The Killing: "Orpheus Descending"

Season 1, Episode 13

A “What the fuck?” kind of ending right up the show’s meandering, frustrating alley

We are going to take this discussion nice and slow, methodically and intellectually going over…aw, fuck it.

This may be the shittiest ending to a season of television that I have ever seen. No exaggeration.

I don’t mean to be crass or overly simplistic with this statement, but that’s about the only way I feel adequately expresses my reaction to this finale. Let’s start with the fact that we didn’t learn who the killer was tonight, something that just about everybody seemed sure was going to happen. Now, according to Veena Sud, such talk was never uttered by anybody associated with the show, but I can’t help but feeling that somebody somewhere led us to believe such a thing, whether by outright lying or letting us infer something other than the truth.

But even if that wasn’t the case, even if we weren’t supposed to expect some sort of resolution in tonight’s case, that still doesn’t change the fact that most of the twists that we were subjected to were poorly placed. Dramatically speaking, it feels like this episode, at least in terms of the case itself, should have come either after the second or third episode. Police work like going over the car’s details, or checking the surrounding radius of the site of the murder, is such basic police work that I couldn’t help but make all sorts of sarcastic comments at my TV throughout the hour. (This is what happens when A) a television show treats you like an idiot and B) you live alone.) In fact, if the show had lead with this part of the case work in the third, fourth, fifth, or even sixth hour, I might have felt like it was pretty good television, and gone along with it. But as it stands it just feels like shoddy storytelling, as a bunch of formerly semi-competent police officers suddenly become good enough at their job to figure things out, but only because the plot required it of them.

So where does that put the rest of the twists, both of the season, and the episode, in this little hypothetical season? Well, imagine that the Bennett plot was just completely excised, that the Linden/Holder scenes of “Missing” were moved up about five or six episode, and that the twist that Holder was working for the conspiracy was moved up about three episodes – giving the season enough time to wrap up the storyline in 13 episodes – and that’s about what a competent season of television might look like. (I could map this out further, but what’s the point?)

I have no problem with the idea that Rosie’s murder was all part of some conspiracy to keep Richmond out of the race/make him somebody’s puppet/whatever. In fact, putting Linden and the police force up against such odds could have made for some interesting drama. But not only does placing this reveal where she did frustrate viewers by needlessly dragging out the narrative, but it also makes all of the time wasted on other suspects seem more stupid. If this is all part of some conspiracy, why didn’t anybody notice anything hinky earlier? Why have these characters go after the small people all season when it’s the big people they should have been investigating all along. It’s like Sud picked out the ending of the season first, and then didn’t notice how stupid it was to place that reveal there when she started breaking down what stories she would tell in the ELEVEN intervening hours.

Nor do all of the new mysteries – Who is Holder working for? Why? Who actually killed Rosie? What do they want with Richmond? – help things at all. All this time the show had been going on one single question (Who killed Rosie?) so for them to switch gears and add about four or five new ones to the mix not only feels like show is repositioning itself just so it doesn’t have to answer the question of Rosie’s murderer and thus can avoid having to come up with a new storyline, one that could have possibility fixed most of this season’s narrative problems.

And this puts The Killing squarely in the Twin Peaks zone once again. The similarity is clear – at the end of both of the shows’ first seasons, the killer had yet to be revealed, and those shows gave the (fairly reasonable) explanation that the show wasn’t about whodunit, it was about the characters that were still alive. That’s all well and good, but there’s one problem: The Killing never gave us characters worth caring about. Sure it was moving at first to see the Larsens struggle with the loss of Rosie, but that got old quickly, and as they began to move on to other things – things that felt increasingly tangential to Rosie’s death – I began to lose interest, to the point where I couldn’t care at all tonight whether or not Mitch left, or if Stan decided to apologize to Bennet. (And was it just me, or did it seem like the show was needlessly rounding the bases by bringing back a bunch of character that we didn’t care about?)

Perhaps the biggest problem with these characters – not just the Larsens, but everybody else – is that we never really learned about them apart from their relationship to Rosie. Everybody was either related to her, investigating her, or a possible suspect. (Just check out how the show treated Richmond’s campaign tonight.) The Killing failed to work on this larger world of Seattle, full of so many political scandals and socio-economic problems, and when the main case began to fall through, that meant that the show had no back up material to follow up with. In just about every sense, The Killing is a failure. Because hey, at least Twin Peaks gave us the Black Lodge.

And here is where I turn my anger away from Sud, and onto AMC. Back last week when they decided to renew the show, I could only assume that they had some sort of pitch from Sud that promised to reorient the show with a new mystery, one that would make it better, worthy of the network that aired it. But apparently that was not the case. They, not doubt deaf to the increased critical drubbing the show has receive, and HAVING SEEN THE FINALE, in all of its shittiness, decided that The Killing was still worthy of carrying the AMC logo. Can a network renege on a renewal order for a show? Because given the fallout this episode has/will have, they might seriously want to consider it.

Going into this night, I was definitely going to give up writing about The Killing, but I wasn’t sure that I was going to give up watching it; I like watching middling shows try to struggle their way to greatness. But it’s quite clear that Veena Sud sees nothing wrong with the show in its current status, and I’ll be damned if I ever watch a show from somebody who wouldn’t want to see their show improve.

Quotes, Etc.:

Think I’m being irrational with this screed? Seriously go and read how asinine she is in her interview with Sepinwall, which was linked above.

“What’s so funny?” “You trying to do math is like a dog wearing a hat.”

Linden’s pleas that “We gotta go Jack” brought back some weird Lost flashbacks, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t even a line from that show.