The brain-frying ending of 'The Killing'

June 19th, 2011, 10:55 pm ·

· posted by The Watcher

The ending of "The Killing" Sunday night left the Watcher feeling like a robot from a bad '50s sci-fi movie who encountered an unanswerable question: My eyes were spinning and smoke was shooting out of my ears.

Twelve hours of circuit-burning later, I was ready to render my verdict: Bad news.

Jaw-dropping? Yes. Head-spinning? Certainly. Dumb-striking, gut-punching, out-of-left-field and any other metaphor to describe extremely unexpected? Absolutely.

Good for the show? Probably not.

(WARNING: I'm going to try to discuss this without using spoilers, but a key point cannot be bypassed, so if you haven't watched yet and want to stay unspoiled, go watch first.)


First, I'm not too upset about the cliffhanger ending. I really would have preferred the season to be self-contained, with the shocking ending resolving the plot, not complicating it.

I'm not super-excited about waiting an entire year to learn who killed Rosie Larsen, but I can live with that. I don't even think resolution is necessary. Not only was I not mad about the ending to "The Sopranos," I actually liked it. (The "Lost" ending, of course, was a completely different matter, but don't get me started on that!)

Real life is messy and often unresolved, and one of the things I liked about "The Killing" was its realness. Rosie's death wreaked emotional havoc everywhere as two detectives, not overly competent and carrying massive emotional baggage of their own, struggled through the wreckage to try to bring one bit of clarity to the world.

"The Killing" wasn't your run-of-the-mill whodunnit.

Sunday's finale changed that. People are no longer who we thought they were. What we thought was merely a killing turns out to be part of a massive conspiracy that must include everyone except Sarah Linden and Darren Richmond.

That revelation seems to change the nature of the show. It now is a run-of-the-mill whodunnit, albeit one with a highly complex plot. Or so it seems.

Can "The Killing" return next season as the slow-paced, highly personal drama we came to love? That is the real cliffhanger.

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