Well it makes sense from a motivation standpoint if you assume it wasn’t some grand conspiracy that had been on-going and that Holder’s motivations are simply an ill advised need to wrap up this case at all costs. One would assume that Holder is convinced of the guy’s guilt and is worried that he’s going to get elected and be able to avoid any prosecution and/or arrest indefinitely once he’s in a position of such authority. Therefore, in a quick ill-advised moment of weakness he manufactures evidence that he assumes will be similar to what they’d find in due course. He’s not a big baddie, he’s just a stupid cop who thinks the ends justify the means.
Of course that someone else is in on the deception throws a monkey wrench in that logical conclusion. Presumably the guy in the car with him is either the techie who faked the photo and therefore no more of a conspirator than Holder is, he’s just a guy who was looking for a paycheck or has a grudge against Richmond. The alternative is that he’s some big power broker who had been operating against Richmond all along, the mayor, the senator, the billionaire, one of the campaign advisers and he manipulated Holder in his moment of weakness. If this power broker and Holder were in on this together from the get-go then the show REALLY is fucking stupid like you note.
They didn’t need to tie up every loose end to reveal the killer the way the advertising said they would. They could have had a season 2 exploring the fallout from the reveal of the killer and the fallout from the investigation. They could have had a season 2 about a secondary crime that led to Rosie’s killing, essentially creating a new case to follow next season that builds on a larger conspiracy.
Here’s how the ending should have played out and where the storylines end up.
Reveal the killer. It doesn’t matter who it is or if they are killed/caught in the finale. That’s what Season 2 is for. The reveal of the killer could open up a new line of investigation surrounding a conspiracy or some crazy underground syndicate. Or it could have just been a crime of passion with no additional fallout and the show moves on to another topic. It’s not important, but paying off the promise of the marketing is critical.
Mitch (I thought her name as Midge all season long!) runs away and is simply gone. No need to wrap that up, that’s just one of the many terrible side effects of the murder. Just like the teacher’s beating and coma.
Stan’s trial doesn’t need to be wrapped up. He confessed, he’ll defend his case and the basis of temporary insanity and they’ll argue about how much punishment he gets, but it’s incidental. It’s another bad thing that happened to this family, the severity of the sentence isn’t really important.
Beardy’s craziness is a fundamental part of the finale and they needed to show it. They could have had him shoot Richmond or get stopped at the last minute, it doesn’t really matter. His story line is wrapped up one way or another, the Larsen family is destroyed and he seeks revenge. Either way he goes to jail or dies and that’s that.
The millionaire’s deal is moot if Richmond is dead and/or his campaign is ruined. No need to wrap that up. Yes he’s creepy and potentially a killer, but if they reveal who the killer is like they are supposed to there’s nothing left of his story to tie up. Either way his $5M is wasted because Richmond is cooked, guilty or innocent and his grand plan of having the mayor under his thumb is moot.
All these things are reasonable ways to end the show and none of them would have precluded them revealing the killer. There’s still plenty of meat left on the bones for season 2 if they choose, but there’s closure there. We were TOLD to expect a reveal of the killer, therefore we expected it.
I don’t feel awkward agreeing with 90% of his comments! We ought to invite him here to exchange a few fine points with us and see if we can’t come to a consensus that The Killing may not be ready for prime time.
You find out who the killer is in the Danish version, if that’s what you mean.
I’ve just found that Wikipedia has a listing of the AMC episodes. Unfortunately the summaries given are obviously the incomplete things that get printed in listings magazines, etc. However, it looks to me that in fact Season 1 maybe relates to only the first half of the Danish original?
Here we start to get differences, although the only one that may be substantive is that in the original the mother has absolutely no involvement with what happens to the teacher.
Here’s where things diverge considerably from the original.
Anyway, I would definitely recommend the Danish series 1. The original is much more of a slow-burn thriller than a whodunnit.
I think Rosie was going to use the money to give to her mother. The scene with Mitch and her father - looking thru the scrapbook of places she wanted to go and never went. I think when Rosie saw that, she felt like Mitch never got a chance at life, so she wanted to get her the money to go to those places.
I don’t think Holder was working with anyone to try and frame Richmond. I think Holder was convinced that Richmond was guilty, and did this on his own to make sure Richmond goes down. I knew something was up when Sarah left the police station and the camera focused on Holder’s face. His reaction said that he was up to something. He might’ve been planning this for awhile. While they were tracing Richmond’s steps - Holder comes up with the gas station not on their route and says, “Trust me Linden…I got this…”
And we still haven’t found out who the other man was in Stan’s dream.
Let’s see … “journey not destination”, check.
