The Killing

[Weinerslave]

Prove it!

[nathansmart]

Well there's been 25 seasons of The Real World - do I need to go on?

[kevin]

Episode was an A+ if only because there wasn't a scene where she called Sonoma and promised to be on the next flight there.

[nathansmart]

I think the twist of tonight's episode will be that the writers of the show killed Rosie.

[BachAndItRocks]

the writers have a lot of nerve ending the season like that.

[nathansmart]

Okay, you guys win, but you have to admit it was a long, hard fight.

[nick]

They're going to wrap up this murder in the first season and move on to a new mystery next year.

Guess I was wrong. Sorry, everybody!

[fggrhjkhdeu]

I hate this show, and I hate myself for watching all 13 episode.

[AnnE]

Guess I was wrong. Sorry, everybody!

I thought I had read that somewhere else but now I'll just blame you.

I didn't get to see it until tonight and today at work, my co-workers raved about the great ending. My co-workers are idiots.

[Weinerslave]

Showrunner Veena Sud actually said this:

"We never said you'll get closure at the end of season 1. We said from the very beginning this is the anti-cop cop show. It's a show where nothing is what it seems, so throw out expectations. We will not tie up this show in a bow. There are plenty of shows that do that, in 45 minutes or whatever amount of time, where that is expected and the audience can rest assured that at the end of blank, they will be happy and they can walk away from their TV satisfied. This is not that show."

Sorry, Veena (if that is your real name), but you can't pull the "we're not like other cop shows" card when your 13 episodes of television contained more red herrings, stupid plot twists and ludicrous coincidences than Dick Wolf threw on screen in fifty years of Criminal Intent and Raped Lady Unit.

[Teaflax]

Yeah, I'm done with this show. I wasn't as down on it as many here seemed to be, but that ending just pissed me off. Now I'll go check who the killer was in the Danish original and let that be my personal ending.

[nathansmart]

Yeah, did someone say here that the BBC aired it with Anglo subtitles?

[Teaflax]

Yeah, did someone say here that the BBC aired it with Anglo subtitles?

Yes, it also won the BAFTA for best foreign drama series a few months ago.

I just read up on who the killer was in the Danish series, and I consider it canonical, case closed.

[BKMaynard]

So wait. It's based on a foreign show that wrapped up the murder in one season, they decided that the advertising should be "Who Killed Rosie Larsen," they didn't know they would get a second season before they finished writing and shooting the thing, and DIDN'T wrap up this case? I promised myself I'd stop getting mad at shows because they didn't play out they way I would have liked, but boy, you're testing my resolve, The Killing.

[nathansmart]

That's what makes me mad about what the showrunner said. She's acting like this ending is some sort of Sopranos thing where an artistic choice split the audience down the middle with savvy TV watchers liking it and regular people not getting it. We all know we're getting a second season and that they are going to say who did it then so this isn't some JJ Abrams mystery box that they are giving us (especially since the show it's based on DID give us the killer). It's clear that this is just a crappy way to get us all to tune in next time and to extend its life, American sitcom-style.

[fggrhjkhdeu]

This show is just a symptom of what is happening to television in the last few years. Most shows adopted narrative styles of soap operas - there is no direction to the story-line, and characters can switch between god and bad in an instant. This makes the characters very flat because in any second whatever you knew about that character becomes irrelevant.

Also

Spoiler:  

The best thing about this show is that Richmond actually used the Orpheus email both for his election campaign and for hooking up with underage prostitutes.

[Kentock]

I don't see that trend in television over the last few years at all. Maybe in a couple of shows.

The much broader trend is towards narrative momentum and long-running story lines that build almost entirely on well constructed characters. Which is in part why people are so mad about this show. The Killing appears to have promised one thing and delivered another.

[RegularKarate]

I am not defending this season finale. I wasn't mad that the episode was a cliff-hanger, I was mad that it didn't deserve a cliff-hanger. Characters keep turning on a dime and it stopped being worth the cliches (which I was very tolerant of for a long time). It was super annoying.

I will say that it kind of makes sense that it didn't end here because while the Danish series cleared up the mystery in one season, its season was twice as long as this one. Still, if you're going to break a season arc into two, don't do it like this.

[douglass]

I hate this show, and I hate myself for watching all 13 episode.

I disliked most of this show, and after about episode 7 was only watching because I'd invested a bunch of time in it already and wanted to see whodunit. (Maybe I just like helicopter shots every 2 minutes, it's possible.) Not getting a payoff left me feeling cheated, since I didn't care about any of the flat characters, or the cliffhanger/resolve/repeat format.

I'd bet you could take a pair of scissors to this show and make a really awesome Extra Special 2-Hour Law & Order.

[RoyalDutchOfDukes]

I didn't watch this show but as a lover of people's intense reactions regarding shows they once liked going to shit or shows with promise going off the rails in a spectacular way, I have been reading a lot of recaps of the finale.

It seems like the lesson of this show and to a slightly lesser extent Lost and BSG to other writers should be "Don't just make shit up as you go along if you're going to promise the viewers some huge mystery or answers to any of the crazy shit you're throwing out there, you better have already figured them out before the show got popular and the network backs the dump truck full of money up to your door.", right? Or is this one more arch in how it cynically manipulated their audience's expectations only to yell "sike!" at the end?

I also have been enjoying all of the knots I've seen people (not here, mind you) twist themselves into to justify how the season finale ended up as I saw a lot of the same stuff when Lost (which I also didn't watch) ended and a lot of people felt like the ending was bullshit. I especially enjoy the antics of the people who are fronting like the writers are somehow geniuses and that the people complaining just don't "get it", especially considering that from what I've read about this show it's not like there's some byzantine backstory that's been hinted at or some supernatural cosmology lurking around the margins of the central human stories.

A friend of mine told me it's the new Studio 60 in terms of insulting its audience's intelligence and wasting everyone's time with pointless, hackneyed bullshit, so part of me kind of wants to watch it. One of my most enjoyable TV watching experiences was watching Aaron Sorkin use an hour of NBC primetime to air the fanfic he wrote about his own life awkwardly grafted to a setting he had zero understanding of every week and then watching it devolve further and further into self-parody with each passing week.