AMC's two-year run of The Killing, adapted from a Danish series called Forbrydelsen, was interesting to watch but both seasons ended with really egregious missteps -- so bad that I feel like commenting on something normally way out of my domain. For a great deal of detail on the series, see Wikipedia and its various sublinks (list of characters, season overviews, list of episodes, individual episode summaries -- damn near everything but the video is on-line, and AMC's website has at least a taste of that).

The setup is that you have one case -- a teenage girl, Rosie Larsen, was drowned in the trunk of a car that was rolled into a lake -- and one episode per day of the investigation as it drags out. The original Copenhagen was moved to Seattle, but actually shot in Vancouver. Several things stretch the case out compared to the usual concision of crime whodunits. They focus a lot on the grief of the victim's family -- a decision that is touching at first but threatens to become deadly mundane, so they wind up juicing the story up with all sorts of unlikely tangents -- the father used to be a mob killer, the father beats up one suspect and his friend/helper shoots another and kills himself, the father turns out not to be the biological father, the mother runs away from her family, the aunt moonlights as a hooker involved with the father of Rosie's ex-boyfriend, and in a really bizarre twist turns out to be the killer.

The case also stretches out because it gets wrapped up in a mayoral campaign, and both sides throw up multiple obstructions to the investigation. It also doesn't help that the detectives are often incompetent -- the senior, Sarah Linden, is psychologically haunted by a similar past case (although, to be fair, her fiancé and son appear to be bigger problems, so much so that the writers eventually had to pack them away), while her junior, Stephen Holder, is an ex-junkie promoted because he was regarded as corrupt. But they are mostly victims of the writers, who make a difficult case all the worse by throwing out red herrings, which the detectives snap at helplessly, and bureaucratic harassment -- the hapless lieutenant of the first season was replaced by an equally useless one in the second.

Still, Linden and Holder could have solved this case if only they had been a bit smarter and had a bit more help. To get an idea how far wrong this went, consider the two season "finales":

• Season one ended with Darren Richmond (a Seattle councilman running for mayor) framed for the murder, arrested, then marched out in public where he was shot (like Lee Harvey Oswald) by a Larsen family retainer (Belko Royce, who also kills his mother and winds up killing himself). Richmond returns for season two alive but paralyzed, in a wheelchair, but exonerated the day after he was shot. The key evidence against him turns out to have been forged -- the forged picture is soon traced back from Holder to Gil Sloane (Holder's shadowy rehab sponsor, another police lieutenant) to Benjamin Abani (the mayor's aide) -- but all the other evidence that made Richmond a suspect is soon forgotten. This evidence connects Richmond and Rosie to a mob-run prostitution ring, and suggests that Richmond gets off on near-strangling, and includes phone records that tie back to Richmond's phone and computer. Richmond himself had given a false alibi, which his lover/advisor Gwen Eaton had initially backed but then recanted.
• Season two reveals a sequence of events: a meeting at the Indian casino between Nicole Jackson (casino manager), Michael Ames (a construction contractor with many angles here), and Jamie Wright (Richmond's campaign manager), which was overheard by Rosie; the others leave, then Wright discovers Rosie, decides to ensure her silence by knocking her unconscious and dragging her off; Rosie comes to, escapes, and is hunted down by Wright, who then locks her in the car trunk; Wright calls Ames, who is driven to the murder site by Aunt Terry; while Wright and Ames argue about what to do next, Aunt Terry puts the car in gear and sends it into the lake, drowning Rosie. Wright winds up confessing much of this to Richmond, then when the detectives interrupt, points a gun and is shot dead by Holder. Linden and Holder suspect Ames, but almost accidentally connect Aunt Terry. Ames and Jackson are arrested, but the lieutenant insists that he doesn't have enough evidence to hold Ames. Next morning, Richmond holds a meeting with Ames and Jackson present -- Jackson thanks him for getting "those ridiculous charges" dropped -- and Eaton excluded.

The decision to make Aunt Terry the unknowing murderer typifies the half-assed anything-is-fair-play approach to the storyline. (I used to think that fiction was constrained by some sense of integrity, but for these people it just means you can make any old shit up.) Still, Richmond's meeting is far more disgusting. I reckon what we're supposed to take away is the Who's "meet the new boss/same as the old boss," but before buddying up to Jackson and Ames, let alone dumping Eaton so callously, he really needs advice of counsel. (In fact, the absence of lawyers around any of the principals here is more than a bit surprising.) We still don't know all the facts in this case, but consider what we do know:

