Review: Midnight at the Pera Palace (Pera Palas’ta Gece Yarisi)

Midnight at the Pera Palace (Pera Palas’ta Gece Yarisi), from Turkey, is a time travel mystery with lots of plot twists. The mystery involved events just before the start of the Turkish war for independence.

The main character in Midnight at the Pera Palace (Pera Palas’ta Gece Yarisi) is a modern day journalist named Esra (Hazal Kaya). She lives in Istanbul and is assigned a cruddy article as punishment for being a terrible employee. She has to write an article with 130 reasons to stay at the Pera Palace Hotel in honor of the hotel’s 130th anniversary celebration.

Esme goes to the hotel. She’s given a tour by Ahmet (Tansu Biçer). He tells her about the history of the hotel and shows her around. Because it’s bad weather, he offers to put her up in the hotel overnight for free. He puts her in room 411. She finds an old fashioned key on the desk, which she’s holding in her hand at the stroke of midnight.

And boom. She wakes up in 1919. Ahmet is there, too. He tells her about the gateway she found and talks to her about not changing anything that’s going to happen in the future.

The British military is everywhere. The officer called George (James Chalmers) has plans to take over the rule of Turkey for himself. The first part of his plan is to assassinate Mustafa Kemal (Hakan Dinçkol). Turkish police and military seem to be going along with this plan, but resisters are everywhere.

Esme decides she must prevent the assassination of Mustafa Kemal so that her country can become the free nation she knows today. (A country with a thriving film and TV industry, by the way.) Ahmet wants to help.

Esme discovers that she looks exactly like Peride, a rich Turkish woman who rubs elbows with the folks at the Pera Palace. Peride gets murdered early in the story and Esme pretends to be Peride for the remainder of the series as she tries to find Peride’s murderer and keep the future leader of Turkey safe.

Esme was a orphan. But it turns out that she is actually Peride’s great granddaughter.

Perida has a daughter, Leyla (Ebrar Alya Demirbilek), who is Esme’s grandmother. The young actress playing Leyla does a terrific job, as the two of them bond.

Perida/Esme meets and falls in love with Halit (Selahattin Pasali) who runs a night club. He might be a criminal, might be helping the English – or maybe not – and is supposed to be the one to kill Mustafa Kemal. He keeps promising Perida/Esme that Mustafa Kemal is safe as long as he’s the assassin.

Perida/Esme does many things trying to solve murders and stop the changing of history. One of them is sing in Halit’s night club.

Ahmet knows other gateways in the hotel, and finds other keys. At various points, Esme goes to 1917, 1947, and 1995. She always has a reason, but she’s warned there are bad consequences for using the gateway frequently. Plus, she still needs to get back to her own time.

Esme was raised lost and alone. So was Ahmet. They meet Sonya (Yasemin Szawlowski). She is another lost and alone character. She was formerly a Russian princess, but now works as a maid in the hotel. She’s an important character, too.

The series is full of twists and turns. It deals with Turkish history and often shows what might have been had history changed its path. It also takes the lost and alone characters in the story and fills in their relationships and gives them connections. The episodes are full of clues and foreshadowings that I didn’t recognize until much later when their meaning was revealed.

I sometimes found events confusing, but mostly I kept up. Knowing more about Turkey and Turkish history might have helped, but it was actually about how the story was told and the twists in the storyline that lost me sometimes.

The series has 8 episodes. It’s streaming on Netflix.

You can watch it dubbed in English, but if you want the original Turkish while watching the series and need help, this Netflix help page is available.