The Killing – Jumping to conclusions can get ugly

Stan Larsen has tried to be reasonable as his heart has been throbbing with grief. When his wife Mitch was mentally curled up in a ball and withdrawing from everything, spending hours sitting in her dead daughter’s room and forgetting about her other two children (and nearly accidentally killing them), Stan was the Larsen family’s rock. He took the boys out to the park. He made their school lunches. He did not cave in to his formerly violent, mobster ways even though he wanted his daughter’s death avenged.

Then he completely lost it on that dirt road after Mitch pleaded with him to make things right. “That man killed our child and you let him go!” she said angrily.

Did Stan and his questionable sidekick Belko actually kill Rosie’s teacher Bennet Ahmed as they savagely beat and kicked him under cover of darkness? Ahmed wasn’t moving at all when Belko landed those final blows with his foot. Seeing the beating scenes juxtaposed with Mitch finding Rosie’s pink T-shirt in the dryer — she’d previously told Linden that the shirt of same design found in the warehouse linked to Muhammed was Rosie’s — seemed to indicate that Ahmed and Muhammed might not be guilty of Rosie’s murder as they had previously looked.

That still leaves the mysterious connection to the Richmond campaign and why Rosie was found in the trunk of a campaign vehicle. Right now, the campaign story arc is the least interesting of all of The Killing’s ongoing plotlines as Richmond isn’t a very well-rounded character and has been acting impulsively, in an almost contradictory fashion. He has been wildly veering from being a do-gooder, all-policy-no-personal-attacks campaigner, to a guy who goes really personally negative against his opponent, punches bathroom mirrors and draws blood, demands $5 million from a campaign donor (aren’t there limits on how much one person can donate to a municipal campaign?) and gets drunk at a bar while playing a song his dead wife loved while wallowing in misery and lamenting the fact that he allowed her to leave a political event alone the night she was killed by a drunk driver.

Is the connection to the Richmond campaign car, when it’s finally made, going to make sense? Or will it feel like the explanation was pulled out of a hat in the writers’ room? I’ve bought into too many serialized shows — namely Lost – fully invested my viewing experience in the hopes that everything would be reasonably tied up in the end, only to have those hopes badly dashed. I’m hoping that’s not what will happen with The Killing.

Now, with it appearing as though Ahmed and Muhammed might not have been involved in Rosie’s death, Linden and Holder are left spinning their wheels, which, I can only imagine, is how real homicide investigations proceed, not full speed ahead with everything falling nicely into place. In this way, The Killing reminds me of an extra-long episode of House. It’s never the first, second or even the fifth diagnosis that House and his team make for a patient who has a mysterious constellation of symptoms that’s correct. It always turns out to be something you didn’t see coming.

In the case of The Killing, I’m going to go on the assumption that we haven’t yet met the person who killed Rosie. But then again, I could be wrong.

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on May 23, 2011 @ 13:00 EST5EDT