THE KILLING...ME SOFTLY
By Todd Schultz
Last year, when AMC’s The Killing ended, I hollered like Goofy skiing off the side of a mountain, due to the sheer drop that this show just felled me from. After a season of feints, subterfuge, and zero resolution the one burning question still remains: Is Mireille Enos attractive? It’s so hard to tell when she is so purposely downplaying her looks. That, and we still have no idea who killed Rosie Larsen.
I can appreciate The Killing being a foil to the formulaic Law and Order, where the latter manages the investigation, arrest, trial, and verdict all in a neat and clean one hour minus commercials, but after an entire season we are still mired in flip-flops between steps one and two.
Why do I still watch? Because it is still well thought mire, with interesting subplots and fine acting from Enos and Joel Kinnaman as the antagonistic detectives investigating the murder of a young girl found in the trunk of a hopeful mayor’s campaign car.
The writers borrowed a bit from Mad Men by shelving the crazy lady, as Rosie’s mother (Michelle Forbes) is MIA for the two –hour premiere while the rest of the Larsen clan receives a package from the real killer. Det. Sarah Linden (Enos) spends most of the episode avoiding her partner while she tries to sort out his lies and find out whom he is really working for.
This show has an uncanny ability, much like Lost did, to infuriate its audience by not answering any big questions, just giving you answers to the smaller questions that only snowball into the larger questions. Or even if they answer a big question, that answer will be so vague/unsatisfying leaving you with a parcel of unanswered smaller questions that will only get bigger as long as they remain unanswered. Until you’ve come full circle to a new, larger set of big unanswered unanswerable questions. Any questions so far?
That really shouldn’t be the case with The Killing. Lost had mystical and supernatural elements that allow the creative head-crowns-own-ass debacle that comes when your mythos is not kept in check. The Killing creates this drama with subplots that despite being well done have no endgame or real effect on the overall story. The Ahmed/arranged marriage wild goose chase is a prime example of such waste.
However, just as with Lost, I will keep wringing my knuckles white at the end of each maddening anticlimax, convincing myself like a Chicago Cubs fans that somehow this time will be different. I will continue to look forward to the slowest murder investigation in the history of slowest murder investigations. Eventually they are going to have to tell us who killed Rosie, or when Stan’s going to sleep with his sister-in-law, or maybe they’re in some kind of purgatory trying to wake each other…oh, never mind. Just answer the questions please.