• Aunt Terry is guilty of murder. Even if she didn't know who was locked in the trunk, she knew someone was. But Jamie Wright is at least as guilty: he assaulted, abducted, and locked Rosie in the trunk, then at the very least called Ames to finish the murder. That Aunt Terry finished it doesn't in any way absolve him.
• At the very least, Ames was present at the murder, did nothing to prevent it. After the fact, he helped cover it up. He was aware of the crime, didn't report it, in fact lied about it and his role in it. With Aunt Terry in jail, the least he could expect would be to be charged as an accessory to murder and obstruction of justice. Then there was his original conspiracy to commit fraud with Jackson and Wright. He's not the sort of person a savvy politician should be inviting to meetings the day after Wright's role in the murder (and fraud) is exposed.
• Jackson may not have been party to the murder, but she was part of the fraud, and she committed massive obstruction of justice in the aftermath.
• Richmond had an alibi for the night of the murder, but there is no evidence that he was not aware of Wright's conspiracy, or indeed of Wright's efforts to cover up the murder. Wright, after all, worked for him, and even if Richmond is legally cleared of Wright's crimes, the whole relationship reflects poorly on his character. For that matter, Richmond still has lots of character vulnerabilities -- we never did clear up all that prostitution linkage from season one. He may expect some sympathy after all he's been through, but his meeting with Ames and Jackson risks drawing a lot of attention to all the crime around him.
• Richmond should also think twice about the way he's treating Eaton. Not that I don't understand the impulse, but she's still the Senator's daughter, she's an ex-lover, and she at least partly bought all the idealistic hooey of the Richmond campaign, so he's running the risk that she'll be disllusioned as well as pissed. She has a lot of options to hurt him back, and she's threatened to use them along the way.

That's a lot of baggage for one scene, but it's typical of the show. An episode or two back Linden confronted Mayor Adams with her knowledge that he had falsified evidence to get Richmond arrested, then declared she'd let that go for his help in getting the actual murderer (at the time believed to be either Eaton or Wright). But she was wrong in letting Ames go: by then the conspiracy had taken over the murder, and the only way to the truth about the murder was through tearing apart the various conspiracies. That would have been more work, but it would also have been more rewarding than just getting to the end and tossing up your hands, decrying how all politicians are inevitably corrupt.

Also worthwhile to take a look at the piece by Jace Lacob comparing The Killing to the original Forbrydelsen (which I would like to see some day). In partiuclar, here's a short list of changes:

The Killing more than liberally borrows from its Danish forebear in its first season, lifting the musical score wholesale, along with plot points, dialogue, costumes (look, it's Lund's Faroese sweater!), and characters while shifting the action from rainy Copenhagen to rainy Seattle. In essence, the majority of the first season precisely echoes the first 10 episodes of Forbrydelsen, but when Sud does diverge from the original, her choices seem unnecessary and cause things go awry.

Within the Danish version, there is no Indian casino, no mob plot, no prostitution ring, no Ogi Jun anime tattoo, no one in the shadows snapping photos of the lead investigator. Unlike Michelle Forbes's Mitch, Pernille (Ann Eleonora Jørgensen), the grief-stricken mother of Nanna, does not go on a road trip and abandon her family so that she can have slumber parties with a teen prostitute runaway. The politician at the center of the murder investigation isn't shot or paralyzed in Forbrydelsen. Unlike in The Killing, the parentage of Nanna is never in doubt (she is the daughter of Bjarne Henriksen's brooding Theis) and she is not believed to be an underage prostitute, a convention that owes more to Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer than to Forbrydelsen. [ . . . ]

In Forbrydelsen, however, the Holder character -- Søren Malling's Jan Meyer -- isn't an ex-junkie but a family man with whom Lund has a hugely adversarial relationship at first, and -- unlike Enos' Linden -- Gabrol's Lund begins the series with a buoyant spirit; it's by the end that she becomes paranoid and brittle. She is a divorcée, raising her teen son on her own, but she is neither an orphan nor a foster kid nor as emotional fragile as Linden. Both become increasingly neglectful with their families as they obsessively pursue the case, but Lund has a support system -- a dressmaker mother (Anne Marie Helger), an intelligent and supportive fiancé (Johan Gry's Bengt), and even a sympathetic ex-husband -- even as she contemplates leaving behind her job and life in Copenhagen to start over in Sweden with Bengt. (Bengt, meanwhile, isn't a stock angry fiancé character; he surprisingly becomes an integral part of the investigation, even as he fears losing Lund forever.)

I'm not a fan of all the psychological troubles detectives go through, even if that seems like a realistic occupational hazard. (We just saw another example, Thorne; nor is going nuts limited to detectives, as Homeland showed.) And I see a lot of merit in the Indian casino angle -- indeed, Chief Jackson is the most plausible villain in the series (give or take a mob boss).

By the way, at AV Club Meredith Blake compiled a list of things that didn't make any sense at the end of season one. I won't quote them here because there are 20 of them (only one I recognize as resolved in the second episode), and then adds another 10 "stray observations (or 'other things that don't add up')." Also at AV Club, Todd VanDerWerf picks up the same thread for season two. Note that for both seasons, the lowest-rated episode was the finale (D+ and C–).

Will have to write about something non-fiction next time. In the meantime, I'm reminded of the Valerie Plame affair, where the only one charged was Scooter Libby, not because he was the only one guilty but because by perjury he made it practically impossible to prosecute the crime. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald explained: "The truth is the engine of our judicial system. If you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost . . . if we were to walk away from this, we might as well hand in our jobs." Libby was convicted, but escaped doing jail time thanks to George W. Bush, the benefactor of Libby's lying -- along with Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, etc. You'd think that such utter contempt for the law would have destroyed any semblance of respect for the Bush administration, but the whole affair has been quietly forgotten -- as if the ending of The Killing has become a cultural norm.