Last updated on August 17, 2014
I’ve had about a week to digest the six episode final season of The Killing, and I am finally ready to talk about it. Probably SPOILERS, so you can go watch it before reading this.
Much of the last season follows the same tonal consistency as the previous season; the show merely transfers our setting to a high school military academy and a heinously brutal set of murders. Of course, our last episode before this showed Linden and Holder as conspirators in a murder of the police chief. He happened to be a teenage girl serial killer, but cops can’t just kill dudes in cold blood, so they cover it up. At the same time, they need to solve the mystery of a brutal multiple homicide, with one survivor who suffers from a case of convenient amnesia.
Now, the important part here really isn’t the mechanics of our police procedural; if that was the case, go watch any number of other shows that do the same thing. The most obvious suspect is the actual culprit, and the typical trick of amnesia works against audience expectations – it’s pretty brilliant, really, but you’ve seen this sort of thing before. Rather, we really see the relationship between Linden and Holder return to previous seasons, affirming itself as the primary focus. They hold a common secret that they must keep at all costs, or they risk losing everything.
Holder wants to live a normal life (also accidental baby!), and Linden just doesn’t want anyone else to leave her. They can really only relate to each other, and the murder bringing them even closer. Now everything is secluded and secretive, now they cannot let the circle of trust be broken. If everyone else has to suffer, they don’t know how to fix it, so they react with anger instead. Neither of them can ever be happy with their secret, much as they would like to think they can, and the cracks in their facade show up at multiple times. Each has to shape the other up when they show weakness; each of them mistrust each other at one point or another. The banter between them becomes more and more strained as time goes on, but they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.
I gotta say, when your main characters actually killed someone and you want them to get away with it, you can’t get away without calling it “dark”. You know they made a poor decision in the heat of the moment, and you cannot help but empathize. However, the final seasons seems, to me, dark without being “dark” in the traditional sense. If season 3 went way overboard with child prostitution, rape, pornography, and God knows what else, season 4 looks tame only by visual and thematic comparison. In fact, it’s much darker and much more willing to probe gradually, letting the audience imagine rather than displaying it outright. Of course, that murder scene could never appear on television (as well as the multitude of new curse words – they do feel like a crutch for good writing sometimes), but it isn’t exploitative at all. Much of the “violence” here deals with psychological trauma rather than anything else, and the two stories interweave much more naturally than in previous seasons. Everyone breaks under the weight of family secrets, abandonment issues, and former addictions whether to the job or actual drugs. It really takes an emotional toll on the audience, that’s for sure!
Still, there’s one thing nobody probably expected from The Killing, and that’s a relatively happy ending. I almost stood in disbelief seeing them both survive through a weird deus ex machina moment with Darren Richmond (remember him?), and yet I found it quite consistent with the show’s thematic elements. While you could say that the only real out for Linden and Holder should be death, death would have been an easy conclusion for these characters – that or jail. The Killing always lets some person or another deal with the aftermath of a poor decision; I think specifically of Holder’s relationship to Bullet. If you kill them, how does one feel the impact of survivor’s guilt or otherwise? It just doesn’t retain the same emotional impact in the audience. Suffering can often remain far worse for the living than the dead (wow, this sounds awfully manipulative, doesn’t it?).
Even if that weren’t the case, the show always held a political/social undercurrent, whether straightforward (as in the first two seasons and their cynical approach to campaigns and governmental offices) or hidden (the dark underbelly of injustice and lacking care for the least of these in season 3 and 4). Political forces return to show us a never-ending cycle of death, and sometimes you just need to walk away. You can’t save the world by yourself without actually destroying yourself, your conscience, and everything you believe in. Everybody has their limit. And for Linden and Holder, how much further could they really go before dying themselves?
If anyone deserved an out for all this, Sarah Linde certainly got it. She was always the one who followed the rules and stood up for the weak. As a foster kid herself, she knew all about the horrible, terrible system from which she came, and she could not let injustices stand. No one was ever going to prosecute James Skinner, so she did the job herself. Nobody else really displayed that much of a consistent moral compass, even Holder. Finally she can make some sort of peace with the strange, intense life she led for quite a few years there.
Now, was it romantic? Somehow I doubt it. We know Holder made a pass at her in season 3, but she definitely rejected that advance. I just think they know each other better than anyone else, having gone through so much together. Who else could understand her motives, and vice versa? As such, I think it perfectly caps off this series in a way that isn’t trite or awful. They’ve suffered enough already; let us have our cathartic moment!
So, all in all, I think I’m happy and pleased with the story. Nothing felt out of place in this last seasons, and everything resolved in a way natural to the show’s initial themes.
