Some pre-finale thoughts on part one of AMC’s The Killing finale.
Tonight is the first part of the season two finale of AMC’s The Killing and the question for me is not who killed Rosie Larsen (I figured that out by the fourth episode of season 1,) but after season 1 season ending fiasco…did AMC deserve our commitment to season 2?
But if you reading looking for a spoiler, I’ll save that to the end of the post.
First the good, I do have to say when this show hits its stride, it easily stands up there with the best of the AMC shows (Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and its so good it’s almost criminal Walking Dead.) There have been passages and full episodes when the tension is so high and the drama so gripping, you don’t think you can live until the next episode.
Joel Kinnaman and Mireille Enos in the lead roles are two of the easiest standouts in an incredibly stellar cast. But it’s their subtle and sometimes brutally visceral performances that takes us through each characters story arcs and keeps us begging for more.
The bad this season has been comically bad, in fact, so epically bad that it was like the show’s producers were defying us to stay with the show. I know for myself there was no less than three times where I was going to toss in the towel this season. Thankfully, either I seem to have a thing for punishing TV or it was my deep-seated desire to scream “I told you so,” when they finally reveal the killer that kept me going. Seriously, if one more red-herring character was introduced as a suspect, the entire city of Seattle would have officially been a suspect as well as insulting our collective intelligence. How this has not been parodied yet is a bigger mystery then who killed Rosie Larsen.
Thankfully, somewhere in the last 4 or 5 episodes the show dropped the rotating suspects and got back to the core mystery and this is when the show reaches incredible level and easily earns our commitment back.
Now for the spoiler…stop reading here if you don’t want to hear my theory…..
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Okay, the killer is Jamie and sadly, I don’t have actual facts from the show to support my theory. This is another major shortcoming of the show, but I’ll go deeper into it after the full finale next week. Why I believe the killer is Jamie is in the first season they spent so much time trying to convince us the killer was the Billy Campbell character, but anyone who has seen the 1991 classic movie “The Rocketeer,” knows Billy Campbell could never have killed Rosie Larsen. So it had to be somebody who was close to his character, have the same kind of access as Campbell’s character, but has some darker motivation that is different from Campbell’s character. At one point, the producers tried to make us think it was Campbell’s girlfriend, but that just wasn’t in keeping with her character, as we knew too much about her.
So that only leaves Jamie. It was purely a process in elimination in figuring it out instead of catching some small detail in his character.