she is, she reacts with a sort of tired amusement.
• Due to the Dead: Kinga and Joanna's motivations are that they owe it to the bodies of the Gronty forest for the truth to come out. This is also why Kocioł's son returned — he realized it was really his mother's corpse that was unearthed.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Kocioł really loves his son, even in spite of constant questioning of his fatherhood by others. And the son loves his mother, as well as loves and is loved by his stepmother.
• The Ghost: Mika's wife, who is a nurse in the local hospital and is thus partial to knowledge and gossip which immensely helps in the investigation, but otherwise remains unseen.
• Happy Ending Override: Teresa died in a car crash between this and previous season, leaving Jass (her new lover), Piotr (who still cared for her), and Wanda all heartbroken. Jass was behind the wheel and blames herself for Teresa's death.
• Human Traffickers: The primary villains of the season's 1999 plotline. And the 1964 plotline, except they are also the protagonists.
• Hollywood Atheist: Downplayed (since it's not a religion), but it turns out Jass lost her faith in Tarot after Teresa's death in a manner rather typical for this trope. (And likewise she's implied to regain her faith at the end.)
• I Gave My Word: Jassijej's reasoning for coming back to town is that he promised to watch over the hotel manager's son. This is also why he kept the details from Jass, although he leaves her a clue.
• Information Wants to Be Free: Kinga brings the results of investigation on the Gronty corpses to Witek, even though he's retired, knowing he will get the story out.
• Men of Sherwood: Need the cavalry to smash up a Bad Guy Bar fronting for a human trafficking operation, but you have gone rogue and are strapped for time? Why, sometimes it's enough to be a phone call away from a few carfuls of tough Roma guys!
• "Mister Sandman" Sequence: The first scene of the 1964 plotline packs as many setting-establishing details as it possibly could, because it needs to differentiate itself quickly from the 1999 setting.
• One Degree of Separation:
  • Joanna, Piotr's new girlfriend and an archaeologist involved in excavations in Gronty, is the sister of the first season's suicide victim.
  • Kinga, the junior attorney, is the girl who caused the suicide of Joanna's sister.
  • The hotel manager had a letter from Elsa Koepke in his possession since the Sixties, and the man he got it from became one of the two corpses unearthed by Joanna.
  • The human trafficking operation is run by the estranged son of the hotel manager.
  • Anna Jass and Kocioł's son met and befriended each other as children. Also, Jass as a little girl was indirectly responsible for Kocioł becoming the hotel manager as we know him from the two previous seasons.
  • The hotel manager and the murder victim from the first season were best friends in the Sixties.
• Patriotic Fervor: Kinga's superior isn't in the slightest interested in truth about the Gronty forest — he's in it to prove that Poles and not the Germans were the victims interred there and is willing to outright lie as soon as the earliest results of a superficial investigation can be stretched to support his preconceived version of the story. The same goes for the inspector from Warsaw's Institute of National Remembrance he brings in for support. ^note This makes the season an odd mix of Period Piece and Instantly Dated — the scenes with them are clearly meant to show the rise of the kind of right-wing politicos who would gain nation-wide recognition by the early 2000's, and who then ruled Poland since 2015 until they were ousted from power in 2023 parliamentary elections. By the time the season was written and shot, they were still in power, thus the instant datedness part.
• Retired Monster: It turns out that however bad they may have appeared in the previous seasons, both the hotel manager and the murdered Party member of the first season were really this, having settled down to their comfortable positions after a ruthless criminal youth.
• Shout-Out: Folks at the local Internet are reading CD-Action, a magazine which is something of a legend of Polish video gaming, and the cafe itself doubles as a Friendly Local Gaming Store for the town's Warhammer crowd. ^note Not an everyday occurence, but given the overlap between video gamers and fantasy fandom, not impossible either.
• The '60s: Flashback scenes in the third season are set in 1964. You can see both the pretty and the ugly side, but especially the ugly, as two small crooks strive to make their way in the world.
• Smug Snake: The new local crime lord acts big and is properly evil and ruthless, but he's bested by (consecutively) a really pissed-off journalist, a vengeful victim, and an underling with overgrown ego. To his credit, he knows there are bigger criminal fishes than him, and he's content to stick to his piece of the pie. A minor example is the yuppie from the previous season, who thinks he's some kind of a hustler now but clearly isn't there yet. (But given that he's said underling with overgrown ego, he's clearly going down that path.)
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The 1964 plotline opens and ends with a song of the era, an upbeat one about how everything's beautiful and life is great and so on. The dissonance lies in that it's great... for the bad guys.
• Turn of the Millennium: The primary plotline is set in 1999, just two years after the previous season, but the change is felt. Capitalism had set in, the borders are open, the old commies are no longer the people to watch for, and computers are becoming commonplace. But computers bring along Millennium Bug concerns and Internet crime, a new generation of criminals arose looking to the West in their criminal enterprises, and democracy hands power to angry young wolves who make up for their lack of genuine anti-communist pedigrees with aggressive media posturing and unscrupulous politicking.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: It's implied the theft of the necklace, which was owned by a really well-connected person, resulted in the firing and arrest on exaggerated charges of the 1964's old hotel manager and subsequent rise in status of Kocioł. Little Anuszka stole it from her mother to give to a friend.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Near the end, Piotr releases three girls from captivity, among them Wanda, but one is shown falling and is left behind as the chase catches up. All we're left with is to assume it also must have ended well since the villains' operation was foiled anyway.
• Written-In Infirmity: Kinga has a stoma. Her actress has one, so it was written as a part of the character as well, because why not.