“Don’t need to be spoonfed”, check.
“If it got such a reaction, it must be doing something right”, check.
All I need are “it’s really about the characters”, and “some people just like to complain” and I’ll have an Excuses for Shitty Television Bingo!
(Do we allow “postage stamps”? Because then all I need is, “you just didn’t get it”.)
I think that would be four corners, not postage stamps.
I was listening to Alan Sepinwall’s podcast this evening to get his opinions on the two big finales last night and I found myself getting really frustrated with his co-host. His co-host was trying to tepidly defend the finale. He agreed the show sucked donkey dick, but he thought the viewers had an unreasonable expectation of getting an answer to the big question. He argued, stupidly in my opinion, that AMC never claimed that we’d get an answer explicitly. He cited all the press releases and all the reviewers packets they received as never explicitly saying anything one way or another. My problem with this is that no one in the general audience ever sees any of that stuff. All we see are the TV ads, radio ads and print ads. Those pretty much exclusively centered around the message “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?”, which strongly implies that by watching you’ll get an answer. Press releases and insider interviews/reviews don’t mean shit to the general public. Had AMC taken the time to explicitly warn people that we may or may not get an answer, then the reaction might have been different. Instead they chased the dollars and used the slimy, misleading advertising in order suck people in.
I don’t care that we didn’t find out who killed Rosie Larsen. What I care about is that this show is unfailingly stupid in every possible way.
Let’s be honest: even if they had played it straight and done a conventional wrap-up, it wouldn’t have made the previous twelve episodes suck less. Sure, it was shit frosting, but the cake was already made out of shit.
My theory is that they know the show sucks, the writers moronic, etc. and said, “How can we get people talking about this show that has put most of the audience to sleep? Let’s leave 'em hanging and introduce a whole bunch of nonsensical plot points!”
And God bless 'em, it almost worked. Hell, even though it was stupid, it was the only thing remotely interesting that’s happened on this show in weeks. If they could have made episodes 1-12 this unconventional, it might not have been such a mediocre snooze-fest.
I will not be back next year unless they fire their entire roster of writers. But I might pop in the thread to silently laugh at those who do.
Just continuing my decompressing after watching the finale on my TiVo:
Setting aside the fact that only two detectives have been assigned to the most prominent murder case in a major American city, setting aside that one detective has zero murder experience and is in fact a junkie, and the other detective is close enough to quitting that she’s gone to the airport multiple times, have there ever been two less competent or less likable detectives depicted on television? The Stooges don’t count; they were a trio.
I disagree. A satisfying finale, even if it had been somewhat predictable, would have at least left viewers feeling like they weren’t given the middle finger. There’s a lot of garbage on TV and people watch it. They don’t kid themselves that it’s great, but it kills the time and gives them an excuse to do something on a weeknight. The Killing wasn’t ever going to be The Wire, we learned that 2 episodes in. But it could have been inoffensively bland like any of the other 25 police procedurals on TV with better cinematography.
A TV show being shit doesn’t make it unwatchable. A TV show that’s shit that thinks it’s pudding and tells you to go fuck yourself for disagreeing however is inexcusable.
No, the show was almost entirely filmed before a single episode was aired. They couldn’t and didn’t make any adjustments to the show as audience reaction poured in. The showrunner was interviewed often and almost always came across as arrogant and blindingly certain that the product was epic and revolutionary.
Hmmm… It seems pretty clear from the NYTimes article that the producers did in fact shoot a straight-forward Richmond Is The Killer version of the finale and distributed it to some television critics. They must have added the scenes with Holder faking the evidence AFTER the show got picked up for season 2. Either that or the Times critic watched it with the sound off and while also listening to a ball game and having sex (which is really the only way anyone should watch it).
I apologize for intruding on the hatefest with a differing opinion. Silly me for thinking anybody would be interested in knowing why I (and, I’m sure ,at least a few other viewers) enjoyed the show.
Actually, I’m sort of irritated and fascinated by it at the same time. I can’t quite put my finger on why.
I think I started watching to see how heavily it would be influenced by Twin Peaks. There are some definite influences. Whether the American authors were influenced by it directly, or indirectly through the Danish authors I can’t say.
Beyond that, I think I kept watching because I’ve been curious every week about what kind of red herrings the authors will throw at us next and how they’ll then explain away the evidence the following week.
I guess I find it interesting in a sort of meta way - watching the process and wondering what the writers are going to try to get away with next.
The first season of Damages had some red herrings/fakeouts too, and a structure that made it difficult for anyone who wanted to figure out what really happened. But that show also had some interesting characters, and when you got to the end, you didn’t feel like you’d been lied to all along.