Monday, June 20, 2011

AMC's The Killing winds down to a whimper instead of building up to a bang

The conclusion of AMC's The Killing is one of the biggest TV disappointments I've experienced. The opening episodes were promising. I was encouraged by its grittiness and its realistic characters. The pain the Larsen family experiences was poignantly depicted, their emotions seemed real. Unfortunately, it began to meander at some point, and as much as I enjoyed the character studies, the story and the investigation seemed to be an exercise in jumping to conclusions, ultimately leading to a finale that was neither shocking nor logical.

The writers were going for ambiguity, but even ambiguity requires some kind of logic, never mind the fact that this is a conclusion that could very well have been arrived at several episodes ago. If you were to diagram the path detectives Linden and Holder followed to arrive at this resolution, it would look like a Family Circus cartoon in which Billy runs around the yard and the neighborhood, playing in the sandbox, riding his bike, enjoying the playset to arrive back home later declaring that he's bored.

The Killing opened like a classic whodunit and then engaged in a game of leading viewers on a wayward journey from one contrived red herring to the next, each suspect being easily dismissed, usually the episode after a cliffhanger ending intended to make the audience wonder, "Is this the guy?"

I eventually found myself feeling cheated by the series because I kept applying logic to the mystery in an attempt to determine who the real killer was. I pondered motives and looked for clues in the evidence that was revealed. I waited for specific details to emerge that would point in a specific direction. I was expecting a shocking twist ending that would make me realize that the red herrings had led me far astray. I was convinced early on that Rosie's death was directly connected to the ugly political battle that was supposed to provide an engrossing subplot to the story. I even contemplated that Mayor Adams had the murder carried out to deliberately implicate Councilman Richmond.

But The Killing is not a whodunnit. It was never about logic. It was about leading the viewer on from one episode to the next, grinding to an unsatisfying end. One episode was an interesting, albeit digressive, character study that followed Linden's investigation into her son's mysterious disappearance. It was finally revealed that he’d spent the day with his estranged father. Seeing a kind of turning point in the relationship between Linden and Holder was intriguing, but the entire episode felt out of place when the series was supposed to be building up to a shattering conclusion. It was like a commercial interruption before the big reveal.

I firmly believe that a good movie or TV series should leave the viewer feeling something, anything, at its conclusion, even if it's anger at a contrived ending. As the closing credits to The Killing scrolled after the screen faded to black, I felt nothing.

Yes, we could debate whether Richmond is the killer, but I can't help feeling that it really doesn't matter. If Richmond is in fact Rosie Larsen's murderer, then he's a really bad criminal, and Linden and Holder are incompetent detectives for not having found and followed the evidence trail to his door starting back in episode 1.

Again, this kind of speculation doesn't matter because it was never meant to make any kind of real sense. The only real shocker was Holder’s evidence manipulation. The moment his action was revealed, I wanted the whole series to be a reboot to focus more on his character so the entire story was built around leading up to what he did rather than leave the viewer speculating suspects from week to week. Now that, I believe, would make for a compelling story.

One could argue that the ending is all part of the realism, that in real life detectives botch investigations, that incorrect conclusions convict many innocent suspects, that real life mysteries often don't make sense and don't fit inside logical boundaries. But, then again, good fiction manages to depict the illogic and the mistakes in a way that makes sense. If the point all along was to show how human error leads to false conclusions, then why disguise that exercise as a whodunit?